The creation and aggregation process… On this episode Russell talks about what it means to aggregate information and turn it into something different, and how that is not the same thing as ripping somebody off. Here are some of the awesome things in this episode:

-- Why taking pieces of information from different people and compiling it into something you make your own is different than stealing.

-- Why studying information from several sources gives you a better overview of an entire topic.

-- And how aggregating all the information you have learned, helps others who are learning from you.

So listen here to find out how Russell aggregates information on different topics.

IF you read any of the intros to the books I’m always like, “I learned from this person and this and this and this.” Here’s like 50 people I studied and then I took all those things and I aggregated them together, and from there I came up with my own framework, my own process. It’s aggregating these people’s ideas into a process that’s simpler for me to understand and hopefully it will be simpler for you as well.

-- ClickFunnels: Everything you need to start market, sell, and deliver your products and services online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)

-- DotComSecrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Growing Your Company Online With Sales Funnels."

​-- Expert Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Converting Your Online Visitors Into Lifelong Customers."

-- ​Traffic Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Filling Your Websites And Funnels With Your Dream Customers.

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. This is actually an episode I started recording a couple of days ago in my car, and I couldn’t, there was a word, I couldn’t remember the word. So I got halfway through and I was like, “what is that word!” and I stopped it and I deleted it and now I remembered the word. So I am back to do a re-do of this episode all about your job and your role and your responsibility as an aggregator of information.

So I am, it’s Friday here, today’s a meeting day and then next week we have inner circle all week, then I’ve basically got like 2 weeks to get all the updates done for the Dotcom secrets book. If you haven’t been listening along, obviously I submitted the final manuscript for the Traffic Secrets book last week, so it’s out of my hands. But then we’re republishing the first two books with a new publisher, so I had this little window of opportunity to update them. So yesterday I spent all day going in, I was like, “I’m just going to tweak some stuff in Dotcom secrets, you know, polish it a little bit.” But after I got into it I was like, “Oh my gosh I need to change everything.’ I want to rewrite the entire book.

It’s funny because I’m 5 years in now, since my first book, with my third book I’ve become a better writer, I tell a story better, all the things like that, and none of the first book, at least the first one, I’m not sure about Expert Secrets, I’ll find that out next. But the Dotcom Secrets book is missing all that. There’s not good story and good things, so I want to weave those things back in, so it may turn that 58,000 word book into a 100,000 word book, who knows. But that’s what I’m doing right now, then I’m going to do the same thing with the Expert Secrets book, and then put them out into the world. And I’m so excited about that.

As I was thinking about this whole thing, I started thinking about my role, and probably a lot of your guys’ roles, as an aggregator of information, and an aggregator of content. If you think about this, the Dotcom Secrets book isn’t my own thoughts, there’s some of my own thoughts in there, there’s  insights I’ve found and things I connected and correlations I’ve seen, stuff like that. I take my own personal experience, but none of the information is new. I didn’t invent it. I was out there and I was trying to learn this stuff, and I started aggregating information from a lot of sources.

IF you read any of the intros to the books I’m always like, “I learned from this person and this and this and this.” Here’s like 50 people I studied and then I took all those things and I aggregated them together, and from there I came up with my own framework, my own process. It’s aggregating these people’s ideas into a process that’s simpler for me to understand and hopefully it will be simpler for you as well.

And I think about for any of us content creators, that’s kind of what we’re doing. The difference between aggregating information and ripping somebody off is you rip somebody off, you’re taking from one person and just ripping them off. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about looking at a whole bunch of sources, and from there coming up with your own ideas, and then always giving credit back to where you learned the original concepts from, which I always try to do.

I remember, this was probably 5 or 6 years ago, I had a chance and I was hanging out with Howard Berg, the world’s fastest reader, and I asked him his opinion on religion and a couple of other things. I’m like, this dude’s read 30,000 books. And I still remember what he told me, “It’s interesting, most people will read one book on a topic, on a religion, or on whatever the topic is, and then they read that book, and then that becomes their reality, that lens of that book becomes that reality. What I do instead when I want to learn a topic, I’ll find 10, or 20, or 30 books around that topic, all from different angles. I’ll read them all, and then from that I have a different perception of what reality is. I’m able to see things from different directions and different angles that nobody else could do.”

And I feel like as a content creator, as a producer, as an influencer, whatever you want to call yourself, an info product marketer, or whatever, that’s really our job to go out there into the world and seek solutions for our own problems, things we’re trying to figure out how to solve. So we’re going out there and reading books, listening to podcasts, trying this and testing that, going to this event, going to this mastermind, talking to this person, all these things because you’re trying to clearer picture in your mind, to make it make sense to you. So you aggregate all this information from that and then you come back and build your own framework saying, “Based on my understanding of the world and what I’ve experienced, this is the truth.”

So that’s what I’ve tried to do in these books and in my podcast and other things. You know, my role is aggregate information, it’s not to create new information. I wish it was. I wish I was the guy who could sit there and be like, “You know what, blah.” But I don’t typically have that. At least not often, maybe I do sometimes. But the most part, it’s me just connecting dots. I see this and this and this and by themselves maybe they’re not that cool, but if you plug these things like this, look how cool this is.

I was thinking about the Dream 100 concept I learned from Chet Holmes. Dream 100 was cool, I learned it from Chet Holmes, but I was like how does it work for me? And then I started thinking that my dream 100 aren’t customers the way that Chet taught. My dream 100 are affiliates. And if I can do a dream 100 with affiliates and they say yes, it opens up this thing to a thousand people. So I took his concept over there, but then I had an insight over here. I have this framework of affiliates and how they work, and if I apply dream 100 to affiliates, boom, this whole thing opens.

