Hot off the press! I literally just gave my welcome presentation at Funnel Hacking LIVE 2023, and I wanted to share this with you as soon as possible! A lot of our people are searching for success and only finding resistance. These are the secrets to overcoming resistance and living in your calling so you can actively make the change you were born to create.

So Napoleon Hill said, there's one quality which one must possess to win, and that's definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to possess it. So do you guys know what your definite purpose is? Not like I want to make money, I want to win a two comic club award. Like definite, like I want to do this by this certain time.

What's up, everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets Podcast. I'm actually backstage behind the scenes at Funnel Hacking Live right now. We're about to start day number two. And for those who are here, hopefully you're having the greatest time ever. For those who aren't, I want to give you a sneak peek of just kind of the cool stuff that's happening here.

So, I did my intro presentation yesterday. The title was called The Calling Versus the Resistance. I'm not going to give you the whole thing, partially because the first half I'm really proud of. Second half, I've got to tweak and clean up some stuff before I officially do that presentation again. And so, anyway, I'm going to play a big section of it though for you guys to hear some of the backstory and start talking about some stuff. And I hope you enjoy it.

And hopefully this will give you even more motivation to make sure you're at next time's Funnel Hacking Live. This is Funnel Hacking Live IX. Next year is Funnel Hacking Live X, which is crazy. So if you don't have your tickets yet, I'm sure we'll have a place at funnelhackinglive.com to get tickets for next year in a couple of days. I appreciate you all, and I hope you enjoy this part of my session from this year's Funnel Hacking Live.

Oh, man. What's up, everybody? Oh, my people. I love you guys all. Thank you so much for coming. Ah, I cannot tell you how excited, how anxious, how nervous, how all the things I am right now standing behind this before the wall goes up. You guys have no idea. Half of me is like, I want to run away and go hide and hide under a rock, and the other half is so excited for everything that's about to happen. Anyway. Oh, I love you too.

We have so much fun stuff planned for you guys over the next four days. So many amazing guests, so many of your peers, Funnel Hackers. A lot of them who were in the audience a year ago listening to stuff who now are going to be on stage sharing with you exactly what they've done to have success. We have so many cool people coming and I can't even wait to have you guys all experience this. It is the honor of lifetime to be able to put together an event like this and have 5,000 crazy people from around the world all fly here to be part of it. So thank you guys so much for your commitment, as well coming here.

As you guys checked in, you all got a T-shirt, right? If we can, throw my slides up real quick. So on the back of the T-shirt, there's a quote. Did you guys all have a chance to read this quote? Can we throw slides up real quick, everybody? From last Funnel Hacking Live to this year, I'm always keeping eyes open for cool things and all of a sudden one day I heard this quote and it was super powerful and it's from T.E. Lawrence's Lawrence of Arabia. And when I heard this, I got chills, I got all the feelings, and everything. And so I'm going to read to you guys because I want this to be something that every single time you put that shirt on, you read it, that it reminds you of who you are. So this is what it says, it says, "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was a vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible."

When I heard that, I was like dreamers of the day, that's who we are, right? Everyone dreams, everyone thinks about stuff. Everyone talks about stuff. There's so many people talking and talking and talking. But the people who are here in this room, you guys are the dreamers of the day. Funnel Hackers are the dreamers of the day.

And I even think about this with our community. We have over a hundred thousand active ClickFunnels members. We've got millions of people on our email list and social. But you are the 5,000 who are the most excited, the most passionate, the ones who were willing to leave everything, leave jobs, leave family, everyone to come here and be part of this because you have a dream. Am I right?

Yeah.

Okay. And my goal over the next couple of days is to help you, to give you the tools and the assets, everything you need to make those dreams become a reality. That's our entire goal. That's what we do here at Funnel Hacking Live. We give you guys the tools and resources you need to take these ideas, these feelings, these things you want to do, and give you everything you need so you can be successful.

So that's what we're going to be going deep on over the next four days, which will be fun. But before we go too deep into it, are you guys cool if I tell you guys a couple stories about what I've been doing last year? Okay, this year has been a little crazy. But one of the things I started doing is this year I started treasure hunting. Do we have any treasure hunters in the room?

Okay. If not, you're going to become a treasure hunter, I think because this is really, really fun. So this is a picture... This happened shortly after last funnel Hacking Live, is I decided to go treasure hunting. And this is the picture of me and my son, Aiden. And I went treasure hunting because I was trying to find something. I don't even know how to explain it. I remember Tony Robbins one time, Tony Robbins said that, "If you look at success, success is like 20% tactics and the actual skillset of doing the thing, and 80% is psychology," it's the things happening between your brain.

And so for me, I spend so much time on the tactics, like how do I do this, how do I do this? What's step one? What's step two, and those kind of things. I still love that. In fact, 80% of Funnel Hacking Live will be focused on those things. But what Tony said is 80% is psychology, it's the things happening between our ears. And I don't typically spend a lot of time talking about that with you, with my people, with Funnel Hackers. I'm always talking about the next funnel and the next way to drive traffic, all that kind of stuff.

And I want to spend some time today going into the psychology of success. And so a year ago I started treasure hunting. I started becoming obsessed. This is actually a little over a year ago, but I started becoming obsessed with personal development, and how can I help myself be more successful, but in return help all of you guys be more successful as well?

And so I started searching the world for everything I could find on success. I don't know about you, but if you open up your phone, you scroll through Instagram or YouTube, everyone has got success stuff happening. There's success quotes, quote after quote, after quote. I look at some of these quotes and there will be like 10, 20, 50, a hundred thousand people like these quotes and things like that, but then there's no substance. It's just like, oh, I feel really, really good. And it kind of ends.

And then I had put out a video. I see people have these amazing videos about going deep on something and they don't get very many views or things like that. And I was like, how do we make this like... I want to get past this light, fluffy motivation of you can do it, but really understand this at a deeper level. And so starting me on this journey and I started trying to figure out, like where did this all begin? What was the foundation of this stuff?

