Japanese Success Secrets

This program is brought to you by thepodcastfactory.com.

Jonathan: Welcome back to another edition of The List-Building Lifestyle. With me today as always is the list-building master, Mr. Igor Kheifets. What’s up, sir?

Igor: Hey, Jonathan, would you like to change the world?

Jonathan: Would I love to change the world? I…um…okay.

Igor: Okay, awesome, because, you know, everywhere I go today everybody is claiming to wanting to change the world or doing something to change the world, and basically everybody is changing the world. So I’m like I feel stupid for not wanting to change the world, you know.

Jonathan: I felt pressure there. I don’t really want to change the world, but you put me on the spot.

Igor: Well, and the reason that I did is because that a lot of the people that I talk to and I ask them like ‘Why did you get into online marketing? Why did you start a business online?’ about 8 out of the 10 will tell you that one of the reasons is because they want to help other people and change the world. And I find it a bit…I see the irony in that, Jonathan, because everybody is willing and waning and pushing hard to change the world, but almost nobody is working hard to change themselves. What are your thoughts on that?

Jonathan: Well, I just thought about my work at The Podcast Factory and one of the things that is my mission is to help more people quit their jobs and I think that’s changing the world at some level, but it didn’t start out that way. I spent the last decade working on myself, so I really value very much the idea of personal accountability and starting to change from within.

Igor: And I agree with you absolutely, because I believe that the world is a reflection of our inner selves. And I know it sounds a little bit, you know, Zen-like and the whole Hindu stuff, but I do believe that before you can expect the world to change and the world to treat you differently, you need to change first for that to happen. And I’ll give you a little story as an example.

I’m not a fan of Japanese comics. They’re called manga in case you didn’t know.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: But there is one manga that I really dig and that is, it’s called the OnePunch-Man. So the story is about a regular Peron who lives in a city called the Metropolis-Z or City-Z or something, and this city is constantly being hit by monsters,

Jonathan. It’s just, you know, that’s what they do on a daily basis. They just get hit by monsters and creatures that want to destroy the city all the time. And so this guy, you know, he wanted to become a hero. He wanted to be a hero for fun. That’s how he calls himself. He just, he didn’t expect to get paid for it. He didn’t want any recognition. He just wanted to be a hero for fun. And so, you know, he was just a regular guy just like you and me and so [03.00] he started training, and he trained hard every day. He would do lots and lots of training until he became so strong he was able to take out almost any opponent, well, every opponent, because that’s what the whole thing is all about with a single punch.

So imagine there’s a giant Godzilla-like monster that wants to eat him and he just punches it once and the monster just explodes into lots of different, you know, small, little pieces.

And so, in this one of the enemies that he fights is a guy by the name of Dr. Genus. And so Dr. Genus runs this place called ‘The House of Evolution’, which, you know, the purpose of this organization is to improve the human race through artificial evolution. So he creates clones of himself to keep constantly improving and improving and improving in order to create the ultimate human being, the ultimate person.

Now, while he’s doing it, he also kind of hates everybody, because he was picked on at school and he doesn’t like people. He thinks people are stupid, and he wants to kill everyone and take over the world. I mean, that is just to be expected, right?

So what he does is he creates the ultimate monsters and fighters that he can control, because he created them through artificial intelligence that would help him take over the world. And so what I found to be extremely ironic about this whole scenario is that this Dr. Genus reminded me of almost everybody I see around me, especially the sleepwalkers that don’t really invest any effort or time into improving themselves. You know, and as painful as it is to admit, one of these sleepwalkers is my father. Now my father can always find something wrong with everybody and everything. You know, even when he’s not right and that’s often, he will find a reason why everybody else is wrong and why the world isn’t a good place. And, I mean, he’s a nice guy and everything and he’s a funny dude as well, like if you talked to him for 20 minutes, you’ll love him. But when it comes to solving problems and getting real about life, then, you know, he’s just a little crybaby and everybody’s to blame but him.

And so he reminds me about Dr. Genus and a lot of other people that I’ve met, you know, over the course of my life who want to change everybody else and everything else, but they’re never willing to change themselves. And this really gets me back to list-building and email marketing, because we always want our customers, alright, to buy more. We want them to buy more and not bitch about it. We want them to buy more at a higher price and not give us any price resistance about it.

But how often do we really go and work on ourselves and look in the mirror and say ‘Why should my customer give me $700 for this service? Am I a person of value? Am I worth this money? And if I’m not, why not? And let me go fix it.’ That’s how…that’s how I got into the whole groove of actually making money rather than just talking about [06.00] it, you know, where most people are right now.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: I start asking these uncomfortable questions like ‘What kind of person do I need to become where people would literally happy and proud to give me money, because of just the kind of person I am?’

Jonathan: Yeah. And that’s tough. Most people don’t want to do the work, and I think that’s what it is. It’s easier to bitch about what’s wrong with the world than it is to say to really just take stock of yourself and your shortcomings and figure out the spots that you could start shoring up.

