Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - (MS) The Strangest Secret, Have You Heard This Story?

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

If you've heard the audio recording from Earl Nightingale called "The Strangest Secret", this is the story behind it; and how it can help you to change the world. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com Magnetic Marketing FunnelHackingLIVE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. And oh, oh, oh, do I have a story for you today? Man, I'm so excited to tell you it's a story. So a couple precursor things. Tomorrow we are doing the official groundbreaking for the Atlas Research Center, which is crazy. This is like this crazy vision I had two or three years ago. As you guys know, you've heard me talk about it, to build this event center library. And now everyone helped donate money towards the cause is all flying in and we're doing a big groundbreaking ceremony we got 50 or 60 people coming tomorrow

which is fun and then we got like a whole handful of cool people coming like joe vitale who i would um i bought his entire library which was man probably half of my library now is uh was joe vitale's at one time and so he's coming and speaking on on books and um which would be really cool and then also like don green who runs a um um the uh the point hill foundation is coming and then tal tusfany and i probably pronounced the last name wrong but he runs the ayn rand foundation he's coming out too so like two of my favorite authors the heads of their foundation are coming out like gosh, gosh, it's so cool. Anyway, so that doesn't really add to the story.

I'm excited. So that's happening tomorrow. And I'm sure you'll hear me talk more about it here on the podcast when it's all said and done. But it's going to be a really cool, really special day. And just grateful for everyone who's buying into this vision. Hopefully give them a really cool experience. So there's number one. Number two is as part of this,

um, soon to be launched of secrets of success and the whole, everything we're doing there. Um, we reached out to the night and go Conan, uh, company. Cause if you think about this, it's all the books I've been collecting are basically everything on personal development, marketing sales from like 1850 to 1950. Right. And most of those things are in the public domain. So I'm republishing a lot of right now. There'll be the members area. It's going to be, it's going to be really cool. So the books, courses, me teaching, talking about all these principles, like all that stuff's going to be in the members area, which is really exciting. Um, but I was like from 1950 to like, you know, to like 1980s or nineties there, actually even further, I said 1950s to like, to like the 2000s. Um, there was one company that was like the personal development

brand and it was Nightingale Conant. And if you don't know Nightingale Conant, it was started by Earl Nightingale and Lloyd Conant. And it was a business started together. And anyway, we're working on a deal right now to try to license, um, some or all of the, um, the audio programs that they've, they published for 50 plus years. If you'll have members there as well, which is cool. So anyway, we haven't finalized the deal yet, but we're working on it. I think anyway, they're amazing and I'm really excited. I think we're going to be able to, to have some really cool things from the Nightingale Conant library inside the members area, which is going to be insanely helpful.

So, you know, from the Russell Brunson library, you got everything from 1850 to 1950. From the Nightingale Conant library, you got like 1950 to 2000. And then post 2000, that's like the the tony robbins era right tony robbins brendan ruchard like the next wave of of personal development people and so um anyways it's just it's exciting so so many fun things are happening but i was like as i started going through all the night and go conan stuff i was like i know who earl nightingale is i know a little bit about him i've listened a lot of stuff and i love it but i don't know his story and so i actually um found found his, his

biography and just finished listening to it today actually. And Oh my gosh, it was, it was awesome. But there's one chapter in particular. I want to tell you guys a story behind, cause it is like the most fascinating, crazy, cool thing. Like one of the best stories I've ever heard. And I'd never heard it until, until I listened to the biography. And so I want to share with you guys and I'm sure I'm going to mess up a couple of details. So I recommend going to Audible and buying the, I think it's like Earl Nightingale on Earl Nightingale or something like that is the name of the book. It's his biography telling his whole story.

But there's one chapter and the chapter is called The Strangest Secret. And that's what I want to tell you guys the story behind. And if you know who Earl Nightingale is, my guess is you've heard The Strangest Secret. That's his story behind. And if you know who Earl Nightingale is, my guess is you've heard the strangest secret. That's his like his trademark program audio. You know, it's like his philosophy on success. And, but the story behind it is, it's like the coolest story I've ever heard. I'm not going to lie. It's one of the best ever.

So what happened was, uh, Earl was, uh, was a radio host, right? A radio personality. And, uh, but he loved personal development things. So he would talk about, you know, all the things. Success, personal development, achievement, thoughts. Like all these kind of things, right? And every week on the show, he would have these things. And he was mildly famous around the country, but not like, you know, not who he became.

