Russell’s been working on a secret all-consuming project, with box-after-box being delivered to his office. And with each box, the staff began to wonder if Russell needed an intervention. But Russell’s about to reveal everything, the full vision including how he’s about to raise the banner higher for entrepreneurs with “Secrets of Success”…
Register for the announcement webinar by going to https://www.secretsofsuccess.com/atlas
Of all the things, I've created, the book is the thing that lasted the longest. I always talk about this with some of my friends who are influencers. I'm like, the written word is the only thing that really outlives the life of the author. Everything else dies. You do a live event, Funnel Hacking Live happens, 5,000 people come, we change their life. And then what happens? None of those people leave with it. But then it stops, not the ripple effect, but what happened there, it ends.
What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today's episode's special. Right now, I'm actually in a recording booth in one of my new book offices in a soundproof little room. It's like three feet by three feet. I feel like I'm in a little box covered in padded walls, but does this audio sound amazing? Let me know how it sounds, you guys. I have headphones on right now. I'm talking to this mic with a wind mic and there's no echo at all, and it sounds amazing to me. So hopefully, it sounds good to you as well. For the first decade and a half of my, not decade and a half, first decade of my podcast, it used to be The Marketing In Your Car Podcast, and I literally record it while I was in my car, driving on my phone, and then I transitioned to the Marketing Secrets podcast, and that's taken a million different forms.
And this week, I'm going to be recording out of this little studio. So I bought this studio and created it for a reason, and I'm actually going to talk a little bit about that reason today. But I'm working on a secret project, and this is a project that has been all consuming for me for the last three or four years, and you've probably heard me talk about it or mention it, but this week, I'm actually going to be sharing it with the world for the first time, which I'm excited for or nervous for. Anytime you have a new thing you're sharing, there's always the fear of rejection from people. And it's funny because you've been watching the journey over the last two or so years. I've bought in about 15,000 books, maybe more. I've spent a fortune on first edition books and sign books and manuscripts and unpublished works and all sorts of stuff.
And from the outside you may be like, "Why is Russell doing this? What is the purpose?" In fact, my internal staff was always got concerned as well when I was getting 50 to 60 packages from eBay a day, every single day for six months in a row. In fact, I think it was John Parks, my team that ask somebody else like, "Do you think we should intervene? Should we call somebody? Is something wrong with Russell? What is happening here?" And it's interesting because you know how it is. I'm sure most of us listening here, entrepreneurs are visionaries, you see a vision of something and you don't see the full vision. You see part of it. And see, there's something here. And you try to explain to people, but you don't even know the whole vision yet. You just know that there's a direction and you saw something and it's important and you start moving towards it and you move towards it.
It feels good, and you get excited and you're like, "Man, if this desire's increasing as I'm stepping towards this thing, it must be good." So you step further and keep going. And sometimes all the people around you are like, "This person's crazy. What is happening to them? What are they doing? And why are they doing this?" And I think I had a lot of that when I was younger. I was wrestling, I became obsessed. I remember when I decided I want to be a state champ, and I became obsessed with it to the point where people were like, "Is this healthy? Should he be doing other things, should he not?" But I pursued that goal with, as Napoleon Hill say, definiteness of purpose. And I had success. I became a state champ. And then after that, I wanted to be an All American. And I pursued that and I took second place in the country and became All American, and I wanted to wrestle in college.
I always went after these crazy ideas, even though I didn't know how I was going to do it, I just knew that there was the goal and I wanted it. Business was the same way. When I started my business 20 years ago, it wasn't cool to be an entrepreneur. People thought I was crazy, and yet I figured it out and had a lot of success. Even a decade ago, we launched ClickFunnels. People didn't know what a funnel was, and I was trying to explain to the world this thing, and it was interesting, but I pursued it. And a decade later, people got it. Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of customers, people building funnels all over the world, competitors popping up left and trying to compete with us because we've done such a good job of it. But a decade ago, it wasn't a thing.
I had to smash through a whole bunch of stuff to make this a thing. And so for the last two or three years, it actually started, I was at Napoleon or Napoleon, I was at a Tony Robbins event in Fiji, and this is back when I was thinking about potentially selling ClickFunnels. And I asked him his thoughts and somebody I saw, there's a whole YouTube video of me with this interaction with Tony. But it was interesting, he said, he's like, "I would only sell it if you knew what the next thing was going to be." And I remember sitting there and I was like, "I don't have a next thing. This is all I want to do with the rest of my life." And I started thinking, I was like, "Well, if I had an next thing, what would that be?" And I didn't know right away.
