Don’t drink your own kool-aid. On this episode Russell answers a community question live for the Marketing Secrets show.

He will talk about how he remains humble as he runs a business worth nearly a billion dollars. Here are the five things he remembers in order to remain humble:

-- You are called to serve.

-- Realize it’s not you.

-- It can be taken away.

-- None of it really matters.

-- And do not pay attention to the fans.

So listen here to find out what each of these things means to Russell, and how they help him stay humble.

I’ve been in this industry now for, man, over 15 years. And in that window of time I have seen a lot of people who have come and made a whole bunch of money and then people who have crashed. I’ve seen people who have gotten really big egos, people, you know, all sorts of stuff. And I’m not going to lie, I’ve gone through a cycle as well, myself. I think there’s times when you drink your own kool aid and you think you’re amazing, and I wanted to address that, because it’s something that I’m actively always trying to work on, and I think everyone should as well.

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What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets show, I’m so excited to have you guys here. This episode is going to be a fun one.

Recently we started a new Marketing Secrets live show, and this is a segment from the show that we are actually going to be posting here on the podcast. It’s called, it’s titled how to remain humble, or AKA don’t drink your own kool aid. I’m going to go through 5 things that you can do to make sure your head doesn’t get too big, as you are growing your company. So it’s been kind of fun, and with that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back, we will jump right into that segment from the show.

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets live show. This is the first time we’ve done this live, live, live. And I’m so excited, we’ve got a bunch of cool things we’re going to be talking about, a lot of fun segments we’re going to be going through with you guys today. But to kind of kick this whole party off, I wanted to go to a question that I’ve gotten from you guys as a community.

We asked last week in the Facebook group, we said, “Hey, if you guys have questions for Russell, please post them down below.” We got a whole bunch of amazing questions back. And I wanted to pick one to answer because I thought it’d be a fun one. I thought it’d be timely and good everybody here. So the question from the community that came that I wanted to answer says, “Now that you run a company worth nearly a billion dollars…” whenever you say billion you have to do this thing with your pinky from Austin Powers, I was a 90’s kid.

“So now that your company is worth nearly a billion dollars, do you have to make a concerted effort every day to remain humble, or do the new challenges you face keep you humble?” So I think that question was really, really cool, so I wanted to address that one because I’ve been in this industry now for, man, over 15 years. And in that window of time I have seen a lot of people who have come and made a whole bunch of money and then people who have crashed.

I’ve seen people who have gotten really big egos, people, you know, all sorts of stuff. And I’m not going to lie, I’ve gone through a cycle as well, myself. I think there’s times when you drink your own kool aid and you think you’re amazing, and I wanted to address that, because it’s something that I’m actively always trying to work on, and I think everyone should as well.

So I kind of reframed this question to something like, how I would kind of rephrase it to somebody. So the question was, “How do you remain humble.” And then I wrote for my sub headline, I wrote, “AKA Don’t Drink Your Own Kool Aid”. And I think one of the biggest problems, and I remember this vividly, like 15 years ago when I got started, I spent the first 2 years in my basement, grinding this thing out, and it was lonely and everyone thought I was crazy and people made fun of me, and all those things.

And as soon as I started having success, I think part of you gets this, especially as an entrepreneur, especially as an athlete for me, you get this like, when you start having success you want to kind of prove to them that they’re wrong. So I think my head started getting bigger. I thought I was, I don’t know, I was drinking my own kool aid, I was reading my own bio. And luckily for me, a couple of years later multiple times now, my companies crashed and burned.

And as painful as that process, it helped me to understand some things. So I wrote down basically 5 things to help you remain humble, that I would say are the 5 things that go through my head all the time as I’m trying to make sure that I’m very careful on this path. I feel like, you know for any of us, if we’re not careful, if our heads get too big, if we stop being humble, all these things that we’re trying to do can be taken away from us. And I very much believe that to be true, just because of my cycle of every time my head gets too big, I seem to get humbled.

So these are the 5 points I have. So number one, I want to everyone to understand that when you take on something like this, that you are called to serve an audience, it’s not about you making money. That’s how we keep score, “How much money did my business make? Did I hit 2 Comma Club, am I in 2 Comma Club X?” We’re always looking at those benchmarks to have something that we can track our results on, but that’s not why we’re in this game.

We are called to serve somebody. Any of you entrepreneurs who are here today, you’ve had that calling where you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I am here to serve this type of person, or this person.” Or “This was me five years ago. I learned how to solve this problem. I’m here, I’m called to serve that audience.” So first thing is understanding that you’re not here as “Look how great I am.” It’s literally for me, I believe that entrepreneurship is a calling. And this calling that you’ve been called to serve this group of people, and when you think about it that way, it’s different. It’s not about you, it shifts the focus from how great I am to how can I help these people, and how can I put them up on a pedestal?

If you look at, especially over the last 3 or 4 years, the market that we do, it’s gets less and less about look how great Russell is, because first off, that’s annoying, and second off, nobody cares. Instead I want to take the people who are having success in our community and I put them up on a pedestal. I’ve been called to serve them, I’ve not been called to serve myself. So that’s the first thing to understand, that you have been called to serve.

Number two, you have to realize that it is not you. I think sometimes we get this grand idea and we’re like, “I’m a genius.” And it’s like, that may be, I don’t know, I don’t personally believe that. I don’t think we just, I don’t think that the idea is us. The idea comes to us. We’re blessed with these ideas, we’re blessed with inspiration, we’re blessed with seeing the vision of where we need to go, and those things, they’re not us, they are given to us. So you have to realize that. That it’s not you.

