--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, so let's get into this episode right now. So I want to read you a couple things. I just finished the book, The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Absolutely tremendous book. The obstacle is the way. Now the name kind of gives away what the entire book is about, but this is a book worth reading. I absolutely love it. This is actually the second time that I've read this book and I've also listened to it on audiobook once. That's right. So this is my third time going through this book. But I want to read to you just a few quotes from this book because when I started adopting this stoic philosophy, and again, when I say adopting, Please do not take it as like, you know, I'm a monkish about this. That is definitely not the case. But, you know, it is something that I think about. It's something that especially when bigger obstacles present themselves, I try to set my mind to the fact that this obstacle, this struggle, this pain has been put in front of me for a purpose, to get better in some way. That by focusing on solving this problem or sidestepping this problem or making sure this problem never happens again, by doing that work, I am strengthening myself. I'm creating positivity because I'm working towards a goal, right? Like, love Ryan Holiday's work, love this concept of the obstacles away. So the entire book, I'd say, from the through thought is the work of Marcus Aurelius, one of the most well-known, most popular, and most successful Roman emperors. And he wrote a series of diary entries that were never meant to be published in a book called Meditations. And you can go get that book. It's a tremendous book. Highly, highly recommend that book. You will read it and you'll put the book down and you'll be like, holy crap, like 2,000 plus years ago, this guy was struggling with legitimately the same thoughts, same insecurities, same conflict that I'm dealing with today. And it's wild and powerful, and I got a tremendous amount out of that book as well. So I'd say that book and the thoughts, life, history of Marcus Aurelius is the through line. And then throughout the book, Ryan brings in all kinds of stories, both modern and historic, and again, the book is tremendous. But at the very beginning of the book, we're not even into the actual book yet, we're still in the preface. Ryan Holiday, the author of The Obstacles Away, quotes Marcus Aurelius from his book, Meditations, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. I'm going to read that to you again. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Absolutely. If you can hold on to that concept, don't Don't think it's fluffy philosophy. It's not. Don't wrap this in some sort of, you know, kumbaya kind of crap. That's not what this is in any way, shape, or form. This guy was a general. He was a warrior. He was a politician. He was all these things that had to deal with constant struggle. This is real-world advice. And when you think about it, think about the things in your life that become challenges. We can either shy away from them. We can allow fear, false evidence appearing real. We can allow our perception of what might happen if we take a certain action keep us from doing that action. Or we can use that fear as a signal. We can use it as a compass point. We can use it as our north star for what needs to be done, the work that needs to be done. Sometimes we just need to have our ass kicked, our head bashed in. Sometimes you just need to get punched in the gut and feel that intense pain to harden, to get better, to get stronger. That's how we improve. If you're not taking shots, if you're not getting beat up, then what are you doing? Where's the progress if you're not feeling pain? And you know that's kind of and I know you know again if you're a field general then you know that that makes a lot of sense or if you're a professional athlete that might make a lot of sense but guys this is this is my point this this this extends um this extends out to our entire lives this this extends to to that call that you're you're unwilling to make to that piece of content you're not willing to create, to that follow-up you're not willing to do, to that event that you are unwilling to go to, to that referral partner that you're afraid to ask for 10 minutes of their time. It's all of these. The fact that you don't want to make that cold call means that that's a place that you have to point your mind. Why are you unwilling to make that cold call? That video that you're unwilling to make? Why are you unwilling to create that video? What is it? Is it that you feel insecure about your knowledge Is it that you don like the way you look Is it that you don like the way you sound Is that you don think people will care Those are all fears Those aren real Someone's going to like the content. Someone's going to think you look fine. Someone's not going to care the way you sound. Someone is going to want to watch that video. It's fear. It's your perception. You're putting out into the future some idea that hasn't happened yet and using that is justification for not taking action, right? Think about Rocky, right? Rocky's talking to his kid, and I think this is Rocky 4 or 5. It's the one where they have the video game and then Rocky beats the current champ in the video game and whatever, and he says, it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, right? Think about that concept. And again, I'm not trying to get woo-woo-y on you. I