It didn't pop up to me. But one thing I did know, I was like the people I have been called the server entrepreneurs. That's not changing. I don't think that'll ever change. They're the people I'm obsessed with, people I love, people I care about the people I've been for 20 years now trying to figure out how do I make their lives easier and simpler, and how do I make them more successful? And so again, I don't think that part will ever change, but the question started being like, "Well, how else can I serve them?" We've served them with marketing advice and funnels and templates, and I was like, what's interesting is the thing that most people latch onto, it's interesting. It's not so much... I mean, people take the tactics and the techniques and strategies for marketing and they use them, but anytime I talk about my family or my personal life or my beliefs or mindset or these other things, those are the times people lean in and they ask more questions.
And I started realizing, the who I'm serving is not shifting. I'm still serving entrepreneurs, but how I'm serving them can expand and grow. And I started getting excited about personal development, how could I help them there? And I was like, "But I don't..." The thing that I think I'm different than most people who come into this world, they're an author, they're a creator, they're whatever. And I don't look at myself like that at all. I look at myself as a curator. If you look at all of my books to this point, yes, there's original thought in those, but for the most part, my job was to curate. Listening to... Going to thousands of seminars and reading books and podcasts and studying and learning and implementing, trying, doing all this stuff and being a human Guinea pig and then coming back and "Hey, these are things that worked."
And I've been very careful on my journey to try to always give credit where credit is due because again, I don't look at myself as this... I don't have to position myself as like, "Oh, I invented these things" like so many people do, which I think for the most part is wrong. It drives me crazy because I don't look at myself as like, "Oh, this intellectual person who figured these things out." I look at myself as a curator, I go through a lot of things. I curate what works, and then I share those with my audience. And so I always give credit where credits to do, which by the way, do that. I can't tell you how much more rich my relationships have been with people who I've quoted and shared their stories with because I was willing to give them credit versus me just acting like I invented everything.
I could've easily, all the stuff I learned from Dan Kennedy, I could've easily been like, "Oh, and this is when I invented the blah, blah, blah." But instead I gave him credit. And now I'm business partners with him. I got to talk to him every day, and I've made his life, I feel, happier because I've extended his legacies. I'm sharing his original thoughts. They're not my thoughts. How dare someone take someone else's original thoughts and part mark them off as their own anyway? And the relationship I have with Dan now has been amazing relationship with other people that I quoted, that I shared their stories, that I learned things from. Man, I can't tell you how much better it feels to give them credit and talk to them and share with them what I learned from them. So hopefully, you guys do that as well.
But anyway, as a curator, I was like, "Well, if I want to go a level up, if I'm finding these entrepreneurs early in their career, when they don't know what a funnel is yet, all they know is that they feel different. They feel unique. The people around think they're weird. They have drive and passionate but they don't know what to do with it, how do I reach those people earlier?" And then long term, they'll still come down and we'll get them ideally in the ClickFunnels and marketing, all that kind of stuff. But it begins with growth. If you read the Expert Secrets book, I talk about the transition from growth, the contribution. We go through phase of personal growth. We're growing, developing, and learning. And then eventually, we start tapping out. You can't grow past a certain level until you shift your focus from growth to contribution to helping other people.
And so that became the thought in my head is that all the people I'm serving right now with ClickFunnels and my books are people who are trying to do contribution. They're trying to start a business. They went past that first tier. So I'm like, "How do I get to people during the first phase of their journey?" Which is growth when they're growing before they have figured it all out before they've figured out their framework or their idea, the thing they want to share with the world, but they're just struggling and they're trying to grow. And so I started thinking about that. And again, as someone who's not a traditional author, someone who's a curator, I starts saying, "Well, who are the people I want to learn from?" If I'm going to go do this, I'm going to go study the greatest minds of our time and go and start curating these people.
And then from that, I'll figure out what we're going to teach and talk about because I didn't know yet. And so I was like, where do I start? And the person I started with was Napoleon Hill. And so I started buying his books. And then I don't know what, I have a weird fascination with books probably because I'm an author.
I know what goes into... It's funny, five minutes ago I said, I'm not an author. So I'm somebody who's written a book, I'm an author, but I know the work that goes into writing a really, really good book. The blood, the sweat, the tears, the stress and anxiety, all the things. When a book is done, how it's like you're leaving a part of yourself. DotCom Secrets secrets was a decade in my life, a decade of trial and error that I figured out. And I wrote a book and I gave it to people. And it was crazy because I used to travel the country giving speeches on the principles of DotCom Secrets. And after I wrote the book, I stopped teaching that stuff. I handed, I could just give someone a book. And it was like, this is a decade in my life.