And so I started looking and started collecting old books and manuscripts. This was one of the first treasure hunts. Like I said, Aiden and I, we jumped in a plane and we started flying around the country. We went to Little Rock, Arkansas, because there was a man there who had been collecting old Napoleon Hill stuff for over 20 years of his life. He had books and manuscripts, all sorts of stuff that nobody had ever seen before. And so this started the treasure hunt. We flew out there. I ended up buying his entire 20-year collection. We packed it back in this plane, we flew back home. And I didn't even know what most of it was. I remember going to our office, we had laid it all out. It was thousands of books and magazines and manuscripts, all sorts of stuff.

And I started going through them and started reading them. I started reading from people who were at the very beginning of the success movement, like people who were discovering these things for the very, very first time. And it was so much fun for me. And so that was the beginning of the treasure hunting.

Last year, after Funnel Hacking Live, we went home and then we had our inner circle meeting, and then as soon as the inner circle meeting got done we had to a chance to go treasure hunting some more with a couple of our Funnel Hackers. So these are some of the guys here at the top, guys and gals. We got done with inner circle meeting and then Justin Benton there, he had a plane lined up and we all jumped in a plane from inner circle, literally left the building, went to the airport, jumped in a plane and flew to Wise, Virginia. Anybody here ever been to Wise, Virginia before? Me and Justin, the only ones.

Wise, Virginia is where Napoleon Hill grew up. I was becoming obsessed with what he was talking about, what he was writing. I was like, I want to learn more about it. And so we went to the town where Napoleon Hill grew up, and this is actually where Don Green, who's the head of the Napoleon Hill Foundation, where he lives, and he had a chance to come out there and actually see the Napoleon Foundation, see the archive, see all the stuff that he had.

Literally, we had a chance to go through and see the original manuscript for Outwitting the Devil. We saw the original manuscript from another book called Outwitting the Beast. Have you guys read Outwitting the Beast yet? Oh, nobody has. It's an unpublished manuscript. We found all these amazing things and Don let us look at them and read them and start looking at them. And over the last couple of months he's been sending me these things, and it's been just the most exciting journey of my life, learning these things from Napoleon Hill.

And then who did Napoleon Hill learn from, and then who did he teach, and where did it go from there? And I started going down this rabbit hole trying to understand this movement. And so for me, I have become obsessed with a certain time period. In fact, the era that fascinates me the most is called the New Thought Movement. And this actually started about 1850. It has gone on until today. Most guys probably didn't even know about it. I didn't even know about it until I started diving deep in the history. But about 1850 is when this movement started.

And what's interesting is prior to 1850, people didn't think about the fact that you could think and change your life. You could think and grow rich. You can think and change your situation, right? 1850 is when this movement began. And the new thought movement, you see here, the focus was on the fact that our thoughts and our beliefs could directly influence our life's outcomes. Prior to that, for thousands of years of history, that wasn't something people talked about, thought about, even understood. People had different things they were doing, but no one ever thought like, hey, if I think I can change my life. And they started getting deeper into thinking, like, what am I thinking about? Where do these thoughts come from? And so back then they all started happening.

And there's a whole bunch of really cool people that popped up during this time. In fact, I'll show you some of my favorite authors, or actually I'm going to go back. So it's interesting because I think there's a lot of people who have studied other eras of time. For example, there's the Stoic Era. From about 300 BC to 200 AD, this was the Stoic Era. And this era focused a lot on personal virtues and self-control. How many of you guys are a little obsessed with stoicism?

Yeah, it's amazing. Ryan Holiday has taken this era and he's made it popular, made it huge again, made it exciting, everything he's done through his work. Another error is like the Renaissance, from 1300 to 1600. They focus on creativity and exchange of ideas. Another era was the enlightenment from 1600 to 1700, they focus on critical thinking and reasoning. But the new thought movement started about 1850. I can think, I can change my life.

And so a lot of people know about the stoic philosophers. People have heard of some of these people. Like on the left-hand side, there's Seneca, there's Epictetus, there's Marcus Aurelius. On the right-hand side there's Ryan Holiday, who I think is the modern day stoic. This is actually a painting I had commissioned for my library I'm building and I put Ryan in there. That's actually a picture of Ryan from Funnel Hacking Live on stage. I don't think he's actually seen this yet, but he is one of my favorite stoic philosophers.

But a lot of people have heard of the stoic philosophers, but very few people have heard of any of the new Thought philosophers, which is a tragedy because these guys and gals are brilliant. Some of my favorite people in the world, they become my friends. And as I've read their works and listened to the things they put out, it's personally changed my life and I want to bring some of these people and these thoughts and ideas to you guys today and honestly over the next couple of years, because I'm so excited.

And so the New Thought Move started in 1850 with this guy right here named Samuel Smile. Samuel lived in the UK and he was the very first person ever to write a book on personal development, and the book was called Self-Help. Isn't that a creative title? But if it was the very first one, it made a lot of sense. So he wrote this book called Self-Help and people reading it and it's like, oh my gosh, you can think and change your life. That wasn't something in our vocabulary. It wasn't something people thought about.

So he wrote that book, 1850s. 40, 50 years later, one of his books got here to America and it was in an attic, and there was this young kid named Orison Swett Marden who was minding his business in the attic. He finds this book called Self-Help. He's like, what is this book? He starts reading the book and he freaks out. He's like, wait a minute, I can think and change my life? This is amazing. So Orison Swett Marden reads this book and then he goes and he's like I want to do this. I want to help people in here in America to change their life, just like Samuel Smiles is doing over in the UK.

And so Orison Swett Marden starts writing his very first book, and he starts writing a book and he's putting his entire life, it was almost a decade writing this book. Page after page, and he ends up getting a manuscript that's... I think it was like a thousand to 2,000, or sorry, a thousand to 1,500 page manuscript he had written. And this is going to be his first book teaching Philosophy of Success here in America. He has this book and he owned some motels at the time. He left the manuscript in the hotel, and guess what happened? Hotel burned to the ground. This manuscript he spent a decade on was gone. He literally was in the ashes looking at the hotel burning down. He's like, my life's work is gone. What do I do?
Part of him probably wanted to go hide. But instead, guess what he did? He walked back to the store, bought a pad of paper, and started again. He wrote the very first book here in America called Pushing to the Front, which is the very first personal help book here in America.

