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Hey, Advanced Selling Podcast friends.
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Hey, are there episodes that you wish you would have bookmarked or episodes in the past that you just quite can t remember what we said?
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Well, hey, you asked for it and we listened.
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This is the best of the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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Let s do it.
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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, we talk printer reviews that lead us to an interesting question about DocuSign.
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Bill uses the word zeitgeist for the second time in show history.
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And we interview Benjamin Spall, who talks about a fantastic, exquisite morning routine.
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Welcome, everybody, to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast in podcast history.
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My name is Brian.
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Now it s way too long.
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I m Bill Kasky.
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So Bill, if you listened last week, and our regular listeners listen to that, Bill did a little pause on his name, and I stepped on him.
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So I was trying to get you back and get you to step on me a little bit.
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Almost worked, kind of, didn t it?
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It almost did, but this reinvention that I m going through, it s very difficult.
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Pause your screen name.
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I started last week with a slight pause in between my first and last name.
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That s right.
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People aren t noticing it, so I think I need to find a new direction tactic.
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I think we re going to start a new trend in sales, where people are going to introduce themselves as, hi, my name is Tom Simpson.
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Well, you got to let the first name get into the brain, especially when it s a very difficult game.
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Something like Bill.
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Now, what is that?
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Is that French?
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Is that Bill?
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OK.
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Hey, if you are having a sales meeting or planning a sales meeting or you know you re going to go to one and you want to have a really fun
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experience, send us an email, listen to advancedsellingpodcast.com, put in subject line, come see us and Bill and I will talk to you or one of our staff will talk to you about what it s like to have us come in and be the talent, if you will, at the sales meeting.
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So listen to advancedsellingpodcast.com, put in the subject line, come see us.
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You know, Brian, you had a circumstance with your MacBook here a few months ago.
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I did.
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Where one of our clients... I did.
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And I had a similar kind of situation with my wife who accidentally spilled water on my old Mac that was about eight years old.
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It was due.
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I was really looking for a reason to replace it, but that s not a good reason.
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So I went out and bought one, and now I m trying to hook up my printer to it, and so it s not working, so I think I need to buy a new printer.
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And you go online to Amazon, and some of these reviews are hilarious.
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I mean, you could literally spend all day just reading reviews.
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Here s one from the printer from S. Steve.
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He rates it a one star.
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He says, it only prints one document repeatedly.
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The cancel button doesn t seem to work.
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Maybe it s defective.
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Maybe.
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I could see Steve painting his face with camouflage stuff, getting ready to head out to Hewlett-Packard to sneak through the bushes.
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He goes to bed at night, wakes up, there s 900 more copies.
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And it s always that test copy thing.
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Here s another one, five star, set it up on my garage and everyone in the house can access and print from their phones, iPads, laptops, perfect.
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It s the best product I ve ever bought.
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Okay, perfect.
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All right, good.
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So I got that to put into the mix.
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Then here s one, love this laser printer, setup was easy.
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Here s the exact setup to set this printer up.
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One, open box.
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Two, unpack.
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Three, remove tape.
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And she or he goes, Luke, goes through this whole process of how, and I don t know if it s he s trolling people who have said it s a bad printer, they haven t set it up properly, and then he goes, oh, that was it.
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So I still don t know what to do.
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So I don t know whether to believe the five star, it works great, or the one document.
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I ve got to go Pernalist.
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That s what I ve done, Pernalist.
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I love when people, they always say to me, they re like, hey, you just print this out and sign it and scan it back to me.
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And I m like, no, I won t, because I don t have a printer.
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So you ll just have to DocuSign it to me.
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DocuSign, by the way, is the greatest invention ever.
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It is.
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Have you used DocuSign?
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I just signed something the other day on it.
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Yes.
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And I m buying a house right now.
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And everything is on DocuSign.
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And it is so simple.
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I just love DocuSign.
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And they seem like happy people.
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Do you see when they run Stock Exchange, like set off NASDAQ?
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There s no paper.
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They re literally a paperless office.
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They are.
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Yeah.
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It would be interesting to know, though, if DocuSign have any printers.
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If they truly are.
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Do they?
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Anyone listening from DocuSign, send us an email.
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Listenerinadvancelinepodcast.com.
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Send us pictures of your printers.
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Of pictures of the DocuSign s printers.
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That s actually funny.
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OK.
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OK.
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Our guest segment today, we re speaking with an author who has written a book called My Morning Routine, How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired.
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His name is Benjamin Spall.
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And he speaks to us from the San Francisco area.
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Benjamin, are you on?
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I am.
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How are you guys?
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Well, we re great.
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And we re even greater because you re on so we appreciate you spending a little bit of time with us.
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Oh, you thought that was funny?
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No, I was legit.
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I love this.
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I love this topic of the morning routine.
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I ve read a couple of books on it.