And there was something about it. Of all the things, I've created, the book is the thing that lasted the longest. I always talk about this with some of my friends who are influencers. I'm like, the written word is the only thing that really outlives the life of the author. Everything else dies. You do a live event, Funnel Hacking Live happens, 5,000 people come, we change their life. And then what happens? None of those people leave with it. But then it stops, not the ripple effect, but what happened there, it ends. The same way someone goes through course. Eventually courses seem to disappear and people move on. But there's something about the written word. The book is still here. Amazing books, like the Bible and things like that that have been around for so long. In fact, I was doing this study on, I think it was the book of John, and we don't have the original manuscript of the book of John.
I think we have the third. John wrote it, and then someone took his and wrote a copy, and then John's got destroyed or lost, and then someone took John's copy and then copied it again. But we have the third versions, the manuscripts we have of the book of John, which is so cool. It's close to the source as possible. I love going back to the source, where did these ideas get originated from and why? And that always fascinates me. And I'd boughten a couple of old first edition Mormon books and a Book of Mormon and a couple things like that that were really special to me. And I thought, "Well, if I'm going to do this, it'd be fun to have a first edition of some of these old books." So I started searching and I found on eBay a first edition, I found a bunch of first edition Thinking Riches, and they weren't that expensive.
So I bought a couple of them. And then I was like, yeah, that's cool. And then about that time is when I had bought this land behind ClickFunnels headquarters, and it was like three lots. And one time we were going to build a big building there, but then COVID hit. So we decided not to build a building, but I was like, "I want to turn it into something. It'd be cool to make this an event center, but also a museum. And in the museum, I could have my first edit books, but I could have a whole library there." And that's kind of where this vision started happening. And again, I didn't know the end of it from the beginning, but I was like, "This is this vision and this was... I'm going to go." So I started pursuing that, okay, I'm going to find books to put in this library that I don't even know yet.
I'm going to hire an architect, start designing this library. And so that's how it started. I have a friend who builds amazing buildings and I called them up. I said, "Okay, I have an idea." And so he started designing it and his architects started working. And then I was like, "Hey, I have this big building. I need books in it. I got to find rare cool books to put inside of this." And so I started searching. I'm like, "Well, I have a couple Thinking Rich first editions, what else do I need?" And I started and I went to eBay and I started searching to Napoleon Hill. And I sort from highest price lowest. And the number one thing, there's a book set there, the Law of Success, there was written three years before the actual Law of Success, and it was for sale for 1.5 million.
And I was like, "Oh." I was, "That's the piece. That would be the crown centerpiece of the library is the first edition of Laws of Success." And I wanted it, and I lusted after it, but I was like 1.5 million dollars for some books is crazy. But I kept looking at it. So I started buying all the other old books and courses and records that everything I could find from him. And then at one point in this journey, I almost bought Success Magazine. And so I started buying all the first edition Success Magazines from the 18 hundreds and 19 hundreds and started collecting those. And then eventually I got ahold of the guy who owned that first edition Loss Success from Napoleon Hill. And I found out he'd been collecting for 20 years. And so he had a huge collection. And so I negotiated back and forth and eventually I ended up buying his entire collection from him.
And I flew out there and picked it up, and there's a whole vlog coming out soon to that story, which you guys are going to love. But then I had acquired, I don't know, 5,000 books from Napoleon Hill in that era. And it started this journey. I started reading the books and started learning about the other people. I learned about Orson Sweet Martin, who was the guy who started his Success Magazine. And I found out about him. I found out about Samuel Smiles, who was the first person who wrote his personal development book. And again, I started going down the Russell rabbit hole of where do these thought leaders come from and where was the source? And I started fighting them and fighting their first edition books that they've wrote. And I found out that there was this window of time from 1850 to 1950, it was called The New Thought Movement.
And prior to that, people had never thought, the concept of you can think and by thinking you can change your life. That wasn't a thing yet. Prior to that, it was very different. And this new thought movement was where people were exposed by this thing of how you could think and grow rich or think and change your life or think and whatever those things were. And in that era, I became obsessed with every author, every thought leader, every book, every manuscript, everything. I started buying them, acquiring them, and keeping them. And again, I was a real vision, a full vision of where I was going. I just knew that this was a direction that was pointed in. And so I was running towards it, just to figure out where it was going to turn out. And I'm not going to lie, it's been an expensive trip.
