Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - The Hidden Lesson Inside A Message to Garcia: Why Winners Don’t Wait for Instructions | #Success - Ep. 80

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

What separates people who talk about success from those who actually achieve it? In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I break down one of my favorite short books of all time… A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard. It’s a story that completely reframed how I think about work, entrepreneurship, and responsibility. This isn’t a book about tactics, it’s about character. It’s about becoming the kind of person who doesn’t need hand-holding, doesn’t need to be pushed, and doesn’t make excuses. The kind of person who simply takes the message, figures it out, and delivers. Key Highlights: The timeless principle from A Message to Garcia that every entrepreneur and team member needs to master. Why success has less to do with talent or opportunity, and everything to do with how you respond when no one’s telling you what to do. How this mindset applies directly to marketing, funnels, and leadership inside your business. The personal challenge I give every entrepreneur who’s tired of waiting for direction and ready to start executing. It’s so short, it will only take you a few minutes to read it… So, why not!? This message has shaped how I build teams, launch offers, and show up every day… And I think it’ll do the same for you. Want to read it or give it to your team? Grab your own copy of A Message to Garcia HERE → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://russellbrunson.com/notes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. now obviously if you want to sell stuff online you're going to need a good funnel but if you want a great funnel then you're going to need to use click funnels click funnels is the number one funnel builder

in the world helping more first time entrepreneurs to leave their nine to five and to launch their dream than any other company on earth click funnels was built for the dreamer and the doer and you can get a free 14 day trial by going to click funnels.com slash podcast right now that's click funnels dot com slash podcasts click funnels because you're one funnel away from changing the world this is the russell brunson show you've probably heard tony robin say this before like if you want to take the island you have to burn the boats right most people don't decide most people dabble i'm going to try a little bit i'm going to see what i'm going to see if this works i'm going to try a little bit but then if it's not going to work then they slip they quickly slip back on their

mind like it's good i i can't do that right whereas deciding is is cutting off all other options like When you cut off all their options, there's nothing else you can do besides go forward, right? It's burning the ship so you can take the island. What's up, everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to my vault. So I'm excited to have you guys here. And today I've got a book that is a legend.

It's been printed over a million times. And a lot of you guys have never even heard of it. I hadn't heard of it until a couple years ago. It's called The Message to Garcia. And this is one of the first editions from 1890. And this one is really cool because it's also signed by Mr. Albert Hubbard. Not to be confused with El Ron Hubbard. Everyone thinks this is a Scientology guy.

It is not Albert Hubbard. It was one of the original people in the New Thought Movement. In fact, he was the guy who owned the printing presses for most of the people that were writing books back then. He had a community called the Roycrafters, and they would print books and magazines for all of the authors back in the day. And so Albert Hubbard was kind of the guy who ran that community. He printed tons of books and magazines, but this by far is the most famous thing that he published. And it's only a couple pages long, and it's called The Message to Garcia. This one's really cool because it has a leather cover.

And again, it's only a dozen pages or so, the entire book. I paid $300 for this copy of message to Garcia for the signed copy. The coolest thing about this book is, again, there's a really short analogy at the very beginning. It's kind of the core of the entire thing. The story inside this book is that there was a guy who was a U.S. Army officer named Rohan and the president of the United States of time said, I need you to get a message to this lieutenant who's in the mountains and the hills of Cuba

during a war, right? And he gives them this message, like, you need to go deliver it to this guy. And then Roan leaves and he goes and he figures out how to get to Cuba, how to get to the mountains, how to navigate through everything, how to get through the war zones, the rivers, the mountains, and everything, and figures out how to come and deliver the message directly to Garcia. And the premise of this book is the fact that he didn't go and ask a ton of questions, like, what's the address? How do I get there? What's the best route? Like, is like, who's going to pay for me to get? He doesn't ask any of those questions.

He's given a task, which is give this message to Garcia. He goes out there. And despite the complexity and the hardness of the task, he figured out a way to get it done. And so the message from this is like, is really for people to understand that like when you're given a task, it's like, how do you, how do you break through whatever barrier? Like most people, they go on a journey, they get a task, they get something they're trying to do, right? And as soon as they hit an obstacle, they stop.

As soon as they get past, it gets a little bit harder, they stop or they can't figure out the answer, so they stop. Right? And the whole point of this book is like, this guy, Rohan, he didn't do anything. He figured out a way to get it done, to get the message to Garcia. And so then afterwards, Albert Hubbard writes this article about what he saw about this story, and it gets published, and then people start seeing it, and they start wanting to share it.

So these big corporations and big companies, they saw this story, and they wanted their staff and employees to understand, like, this is how the mindset we have to have to be successful. We have to figure out, like, how you give them, like, if you're given a task, like, give a message to Garcia, you just figured out at all costs. Like, you don't have to, like, whatever it takes, just go. and get that task figured out. And so we had these big corporations and companies all around the world who started asking, like, can I, can we republish this?