Shortly thereafter, Orison Swett Marden started a little magazine you may have heard of called Success Magazine. And he was the one that brought the success philosophy, the new thought movement here to America. And Success Magazine is still around today. I almost bought it a couple of years ago, but I didn't because of a whole bad business deal. But someday I WIll own that magazine, just because Orison Swett Marden is the man.

But there's more... these amazing philosophers that no one ever talks about. How many you guys knew who Orison Swett Marden was before today? Nobody. You think the owner of Success Magazine would let people know about this guy, because he is insane. He wrote like 40 books on personal development after that one. This guy is one of the greatest thought leaders I've ever met.

Napoleon Hill came from this lineage. I love Napoleon Hill. We're going to talk more about him today. Also, Robert Collier. How many of you guys know who Robert Collier is? The marketers in the room know because he wrote a book called the Robert Collier Letter Book, one of the greatest books on copywriting ever written. But what most people don't know is that he wrote like 30 books on personal development that were even better than that. One of the greatest new thought philosophers ever.

Then Elsie Lincoln Benedict, anyone heard of her? She's literally one of my favorite people on the planet. In 1919 she spoke to over 3 million people around the world, and this was rare, 1919, there weren't women speakers, women authors, but she was out there on the forefront speaking and she's one of the most brilliant minds I've ever heard.

And it goes on, Earl Nightingale, Elizabeth Town, Charles Han, or PT Barnum, Elbert Hubbard, W Clement Stone, Maxwell Maltz, these are the people I've been studying who I'm obsessed with. And so I'm going to try to bring some of these ideas and these principles from these guys to you guys today, that we can use to help get our psychology correct so that the rest of the days we're giving you guys all the tactics and the techniques and all the stuff we need to be successful. You guys will be able to have more success with. Does that sound fun? Okay.

As I've been studying all these people, it's... I don't know, I'm such a nerd. So I have a separate office with my books that I go to and I can just look at them and smell them and stuff, because the old ones smell so cool. It's kind of weird, but it's like there's something special about it too. So I go there, and as I'm reading these books, one of the thoughts I have a lot is whenever I'm here, as I think about this clip from a really cool movie, some of you guys have heard of, not my favorite movie, but this is one of my favorite clips. How many of you guys have seen the movie Dead Poet Society? Okay. The movie is great, but there's this one clip that literally changed my life.

And every time I'm reading these books and learning from these people who have passed on. This clip rings in my head over and over and over again. So it's like a two-minute video. I'm going to show you guys really quick. And if you watch nothing else in the movie, just watch this piece because it's really powerful. Does that sound good? All right, here we go.
Thank you, Mr. Pits. Gather ye rose, but while ye may. The Latin term for that sentiment is carpe diem. Now who knows what that means? Carpe diem. That's seize the day. Very good.

Mr?

Meeks.

Meeks. Another unusual name. Seize the day. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Why does the writer use these lines?

Because he's in a hurry.

No. Ding. Thank you for playing anyway. Because we are food for worms, lads, because believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die. Now I'd like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. You've walked past them many times. I don't think you've really looked at them.

They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts, full of hormones just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things. Just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. If you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. You hear it? You hear it? Carpe. Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary. As I learn from these people who have passed beyond, I'm like, man, we all have this little time we're here on this planet. And I honestly think for every single one, we come into this world, we have a chance to be here for however long we're here and then we leave. And I feel like for all of us, one of the things we should be doing is when we're here, we're learning, we're growing, and everybody should have a chance to write their philosophy on success. What did you learn while you were here? What were the things that you were able to gather to help make you more successful?

And so someday I'm going to start a whole movement to get all you guys to write your own success philosophy. But for me, as I've been studying these people, I've been studying each of their success philosophy, what they were doing, why they believed it, and from there, trying to develop my own to help me to get to higher levels, try to get to the next phase and evolution of my life.

So with that said, I'm going to jump into my formal presentation, which I'm excited for. Last year, the intro presentation, I gave a presentation called the Drifters Versus the Driven. You guys, who here had a chance to be here for that presentation? Okay. If you missed it, I actually just recently, I think two or three days ago, we put that episode on the podcast. So if you listen to Marketing Secrets podcast, you go back, you listen to that one, it was all about the Drifter Versus the Driven. And this is going to be basically part two of that presentation. I wanted to take it a little bit deeper.

And so the title of this presentation today is the Calling Versus the Resistance, and that's where we're going to go. So you guys excited for that? All right, so am I. So the first thing I want to talk about is the actual calling. What is the calling? You guys have heard me talk about this before. The Call to Adventure. You guys have been called. I tell you all the time, everyone who's in this room has been called to serve a certain group of people. We have this calling.

And I've had people ask me in the past, like, what do you mean, Russell? You say you heard a call, you have a calling. Did you hear something? Did somebody tell you something? How does that work? How many of you guys ever wondered that? Is this even a real thing? What's Russell talking about? This is like woo woo weird stuff or is it an actual thing? I strongly believe that every single one of you who are in this room have been called of God to do something amazing. You came to this planet, you were given the gifts, the talents. And he's like, look, you're here today. Now you've got to go and do something with the gifts I have given you. And so there is a literal calling.

But a lot of times it's not like what you think it's going to be. I think when I first got started in this, I heard people talk about like, oh, you're going to feel like this call to do something. I thought it was going to be like a phone call. Hey Russell, your job is to go and you're going to gather a bunch of funnel nerds together and start a movement called Funnel Hacking Live. And you're going to have all these people, you're going to help them to serve them, right? It wasn't that ever. There was no phone calls, there was no nothing. I started thinking, what was the calling? What was it? Because it wasn't something like this, like a huge thing hitting up in the head.

I started thinking back in time, started trying to remember. And as I started trying to remember, I realized that it was just a feeling, a feeling place in my heart. It was desire. And the desire, I didn't know where it was going to lead me to. The desire came and it was just like, hey Russell, here's something that you're going to be interested in. And that began with some desire. And then I started pursuing that desire and it got more and more exciting. So for me, the way that the desire began was back, man, over 20 years ago now.

