Kevin Hogan is generally agreed to be the nation's leading body-language expert, working closely with the BBC and The New York Post. He is the author of 15 books and is a dynamic, well-known international public speaker, consultant and corporate trainer. He has trained persuasion, sales and marketing skills to numerous Fortune 500 companies. His keynotes, seminars and workshops help companies sell, market and communicate more effectively.
His cutting-edge research into the mind and keen understanding of consumer behavior create a unique distillation of information never before released to the public. Each customized program he leads is fit specifically to the needs of the group or organization. Kevin will give you new and easy-to-implement ideas to achieve excellence.
KEVIN HOGAN: Hi, Ric. How are you doing?
RIC THOMPSON: I'm fantastic, looking forward to this today.
KEVIN HOGAN: I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and your listeners. I think it's great, and hopefully, we'll get some cool ideas disseminated out, as many as possible in as short a period of time as we can.
RIC THOMPSON: That sounds great. As always, we're flying without a net here, so let's see what kind of magic comes out. Let's start off, Kevin, because there are a number of different things that you are very well-known for, but let's kind of focus in on just the general area. Let's say I'm an entrepreneur just getting started. I haven't really broken through yet.
Maybe I'm even a little bit stuck, like I said, at $30,000 to $35,000 a year. I'm not starving to death, but I am definitely not happy, and I've definitely got a lot more potential in front of me. What would you say? What are your thoughts on that?
KEVIN HOGAN: First of all, make sure you have that question written down because I'll eventually answer it. Let's start out here: imagine that you're fairly new in business-maybe even five years in business-and you haven't quite 'made it' yet. Why is this? I've read all the books, even the ones that matter, like Think and Grow Rich? I've read the books and it's still not happening. What is missing?
I became very curious about this question about 12 months ago. I started to write a book with Dr. Mollie Marti at the University of Iowa and Dave Lakhani, who is a professional speaker and also does quite well in the field of influence in turning research into real-world influence that he can help other people with. We put together this book; it's called The Twelve Achievement Factors. Don't worry; you can't go buy it now even if you wanted to.
It's not out. I'm not going to try to sell, but do remember the title because it's a good title: The Twelve Achievement Factors. There are a million books that say, "Here's what this successful person did, and here's the model. You go and do this. You start a software company and you get on everybody's computer in the world. If you can just get on everybody's computer in the world and make them all give you a dollar, you'll be a billionaire." Of course, this is true, right?
Then there's Coca-Cola. You can sell everybody a bottle of Coke. You're going to be wealthy and get people hooked on your product, and that's a cool thing. Then you go out there and you try to sell your product, your idea, your patent, your trademark, or your invention and you do all the things exactly like the books say. It's like you have it in your mind and you do all this stuff.
You work hard, you're up all night, you're sweating, and nothing happens. You think, "That can't be possible because I did exactly what I was supposed to." We came up, the three of us-Lakhani, Marti, and myself-and we were trying to figure out what the difference is between success and failure, because there are lots of successful people, but there are lots more people who aren't.
I'm only measuring success today in terms of wealth, income that is collected for the accumulation of wealth purposes. There are a lot of other things that are important as success: being happy, having a great family, love, and all the things that we can't measure so easily, but we can measure money. That's a measurable commodity. Are you familiar, Ric, with the books like Built to Last, Good to Great, and some of those titles? Do they sound familiar?
RIC THOMPSON: Absolutely, sure.
KEVIN HOGAN: That's where we started. We started to read stuff like that. The good thing was that the books are actually a few years old, so I was reading these books about companies, what things these companies had in common, what made them great, and how they got there. An interesting thing happened; over the following three to four years those companies, after the books were published, turned out to actually not perform as well as the rest of the companies in the United States did.
They actually tended to under-perform. Here I had all these companies-including companies that had been great for 25 to 50 years, like GE, General Electric, J & J, Proctor & Gamble, tons of companies-and all of a sudden they under-perform. They had all the attributes of being excellent and amazing. They were doing everything right, and then everything went to heck. Why? Why is it that these companies are now actually showing negative losses on their statements? What is going on here?