And so it, again, it got printed over a million times in different languages all around the world to give people the understanding that, like, when you have a task, you have to figure out a way to get it done. We start thinking about people that are successful in any areas of life, right? I think about this. When I was in sports and athletics, as a kid, I was a wrestler growing up. And a lot of times, like, you set a goal or you set something. I wanted to be a state champion.

And then I wanted to be an All-American. I had these different goals. And it's one of the things where, like, there's not a playbook. Like, here's all the 12 steps to go and do the thing, right? It's like for you to get that task to be able to accomplish the goal. Like, you have to be willing to do anything. Like, break through walls if it needs to happen, right? And business was the same thing where I was like, I want, you know, my very first

goals, I want to make a million dollars in a year. Like that became the goal. Again, there wasn't at the time, like a blueprint, like follow these 12 steps to do it. It was like, all right, I got to figure this out through thick and thin. And, you know, when I was doing it the first time in, college, like I didn't have, there weren't, there weren't coaches and mentors and coaching programs and software. Like, I, like, I was trying to figure like, okay, I remember I wanted to sell something on the internet. I'm like, well, how do I get something on the internet? And I didn't

know that. And there wasn't chat TBT to ask. There was, you know, and so like, I was figuring things out. Eventually, I figured out, okay, you have to have a server. Because I think, first I bought a domain. I'm like, have a domain. Like, where's my website? There's no website. Like, okay, we have a domain. Now you got to figure out, like, I had to figure out the domain points to a server. So I had to get a server. And then from there, it's like, how do I get a website on the thing? It's like, well, there's different software, like, front page and Dreamweaers. I download front page.

And, like, there's so many steps. And there was no path. There was no plan. There was no nothing other than, like, I've just got to smash through wall to get it. Like, my equivalent of, like, getting a message to Garcia was like, I had to sell something on the internet. And there was so, it was so difficult to do that. And then again, this is 20 years ago. This is before, even after we figured out how to get a website online, then it was like,

how do I sell something? How do I get traffic? There's no Facebook. There's no MySpace, right? And I see people nowadays, and it blows my mind. because we've made the process so simple. Like, if you have a ClickFunnels account, you click a couple buttons and your site's live.

You can take orders. You go to Instagram and you make a reel and you get traffic coming. Like, it's so simple nowadays, yet most people just stop. I think it's coming back to like this concept of the message to Garcia. Like, if somebody gives you a task,

like you've got to go to the mountains of Cuba in the middle of a civil war and you've got to take this message across the enemy lines to the deepest part of the jungle and deliver it. And Roanne didn't ask a single question. He said, yes, sir, I'll go. And he figured out a way to get it done.

I think if more people embrace that mindset, instead of like, well, I don't know how to do this. I'm stuck. I'm confused. And they just hit a wall, hit a wall and they just stop, right? One of my friends said Temagali, he said something at one of our events sometime. He's like, if you want to be successful in life, you have to stop stopping. He's like, people just stop. He's like, you have to stop stopping.

Like, if you want to be successful, to keep moving forward. I think that's what people miss. Especially nowadays, like any hurdle you have, you can get figured out with chat GPT and with AI. And with, like, it's so simple nowadays, yet more people are lazier and more people stop and so I think if we come back and start adopting this message or this concept of how do you carry a message of Garcia you just do it you figure out a way and you apply that to anything in life it could be your relationships could be your business could be your sport like whatever it is you're trying to accomplish in life when you adopt that mindset that's how you

win the best mental framework that I think through when I do this is you've probably heard Tony Robbins say this before like the the quote of like if you want to take the island you have to burn the boat if you want to take the island and you're the head of the army mean you want to take the island the most powerful way to take the island is burn the boats because if there's no way to go back it's amazing what happens when it's a must to do something versus a should that's what makes human beings succeed that concept i think it came from world war two when they're storming normandy right and there's just be going on these beaches or whatever and and it's like they leave the boats behind you're going to start going and freak out and go back and it's like

if you want to be successful and take that and you have to burn the boat so there's no turning back myron golden spoke at a funnel hacking live event one time he came on stage for 20 or 30 minutes he talked about this concept of deciding. And I wish Myron is here to explain it. He does it better than me, but one thing I remember so powerful from his presentation was that the word decide means to cut, like literally to cut in half.

When you decide, it means day is from the Latin root of or from, side means to cut. You commit suicide, that means you cut off sue, your life, right? An incision, you cut inside yourself, right? You get cut inside. Well, when you decide, you cut yourself off from any other possible. So to decide literally means to sever. It means to cut. And so most people don't decide. Most

people dabble. I'm going to try a little. I'll see what I'm going to see if this works. I'm going to try a little bit. And but then if it's not going to work, then they quickly slip back on their mind. Like it's good. I can't do that. Right. Whereas deciding is, it's cutting off all other options. Like when you cut off all their options, there's nothing else you can do besides go forward. Right. It's burning the ship so you can take the island. If somebody wants to do something like this like, like actually get the message to Garcia, whatever your version of that is. It's coming back to the case. If I'm going to do that, like, I have to decide. I have to cut off all other options. And most people aren't really dead. Most people