So my beautiful wife and I, Colette have been married now over 20 years, which is insane. Give her a round of applause. Can you imagine being married to me, by the way? It would be a nightmare. She's lasted over 20 years and it's been amazing. Anyway. I love her. And 20 years ago we got married. About this time is when I was trying to figure out this whole business stuff. I don't think I had a desire at that time. I used to be like, we're getting married. I didn't have a job. I wanted to wrestle. She had a job. I was like I've got to figure out something, because I didn't want to quit wrestling, but I didn't want her to have to support me. So I was like I've got to figure out something to do. And about that time, that was where this desire was placed in my heart, like you need to go and create something.

And I didn't know what to create. I remember I started listening to business stuff. I went to Google, typed in how to make money on the internet. How many you guys ever did that? That's how you got here. That's the beginning of the funnel, in case you're wondering. So all of us did it. You can admit it, you wrote that. So I typed how to make money, and all of a sudden we started this process. I was trying this and that and all sorts of just chaos and everything.

And eventually I stumbled into people who were doing business correctly. They were doing some really cool stuff. And I started listening to them. And for some reason when I listened to them it was exciting to me, which is funny because I was the kid who I struggled in school. I remember my mom taking me one time in high school to a bookstore. I was like why would anybody in their right mind want to go to a bookstore ever? This is the stupidest thing in the world. Books are so boring, says the man who has boughten 15,000 books in the last 12 months.

But I was like, this makes no logical sense. I go to school, I understand my teachers, I learned stuff, thought it was stupid. I really, really struggled with them. For some reason, out of the blue, I find these guys on the internet who are talking about business and marketing. And all of a sudden I had this spark and I was like, whoa, this is really, really cool. Okay. Why did I have that desire? I don't know. Why was I excited? I have no idea why. But that's where it begins. It begins with a little spark, with a little bit of desire, and you start pursuing that and you start getting more and more excited.

I remember for me, I was wrestling at Boise State University and I remember sitting... We would go on these road trips, so we'd have 20 wrestlers jammed in a van. We're all on top of each other, on top of our bags, because Boise State was too cheap to get multiple vans. So everyone's on top of each other, we're cutting weight so we haven't eaten in three or four days, all sorts of stuff. We had these 12 hour van rides to Oregon or to Arizona to go and wrestle. And so all my buddies would be listening to music and stuff, and I would go and I would download tele-seminars. Who here remembers what tele-seminars were?

Okay. Prior to Zoom and go to webinar, before webinars there was these things called tele-seminars where you would dial in and you would listen. And so most of the tele-seminars happened while I was in school. So I would export them and then I would burn them onto a tape player at Radio Shack. This is how it really worked. I'd go to Radio Shack, I brought a tape player, we downloaded a thing, we'd record it onto this tape player and I would put these tapes. And while we'd be driving on these long things, I listened to the tapes in the car. I listened to people like Armand Morin and Alex Mandossian and Marlon Sanders and all these guys who were the first generation of internet entrepreneurs talking about what they were doing. And it was so exciting. Everything said, I just got sucked into it.

And they called and kept coming. I'm like, why am I so excited about it? I can't stop thinking about this. All I want to do is just learn about this and learn about it and learn about it. But I had no ideas. I had no business, I had no product. I had nothing. And all of a sudden, one day I get this idea. Like, what if you created a product? And it's not going to make a lot of sense nowadays, but back then I had the first idea. It was like, I want to create a product that it'll take a file and it'll brand it. So somebody opens a PDF file, the first thing they'll see is my ad before they actually get into the things. That was the big idea. That's what started this whole thing, by the way.

And I had this idea and I'm going to call this zip brander. It'll zip the file and it'll close it. When you unlock the zip file, it'll show you an ad and then it'll get them into the thing they unzipped. And that was the very first idea I had. Zip Brander. And so I go and I buy the domain name. I try to put it all together. I tried to hire these programmers. A whole long story short, eventually I found somebody who would build this product for me. I paid this guy named Cyprian in Romania $120 to build this and became my very first product. I had something to actually sell. Now all these things I was listening to, I could apply it to something. I have something I can actually do marketing with. And so I'm like, I have this product, now what do I do?

Well, they talked about writing a sales letter. So I learned about that. So I'd go and I start writing a sales letter. And then I needed to drive traffic and all the different pieces. And I just became obsessed with applying all this knowledge to this thing. It started me down this process getting closer and closer and closer.

And I look at that now and I'm like that was probably the dumbest idea, I think maybe ever. I think total, I probably sold 20 copies of Zip Brander. Do we have any Zip Brander customers in the audience? There's usually one. Okay. But I was like, that was my first big idea. I tried and I tried everything, but I was gaining something to apply to. And that was this calling happened, like you need to create something.

And I want to tell you how callings work. What happens is God gives you an idea and he's not going to give you like, hey, Russell, you should go build ClickFunnels. He gives me... I'm like, I don't know how to do that. And if I would've tried, it would've got crushed under the weight of it. He's like, I'm going to give you a little idea. This is a dumb idea, but here's this idea. It's called Zip Brander. He places the thought in your head and you're like, oh, Zip Brander. This is a good idea. And he's going to watch. He's like, what's he going to do with that? Is he going to be a good steward of that idea? Is he going to do something with it or not?

So he gives me an idea and I go and try something. And if I do, he's like, oh my gosh, Russell actually took the idea and did something with it. I'm going to give him a better idea. Can't give him a worse idea. We'll give me him a better idea. The next idea. So then for me, the next one is this little software product called Forum Fortunes. I was in these forums answering message. I was like, I create software to do this. And God gave me a little bit better idea. And so I went and found a programmer, made this thing called Forum Fortunes. Any Forum Fortune customers out there? Probably not. And I sold that and that one sold more stuff. And I was like, oh. And God's like, oh my gosh, if I give Russell something, he does something with it. Here's another idea. Gave me the next one and the next one.