I think right now, I'm about $12 million into old books, which is nuts if you think about that. But man, it's been, for me, the most fulfilling and rewarding journey. And there's so many stories that I found that I want to share. And so I'm launching a whole new company soon. And in fact, in August, we'll officially launch, it's called Secrets of Success. And again, you'll hear me talk more about that. But what I'm doing with it, I'm really excited for, I'm proud of, and it's going to be cool. I end up flying out to the Napoleon Hill Foundation and we built a really good relationship with Don Green over there. And he's been sending me unpublished Napoleon Hill manuscripts and works and books and oh, just fascinating stuff. And so we have a partnership with them actually. And so they're going to get a royalty membership site because of all the amazing things that they've donated to the cause.
Anyway, so many stories I want to tell you, but I just don't have time in the context of this podcast episode. But I do want to tell you is that I finally figured out the vision for this. Why am I doing this? What's the purpose? Is there a reason? What's the reason? Why am I doing all this? And what's cool about it, I'm actually sharing this for the first time ever live this Thursday, depending when you're listening to this. And so I'm going to put a, there's a webinar registration link. You can register and well, I'm going to tell the story and I'm going to show a lot of these books and these manuscripts and things like that, and it's going to be really cool. So for those of you guys who are listening to this, stop everything you're doing now and grab a piece of paper and write this down because I want you to register for it.
It's www.secretsofsuccess.com slash atlas A-T-L-A-S. Secretsofsuccess.com slash atlas. So free registration. And during the registration when you register, I'm going to jump on. And again, this is Thursday, which usually when these podcasts drops, maybe I'll drop this one earlier this week, make sure you guys have a chance to get there. But worst case, I'll put the replay of it on that page as well. But I'm going to show you guys behind the scenes and I'm going to show you some of these books and manuscripts and things that I've acquired that are so special to me that are so cool. So I'm going to show you guys those. But then also, I'm going to show you guys the vision for the Library Event Center. In fact, we went down to Burbank, California and rented a green screen studio, same ones, they filmed like Mandalorian, things like that in. And we filmed me walking through the library.
We've got all the designs, architecture designs like 3D design. And so I'm going to show you guys the video of me walking through and showing you all this stuff, which is really cool. And then, yeah, it's going to be really cool. I'm going to share with you guys the vision. Now, I have shared this vision once before and it was in Mexico. In fact, I'm going to do a second podcast. We're going to drop a couple podcasts this week. So this one's already getting long, and I want to make sure that you guys don't miss the call to action. Then come back. So the next episode, I'm going to tell you guys the story about how I raised over 10 million to fund this library from by making a million-dollar offer. And so episode two in the series will launch, maybe that'll launch on Thursday.
I don't know. I'll talk to my brother about it, who publishes these podcasts for me. We'll drop a couple this week that we'll tell the rest of the story. And so that episode, I'll tell as a story about about the million-dollar offer, which would be really fun. But with that said, at the end of this podcast, go and register. You don't want to miss it. It's going to be really fun. I'm showing you guys priceless stuff that's worth literally millions and millions of dollars, telling you guys some cool stories and you'll have a chance to see what in the world was I thinking? Why am I doing this? Where's the vision actually going to? It's interesting. I actually, I shared this with my wife and some of my employees and stuff like that, and after they saw the video, they're like, "Oh, wow, I see now."
And it's so funny because prior, for the last three or four years, they're like, "You're crazy. What's he doing?" Now, they're like, "Oh, I see. I want to be part of it." And that's my goal for you guys. I want you guys to see what I'm creating and why, and hopefully want to be part of it. So with that said, again, secrets of success.com slash atlas. Go and register. Go check it out and come hang out with me this Thursday. We're going to be talking a lot of really cool things.
All right, appreciate you guys. With that said, I'm end this episode and I'll do another episode that we'll probably drop tomorrow. So you guys go early. Telling you guys a story about the million-dollar offer, and also I'm going to talk you guys about how you can actually come to Boise, Idaho for the groundbreaking ceremony that's happening less than a month from now. There's 60 people are going to be coming. And if you want to find out how to be one of those 60 people in Boise during the literal groundbreaking, we have shovels and tractors.
We're going to dig a hole, and they've got some cool speakers coming out. Joe Vitale's going to come out and speak and a bunch of other cool people if you want to be part of that private groundbreaking ceremony. Also, you got to be on the webinar. So secretsofsecretssuccess.com slash atlas A-T-L-A-S. And that's the thing you guys. And we'll talk to you guys on the next episode. Bye everybody.
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