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And it seems like it s become more of a thing than it was five to 10 years ago.
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I don t know whether Tim Ferriss talks about it a lot.
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But
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Somebody in the culture is talking about how important your first hour is, and it s leading to a lot of good content.
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So how did you come about the notion of morning routine, and why it was so important, and why you decided to write a book about it?
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Yeah, no, it s funny you mention five odd years ago, because that s exactly right.
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It was around five and a half years ago that my co-author and co-founder Michael and I decided to create our website, which is mymorningroutine.com.
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And back then, you re totally right, back then morning routine
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talking about how to get stuff done in the morning, especially for entrepreneurs.
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But yeah, morning routines as a concept wasn t really a thing back then.
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So we started on our website.
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We kind of interviewed our friends to begin with.
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We wanted to get people we knew and get it out the door.
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And yeah, ever since then, it s kind of grown.
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Since I think it s December 2012, we ve interviewed one person a week.
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And it s just kind of snowballed since then.
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So why do you think that is?
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I mean, what happened in the zeitgeist that
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I had to use that term.
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You had to throw in zag days, didn t you?
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What happened out there?
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What is your sense of what occurred?
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Yeah, I have to say it s got very broad appeal.
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So I ve spoken on the topic of entrepreneurs, with business people, and also with health and wellness people.
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So there s a very broad spectrum of people who are actually incredibly interested in that.
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And there s definitely a kind of voyeuristic element to it.
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getting into like the most intimate time of people s days, like finding out what they do.
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But there definitely has been people, like you mentioned, Tim Ferriss, he has been interested in it the last three years or so.
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And there s definitely been people who have helped to spread the message even further.
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So that s helped them, but to be honest, it s also helped us as well.
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So it s great that you have the opportunity to dialogue with all of these really successful people and hear all their morning routines, which you document then and talk about in the book.
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I m curious to know, what s one thing that you have changed in your morning routine that you learned from one of the people you interviewed for your book?
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Yeah, I d say the biggest change, and some people might find this boring, but to be honest, it s so important, is I no longer keep my phone in my bedroom overnight.
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Basically, about an hour before going to bed, I put it on airplane mode, and I stick it in the kitchen.
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And I now use the analog alarm clock, so I don t actually need my phone to give my alarm.
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And then for the most part, unless I have an interview like this first thing, or I have a meeting I need to check up on, for the most part, I won t turn my phone on.
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until I either finish breakfast or get up to go to work and that has been great for me.
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It s kind of meant that I have that calm space in the morning which I can kind of reflect on the day without having to check email and Twitter throughout and it means that while I m having breakfast my wife I m not thinking about
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I m kind of just thinking about what s most important to me.
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So it took me a while of people on the website and now in the book, people would mention this a lot.
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They have done it.
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It took me a while to kind of internalize it and do it myself, but I m really glad I did.
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So Benjamin, what is the most
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of all the people you ve interviewed, someone who you say, man, this person has a rigid, this person is really rocking it in the morning.
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I heard Stanley McCrystal, was it McCrystal or Crystal?
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He was, he has an unbelievable morning.
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He s like, he gets up at four and he does 150 sit-ups and then he takes a shower and then he goes to the gym.
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And I mean, it s just, it s crazy.
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He does it every day and he looks, he s 70 years old and he looks like he does it every day.
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So who is one that you would point to and say, man, this person really rocks it in the morning?
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Yeah, I ll give you two.
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So one for sure is Stanley McChrystal.
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He s a retired U.S.
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Army four-star general.
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He was head of the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan at the beginning of this decade.
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detail when I spoke with him and we transcribed it for the book.
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Yeah, just working out 4am is just, you really have to read it to believe that, because it s pretty intense.
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And the second example I would give is Bill McNabb, who is the current chairman, and when I spoke with him he was the CEO of the Vanguard Group, and his is less intense than the first book, but for sure he kind of gets up and he has this space, I can t remember the time,
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It s in about 6 or 7.30 a.m.
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He s already at work, but he doesn t do any work.
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He doesn t check his email.
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He doesn t look over memos.
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He doesn t look over meetings for the day.
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He just sits down and kind of contemplates the day ahead and contemplates the kind of work he ll be doing, but he doesn t do it.
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He kind of has that quiet time at his desk.
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And we think that s incredibly important.
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It was great to hear that from a business leader.
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I think that instead of rushing right into the day, instead of checking his phone immediately and getting on email, he s kind of having that quiet space because he knows that he works better and he operates better throughout the day when he has that.
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That s a wonderful, wonderful idea.
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Really good ideas already for our listeners.
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We re talking to Benjamin Spall, author of the book My Morning Routine.
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And you can actually go to the website.
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There s mymorningroutine.com to find out some more information, pick up a copy of the book.
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So Benjamin, let me ask you this.
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I m going to go the opposite direction.