want you to create more content. I want you to make more phone calls. I want you to plow through this. What I want you to know is every single person listening to this podcast right now, and there are thousands of you, multiple thousands. On a good month, there's 10,000 of you listening to this podcast, right? Every single one of the other people, not you, every single one of the other people on this call has fears. We all do this. I do this. When I create episodes like this, these solo episodes where I'm kind of just going after it, getting after it, I don't know what I'm going to say half the time. I mean, I have a concept. I write down some notes. I have a kind of through-line narrative that I want to try to hit. Obviously, I want to deliver value to you, but what if it's terrible? What if you hate it? What if I make some off-color joke that you don't like or some conservative or libertarian reference that offends somebody? I don't want to do that or whatever. I just, you know, things come out of my mouth as I'm moving forward in my mind. And I don't know if you're going to like this. You could hate it and unsubscribe. And then I've just lost a subscriber. And the more subscribers that I lose, the less people want to sponsor the show. And the less people want to sponsor the show, the more inadequate I feel. And the more inadequate I feel, the less I want to do this podcast. And the less I do the podcast, the worse I get at it. And as I get worse, then you actually do go listen to someone else. And now, from me just thinking that you may not like something that I said in one solo episode, I've taken this fear all the way through to the point where I just stopped the podcast because no one wants to listen to it anymore. I mean, that's bananas. It's bananas when I describe it to you that way. But that is what we all do every day with the things that create fear. So what we want to do is use fear as a compass needle, as a north star. Use it as a set of guideposts. Why are you allowing false evidence that appears to be real, fear, why are we allowing that to keep us from doing the work that we know we need to do? Look, I'm not saying it's easy. It's definitely not easy. I mean, there's no doubt it's not easy. None of this is easy. I'm not saying it's easy. And frankly, a lot of times when I do episodes like this, I'm trying to talk myself into something, right? Like me talking to you about this is me trying to solidify in my brain that I'm going to use my fear as a compass needle, that I'm going to use it as a North Star, that it's going to be the guide rails for where I need to focus my attention, right? That's what this is. So Marcus Aurelius and Rocky weren't the only ones to have similar thoughts. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, The things which hurt instruct, right? It's so simple. When you make that cold call and that guy picks up the phone and you start on your pitch and he hangs that phone up or says, hey, don't bother me anymore, you asshole, click, and you feel terrible. You feel terrible. Who wouldn't feel terrible? That's a terrible thing. It doesn't mean you suck. It doesn't mean you shouldn't make another phone call. What it means is maybe your pitch wasn't on point for that particular prospect. Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe his wife just told him that she was cheating on him. Maybe, you know, maybe reverse. Maybe it's a her who picked up the phone and her husband just told her that he's got $50,000 in gambling debt that he's been hiding from her. And now you cold call her and all she wants to do is rage on you because she can't rage on her husband at that point or whatever. You know, I mean, who the hell knows? People are having bad days. People have all kinds of things. Maybe she just lost a huge client. Maybe she just made a cold call and had some guy call her an asshole and hang up on her. So when you cold call her, she's feeling so shitty that she does it to you. There's a million reasons why a cold call might not go the way that you would like it to go. And the point is, you don't know unless you pick up the phone and you make the call. This is something I'm working through with my kid with hitting. So my son plays baseball. He's a very good baseball player. At 8, he's better than I was at 12. And I'm very proud of him and all that kind of stuff. But he gets a little fearful sometimes in the batter's box. Not so much about getting hit with the ball, but he's fearful of getting out, right? He doesn't want to get out. He doesn't want to strike out in particular. Less scared of getting out as much as he doesn't want to strike out. In his mind, striking out is like the worst possible thing that could happen, is striking out. And what I've tried to tell him is to get a hit, you got to strike out. If you step into the box, you're going to strike out eventually. And so to get a hit, you got to step into the box. You have to be willing to accept the fact that there's going to be times when you get a hit and there's going to be times when you strike out and there's going to be times when you hit the ball as hard as you possibly can and the shortstop's thinking right there and whack, catches the ball. And in the book, you struck out. It looks like a weak ground ball, even though you clobbered it. It doesn't matter. All you can do is the work. That's all you can do. And that's all these guys are saying. From Marcus Aurelius 2,200 years ago to Rocky in the, that movie was probably came out in the