And anyway, he was leaving on a sailing tour or something i don't know if he's gone for a month or two on the sailing tour and before he left his office assistant was like hey you know normally we have these monday meetings or whatever it was these meetings where we train our sales staff since you're gonna be gone would you mind recording something for them that we can you know while're gone, they can listen to to motivate them to do better in sales and things like that. And so at the time, Earl had been like having this, you know, having this thought or these different thoughts in his head about something he wanted to create. And so he said, like he woke up at 8 a.m. in the morning. He sat down for two hours.

He wrote this little booklet and he titled it the strangest secret then he went into the recording studio and he clicked record and he recorded this audio teaching this process this principle of the strangest secret and it's not super long i think it's like 30 or 40 minutes long or maybe it might be less maybe 20 or 25 30 minutes long but recorded this audio uh uh on record and then they pressed a copy of the record for everyone on the cell staff. I think, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 of them, right? They recorded the whole thing. And then I handed out to cell staff and then he took off and he went out of town and, you know, back then didn't have cell phones, obviously. So he didn't know what was happening, but he went sailing and I can't remember if it was a month or two months, but he was sailing and just kind of disconnected.

And while he was gone, this is where it gets crazy. So his office assistant, uh, handles out to the salespeople and they all loved it. And they're like, this is where it gets crazy so his office assistant uh handles out to the sales people and they all loved it and they're like this is so good and so they start asking for for more copies for their friends and family members so she started like going and you know produced a couple more records hand out for their friends and family and and they you know their friends and family got it they loved it and they start asking for more so she's like do this little side hustle she's like printing these things handing them out printing them handing them out and then somebody uh sends one to the radio station that um that uh the earl was like the you know the voice of you know whatever he was the main radio host for and um and uh the people in the station listening like this is

really really good so what they decided to do which is crazy is they without his permission without asking when they decided to air it live on the radio so they played it live on the radio um during when he would normally be speaking i think he probably told people like hey this is a record you recorded for his his staff and here's something you guys can hear while earl's gone so they played it and people freaked out and then they started calling his office asking for a copy they wanted to copy the vinyl they wanted what so um his assistant was like all scared like Earl's gonna be so mad like that but I'm doing this and so she decided she's like well if we're gonna do this I'm gonna I'm gonna mark it up a little bit so it makes a profit on so she started charging people for these records and um and so um she thought that would

discourage them from buying it but instead it got more people wanting it more people and so she started printing him and shipping him and printing him and shipping them. And it got to the point where her boss is out of the country on a sailboat. She's supposed to be doing office manager stuff. Instead, she's full-time printing and shipping these records out to people. And so people would come to the office. They would mail in.

They'd send checks and money orders through the mail, like all through word of mouth. No advertising, no marketing, not a single ad was played, just people hearing about it from other people. And during the, I think it was the time while he was sailing the ship, they ended up selling 200,000 copies of this record, which is insane. Once again, no ads, all viral marketing. And so she's about this whole production where she's printing and she's shipping

and she's so scared that when Earl comes back, he's going to melt down because she turned this thing into this printing and she's shipping and she's so scared that when Earl comes back, he's going to melt down because she turned this thing into this printing and shipping house. Um, and, uh, the thing starts selling like crazy. And so fast forward to Earl gets done with his sailing trip. He gets, he gets, um, you know, the boat comes back into the dock wherever it's at. And, um, and we get there, there's thousands of newspaper reporters, people there. And he thought he was going to be under arrest. He walked in. He's like, am I under arrest?

What's happening here? They're like, no, you're not under arrest. And they said, you need to call your assistant. So he called the assistant. She's just like, I'm so sorry. I don't know what's happening. We're selling like 200,000 copies of this record. And she thinks he's going to fire her or get super mad at her.

Instead, he's like, recognizes the opportunity. And he's like, keep doing what you're doing. And so, um, race is home and this becomes their business printing and shipping these, these records out to people. And what's crazy is it became the first record to go gold, which I don't know if that means a million copies. I'm not sure how that works, but, um, they, they, um, you know, for, for records like, you know, Michael Jackson sells a million copies of those gold or platinum or whatever that looks like. I don't know. But there had never been a record in the genre of a spoken word.