It’s not you making this greatness, it’s you because you’re following a path and you’re doing the right things, that you are given these insights, these ideas, these things. So it’s not you, so the more you think that, “Oh this is me.” The less those ideas and those inspirations will come to you. So it’s a very fine line. When your head starts getting big, those things will become less and then things start shrinking for you.

And the more you realize that it’s not you, that you’re just there receiving these ideas, receiving inspiration, then it gives you the ability to be able to continue to get those things. So that’s number two. So number one, you’re called to serve. Number two, realize that it is not you. Number three, all this stuff that you are creating can be taken away at any second. I can literally wake up tonight and get a text from somebody and be like, “Hey Russell, Clickfunnels is gone.” And you may think, “No way, Russell.

You’re too big.” No, I’ve seen that happen all the time with different companies. It could be a government agency comes and shuts you down, it could be your servers crashing, it could be a million things that could happen. Some of you guys remember a Clickfunnels story, we were probably a year, year and a half into Clickfunnels and I was flying to London to go speak at this event, and when I landed the plane I got off, and initially I didn’t have internet because I had to get an international chip in my phone.

I plugged one in, and as soon as I did my phone is blowing up, and Clickfunnels servers were down. We were down for like 7 or 8 hours. We were on the brink of losing Clickfunnels, the whole entire thing, 4 years ago. When we first started this whole journey we almost lost the entire thing, and we would have lost the company, because of a database issue that happened. Now since then, we’ve gone insane and hired insane amounts of people and infrastructure stuff to make sure that stuff doesn’t happen again, but it could happen for any of us.

For any of our businesses, we could lose it. So it’s understanding that this could be taken away at any given time. And it could be a million different things. I’ve had close friends in the last couple of months that have passed away from health issues, that was taken away from. There’s government interactions, there’s servers, there’s a million different things.

So if you think it’s all you, a lot of times that when we get humbled. I’ve had multiple times when my company has crashed and I realized, you know prior to that I think, “Oh, I’m a genius. Look how great it is.” Then when it’s taken away it’s like, “Wow, it really wasn’t me.” There’s so many other things that we need to be grateful for that are happening, that keep us moving. So that’s number three, it can be taken away. Number four is that none of this stuff really matters.

When all is said and done, it doesn’t matter. As much fun as entrepreneurship is, as business is, all these kind of things, it doesn’t really matter. Last night I was with my kids, they had a wrestling match and I remember going there and watching it and both of my kids did awesome, they both won their matches. Dallin had, he was wrestling the kid who was the district champ last year, Dallin went out there and won. We were going crazy and we were screaming and I was like, I was sitting there and I’m like, “This is what matters, me spending time with my kids and my family.”

That’s what matters, it’s not this, you know I’ve on Instagram I think 2 or 3 times over the last month, I’ve made posts where I’m just like, “Business is what you do while you’re waiting for your kids to get out of school. Business is what you do while you’re waiting for your wife to come home.” This is kind of the thing to keep us occupied and have some fun and hopefully serve some people, but when it all comes down to it the thing that really matters is our families.

So I think when you realize that, that none of this stuff really matters that much, it gives you a different perspective. And number five, and this is one that’s really, really hard, don’t pay attention to the fans. I think sometimes when you start growing, people start talking about how great you are, and you have to be very, very careful. One of the mermaids, the sirens, the sirens who are in the water and they’re singing this beautiful music right, and you get closer and closer and they come and they eat you and they destroy you.

We were, that’s a long story, I was telling my kids about that when we were in the swimming pool, and I was like scaring them, and it was really funny. But that’s another story for another day. But you have to be careful. The fans, the people who you’re serving will look at you as if you’re something great, something special, and they will tell you that over and over and over again. And as much as I love hearing it, I have to listen to it, and then I have to put it on the shelf.

You can’t, if you do that, if you keep listening to what the fans are saying, it becomes very, very hard. It’s funny, Sean Stephenson who is a close friend who passed away a little while ago, I remember we were joking one time when we were hanging out, we were joking about our wives and like, we love our wives, and he said one of the things about our wives, he’s like, “Our wives aren’t fans. They fell in love with us, and they love us, but they’re not our fans. It’s nice because you come home and you feel like you’re all awesome and then there’s your wife who loves you, but she’s not a fan.

And she’s just like, ‘hey.” And it instantly changes this whole thing, and I’m so grateful for a wife who’s not a super fan, who’s realistic, who’s just like, ‘this is what it is.” So I think it’s important for all of us to have people in our life around us who aren’t fans, who are like, the people who love us, because it helps take the ego off and lets you focus on what’s actually important. So how to remain humble, those are the 5 things. Number one, you are called to serve.

Number two, realize that it is not you. Number three, it can be taken away. Number four, none of it really matters. Number five, do not pay attention to the fans. If you do that as you are growing and you are serving and you are changing people’s lives, it will help you to focus on that and not get a head that’s too big. Alright, I hope that helps.

On the next episode of the Marketing Secrets show I’m going to be taking you guys inside of my inner circle room to a private conversation from one of my favorite people, her name is Annie Grace, she is going to be sharing her story about the difference between a funnel and an hourglass. Stay tuned for that episode, you are going to love it and it will probably change your life.