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Our listeners are salespeople.
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After doing the research for your book and interviewing people about their morning routines, what are some bad morning routines?
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I m guessing a lot of our listeners do some really bad things in the morning.
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What are some things that everyone s, you know, that you should not do this as part of your morning routine?
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Bloody Mary s?
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Yeah, no, one thing for sure that we really rally against is hitting the snooze button.
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And we re totally for people using alarm clocks because
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Some of us can wake up naturally without an alarm and that s fine, but many of us kind of need the alarm clock as a backup.
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So even if we know we typically always wake up at 7.25, it doesn t hurt to set an alarm for 7.30.
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But what does hurt is hitting the snooze button.
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is when you hit the snooze button on a Monday morning, you re kind of already saying, no, I don t want that.
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You know, I already don t want to do that.
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So it s mentally, it s a bad thing.
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But also in terms of your sleep, you know, you may get a little bit of sleep if you snooze five minutes, but you re going to wake up in kind of a hazy state.
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So that s one thing for sure.
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Sometimes it can t be helped.
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Sometimes you have a meeting first thing or you have a call first thing and you just need to check if your schedule has shifted.
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But for the most part, like so many people mentioned, we have this question in the book, how soon do you check your phone?
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And so many people mentioned that they re kind of laying in bed and they re holding their phone a couple inches from their face and they recognize that this is a bad thing.
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So this is some of the successful people we spoke with, they recognize that they shouldn t be doing this.
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but they still do it and it s kind of an addiction.
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But it is, it s a really bad way to start your morning, especially if you re going on Twitter and you know what that s like nowadays.
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So you kind of just, you don t want that.
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kind of once you have the calm of the night, kind of continue into your morning.
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Yeah.
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We re speaking with Benjamin Spall today, and you can find his book at MyMorningRoutine.com.
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Benjamin, as we close up today, and we appreciate you taking out some of your time to talk with us.
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After you wrote the book, I know that when you write something, sometimes you either let it go totally when it s done, or you become even more invested and more excited about it.
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What was your response after you ve interviewed these people, you wrote the book?
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Does it make even more sense now than it did when you started?
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Or are you off to other projects since this book is kind of done and out?
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No, it did make more sense.
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And I have to say, the book is 64 interviews with different people.
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And then we break that into 10 chapters.
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And at the end of each chapter, I kind of distill all the information from that chapter.
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So for example, we have a chapter on morning workouts.
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We have a chapter on morning meditation.
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And we have a chapter on productivity, which is great for entrepreneurs and salespeople.
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And so at the end of the productivity chapter, for example, I kind of take all the tips from those routines, but also from the 300 plus that we ve interviewed on our website.
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And I kind of just, we put it through kind of this algorithm, we kind of figured out what people were saying the most.
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And then I break that down into tips.
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And that was incredibly helpful to me.
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So even after doing the, even after doing the website for when we started the book, it s about three and a half years.
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It really helps to distill kind of all the information we ve been getting over the years.
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And that will help in the way that you can just see the easiest part.
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So we kind of say in the conclusion, it s not that hard.
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We kind of just put these tips and we re not suggesting that this is the one morning routine you do.
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Some people kind of say, you know, this is what you need to do to be successful in business and in life.
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We re not saying that at all.
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We re saying here are a bunch of ideas and here are the kind of distilled tips.
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And try them out.
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Experiment with them.
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But don t expect everything to work.
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And don t expect yourself to enjoy everything.
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Give everything a first shot.
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Benjamin, I appreciate you being here.
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Brian and I are so honored you were our guest today.
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And people in the audience, go to mymorningroutine.com.
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Pick up a copy of Benjamin s book, How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired.
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Benjamin, thanks for your time, buddy.
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Thanks very much, guys.
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Have a good day.
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You too.
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Cheers.
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Great stuff from Benjamin there.
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For you listeners, make sure when you hear an interview like that, that Bill and I do, just take something from that and start to implement it.
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There were some things there that I know I can do, like putting the phone in another room, that sort of stuff.
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So go buy the book.
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And I think, you know, we should make this commitment whenever we have somebody on because we vet these people.
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We just don t have people on for no reason.
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And so I was reading an email by Grant Cardone the other day, who has also been a guest of our show.
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And he says, you know, the most successful people read 50 books a year.
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They re constantly reading, constantly consuming.
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So for the cost of the book, which I assume is 10, 15, 20 bucks,
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I think you can get a lot of good stuff out of it.
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I bought another book recently.
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It s titled a little bit differently, not by Benjamin, by my other author, but talks about that morning routine.
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So I m really anxious to get this.
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Great stuff.
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Hey, if you haven t done so already, send us an email.
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Listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Put in the subject line, come see us, and we ll be happy to be part of your next sales meeting or sales retreat.
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That is all.
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We ll see you next time on the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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Bye.