And I remember one day he gave me this idea for potato guns. I'm like, what? Potato guns? It makes no logical sense. But I was like, all right. So we made a product selling potato guns. You guys have heard that story before, right? And I sold a couple copies of that thing, but it wasn't like this huge thing, but it's like I sold some potato guns. Why was that a big deal? Why was that important? I don't know. At the time, looking back 20 years ago, it's like, oh, Russell, you need to make this potato gun product, not because it's going to make you a bunch of money, but you need a story that's relatable so that in the future, if you keep doing what I'm asking you to do, you'll be prepared and you have something to tell people, something that'll give them hope, give them understanding, give them belief. You have these little ideas, these little things. Every time we do something, it gets a little bit bigger.

And it's the first thing to understand, that's how the calling happens. It's not just like, Russell, here's ClickFunnels. It's like a little idea. And then are you going to be a good steward of that or not? If you are, okay, here's another idea. Here's another idea. And eventually what happens is you get better at what you're doing. You get better at what you're doing. Your capacity increases. You can handle it until eventually it's like, okay, now Russell may build ClickFunnels. It's like, oh, I don't know how. Well, here's Todd. Oh, what's up Todd? Todd build ClickFunnels. He builds it. Now we've got this thing. But it all works In a process like that.

It was interesting, I was doing research for this presentation. I found a really interesting story about Michael Jackson. Did you guys know that Michael Jackson and Prince hated each other? They were competitors back and forth. And so there was this story where Michael Jackson was doing this big huge concert. They already spent $24 million. He was trying to make it better and better and better. And he goes to his manager, he wakes up one morning at three o'clock in the morning, and his manager's name's Kenny. And this is what the story says, it says God channels this through me at night. I can't sleep because I'm so supercharged. And then Kenny's like, well, Michael, we can't do that idea. We've got to finish this thing. Can't God take a vacation?

Without missing a beat, Michael said, "You don't understand it. If I'm not there to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince." Okay? I think that's how this whole thing works. How many you guys, have you ever seen something like, oh, I had an idea for that. Crap. I know when we were building ClickFunnels, there were five or six other people who I knew who were actively building the exact same thing. It wasn't unique. It was like, okay, well here, we use the funnel to building software and everyone's trying to sprint this thing. Who is the one who's going to finish it? Who's the one who gets it to the finish line? Who's the one who's going to make it to the end?

And so that's what the calling looks like. It's these little ideas. It's you saying, "Look, whatever you want me to do, I'm going to do it." And if you do it and then he gives you something else, and it starts growing, it starts growing. That's what the calling is. And if you do that, what'll happen is in a year from now, five years from now, 10 years, 20 years from now, you look back and you're like, "Look at where I am." I look back at 21-year old Russell who's sitting on a bus in the back of a car listening to tapes about how to make money on the internet. I look at that and it's like, how did that lead me to here? But it was the first step and the second step and the third step.

So that's what the calling looks like. And most people I've talked to, it's been very, very similar. It's not just this big light bulb moment. It's these little things where you're going to take something and move with it. Okay? So here's a picture of you, and here's the calling. Okay? It's like a voice that points you in a direction. The goal of this calling is to make you driven. My presentation is actually is all about being driven, being someone who isn't just sitting there silent, who's driven to move forward, to change things, to move things. That's the path.

So the voice here, I'm going to call the voice the calling. It moves you towards some kind of goal. So this is a picture of a mountain. There's a goal. Okay. So then the opposite side of that, so we have the calling, and then we have the other side. And there's a lot of different names for which you call it, the adversary. You can call it Satan, you can call it whatever you want. But recently I was reading a book by Steve Pressfield called The Art of War? Anyone here... Sorry, the War of Art. Okay. In the War of Art, if you guys haven't read it, it's a pretty fast read. It's amazing. But in the book, he calls this the resistance. And when I read that, I was like, oh, that's what it is. That's the feeling of what it is. It's the resistance. It's the enemy. It's the thing that's holding you back.

The resistance is all the things is you are trying to be driven, as you're trying to move forward towards something, the resistance is all to keeping you from doing that. So I read the book, and this is probably a month ago. And as I was preparing for Funnel Hacking Live, I had this idea. I was like, what if I start documenting every time I feel the resistance? Every time I'm supposed to be doing something, but I feel the opposite, like don't do that, Russell? And so I got my phone and I started recording myself.

And what was interesting is I realized I felt that resistance so often, over and over and over again. So let me explain what the resistance is for those who don't quite understand it. How many guys in the morning you wake up, you're laying in bed and you know you're supposed to get up and go work out, and you're like, oh, I don't want to, and you turn the alarm off? That's resistance. How many of you guys are like, oh, I've got to write a blog post, or I've got to record a podcast, or something, you're about to do it and you're like, oh, I don't want to, I'm tired. Oh, I'm going to go check my email real quick. Oh, I'm going to do this. That's resistance. It's coming from the side... It's your brain trying to get you to do anything except the thing you're actually supposed to be doing. Resistance hits us all the time in every single situation. Even today, for example, I think I probably hit it 12 or 13 times before I came on stage.

In fact, right before that thing went up, the resistance is like, get out of here, Russell. You are not ready for this. There are so many people out there are going to make fun of you. What if you trip? You're wearing a jacket, you don't even like jackets. Freaking out, right? It's a beautiful jacket though. My son told me I look like Star Lord today. So I'm still pretty pumped about that. If you can address me as Star Lord for the next couple... Anyway. Okay, so the resistance is that feeling. How many you guys have felt resistance before in your life? Okay.

So a month ago I read this book, the War of Art. He's talking about the resistance. He goes through a million different ways that you see it and it shows up. And I was just like, okay, I want to be aware of this now. So I start recording myself. So I wake up in the morning, getting ready for Funnel Hacking Live. So two weeks ago is when I started prep for Funnel Hacking Live, for all my presentations. So I remember Monday morning waking up, I'm laying in bed, my alarm goes off. It's like five o'clock in the morning or something. I was going to get up. I was going to get a couple of hours and before my kids woke up and everything and five o'clock goes off and I'm like... I just turn it off, 10 more minutes. It goes off again. 10 more minutes, 10 more minutes, and I'm asleep. Then I wake up, I'm like, oh, dang it. Okay, it's six o'clock, I could still get up if I needed to.