are always dabbling. Like, I remember when my wife and I got married in our marriage, right? And we saw so many people around us. We loved who were getting divorces. And it's, and there's obviously there's so many situations. And I'm not saying this is perfect or that, you know, anything other than that one of the things we said, when we after we got married, we have to make sure that we have no options. Like this marriage is going to work. There's no other options. And so literally during our first month or so in marriage, we made a rule. We said we can never say the D word. Like, we can't joke about it. We can't talk about. Like, that is, that is like, because as soon as you do, as soon as you start joking, as soon as it's an option on the table,

then it's really easy to go back, right? As soon as you're like, oh, I can't figure out to get my message to Garcia. I'm just thinking like, I'll just go back. It'll be easier. As soon as that's an option, you're not going to take the islands because you're not burning the boats, right? And so we're like, we were burning the boats. And what's been powerful that, we've married for, man, almost 25 years. There's so many times, like marriage is not easy. It is difficult. It is hard. Like, it is, you know, there's ups and downs all the time. but there was never, there was never an outlet. There was never an option.

It was like, we're going to solve this. We're going to figure this out. We're going to have the conversation because there's not, there's not an out. Like, this is how it's going to work, right? When we got in business, in different parts of my business, different phases of the business, same things. Like, we've had business failures a lot. And when the business failure happens, it's not like, oh, we're, anyway, we're out. It's like, no, like, we will figure this out.

One of my friends was up here. Some of you guys know McCall Jones and Catherine Jones-lish, they told me the other day. They said that behind my back, they call me the cockroach. And I was like, what? And they said, yeah, at a nuclear war, a nuclear bomb hits, everything dies except the cockroaches. Cockroaches figure out how to live through. Like, they're the only things that survive everything. And they're like, Russell, we've seen your ups and downs over the last decade.

Like, you just keep coming back. Like, you're like a cockroach that cannot be killed. And I think it comes back to this. Like, I have a goal. I have a mission. It's bigger than me, and I'm not stopping. I've cut off all their options and I'm pursuing it with all my heart and my mind. I think most people don't do that.

Most people just dabble. And they give themselves an out. And they give themselves so many different outs. It's like, stop giving yourselves out. If you really want to accomplish something, you've got to burn the boats if you want to take the island. Do you want to take the message of Garcia? You've got to figure it out because no one's going to give you the answer to everything you need, right? It's your job to go out there and like you've got a mission, like figure out how to get through the mountains and get that message to Garcia.

When I first started my book collecting journey, some of you guys may have seen the documentary Bibliomania. If you did, I actually purchased this entire collection, a guy who was collecting Napoleon Hill. books and documents for over 20 years, and I actually went and purchased his entire collection from him. And when I was there, he was showing me, it was not just the Pulling Hill stuff, there's all these other books that he had from different authors and stuff. And I'm not going to lie, like, I didn't, I'd never heard of Albert Hubbard. I didn't know who that guy was. In fact, I thought it was the Scientology guy at the time, like, but I first heard the name. And I was like, oh, and he's like, this is the, like, Albert Hubbard, like, you know

about the message to Garcia, right? And I didn't want to act dumb because I thought everybody had heard of it before. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, message of Garcia. And I I remember like I took a picture of the book and that night I was like Google like what is the message Garcia I'd never heard of it before and I read the story and again it's it's such a short fast read I actually I found it online and I read it really quick and I got it I was like oh I was like that's why this is so cool and I started reading the story about the marketing and like the fact that it you know over a over a million times it had been printed in like I think like 20 or 30

different languages because when people like employers and bosses and in coaches and athlete when people saw that this message was so timely this is back 18 So this is before the turn of the century. It reminds me a lot of like Jocco's message of like extreme ownership, how corporations and armies and everyone took that message. It's like, everyone takes extreme ownership. It was the same thing back then in 1899 with with this message, the message of Garcia. It's just like, look, when you have a task, you got to figure out how to get it there.

And it was such a, such a powerful thing. So I read about that there and then I've actually got about a dozen different versions of this book now. I've got first editions, later editions, ones that are in bigger books and smaller books and pamphlet versions, and there's so many cool ones out that I've found. This is my favorite one, though, because I love the leather case

and just the way that it's packaged and the fact that it's signed by Elbert is pretty cool too. All right, if you want to read the message of Garcia, I wasn't giving you my notes, but the book is so simple. You can read it in like 15 minutes, the entire thing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a link down

to our copy of the message to Garcia in the comments down below. Click on that. Go over there, and you can get a free copy and that way you can read it and you can get inspired. I would recommend reading this and then tell it to your kids, tell it to your staff,

tell it to people that you have stewardship over have them read as well and can get this mindset for all of them of you can help them to get the mindset from this book the message of Garcia it'll help them to produce more and help your company grow your family get more done and it'll be pretty powerful so that's in the comments down below other than that thank you guys for hanging out today and we'll see you guys on the next video