So it was the first spoken word record to ever become a gold record. It was crazy as we were talking to Nightingale Conant, Vic Conant, who runs the company now, actually sent us a picture of that record. I saw it. I was like, that is insane. Like, anyway, my goal is to see if there's any way I can buy that from him to let him put it in our library. Cause how cool the story is that, but it was the first thing that went viral. It was the first thing that, you know, word of mouth, it was like this thing that just, that literally changed the world. And it was off of this recording he'd created for his sales team and never thought twice about it. And one of the quotes in the book, it said, it said he went sailing as a normal man. And when

he came home, he was a millionaire and he didn't even know it. Like how crazy cool is that? Like, oh, I got chills just saying it again. But when I, uh, when I was listening to the audio book and they said that, I was just like, what a crazy cool story. So what is the moral and the motivation or what's the moral of this episode of the, of our podcast? I don't really know. A couple of things though. Number one is you should all go listen to the strangest secret. Um, I'm hoping that someday we'll have it in the members area of secrets of success. But if not, like, um, if you buy the audio book that it's listened to in the appendix of the audio book, they actually have it in there so you can listen to it. And again, I think it's, I think it's like 20 or 30 minutes long if I, if I remember right. Um, so go listen to it cause it's really, really cool. And one of

the core foundational, like things in the personal development industry, right? Like so much of what has been developed since then came from this recording, you know, some people were inspired by it and they went deeper and they created books and courses and seminars and everything. But it was like one of those, um, those pivotal, pivotal things that like shifted, um, shifted the world, shifted society in a similar way to like thinking grow rich did when Napoleon Hill's book, they sold, you know, 30, 40 million copies. I get shifted the world. Um, and this is the same thing. So I think number one is just go and listen to it, finding it and find out for yourself, like what is the strangest secret? Do you even know what it is? If you don't know what it is, you got to find out. Cause I promise you it's, it's simple, but it's so powerful.

That's number one. Number two is, um, you never know what things you create are going to be the things that resonate with people. I think so many people are always waiting to like, I don't know. And I do sometimes too, like I'm gonna wait to create the most perfect thing ever. And so we're waiting and we're waiting. We're trying and we're, you know, like we're trying to make the best thing ever versus like, you know, Earl's on the radio every day teaching and, you know, giving sermons on success. And ooh, that's a cool name.

Sermons of success. Like doing these things out there and like, um, and, uh, trying to help people be more successful. It wasn't until like just randomly, like almost as an afterthought, you know, he sat down for two hours and wrote what became his finest work and then recorded it. And it went viral because of itself. How many times we've done the same thing? We try to engineer the most perfect video to go viral or a podcast episodes and be perfect. And it doesn't work. Right. But we do it and do it. And eventually there's like one that hits, um, so many people I know who have gone viral on YouTube or Instagram or whatever.

And it's like for most of them, they put out 100 videos and then one hit for some reason, right? And that was the one that became the viral video that built their channel and changed their entire life. And so you never know. So it's just like putting stuff out there all the time. There's a principle, and I have not read this book yet. So this is me telling the story like regurgitated from me me hearing from somebody else. So I probably tell it wrong. In fact, just Steve Larson told me, I think it's the book war of art, but again, I'm not positive. So don't, don't quote me, but in the, in the story I heard from Steven, which I think was from that

book. So that's how many, you know, how many, um, it's playing phone booth. So I'm going to mess up the story, but, but the story from that i heard steve tell that was really really cool was basically that they had these two students in our class or something and they had 30 days and they said a half the class you have 30 days trying to make the most perfect art possible like make something that's gonna you know be the best if the other group you can make as many variations as you want and the last thing you make will be your art project right so like every day create something new and then the end of it seems better so i did this over 30 days and what happened is at the end of 30 days the people have spent 30 days trying to make something

perfect um theirs were way worse than the people who were creating something new every single day for 30 days and eventually made something awesome right it was like the iterative process of trying over and over and over and over and over again, it created something amazing. And so the principles, I think watching Earl Nightingale's story from the outside and then the story from the war of art, I think, and from all the other stuff is just understanding. It's like it's us producing, putting things out over and over and over again.