knots, the 2000s or whatever. And then to Benjamin Franklin in the founding of our country to Ryan Holiday, The obstacle is the way. Right? This concept, it's not rocket science. But you got to do the work. And when it comes to content, one of the things that I tell the people that I talk to about creating content over and over and over again, you never know which piece of content is going to be the home run. You don't. You don't know which piece of content. Then YouTube or Google or the Instagram algorithm or whatever, you don't know which one of those, which piece of content is going to be the one that takes off. You can follow every best practice tip, trick, gimmick scheme that you could possibly find online and you absolutely have no, the hubris of you, the hubris, the ego, to think that you possibly have any idea which pieces of content are going to do well and which aren't is insanity. It's absolute insanity. You have no idea which one is going to hit and which one isn't. You could dial in every little lever and have it absolutely flop. The lighting could be perfect. The framing could be perfect. Your pitch, your tone, the way you deliver it, you could look perfect. You could have perfect makeup on and perfect clothes and the sound and the backdrop. And it could be, it could absolutely bomb flop and get seven views and never have another view. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about that except show up again the next day and create another piece of content because it's not about which piece of content wins. It's about putting the content out there and allowing the market to choose. That's all you can do. That is literally all you can do. You can follow, you know, Carruthers or Mick Hunt or Charles Speck or Billy Williams or Randy Schwantz or insert whatever other sales prospecting master guru is out there. And all of those guys and ladies, you know, other than Kelly Donahoe, Piro, who crushes the service side, does a little bit of sales. I just don't know too many female sales trainers, I apologize. If you're out there, hit me up, have you on the show. All of them are rock stars and their advice is absolutely amazing. And it still doesn't fucking matter. You still just got to make the calls and let the prospects determine whether or not you win. I mean, David Crothers wrote a book, The Extra Two Minutes. And I agree with him that taking a little extra time, thinking through your pitch, thinking through the way you position it, how you find little tidbits, maybe on their website or their socials to kind of connect with them. Sure, that helps. But that guy could have just found out that his dog died 10 minutes before you call, then he tells you to go fly a kite. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. There's nothing you could do. You could call that woman and she just lost her biggest client 10 minutes before to one of her competitors and all she wants to do is freaking strangle somebody. And then you call with your cold call and it's perfectly timed and you have the right intro and you're breaking patterns and you have a little hook that you found from her social that allows you some common ground. And you could get to her and she could absolutely bitch you out on the phone because she just lost her best client and she has no one else to vent on but you. What are you supposed to do with that? Does that mean you're terrible at cold call prospecting? No, it doesn't. It means she was having a bad day she didn want to hear from you That all it means Pick up the friggin phone and make another call Now look I struggle with this immensely This is like one of my biggest fear things And if I were still a day producer I would have to work on this really hard Thankfully, I'm not a day-to-day producer anymore. That's why I give you guys so much credit and I love producers because you put yourselves out there. And I guess all I'm saying is that this concept makes a ton of sense in cold calling. It makes a ton of sense if you're doing drop-ins still or going to networking events and it makes just as much sense and is just as important when you're creating content, when you're doing digital marketing, when you're trying to get people to contact you. It is just, if not more important because you put that piece of content out there. It's a salesperson working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And here's the key, my friends, you may put a piece of content out and week one, nothing, terrible. Month one, nothing, terrible. Wait, you're up. That was a waste of time. That content doesn't work. Video doesn't work. Social media doesn't work for us. In our part of the country, my clients don't go on the internet. You know, like all that stupid stuff. You could say all of it. And then a year from now, It absolutely blows up out of this world. Or Apple iTunes, et cetera. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are gonna help you grow as a person and grow your business, but they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. Why would I do that? Because we don't control the algorithm. Someone could trip upon it, like it, share it, 10 more people come in, watch it, one of them likes it, one of them actually clicks through your link and calls you, fills out your form on your website. I mean, Google is tracking all of this stuff. I'm talking about YouTube right now. And then all of a sudden, YouTube's like, wait a minute, this video has a ton of value and starts showing it to a bunch of people and people start watching it. Now, here's how that doesn't happen. Here's how what I just described, that kind of resurrection of content, how that doesn't happen, is if you don't continue to do the work. Stop being egotistical. Stop being selfish. Stop having the hubris to believe that you have any clue what you're doing. I don't. I've created 350 some odd videos. 