Another really cool insight that came to Russell while he’s “meditating” in the Napoleon Hill room.
...this book has taken me, I guess technically, 40 years of bumping into things. Now it's been a two and a half year process of actively figuring out, what is the actual perfect framework for success?
Hey, what's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson. I'm sitting here in the Napoleon Hill library, having so much fun and inspiration and ideas and just wanted to share some of my thoughts with you about the evolution of your frameworks, your ideas, and I hope you enjoy.
A lot you guys know I'm working my fourth book. This one's taking me longer than all the other ones. Well, I don't know if that's completely true. Technically, DotCom Secrets took me a decade to learn the stuff and then write it. I rewrote it five years later. Expert Secrets was the same thing. It was almost 10 years of trial and error to learn the stuff. I guess Traffic Secrets, the same way.I guess it takes me about a decade to learn a book and then 18 months or so to write it. This one, The Success Book is something I've been, it's interesting because I've been on this journey for most of my life, right?
I would say actively pursuing success started for me when I was in high school or excuse me, not high school. It would've been ninth grade, so junior high. When I started wrestling, it was the first time I had a thing that I wanted to become good at. I still remember I was watching this video from Tom and Terry Brands who are two of the best wrestlers in the world. The intro of the video first has Tom Brands and he comes in and he says, "My name is Tom brands. My goal is simple. I want to be the greatest wrestler in the whole world." Then his twin brother comes out, "My name is Terry Brands. My goal is simple. I want to become the greatest wrestler in the whole world." I remember hearing that and I was like, "My name is Russell Brunson. My goal is simple. I want to become the greatest wrestler in the whole world."
Then boom, it began. So I fought and spent a decade pursuing that goal. I didn't become the best in the world. I did take second in the nation though in high school, which is pretty awesome. I was ranked in the top 10 in college. Never placed in college though. I pursued it and enjoyed it and I became someone different along the way, even though I didn't reach my ultimate goals. That was the first time I was pursuing success and I wish I would've understood the principles of success better. I was just doing my best and I had success inside of that. But man, can you imagine if I would've understood the stuff that I've understood nowadays? It would've been so much more fun. Anyway, I digress.
I'm spending all that time and then in business having success. Again, my goal was never to learn how to be successful. I never looked at it through lens of, let me master success and then apply it to business or apply it to wrestling. I was trying to be successful. I would bump into things, but I didn't have something like a framework or a pattern that was engineering to get success. Does that make sense?
I'm saying all that to say that this book has taken me, I guess technically, 40 years of bumping into things. Now it's been a two and a half year process of actively figuring out, what is the actual perfect framework for success?
That's a big nut to crack. You know what I mean? Especially, how many books have been written on success and how many seminars and events and motivation. When I wrote DotCom Secrets, I was the only person that was writing about funnels. It wasn't like this was a thing yet. There were people talking about it and people did some trainings and stuff on it, but I was the first to write a book about it. So it was easier. Where now, I literally have been buying every success book known to mad and there are thousands of them. I think conservatively in the last six months, I've probably bought three to 4,000 books on success. I wish I could say, I read them all, but I want them all so I can look at them and see what their titles are and their differences and their outlines and their tables of contents. Then going deep into ones that fascinate me.
So anyway, with that said, I've built this little working station where I'm writing this book in a small office with no windows. That is just wrapped in old books from the greatest minds of our time. I'm sitting here amongst them as I'm studying and flipping through their books and reading and preparing. I'm really enjoying it. I digress.
The reason why I'm telling you this, I'm sitting in the Napoleon Hill room right now, and I'm looking at this all the Napoleon Hill books through time. It's interesting because I did a podcast on this a little while ago, but I want to go a little bit deeper into it.
I talked about how Napoleon Hill basically has one framework and all his books kind of fit in that. The Laws of Success, there are 16 laws of success he wrote. Then inside of the 16 Laws of Success, he's used those same 16 laws. Almost all of his books are taught through that framework of these 16 laws.
For example, Laws of Success is this big, huge book series. Then Think and Grow Rich is one book that basically takes you through those 16 laws of success through the lens of how to think and grow rich. But if I look at the books here, he also has a book called let's see, hold on, trying to find one that's a good example for you guys here from the bookshelf. Man, I probably have 200 Napoleon Hill books here. Because this stuff is in the public domain, so many people have written and rewritten them and stuff like that.
Here's one called How to Sell Your Way through Life. Another one called Succeed and Grow Rich through Persuasion. One called How to Raise Your Own Salary. Another one called The Master Key to Riches. These are all books he wrote, but they're all different ways to teach the same 16 principles. Does that make sense? Think and Grow Rich was like, here's Napoleon Hill's 16 laws of success, but in a book that's going to help you to think and grow rich. This one right here is How to Raise Your Own Salary, Napoleon Hill's 16 laws of success teaching you how to raise your own salary. It's just fascinating how he's taken the same framework and plugged it into these different books. What I want to talk about today is not so much that, as the evolution of his frameworks. This is what's fascinating to me.