And when you do that, that's when you become good enough to create something that will truly go viral. And anyway, it's exciting, especially right now for me. Like, um, I'm working, I've been working for almost three years on my next book project. Um, you guys have heard me talk about it a lot and it's just been a stagnating spot. I haven't been able to like figure out how to really take it to the next level, which is why I think a big part of me is buying these books and going on this, you know, you know, this personal development rampage, try to study and learn everything for everybody. I'm really just geeking out on trying to try to figure out how to make something truly amazing.

And it's interesting. I decided to partner up with a co-author on this book and I don't have all the details yet. So I want to announce someone who you would know and he's written a bunch of really good books. And so this morning, actually, I sent him over kind of my research and all the work I've done at this point. And I think I've done four or five seminars teaching these principles. And so I sent him a brain dump, like, here's everything. Here's all the stuff I have. I want you to go listen to it all.

And it was just kind of cool to see, you know, three years worth of work, like, condensed down to these maybe 10 hours of me, of audio, video, writings, everything that I gave to him to go through so we can, um, collaborate and start making this book a reality. So anyway, um, just, I'm in the process right now and just makes me think about if I was trying to sit down and write the perfect book, it'd never be perfect. But because I've been three years, like creating, posting, writing, you know, all that kind of stuff is getting better and better and better. And I think my goal and the goal that this, uh, my coauthor and I, which again, as soon

as we have finalized contracts, we'll tell you guys more of the details about it. But, um, um, our goal is to sell 10 million copies, um, which is insane. Um, I, I'm, you know, even a million copies is insane. I think they said like 1% of the books in the world or less than that. I don't even sell a million copies. And right now between my three books, like dot com expert and traffic, we're getting close to crossing a million copies combined to those three books. But one book to sell a million copies is crazy. But you guys know I'm a little, a little competitive, maybe hyper competitive. But, um, the books that the, the books that,

you know, the big books nowadays sell 10 million copies. So, um, Jordan books that the, the books that, you know, the big books nowadays sell 10 million copies. So, um, Jordan Peterson's books sold 10 million copies. Um, atomic habits, James clear book, I think sold 15 million copies. And those are the books that, you know, it's crazy. So, um, Michael, our goal, uh, in pursuing this book is to sell 10 million copies, which would be the equivalent of like Earl Nightingale's strangest secret would be the equivalent of thinking, grow rich, be equivalent of, you know, the greatest selling, uh, things of all time.

And so that's the vision and the strategy and the mission is to like, how do we create a book so good that we can sell 10 million copies? And so, um, that's what we're working on. That's the secret project that, um, will be our, you know, the big project. The goal is to launch the book in about a year from now. Um, so that's where we're at. So there's my, there's Russell's definite purpose that he is running towards right now. And I'm excited for, and I'm excited to be able to share with you guys someday soon. So anyway, there you go. Uh, the reason why this episode is longer than normal

is because I'm driving to the airport, uh, because Bill Allen, who's one of my inner circle members, who actually my Atlas members, who's the highest level mastermind. And he was one of our, he bought one of the two of the million dollar seats and he bought some of the other seats. Like anyway, he flew out here and he's a pilot, one of the best pilots in the world. Actually, he's like a fighter pilot. But anyway, I can't, I'm sure I'll find out the full story today, but one of the best pilots in the world. And he flew out in his own private plane and he does a podcast where you're actually

in the plane during the podcast. So I'm driving the airport, we're jumping in a private plane and flying around in circles to do a podcast in the air. So that's what I'm doing right now in about 15 minutes from now, which will be awesome. So I'm sure that you guys have a chance to hear that. Hopefully, uh, but hopefully have a chance to actually see it. Cause it's going to be crazy. He's got like GoPros, like duct tape to the wings of the plane and a bunch of stuff. So it's going to be a lot of fun. Anyway, I digress. I'm almost at the airport.

So I'm going to leave you guys with the challenge to go listen to The Strangest Secret and then start visualizing in your own mind how and when you could create the thing that will become your finest work. The thing that will be your thing that goes viral, the book that sells 10 million copies, the recording, the podcast, whatever it is. And again,

it's not going to come from you trying to make the perfect thing. It's going to come from you publishing a lot to become worthy enough to create the thing that will go viral and change the world. So that's it. I appreciate you all. Thanks for listening. I hope you have a great day. Talk soon.