Igor: Yeah, absolutely. And so if you’re trying to mail to your list and the list doesn’t respond, they don’t open your emails, like the first response, the natural response is to say ‘The leads are crap. They don’t convert. They don’t respond. I need to change my traffic source.’

Now the problem with that is that you’ll eventually end up changing many different traffic sources and you’ll find out that the common denominator at getting all these leads is you.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: Not the leads or the traffic source.so you’ll eventually come to realize this and it’s just better that you come to realize this truth right now. So if you’re not getting the sales you want, if you’re not getting the email opening rates that you want, if you’re getting excuses instead of people committing to make a sale, right, you need to advance yourself. You need to improve yourself.

You know, Jonathan, I have this client who I served recently who I really do not wish to serve anymore because he was really closedminded. He told me that he can’t sell to women. Like he said that women just don’t buy from him. Therefore he needed to make sure that we before we run with the promotion that we only send him men, to which I said, ‘Dude, it’s just a bunch of bull crap. You’re not just selling to women properly, like, you know, you’re supposed to. You just need to say different things in order to sell to women, because women are driven by different things.’ Right? Women are…

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: …Slightly in that regard. And so the reason I said it to him, not because, well, because I knew was doing the phone sales, like he would actually need to get you on the phone to sell you something, to which I of course said, ‘Dude, if you’re getting them on the phone, then I think it would be easier.’

I mean, it’s a 100 times easier to sell something on the phone than it is to sell something, you know, using email or some sort of like one-to-many mechanism. It’s just one-on-one conversation. Nothing could be easier if the lead has told you, if that person told you, ‘Look, I want to learn more about your product or service,’ right? And…

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: And so I was like ‘Awesome, I can help this person.’ And so, but I told him upfront that there is no way for me to know whether it’s going to be a man or a woman. Like I can write in the email swipe and say ‘look, if you’re not a woman’ – I’m sorry – ‘If you’re not a man, don’t click on this link, but guess what’s going to happen?

Jonathan: The women are going to want to click.

Igor: The women are going to click on the link just because I told them not to do it. So I told the that it’s not going to be useful for him to like exclude the women and just let this solo run, just let the test run. And we just did like a 200-click test anyway. So this guy runs the ad and disappears because he needs some time to follow up with the leads. [09.00]

And he comes back and he complains to me that just as he’s expected that most of the people who responded were women and he hated that and he was really upset with me, to which is said, ‘Look, if for some reason you’re only attracting women although I know that the people who hit your page were both men and women, then you’re probably talking in a way that attracts them. You’re probably stating the benefits…’

Jonathan: Man up!

Igor: Yeah, yeah, exactly! ‘So you’re probably stating the benefits. You’re probably talking about the issues and the problems and the concerns that more women have, that women have like more so than men, and you’re just making them respond.

Why don’t you change your qualifier copy and qualifier marketing and just tracking more guys? Or better yet, why don’t you use this opportunity?’ Because remember, Jonathan, we’ve talked about this, every challenge holds an equal seed of opportunity.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: ‘So if you’re attracting women, why don’t you figure out an offer you can make to women where they would be dumb not to say yes? If you’re already attracting them and you’re already investing your time to talk to women on the phone, man, it’s just the universe telling you – Dude, you have like an untapped market here. Why are they coming to you and not somebody else?’ So that is a classic case where the media wasn’t at fault for the lack of success, but it’s the inability to keep an open mind and to be able to adjust towards the media, right, where the issues was.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, I think that today more than ever – and maybe it’s a US thing that I’m finding or maybe it’s everywhere – but there is a lack of personal accountability in this world. People just do not want to be accountable. They
want to point fingers and blame.

Igor: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the marketing that everybody kind of consumes through TV and media doesn’t really help, does it? I mean, we are being told to blame someone else. It’s always this person or that thing or terror or, you know, whatever the case, but we’re always told that someone else is to blame.

I remember when my life, for the first time that my life really changed was when I decided to stop being fat. And up until that point, you know what I thought Jonathan? I honestly believed for about 17 years of my life that I was fat because it was genetics.

Jonathan: Ah, really…?

Igor: Yes! I thought I was fat because my dad was fat.

Jonathan: Same genes.

Igor: Yeah, and because my dad’s mom was fat and my dad’s sister was fat. Now I was completely ignoring the fact that my brother was skinny as hell and this dude is still skinny. He’s like, check this out – he’s 10 years older than me, okay, so he’s like 37…38 as we’re doing this and he just eats all the wrong foods. He eats snicker bars, candy, chips, everything, and he doesn’t get fat, you know. It’s just [12.00]…I think it’s unfair, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Made by Dr. Genus.