As I start digging and finding all these things, I'm trying to find every first edition of everything he's ever published. I found like gold mines of just cool things. I can't wait. Some things I can reprint and show you guys, some things I won't be able to. But man, there's so much cool stuff here. One of the earliest things I found for Napoleon Hill is this little booklet. It's like a little pamphlet. It's called Magic Ladder to Success. If you look at it, it is... Let me see, I'm going to open up right now. It says, it's a pamphlet. It's only, how many pages is this thing, it's tiny. It's 36 pages. On the back of it, there's a pitch for his magazine. So it's maybe 35 pages.
It's The Magic Ladder of Success and as he's teaching this in May 1921, he's going through this process. In The Magic Ladder of Success, there's these rungs. There are 16 rungs on this ladder and you have to step up these 16 rungs to have success. Ooh. So this is before he wrote The Laws of success. He called it The Magic Ladder to Success. As you flip through the pages here, rung number one, A Definite Aim in Life. If you look at The Laws of Success, law number one is very similar. Back then he had this rung number two, self-confidence. Rung number three is initiative. Oh, the page is ripping. Rung number four is imagination. Again, this is a super old pamphlet. But anyway, he goes through them and the first time he ever taught these way back in the day, he called them, The Magic Ladder to Success, which is really interesting.
Fast forward. A few years later is when he wrote the actual Laws of Success. Oh, excuse me. Actually, before that, I have another book I found. This one's so cool. I can't believe I found this one. I feel like I'm a treasure hunter going through, finding these first edition books. You guys, it is so much fun. So this one, what year was this one published in? I'm not sure it's going to have a copyright date inside of here. Maybe it wasn't copyrighted, which is definitely possible. I'm not finding a copyright date in here. At least not quickly. It's probably here somewhere.
So the first one's a pamphlet called The Magic Ladder to Success. Now this is a book called The Magic Ladder to Success and it's probably, let scroll the back here. It's 200 pages. It's a 200 page book and it's taking the same 16 rungs of success they talked about in The Magic Ladder to Success pamphlet, and then it became The Magic Ladder of Success book. Again, it's the evolution of these ideas.
I'm sharing this with you guys because all of you guys have a framework, right? Some framework for success that you're doing. I struggled with this too, I'm not the only one, but we have this framework and then we're waiting for it to become perfect.
But you look at this and Napoleon Hill's first one was a 20 page booklet teaching these 16 rungs of success. And later the book, The Magic Ladder to Success, which is a 200 page book of him teaching the principles. Then you fast forward over here to this side of the library. Then a few years later is when he came out with The Laws of Success. This is interesting, the very first edition, which I have the first edition book here, it was published in 1928. It's eight books right here. I actually found, this is the most expensive book I bought to date, I found a laws of success book he wrote three years before the actual first edition. He only published a handful and I have one of the original copies that he actually signed, which is so cool.
That one was actually 16 books. It was one book for each law of success, which is really cool. Then became Law of Success, eight books. I have probably two dozen different versions of The Laws of Success. One were there're eight books. One huge fat book. There's those ones. That was 1928. Then fast forward to 1945, he went back through, he kept evolving these laws. These principles, these things. They came out with a book set, it was a book set called Mental Dynamite. It was 16 books that he wrote and he wrote it in 1945. What's interesting is that 1945 was the middle of, I think world war II. There was a paper and ink shortage. So he only printed a few dozen copies of this and never got mass produced. I happened to have a copy of it. It's really cool. It's 16 booklets called Mental Dynamite Series. It's 16 books teaching once again, the 16 laws.
It's interesting because you look at this, it's this evolution of these principles. After going through this and writing as far as back as I can tell, the first thing I have is The Magic Ladder to Success. This was the first time he put these things down to like, here are the 16 principles. Then he kept evolving and evolving and evolving and evolving it. He kept growing and evolving until it became boom, from that to The Laws of Success, to Think and Grow Rich, to Raise Your Own Salary to Mental Dynamite and so on and so forth. He kept doubling down on these 16 laws, these 16 principles, his framework for success.
I just want to come back to you. This whole business. I don't care if you're selling physical products, info products. Whatever it is, you're trying to get some result for a customer. You have some process you're taking somebody on. I'd call it the Framework, you can call whatever, but you have that thing, right? So what is the step by step process? Napoleon Hill went and spent 20 years figuring out the 16 laws, or 16 rungs of the ladder or whatever you want to call it. Then he spent the next 50 years of his life just teaching that over and over in different ways and different structures, different formats, different things.
In fact, the guy that I bought most of these old books from, he made me laugh. He's like, "Have you ever noticed, it seems like Napoleon Hill is just plagiarizing himself over and over again? And it's like, well it's because he knows these are the principles that work. He's evolving him and tweaking him and he's got better stories and different stories and different ways to apply it and faster ways to apply it and so on and so forth.
A question for you that I really want you to think about is, first off, what is your framework? Do you have that yet? If not you got to define it. Like, "For my customers, this is the result I'm getting them." Then these are the steps or the laws or the rungs of the ladder or whatever. It's the step by step process that you go through consistently every single time to get someone success.