It turns out there is some randomness involved. You can actually go to the dice table in Vegas, throw seven passes in a row, and think you're doing really well, that you're amazing all by yourself. The fact is that the eighth roll could just as easily be a loser as it is a winner. Realize there's some randomness in life. That's a really good thing to know. Here, I'll recommend somebody else's book because I want you to learn about the things that go wrong in life.
It's a really important thing to know. There is The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb. Pick up that book; that's a really cool book. It sort of gives you cause to understand that you aren't in total control of everything. When you do everything right, there's still stuff that can go wrong. That's number one. Number two is that just because you have somebody's success formula doesn't mean you've got their recipe for success. I don't know if you've had this experience, but my mom made great food.
She used to make great potato salad; it had this right flavor, mustardy and all that. It was perfect. It was the perfect food. She would tell other people how to make it. It's not like mom held anything back, but it didn't taste the same when anybody else made it. The fact is that it tasted downright bad sometimes with almost the same exact recipe, if not the exact same recipe. How can that be?
The deal is that we always talk about the things that we want in life, "I want to be successful," "I want to be earning $100,000 a year," and "I want to be helping 500 people a month." If you're in relationships, "I want a gal, and I want her to be really pretty, sweet, nice, and not yell at me," and all those good things. We have all these things, but we don't specifically itemize the things that we don't want to happen.
What the books all miss and what the gurus miss when they're communicating is they're telling stories from their perspective of what they did to succeed, all of which are legitimately cool and valuable things. They're neglecting to say the things that you should not do, the mistakes that they avoided or overcame and those kinds of things. In other words, what things don't you want to have happen in your business? Those are actually some of the things that cause you to be really successful.
If there are ladies listening, here you go. Imagine, ladies, that you're saying, "I want the perfect husband. I want somebody who's funny and happy and somebody who's strong and good looking." Great! There's your model. Now that same guy could be a terrible father. He could be completely unkind in many other ways to your relatives. You didn't say you wanted him to be kind to your relatives; you only said you wanted him to be nice.
There are all kinds of other terrible things that this person will do in life, and this is what happens in everyday life. We don't itemize the things that we don't want to happen. We don't create ways to get over the obstacles that are going to come up in life, so what happens is people get out of a success path. It's very easy to do this in any business: real estate, investing, anything.
They fall apart and they don't succeed because they don't know what they don't want. That's a head-scratcher right there! How do you know what you don't want? We'll go back to the relationship for just a second. The woman doesn't want somebody who's going to hit her, right? Does that make sense?
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, I'd say so.
KEVIN HOGAN: Fair? Yet we know that with one out of 20 that happens. The woman doesn't want somebody who's going to hit her children, let's say; let's go there. She would like somebody who actually has proven income potential, not like he just got out of college and he could get a really good job; he's really smart. That's nice, but does he have proven income potential? Does this person have a track record of bringing in $50,000 or $100,000 a year?
This would've saved a lot of problems along the way, too. As people look at the downside, the drawbacks, and things that can go wrong in life and they find out ways to solve those problems ahead of time, then it's much easier to build wealth. Otherwise, what happens is we get discouraged; people tend to get discouraged. I talk to people all over the world, and they say, "I started this business, and I read Think and Grow Rich," as an example.
I'm not picking on Napoleon Hill. That book was so huge. I must have read that thing I can't even tell you how many times, maybe 100 to 150 times that it went in my mind. Then The Law of Success, that other beautiful book that he wrote. Without that, I don't know if I would've had the motivation early on to go through those discouraging things. The fact is that most people, when they get discouraged, inertia sets in and they tend to not continue to work as hard, to do as much, to achieve the goal, to go for the goal.