Igor: Yes! Exactly, maybe it is Dr. Genus! So I always ignored the fact that he wasn’t fat and that my mom was not fat. So eventually, you know, I was only able to improve my life and stop being fat and get skinny – rather quickly, by the way. Just in 2 months I think I lost like 20 pounds.

Jonathan: Wow.

Igor: All through just saying, you know, looking in the mirror. I remember standing in the shower – and, Jonathan, please do to imagine me naked, standing in the shower right now.

Jonathan: I wasn’t until you said it.

Igor: I was standing in the shower like a really tall mirror and I was looking at myself and I’m like ‘Dude, your fucking fat!’ you know? And that was the first time I said, ‘Okay, I am to blame. I am fat because I drink soda pops. I eat cake. I love chocolate. Like I love…I eat more potatoes than anything else which, I mean, it’s not healthy.’ So I finally was ready to admit that I was to blame and that it’s up to me to change that, so what did I do? I stopped drinking soda pops. I completely got off cake and cake and sweets and sugar. I started eating less in every meal and eating healthier. And I started running every other day, and it wasn’t like a lot. It was maybe like 0.7 of a mile or something every day, just a little bit. And before you know it, 2 months later I’m, you know, I wasn’t skinny, but I was lean.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: Like you could actually like see my face shrinking as a result, and I was like ‘Wait a minute, did I…did that just happen by accident? By luck? Or did I just make it happen,’ and when I finally realized that I’d made it happen, things started changing, you know. I was able to adapt this same philosophy to everything.

On the past show we discussed pick-up art, you know, getting skilled at communicating with the women. I did the same thing with that department of my life. I did the same thing with the moneymaking department of my life. Like today if my income goes down, right, the first thing that my wife wants to tell me, she’s like ‘Oh, it’s probably, you know, the industry. Oh, tell me, is this competitor’s income down? This guy you’re talking to, is his income down? Blah, blah, blah…’

And even if their income is down, I still do not accept it as a matter of ‘That’s how life is. That’s how the market is.’ There is no such thing as the market. You create your market and you create your income, and I believe that if I’m not making the kind of money that I want to be making it is my responsibility and my fault that happens. So I’m going to fix it by just starting to execute things that I haven’t been executing that work. Usually I’ll go, you know, look up the industry information, get a coach or something or just go back on the basics – usually that’s plenty, because it’s always about the basics, and I end up fixing it. And so I can go from having a really bad month. The next month, I’ll explode and I’ll double it simply because my conscious effort has been directed towards improving the income with the belief that I’m the one in control.

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s interesting too [15.00], because I had the same experience as to where first took control of my life. I was the opposite. I was super skinny and I used to work in construction and wear like 50 pounds of tools. My back was
hurting at like age 22, and I’m like ‘I’m way too young for my back to hurt!’ And I did the research and I did the work in the gym and changed my life and realized, ‘Oh, wait a second! I’m not 130 pounds anymore. I’m 170 pounds of mass now!’ and I realized then that I had control of my life.

Igor: Exactly. And how empowering is it, Jonathan, to really and truly realize that hey, you are in control of your life.

Jonathan: It’s amazing.

Igor: You are able to change. And here’s another great realization – you don’t have to change the world. You don’t have to try and change other people. When you change yourself, everything around you changes whether you want to believe it or not, by the way, it just happens like…

Jonathan: That’s…yeah, that’s exactly how you change the world. It’s not…you’re really not going to change the world. If you changed yourself and the world is now changed around you. Your lens, your view, your outlook, all changed.

Igor: Yeah, your own set of glasses if you will. Like you look at anything and everything through your own set of unique glasses and the world is around you, just like other people see it the same way only through their own eyes. So the moment you change your own set of glasses, you put on a different set of glasses, life changes very, very quickly.

Jonathan: Awesome stuff, man. Good lessons on personal accountability, working out, getting fit, we’ve got it all in here! Becoming a lifestyle show here. Last night it was a pick-up artist. This time it’s changing your body and changing your world. I love it, man. That’s good stuff. So anything else you want to say as we’re wrapping this one up?

Igor: Well, no. I just want to remind you that, you know, you are in control, so stop bitching and moaning, and start asking yourself ‘What am I not doing? What am I not doing in order [to]’ – or should say – ‘what should I start doing in order to get the results that I want to get?’

Jonathan: Yeah, take action. I can dig it. So that’s a wrap for The List-Building Lifestyle, episode number 8, 2 months on the air, and we’re still rocking and rolling and we’ll be back in your earbuds next week. Thanks for tuning into The List-Building Lifestyle show. If you’re digging what your hearing, your next step is to go to iTunes and in the search bar type
‘List-Building Lifestyle.’ You’ll see Igor’s face smiling at you. Go ahead and click on that. Subscribe to his show and if you’re feeling really generous and you want to help us out, then give us your rating and review to help other smart people like you find this show.

Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you on the next one!

This is thepodcastfactory.com