300. No, that's not true. 305. That's not 350. 305. 305 videos on the Rogue Risk YouTube channel. We've done 100,000 views in the last 365 days. I don't have a freaking clue which videos are the good ones and which are the bad, and I just simply don't care. I just keep creating content. I just keep creating content. You cannot get me to stop creating content. I will keep creating content until I'm kicked out of Rogue Risk, until someone just puts a boot to my butt and shoves me out the door. I will keep creating content. I will keep educating. I will keep bringing value to people who have questions about insurance and I'm just going to keep going because I don't believe that I have any freaking clue which videos are going to be the good ones and which are the bad. And I, you know, since I, you know, since what happened with my wife and I or whatever or ex-wife, you know, I started doing videos from my desk here in my apartment. So it looks a little different. I'll be honest with you. I was a little insecure at first when I started doing that because I was like, you know, I had the office and the studio at the big house. I'm in a little apartment now, and I had the nice backdrop, and it looked cool, it looked pro, and now I've kind of got this angular side shot where I'm sitting and I'm trying to make an apartment desk look like an office desk, and at first I was like, oh, you know, is this, and then I said, you know what, fuck that. I'm going to keep delivering amazing content, and I guarantee no one's going to give a crap that I'm doing it from this kind of like angular side shot versus this really nice setup that I had at the old house. No one's going to care. Guess what? No one's cared. No one cares. No one cares. They just don't. They don't care. So you got to keep creating content. Now I'm going to give you, I'm going to show you this in a different way. Here's a little different, here's a little different, a little different method. So we get a lot of comments on our YouTube channel. Some of them are bananas and some of them, especially the ones related to the carriers. Like if I do a carrier review or talk about a carrier, a lot of times someone who's had a beef sometime with some carrier will find it and this carrier is the worst carrier ever and I don't respond to those ones. But every other legitimate question, we probably get half dozen to a dozen questions a week. I respond to all of them, every single question. And you may be saying to yourself, Ryan, why would you do that? You're a busy leader of a company and you're growing and I don't have time to respond to questions. And that's fine. Maybe you don't. I don't believe you, but maybe that's true. You can make time. I'm also a little crazy. So, you know, just keep that in order. But I'm also gangster gangster and we crush it. So maybe you should be a little crazy too. So here's the deal. I answer every question because I have no idea who these people are and which one of them is going to contact us. I have no idea which response to which question is going to lead to someone contacting us and doing business with us. And when people see a video and scroll down and see that the company is actually responding to all the comments, they ask questions or they believe that we're legit and they click through the links. And I believe, though I have no qualitative evidence to back this up at all, that the fact that we've probably gotten a couple hundred at least, if not more, comments and I've responded to 75 to 80% of them with legit answers, not just thanks, but like real legit, sometimes paragraph long answers plays a role in the fact that we do so well on the channel. We're showing YouTube that we add value. We're showing more importantly, insurance consumers who have an issue and I just do it. I don't think to myself, oh, do I have the time or oh, what if this answer isn't perfect or oh, what if I respond to them and it's not exactly what I wanted to say. I don't belabor it. I just do it. I just respond to the question. I move on with my life because one of those answers to one of those questions is going to yield one more person clicking through and becoming a client of Rogue Risk or at least giving us a shot and if we can help them, that's amazing. Because I don't believe that I know the answers to any of the questions. I don't know which prospect is going to pick up the phone when I cold call. I don't know which channel partner is going to respond when I send them a cold video, vidyard email. I don't know which piece of content is going to yield someone contacting us. I have no idea. I don't know. I'm not some master guru rocket scientist who crafts this perfect piece of content and pushes it out in the world and just knows it's going to blow up. That's simply not the way that it works. I mean, look at the way Gary Vaynerchuk rose to the fame that he has today. That dude just created a massive massive unyielding unrelenting amount of content and in exchange he became one of the most sought after marketing and business speakers in the entire world now you don't have to like Gary V that's that's not my point my point is he absolutely dominates. Dominates. You