If I don't get enough sleep though, I'm going to be hard for me to actually function during the day. So if I get one more hour of sleep, I get more done during the day. I'm like, okay, I'm going to go ahead and go back to sleep another hour, right? Resistance is fighting me. I finally get up. I'm like okay, I'm going to go and I get everything ready, drive my son to school, drop him off, go to the office, about to get out. I'm like, okay, now I'm going to finally going to work. And all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I'm going to check my email real quick. Pull my phone out. Oh, I'm going to check social. Oh, I'm going to check Facebook. Oh, Instagram. Oh, I wonder if anybody messaged me on Slack. Oh, and also I'm doing this and this and this and this.

So I'm like, oh crap, resistance got me again. Put the phone down. And then I go to the next thing and the next thing, and I'm realizing this thing is hitting me every 15 seconds. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I was like how do I get anything done? How do any of us get anything done? And so the resistance is the opposite. We have the calling, the thing that's driving us, and the resistance is the other side over here.

I'm going to draw... We'll make this guy look a little evil. This is the resistance. And the goal of the resistance is to get you guys to slide off the track, to get into what Napoleon Hill called hypnotic rhythm, to get this thing where you're stuck into this spot and you're not moving forward. Okay?

It's interesting... I'm curious how many you guys feel this. Hypnotic rhythm in my mind is this feeling where you're stuck, you're stuck in a rut. Have you guys ever felt this before? You're stuck in a rut. This is what drifters go do. They're stuck in this thing where they just can't seem to get out. And they're just drifting and drifting, versus the driven are all about moving forward. And there's times I was like, I want to move forward, I want to move forward, but then the resistance is always pulling us back, trying to get us to drift. Like, no, I've got to move forward, got to move forward. And we're drifting. We're like this constant battle back and forth.

If you think about this, the majority of people, especially outside this room, the majority of people live their life in resistance. They're living in this life where it's just like this circular thing. Okay? I don't know about you, but I look at those people, it makes me so sad. I'm like, do you know what you're capable of? Do you know what you're... If you would put your mind towards something, you could change so many people's lives. It's frustrating.

In fact, when we were in Kenya, Eileen asked me, she's like, why are you so passionate about this kind of stuff? I was like, I think the reason why is because I see people, I can see the potential. I know what one human being is able to do. If they're able to get their message out, they can change an army of people. And so when I see somebody who's got so much potential, so much they could be doing, they're not, it drives me nuts. It's really hard for me.
Where was I going on this? Sorry. And so hypnotic rhythm is like this feeling, like this, right? And this is where most people spend their life and we're always trying to get out of these ruts and start moving forward to be one of the driven. And so that's kind of where resistance hits us.

And so I wanted to give these names because I want, as a community, for us to be able to talk about this, have this calling. I have something I'm working towards. I have a vision where I'm trying to create, and then the resistance is this thing that I'm fighting against. And so we have that battle back and forth, it's the key, okay?

Now, one of the interesting things about the calling that a lot of you guys have probably noticed is that we don't... Sometimes we'll see way over here, like you'll see the end goal like, oh, that's where I want to get to. I'm trying to get to that thing over there. But all the way from here, there's all foggy. Kind of like when they open the wall here, all the fog came out. It's really, really foggy. I don't know how to get from here to here.

And so our job is to take steps forward in faith. You take a step forward, and then the fog clears a little bit. You're like, oh, I see where to go. Okay, I'm nervous, I'm scared. I'm taking another step forward. And faith. Boom. And then fog clears and you keep going forward. And so faith is such a big part. It's taking these steps of faith towards the goal, towards the calling it's driving you towards.

Okay. So calling and resistance. Now, one thing I want to point out that I think is really interesting that has helped me so much in my life ever since I first... I read this in a book a couple of years ago and it was powerful. How many of you guys struggle because you have a lot of voices happening inside your head? Come on you guys. I know it's true. How many you guys have more in one voice in your head? Okay. And you're like, is that me? Did I think that or is it somebody else? What's happening?

Okay, in the book I read, they explained it was so powerful. So there's basically three voices inside your head. The first voice is actually your brain. And what this voice says, this voice asks questions, asks a lot of questions. Like should I do this or should I do that? Should I do this? Should I do that? That's actually your brain. Your brain is the thing that's asking questions back and forth. That's how our brain functions. Like should I go this way or should I not? Should I sign up for the program? Should I not? Should I go to school? Our brain is always asking questions. Okay? That's how you know it's coming from you.

The second voice... So that's the first voice, is you. The second voice is this calling. Now this voice is different. This voice is not something that's ever questioning. This voice tells you things, and usually it's quiet and usually it's one thing. It's like, hey Russell, go do this. Hey, call that person. Hey, go over there. Talk to that guy. That's what the calling feels like. The calling doesn't typically repeat itself over and over and over again. It asks you once like hey, or doesn't ask you, it tells you once. Do this thing. And then wait to see what you do. Oh, he's a good steward of this idea. I'll give him another one. Do this. Try this. We have to learn how to be in tune with that.

But it's hard because the resistance is the third voice. The resistance is annoying. The resistance is loud. Typically, it speaks in absolutes. You guys remember Star Wars, when they're like, "Only Siths deal in absolutes"? It's weird how Star Wars fits almost every situation. Anyway. The resistance speaks in absolutes. This is the one that says, "Hey, Russell, you're not ready. Hey, you're not worthy. Hey, you look funny. Hey, you talk too fast. Hey, no one's going to pay attention to you. They're going to mock you on social media, blah, blah, blah." Thing after thing, after thing after thing, okay? And it's not quiet. It's loud and it berates you over and over and over again.

So these are the three voices we have in our head. And when you start understanding that's what's happening, you say, "Look, this voice of resistance is coming and it's talking and it's not nice. It's direct. It's absolute." It says, "You are not good, Russell. You're not good enough. You're not ready, you're not worthy. No one's going to love you." That's what's coming from here? And when I'm aware that that's not me thinking that's coming from external things, it gave me freedom. I realized that this is not me. This is something I've got to be listening for. And when I hear it, I've got to move forward.