Then after you have that framework, obviously you can evolve it, you could add it. Maybe it's six steps and eventually becomes eight steps. You could do those things. I think it's fascinating that he literally in 1921 came up with 16 rungs of the ladder. Then it's been 16 through the next 50 years. He didn't change that. Didn't become like, "Oh, here's the 17th rung. Here's the 22nd law of success." It always was those things. What he tried to do was, how do I make this simpler and simpler and simpler. The Laws of Success is amazing, but it's a big, huge book set. No one was reading it. So he's like, "How do I make this simpler?" So he made a smaller version, which was Think and Grow Rich and boom. That one blew up and sold. I don't even know how many copies. A lot. In fact, I have a whole bunch of the old and original ads for Think and Grow Rich, sitting here right in front of me.
In fact, do you want to hear the headline? Here's the headline for one of the original Think and Grow Rich ads. It said, "Would you give $2 to be rich? From the moment you joyously hold Think and Grow Rich in your hands, this powerful new friend starts in to help you. That you that reads these words will be a new and different you one hour after reading Think and Grow Rich. Yes, strange things may happen in an hour. Strange things, happy things that will affect your whole life. Things that have happened to countless ambitious people who have read this amazing book."
"Think and Grow Rich has changed thousands of natural born doubters to doers. They were set aflame with new ambition. They found the easy road to self advancement in this big book. They found that just one thing would bring them what they wanted. No tiresome study, no dull lessons, no long drawn out theories, no difficult things to understand. Clear and easy for you. Napoleon Hill makes everything in this great book so simple and easy to understand. Every reader of this book is dumbfounded at its simplicity and gratifying clearness. The first five minutes he reads, he quickly realizes that he has found exactly what he's been looking for and nothing in the world is as marvelous as that feeling of happy discovery. The great relief, the fine new grateful feeling of surging, enthusiasm, and fresh, glowing ambition that fills you from head to foot. You grow warm all over with a keen yearning to try it once the vital secrets he lays bare. You know by instinct that they fit you and are for you and that you can make them do for you many things, which you never thought were possible."
Isn't this amazing? This is the original ad for Think and Grow Rich. I'm getting so excited right now.
"Each and every page surprises you and each new page you turn gives new impetus to those feelings. You are impatient to begin. Surging within you is a thing of fire you can't understand, but you will later. You will realize that you are done with vain starts towards success. You are through the mental tussles that bothered you. You are done with all the doubts of your despair and have left them all behind. For you have this thing that is strong ensure and has miraculous power and will be right for you from today on opening the new past to a bigger life."
"What I would do if I had a million dollars. A man needed a million dollars for a plan, he had to help thousands of young men succeed in life. For years, he could not raise it. A fresh idea came to his mind and within 36 hours, he had the million dollars. Read the methods he used in Think and Grow Rich."
Oh, that's so cool.
"Happy results are secured with no hard labor, no sacrifice, no silly cold, no great education. This is your guarantee."
Ah, so cool. Anyway, that's just one. I have five or six of the old ads here. Here's another headline, "When riches begin to come, they come so quickly and in such abundance that one wonders where have they been hiding during all those lean years."
So cool. I just wanted share this with you guys because this is the key for all of you. Creating a framework and then adding it and then making it better and better and better. The success starts coming with simplicity. So again, I was talking about earlier, he went from 16 books to eight books to one book that could get in people's hands and made the process simpler. For me, if I think about the funnel stuff, I spent a decade, decade and a half studying and mastering funnels. Then I was trying to teach people how to do it. It was complex. How to make it simpler, simpler. Then the DotCom Secrets book made it simpler. Then ClickFunnel software made the practical application of these principles simpler. It's all about simplicity. How to make it easier and easier and easier and easier. That's the game that we play.
For you guys, what I want you to start thinking about too is, what's the framework that gets somebody from A to Z. Gets them the result that you promise them inside your business. Then you create that. Make your first version. Make your The Magic Ladder to Success booklet that's 30 pages, that just goes through the things. Then put it out there, make it a lead magnet. If somebody's out there like, "Hey, I'm going to do a 200 page book. Then I'm going to try a book series and a set and a thing." Obviously, most of you probably aren't writing books. But maybe it's a webinar, then a podcast, then a masterclass, then a weekend seminar, a virtual seminar. You're putting it out there. And then, can I make software to make this simpler? Can I create supplements to make this simpler? Like what are all the things I can create to make this simpler and simpler and simpler?
Those are the things that you got to be thinking through to really win this game. With ClickFunnels 2.0, that was the initial impetus for the whole thing is. How do we create something to make this simpler? And boom. Inside of that question came ClickFunnels 2.0 and all the things that have come with it.
So anyway, I'm excited. I feel this room's magic. Hopefully some day you have a chance to come visit it. You think there should there be a golden ticket? Like I'll put a golden ticket inside one of the books then invite you guys to come hang out with me for a day inside of the Napoleon Hill room? You can write and study and read. Ooh. Would that be fun?
Anyway, I hope you guys are amazing. Thanks so much for listening. I appreciate you guys. Go and create your frameworks, create your system. Simplify them. Make them easier for people. And when you do that, you will change their life and through the process, it'll probably change your life as well. HAPPY Thanks so much you guys, and we'll talk to you soon.
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