don't have to like them, but enough people do. Enough people do. And my friends, that's the point. You don't need everybody to like you. Frankly, you don't want everyone to like you. You just don't. What you need is enough people to like you, just enough people to like you, that you kick ass. That's it. That's all you need. That's the secret. That's the secret. You just need enough people to like you. That's all. You should assume that when you do a video, someone's going to look at your video and be like, look at that dumbass. And you should assume someone else is going to go, oh, God, the quality of that video is terrible. And someone else is going to go, oh, the accent, the way they pronounce that word, so stupid. You should assume people are going to say that because people are idiots and they have their own taste and it's America and we get to think whatever the hell we want here. And that's amazing. There's also going to be people that go, wow, that chick, she's pretty freaking smart. Man, she's crushing it. Jesus, love this. I want to do business with her. She's awesome. She's going to take care of me. Or man, this guy, I love the way he explains that. That dude, he gets it. He gets the way I think. I want to do business with him. If you get one person who says they want to do business with you, if I told you you were going to produce a video and only four people were going to watch it, only four, but one of them was going to be a tremendous client and the other three were going to think you were complete moron. Would you make that deal? Would you create that piece of content? Would you do that? I hope you would. Because guys, that's the game. That's the game. That is the game. That's the whole game. Just create content all day, every day. Not actually all day, every day. There's tactics so that you have your life. That would be nuts if you did it all day, every day. And maybe you can, which would be even more amazing. And I would love to see that. And God bless you for doing it But my point is there are tips and tactics like batching like making your videos templatized So okay let wrap up with that Let wrap up with some some super tactical stuff um here and hopefully you made it through these 30 minutes. Um, you know, cause you know, this is the way that I think. And part of this is me talking myself into different things that I know I got, I need to do. But, um, here's just a few, a few things. Um, uh, if you want your videos to look good, look good, very simple. Um, pick up your, your iPhone or God, if you're using an Android, you have other life choices that you have to, you have to question, but okay. Pick up your smartphone, uh, stand in front of a window and maybe take two steps back from the window, hold that iPhone up. So you're facing the window with the iPhone pointed back or smartphone pointed back with the camera, you know, pointed at you. Hold it up with a slight down angle that kind of slims you, narrows you, makes you look a little longer, allows you to position yourself in the camera a little better. It's just a more attractive look. And then speak clearly. You're Spielberg. Spielberg. If you have the new iPhone with the cinematic mode, it's probably better than an A7 Mark III Sony camera. I mean it's freaking ridiculous The first cinematic setting video that I did With my new iPhone 13 or whatever the hell this is I had people like Oh who got the new camera What new camera did you get And I'm like it's my iPhone bro And so now Stay in front of a window So lights facing you So you're lit You're the subject You want to be lit If you can have the window open Light coming in and turn all the rest of the lights off Now that will give you kind of a framed look Cool slight down angle. That will remove any garbage in your backdrop for the most part because it'll really just be capturing you with maybe a little bit of background. And then just talk clearly into it. That's it. Two, three minutes of value. Now you look, you sound amazing, you're lit, you're focused, you're the subject because you've got that little dark around you and all you needed was a phone that you already have. Now all the non-content related stuff out the window. Okay, great. Next, templatize the way you create videos. Mine is very simple. Super, super clean, short intro. Today, we're going to answer the question, what is home insurance? Let's get it. Then I put a, I put it. So that's it. That's the whole intro. I start right there. No garbage up front. No, hi, I'm Ryan Hanley, the president. No one gives a crap who you are at the front. You got to hook them in. Hi, today we're going to answer the question, why do you need home insurance? Bam, done. I do a little tiny seven second logo thing that I got off Fiverr for 10 bucks. Paid somebody 10 bucks, take my logo and make it, maybe it was a little more, maybe it was 25 bucks. Make my logo move with a little bit of music. That's it. Pop that in. And then I get into the content. Hi, my name is Ryan Hanley. I'm the president of Rogue Risk where we do insurance differently, specifically by giving you knowledge and information to make the right insurance decision. There it is. If you like this video, tap that like button. If you're watching on YouTube, that helps other amazing business owners and decision leaders just like you find this video. Bam. Then I get into my content. That's it. Think about how short that was, how punchy, bang, bang, after I messed it up that first time. And then I'm right into the