And then the questions are your mind. And so I started paying attention to my thoughts that are happening. Sometimes we hear this over and over and over again. We think it's us. We're like, man, I must not be ready. I must not be worthy, because I keep telling myself that. It's not you. It's resistance trying to get you to not take your calling. Or you're like, wait, am I supposed to call that person? Am I supposed to do that thing? Also, you're doing the questioning thing. Okay? If you're doing this questioning thing, you're like, wait, was that me? Was that someone else? If it came as a quiet direct telling me what to do, then yes, it's coming from the calling.

Okay. All right. That's the first thing I want to talk about. The second thing I want to talk about, and this is the part that I have been geeking out on the most, I'm having so much fun talking and thinking and learning about this. I'll adjust my slides to it. It's talking about conscious versus subconscious, how our brain works. The more I've started to understand how my brain works, the easier it is for me to be successful in any area of my life. And these are simple concepts. Obviously there's a deep side to this, you can go deep into the science and all that kind of stuff. That's not my goal. My goal is to give you guys a usable model that's simple, that's easy, to help you understand how our brains work, okay?

The first thing to understand is that there is a conscious and a subconscious mind, and I know most of us know this. This is something that back in the early 1850s, back when the new thought movement was happening, is when they were discovering this stuff. They're like, oh my gosh, there's a conscious mind, there's a subconscious mind, and they're different in how they work together.

So when you start reading all the books from the new thought movement, this is what they're just discovering. And the very first time you see how excited they are and they're freaking out and they're testing things, and they're trying things and learning all these crazy things during this journey, which is so much fun to read about. And so for me, it gets me excited. And now there's so much more science on that, that we can even understand it better.

But there's the conscious and the unconscious. So the first thing I want to talk about... In fact, I'm going to draw a picture of a brain. I think a brain looks kind of like that? There's a brain, okay? There's like little squigglies in the brain, so… We also have that part. Okay, so here's our brain. Now, first thing I want to talk about is our conscious mind. So conscious mind is up here in the front of our skull. This is the part that we're having conversations with every single day. Okay? Let's say this is the frontal lobe part.

And if you look at this, basically there's two voices that are happening inside your conscious mind. I talked about the conscious mind, it's the asks all the questions, it's your brain asking questions. I think it was Buddha said that this conscious brain is like monkeys. And when they do more research, actually there's two monkeys. And for those of you guys who were... How many of you guys went to unlock the secrets two years ago? Yeah? So that's our young entrepreneur event with kids and stuff. And I brought monkeys and elephants and lizards. We had a bunch of fun with it. I didn't do it for today, but I do want to bring back one of the slides, which is this.

So understand that there's these two monkeys that basically are sitting up here on the front. Okay. There's monkey number one. I've never drawn a monkey. They've got tails. I don't know. There you go. Okay. But they're here on your conscious mind. And this is the conversation you're having. Every single person is having this conversation consciously every single day. Emotional logic, emotional logic. For example, let's say I go to the grocery store, I'm hungry. Emotionally, I'm like I'm hungry, I need to eat something. Or I go to the drive-thru or whatever.

And so I'm emotionally driven to go do something. I go to the drive-thru, I look at the menu like, oh, it's amazing. And my emotion is like, oh, you want the milkshake for the appetizer. Emotionally, I want that. And the logic comes in like, wait, you're really going to drink a milkshake for breakfast? I'm like but I really want one. Yeah, but that's a lot of calories. Then you're going to feel sluggish throughout the day. And boom, here it is. Emotion and logic, this is the two voices that are questioning each other in your head every single day. And some of you guys, your emotion is way louder. And some of you guys, your logic is way louder.

How many of you guys do you think are more emotional, you hear the emotion more often? Okay, how many of you guys are more logical? Okay. The reality is we've got both these things. And when we're questioning, it's emotion questioning logic, emotion questioning logic. This is the debate that's happening in your brain all the time. Again, Buddha called it the monkey brain, because it's like this chattering, chattering, back forth, back forth, back forth, back forth. It can be exhausting sometimes. So we have these two things, emotion and logic happening all day long. And so this is what's happening here in your conscious brain. It's the first thing to understand.

So our conscious brain has got these two things. This is the question that's going back and forth. Now our conscious brain has got some very important things it needs to do, and I broke it down to five or six different steps that our conscious brain is responsible for. Okay? The very first thing our conscious brain is supposed to do is to figure out our definite purpose. What is the thing that we are trying to do? What is the result we're looking for? What is our purpose?

When you start reading Napoleon Hill and read all his books, his manuscripts, it's interesting because almost every single one of his books, he has different laws of success and we have Think and Grow Rich, all these different books, but almost every single time he starts the book talking about this one principle, which is having a definite purpose. You have to have a definite purpose. If you don't have definite purpose, you're just wandering around doing nothing.

The reason why most people don't succeed in life, because they have no definite purpose. So because of that, they're in the hypnotic rhythm. They're just going circular, not moving towards anything. It's not until you have a definite purpose, like this is the thing that I'm trying to do, this is the thing I'm trying to accomplish, this is where I'm going, that's when everything changes for you, okay?

I started thinking about myself in my life. Like when I was growing up, a lot of you guys know I was a wrestler growing up, and I wasn't a great wrestler. You can ask my dad or my brothers. I wasn't a great wrestler. Went to wrestling practice to try stuff. I was just kind of just there. I was with my dad. I was just like, okay, I'm wrestling. I was kind of just doing the motions.

Wrestled my first year. I won half the matches, lost half the matches. And then the next year I started and I wasn't that good. And I remember my dad took me to the state tournament.
I'm sitting in the state tournament and there were two kids from high school who were actually in the state finals. I remember watching, the first guy was a guy named Matt Woods. Matt went to the state finals. He wins the state title. He was already a two-time state champion. He became a three-time state champ. I remember watching him as the ref raised his hand, and I saw that. I remember saying, "That, that's what I want to do." I had a definite purpose. I want to be a state champ. It wasn't like I want to learn how to be better, I want to get a good workout. It was like no, that is the thing I want to do. It was definite. It was not just a purpose. I want to wrestle. No, no, no. I don't want to wrestle. I want to be a state champ.
When do I want to be a state champ by? I want to be a state champ as soon as possible. I want to be a state champ by next year.