And then when paid ads started coming I was looking at paid ads and looking at how we do our interest and our targeting and all the sudden I was like, “Wait, if we apply the Dream 100 to affiliates to influencers on the platforms, all the sudden that becomes this new framework.” And boom, that framework became Traffic Secrets.

So it’s like, that’s our job. It’s not just to learn and study and follow one thing, but to go out there into the world and look at all the different options. Here’s the topic you want to learn about, go study from 10, 20, 30 people so you get this more whole-istic view of the truth, what the reality actually is, and then your role in this equation and my role, is then to aggregate information, as I see it, and try to produce and assimilate and give back the truth of the thing I’m learning.

So for you it could be whatever, let’s say you’re in weight loss, so you’re like, ‘Okay I’m going to go out there.” and instead of saying, “I’m 100% ketogenic,” study ketogenic and paleo, and meatetarian (there’s a meatetarian diet now where you only eat meat), and then vegetarianism, and fruitetarianism, and then there’s …. Blah. Just study all of it and then from there you get a more whole-istic view. “Hey, this is based on what I’m understanding and what I’m seeing, and this is my belief, it’s not just one or the other, it’s a blend of things.” And that’s when you create this new category, and that’s where you find your spot, your prolific zone where it’s like, these things I’m sharing are unique. They’re not unique to the world but it’s my aggregation of them that makes them unique.

Anyway, so that’s what I wanted to share with you guys today, and I hope that it helps because a lot of times I think that we’re out there trying to figure out our thing and we’re confused because we’re like, “Well, this person says this, and they’re both kind of true, but they’re both different, what is this?” There’s probably truth in both those things, so study and look at them, find the truth in both and come back. I think that’s one unique view I have religion. I definitely have my beliefs but I also believe there’s truth in all religions. I think they’re all based on truth. So I don’t just go and close off my eyes, I have friends in other religions and things, and I respect them and I enjoy it. I figure out what’s the truth that they bring that maybe I’m not able to see or I miss it because of whatever thing.

When we were in Fiji we went to this Pentecostal church and it was so much fun. The dude is up on stage preaching and sharing scriptures. And I don’t agree with 100% of the doctrine of what he shared, but there was definitely truth, I definitely felt the spirit, I definitely got good things. I’m like, I’m going to take these pieces of truth and then I’m going to apply it, and bring it back into my world, now it’s mine. I have this truth, I have assimilated that information, I’ve aggregated it, and I can bring it back and I can share it.

So it gives me the ability to respect people, not reject them. I think the world we live in now, the Facebook society, if somebody doesn’t believe exactly what we believe we reject them, we fear them, and we hate them and all these things, and it’s like, that’s insane. But instead look at that and be like, “Okay, I don’t agree with that, but in that lens, that’s interesting.”

You know, it’s funny, I don’t know how many examples of this I should give, but I was reading my new favorite book called American Kingpin, it’s so good. But it’s this story of the dark web, and it’s the story of the dude that started the Silk Road, which is this drug trading website. And I’m listening and they start talking about his beliefs and why he believed that. And the guy was super libertarian, he believed that the government shouldn’t have control over people’s bodies and things like that, people should be able to do what they want.

And I was listening to this and I was like, man, there’s some really good truths and really good points in there. But then he took it to the extreme of like, “What that means is that everyone should be able to do drugs, therefore I’m going to build this drug super highway and give everyone access to any drug they want.” And it’s like, “Whoa, you went way too far off the deep end.” But I can respect the truth of some of these statements. Wow, there’s truth in there, let me take that piece of it and not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let me take that truth and bring it back to what I have and then as I’m teaching my kids or my friends, or I’m at church or whatever, I’ve aggregated this information from a lot of spots and I can now share what my truth is.

So you can respect other people and not want to blow them up on Facebook and things like that. Anyway, I hope that helps some of you guys. But it’s, I look at what’s my job for the next 100 years that I’m here on this planet, maybe longer, who knows, depending on what things I learn about health, maybe I’ll live to be 200 years old.

But it’s funny because I remember as I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book, I was like, “I’ll never write a book again.” Then I did Expert Secrets and I was like, “I’ll never write a book again.” And about that time I went and met with Brendon Burchard and Brendon’s like, “I write a book every two years.” I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “so do you.” I’m like, “No I don’t.” He’s like, “You wrote one two years ago, you’re writing this one, and you’re writing one two years from now.’ I’m like, “I don’t think I will.” He’s like, “No dude, that’s what you do, you spend two years and you go out there and you pick a topic you’re excited about and you study it, aggregate the information, geek out on it, and then from there you take all your research and then you turn it into a book that you can now give the world. ‘I’ve spent two years on this journey, here’s the Cliff notes, hope it helps.”

And when he said that I was like, oh my gosh. That’s really, really cool. And I decided at that point, I’m going to write a book every two years. And it’s just going to be a thing that I do until I die. Because how fun is that? You wake up every morning knowing, I got two years to go out there and aggregate all this data, this information, bring it back and give it back to the world, the truths that I found. I’m not going to do it seeing from one viewpoint. I’m going to look at a whole bunch of viewpoints and find the pieces I feel are truth, bring them back and present them to my world, my audience, my people.

Anyway, I don’t know about you, but it gets me fired up as a creator. So for those of my creators who are listening out there, I hope this helps inspire you and give you ideas and give you a plan and a vision and hopefully see it through my eyes, kind of what I’m looking for and hopefully it helps you as well.

With that said, appreciate you all. Thanks so much for everything. If you enjoyed this episode please take a screen shot on your phone, post it on the Instagram and the Facebook, and tag me on both platforms, and then do #marketingsecrets. And I’ll see it in my feed. It’ll show up there and I’ll be so excite to hear what you thought about this episode. Thanks again for everything, appreciate you all. Talk to you soon. Bye everybody.