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Hey, Jordan Harbinger here.
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Welcome to Minnesota Monday.
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I m happy to be here with you kicking off the week with something quick and actionable that you can implement right away that will make you more magnetic and effective.
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Today we ve got Ryan Holiday.
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Thanks for coming back, man.
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I m very interested in knowing
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what makes you an authority that s in demand when it comes to this?
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I mean, I see you talking at Google, I see you traveling to different summits and seminars and things like that, and there s just a massive weight to your authority.
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And yes, part of it is you ve written a bunch of really great books, but there s other actions that I m sure that you are doing this consciously that have gotten you to a point where you can swing that kind of weight that other authors, other people who are thought leaders, et cetera, maybe should take notes on.
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Well, thank you.
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And yeah, I think obviously there there is sort of nothing better for getting speaking than having a book.
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But it s not simply like it s not one of those fake it till you make it situations, which I think a lot of people confuse or make the mistake of thinking of.
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Right.
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They go like, oh, lots of speakers have books.
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Let me get a book and then I will be a speaker.
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It s usually the other way around.
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Like it s usually the ideas in the book
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happen to overlay with a niche or a need for companies to have give you a talk, right?
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So if I wrote a really good book about horse grooming, you know, chances are the CEO of companies that have become speak or the person who selects speakers for Google, he s not gonna be like, hey, come chat to the Googlers about this, right?
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Like, cause there s no, so it s really about dominating a niche that
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Add some value to a company or a conference or an event so i ve thought about this a lot and books are one way to do it but it s it s it s about establishing a an overwhelming amount of expertise in a given area.
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So my first book was an expose of how the media system work and you could see why people who are in the media are going to want to see someone sort of reveal how that works and show some of the flaws in their industry and conversely people who are trying to place things in the media marketers are gonna want that too.
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Now, one of the things I did with that book that has gotten me a countless amount of gigs and actually sold a lot of books too, is I realized early on that one of the critical but under-competitive spaces was universities.
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That professors are looking to assign books to their students that are not boring, that are not like all the other books in their space.
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So, I put up an offer on my site and I said, look, if you re a college professor and you assign this book to your class, I ll do a Skype Q&A with your class.
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They ll read it and then I ll answer any questions they have.
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I don t know if you remember in college, but you never got to interact with the people who wrote the text that you were reading.
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And so professors love that and students love that.
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And so like there have been like I ve spoken at now journalism schools and marketing departments all over the world.
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I ve never had to leave my house.
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And in some cases, the same class has assigned that book for the last four years that it s been out.
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And in one case, one of the students in one of those classes is now a well-known journalist who had me on her show about three months ago.
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So like I look for
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The places where there s not that much competition so like when i did my book on growth hacking one of the things that i realized is that.
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Most of the things that marketing students are learning is woefully out of date right so if i wanted access to the students i came up with a program with my publisher where we said if you can prove you re taking a marketing class will give this book.
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To you for free and we gave away about a thousand copies and those marketing students are now marketing professionals sometimes some of them even run their own companies and they ve invited me to come speak so i m just looking for like who makes these decisions or who is likely to make these decisions in the future and i try to target them directly.
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And how do you go, what s the process of looking at the targeting?
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Are you online using email hunter or is it, how do you niche it down to what departments and what you re looking for and then reaching out to those people?
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What are the mechanics of that?
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Yeah, so one of the things we ve done with my publisher, for instance, with university professors is they ve pulled a list of every university, they scraped
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a list for every university professor in this space, then they send them an email that offers them a copy of the book for free and puts my offer there at the bottom.
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So the professors are already more likely to check out the book because they know there s this additional upside that separates it from the other.
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And we get a lot of inquiries.
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I m also really active on Twitter.
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So I track the verified Twitter mentions that mention my name.
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So for instance,
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I saw that people in professional sports were starting to read my book on Stoic philosophy.
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So every time one of them would, like every time an athlete would read the book, I would reach out to them on Twitter and be like, you know, I m totally flattered.
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This is amazing.
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Let me send you some more books and you can give them to your teammates.
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And so the book made its way through professional sports.
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primarily because I made it easier for it to spread.
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It s like, I m sure a lot of these people liked the book.
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They might not have liked it enough to go buy copies and hand them out.
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So I took that hurdle out of the equation and I made it possible for them to give copies away without them needing to go on Amazon and buy a bunch of them, for instance.
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Right.
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So you remove a lot of the obstacles and you make it almost so much easier.
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It s so easy that they can t say no to all of the little elements that you want included in this.
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Sure.
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It s like, look, if you liked a book and you mentioned on Twitter how you were liking it, and then that author sent you a case of 50 copies, you re not just going to leave those in your garage.
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You re going to do something with them.
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And, and so I ve, I ve tried to, it s like from a marketing perspective, when you see an influencer like your work,
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you should assume that one, they are passionate about it, because they re the most selective of all the audiences.
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Two, they are very likely to know other influential people.
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And three, they re very busy.
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So if I send them a bunch of copies, I m sort of, it s like, hey, this is working.
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I m going to put more fuel on that fire.
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I ve now spoken at Google on four different occasions in multiple countries.
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And part of the way i was able to do this is that i actually sort of looked into how it works right it s not the ceo of google who decides who talks there in fact any employee at google.
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If they feel so inclined can propose a speaker and ask them to come talk and then they re in charge of organizing that event.
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So two of the talks i gave were actually incoming inquiries that i got from people who work at google who d read my book sort of going to what we re just saying and they said hey i m a big fan if you re ever in town like i d love to do something and then i made sure i flew i paid for myself to fly out there and we set something up right so.
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It s understanding that the decision makers a lot of times are not busy elite you know high level people sometimes they re just passionate employees who want to make a change or to do something inside an organization.
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and that you have to treat those people really well and you should treat them as important as they actually are and like they have the ability to make this thing happen for you and that s why you know that s why i check my own email that s why i follow up on every you know thing that might be remotely interesting and i m
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I m, you know, Tim Ferriss talks about this idea of pre-VIPs, like people who are important or will become important in the future, and making sure that you, he says, like, treat everyone as though they could put you on the front page of the New York Times, because they might actually be able to someday.
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Don t forget about the Art of Charm Challenge.
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It ll help you connect with others, create more productive personal and business relationships, and has step-by-step challenges to help you move forward.
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There s also a Facebook group with thousands of other AOC family taking the challenge as well.
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Of course, AJ and I are in there with the rest of the Art of Charm team, helping you all move through the challenges.
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Text CHARMED, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444 here in the States, or go to theartofcharm.com slash challenge and get rocking.