So I told my friends, "I'm going to be a state champ next year." They're like, "You're not even good." I'm like, "I know, but I'm going to be a state champ next year." Definite purpose. When I had a definite purpose, I had something to run towards. Before that I was just circular, just in the spot, just like, oh, I'm showing up to practice. I'm doing something. As soon as I picked a purpose and I had that purpose, a definite purpose, then I had something to run towards.

Same thing happened in business. When my wife and I got married, I had this business. I was trying to sell some stuff. We were joking because I think I had probably five customers maybe when Colette and I got married and I was so nervous. What if one of my customers emails me? I'm going to be in trouble. So I brought my laptop to our honeymoon just in case one of our customers would have an issue. I could fix it on the fly.

But I remember, I was trying to figure out this business, but it was just kind of like I was doing this thing. I was just going around. And it wasn't until John Reese, and some of you guys have heard me tell the story before, John Reese, I think it was August of... I don't remember the day off the top of my head, but he did what nobody had done prior. He sold a million dollars worth of his course in an 18 hour period of time, made a million dollars in a day.

And I remember sitting there as this young entrepreneur just doing this thing, and all of a sudden I was like that. That's what I want to do. Definite purpose. I want to make a million dollars. And I was like in my hand, I'm like it's not possible for me to do today, but if he did it in a day, I think I could do it in a year. I remember he had a thousand dollar course, sold a thousand copies. I'm like, hey, I need to make a thousand dollar course, and I've got to sell a thousand copies in a year. That's three a day. If I can do that, then boom, I made a million dollars. So now I had a definite purpose. It wasn't just I'm in business to be in business. It was like I want to make a million dollars in a calendar year.

And so literally, it wasn't just in a year. Random, it was like in a calendar year, it starts January 1st, ends December 31st, I have to make a million dollars in that window. But it was a definite purpose. Now, you may be like, oh, Russell, that seems really, really easy. But back then you have to understand I'd maybe made $15,000 total, like five years in business prior to that. All of a sudden I'm like, oh, I'm going to make a million dollars in the calendar year.

But what happened? It took me out of this rut of drifting and resistance and just like, oh, I'm just here doing the thing, to getting me out of that and saying, "This is where I'm going." Driven, definite purpose. So I picked a definite purpose, and I started running towards that. And I started in January 1st. Went through the whole year. At the end of the year did not make a million dollars, but man, I got close. It was like 600,000, $700,000. I'm like, okay, December 31st. It starts over again. Started the next year, set a goal, calendar year, got really, really close that year. I think got to 800,000 or something like that. Missed it again. I'm like dang it. Next year, started the goal, boom, and by I think October 17th was the day that I broke a million dollars. Okay? Thank you.

Three years prior, I was making one or two sales every other month, because I was just drifting, to boom, definite purpose. The first step is our conscious mind, is figuring out what is the definite purpose? What is the thing that I'm trying to do? Okay? I remember, man, 12 years ago, going to ClickBank. I remember walking to ClickBank. They had these big huge offices and everything, and employees. They had staff, this wall with clocks on the wall for every time zone they had customers in. I remember sitting there like that, that. You have to understand. 12 years ago, I didn't have a business. I had a couple offers. I had a couple of funnels that were out there and that was it. But I didn't have a business, but I saw a ClickBank. I was like that. I want that.

Okay, how do we build a business? Well, building business, we need more than just selling a product. And we started going through it and like, boom. 10 years later, ClickFunnels. So for you guys, the first key is like, do you know what your definite purpose is? I think my next slide here is Napoleon Hill.

So Napoleon Hill said, there's one quality which one must possess to win, and that's definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to possess it. So do you guys know what your definite purpose is? Not like I want to make money, I want to win a two comic club award. Like definite, like I want to do this by this certain time. In fact, as I was doing research for this, one of my friends sent me this. Bruce Lee was a huge Napoleon Hill fan. In fact, in his day planner, you see the times that he was studying Napoleon Hill throughout the day.

And then this is a document that went up for auction and it got sold before I found out about it. Otherwise, I would have it because it's insane. But he had his definite chief aim, his definite purpose document, and this is what it looks like right here. In fact, if anyone knows who bought it and you can connect me with him, I want to buy this. I want this frame. This is the coolest thing in the world.

But this is Bruce Lee picking his definite purpose. And some people think like, oh, Bruce Lee was like the greatest karate guy of all time. He wasn't. It was not his purpose. His purpose was not to be the greatest karate person of all time. Okay? This is his purpose. He said, "I Bruce Lee will be the highest paid Oriental Superstar in the United States. In return, I will give the most exciting performances and render the best quality and the capacity of an actor. Starting 1970 I will achieve world fame, and from then onward till the end of 1980, I will have my possession, $10 million. I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness." Definite purpose.

This is what I'm talking about. Napoleon Hill said, "You've got to take this. You've got to write down your definite purpose, print it on your wall, and read it every single day." Otherwise, it's so easy for resistance to slip you back into this. You've got to be able to see it, and see it, every see…, see it over and over and over. Again, this is the one that Bruce Lee wrote and had on his wall. Once again, if any of you guys can help me find this thing, I really, really want it. But it's pretty cool, right?

And so my question for you guys is this, is what is your purpose? What's your chief aim? What are you doing? You have to be specific. What exactly do you want, and when, and then what are you willing to do to achieve that? Okay?

All right, everybody, thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that. Again, if you don't have your tickets yet for Funnel Hacking Live, next year we are doing actually two Funnel Hacking Lives. There'll be info on the page if you go to funnelhackinglive.com. We have a virtual one that's going to be happening next September and then a live in-person one happening next February. It's going to be insane and I want you there. So if you don't have tickets yet, go to funnelhackinglive.com and get them. All the details, information should be there, and hopefully I'll have a chance to see you guys at the next big party. All right, thanks everybody.