You want people to know that a lot of stuff can and will go wrong, and we call this outcome-based thinking. This turned out to be one of the core factors. Outcome-based thinking works like this: What is it that you want? You write this down. I'm making a little squiggly line with my hand here, which means it's profound, but you probably can't see that. While you're driving, remember to write this down.
What is it that you want, specifically? Number two, what are the things you don't want in this business? What don't you want to happen? Number three, what are the obstacles that are going to happen along the way? Then one of my favorite phrases is 'what else?' When you think of obstacles that could be along the way, we might have insurance problems. What else? We could have lawsuits. What else? You just list all of the possible things that can go wrong in this business.
It even gets into fantasy. Think about the weird things that happen in life. These are the 'black swans'. Earthquakes happen. Weird things happen in people's lives. Write down all of those things. Now you think, "I'm prepared now." Now you have to create the map, and a real map has obstacles that are overcome. How specifically would you go about overcoming each of these obstacles?
The person who actually does this step is the person who is prepared and succeeds. My son was in Boy Scouts, and they have the proverbial motto of 'Be Prepared', which is a pretty cool motto. Nowadays, 'Be Prepared' is a lot different than it was 25 years ago when scouting was an option for me. In those days, I think you got a canteen and a compass.
Now you get a canteen, a compass, and a first-aid kit. You get a flint to make a fire, you even get a lighter, and you get a knife. You can do a lot of damage with all this stuff, too. Anyway, these kids are walking around with these huge backpacks. They are prepared, and the reason is this. Twenty-five years ago, they said, "Give the kid a compass and a canteen, and he'll be fine," which is true to some degree.
There's always motivation when the mosquitoes start biting, it gets cold and dark, and all that. You've got to get back to camp, so you do find your way because you're motivated. What about the kids who aren't motivated? What about the kid who needs the first-aid kit? The reason that the kid got bigger and we got more efficient at learning what people need is because we watched other people fail.
Really, when you watch people fail you learn a lot more than when you watch people succeed. Everybody watches people who succeed. We watch the Olympians who are going to be in the Olympics coming up here. I know people will be listening to this probably forever, but think about your Olympians; they're great stories. They're very focused and single minded; that is their life.
I'll promise you one thing; that won't be your life in business. If it is, you'll probably fail miserably. If you think back 10 years to how you found stuff on the Internet, it probably wasn't with Google and it probably wasn't with Yahoo!. You probably found it through www.AskJeeves.com and some of these other ways. If you think about your current email address, it's probably not what you had 10 years ago.
If people get too narrow of a focus and too long-term of a goal, they get these big 20-year goals like, "When I grow up I want to be the president of General Electric." You and 10 million other people! That's a really narrow goal. I want to beat Michael Jordan at basketball, but chances are I'm not going to be able to accomplish that until he's in a wheelchair, and even then I'm in trouble. We have to get goals that make sense. We have to get goals that we can actually achieve.
We have to be able to be prepared for all of the stuff, like the little kids, the scouts with their first-aid kits, for all the stuff that can go wrong. You literally map it, because then you anticipate challenges. One of the biggest things that I've watched, when I look at people who succeed versus fail and I pay close attention to the people who fail, they have a map for things that they do when something goes wrong.
They don't get too stuck on one long-term goal. Short-term goals are very crucial, by the way, to achievement. All the research points to this beyond a shadow of a doubt, but the further out you go the less valuable those goals become, and they can actually be counterproductive. If your mom says, "You'd make a great minister," and you say, "Great, that's what I'll do. I'll become a minister," or a great lawyer or whatever, I think it might be the same thing, actually.
You're just negotiating with a different entity. I never thought of that before. As you think about it, there you are and you're going to be a great lawyer. What if attorneys aren't that needed where you are? Then all of a sudden you have this one skill, right? Then you become scared because it's all you know. There's Barbara Sher; she wrote a book called Refuse to Choose, a revolutionary program for doing everything that you love. It's about five years old, and it's by Barbara Sher.
The idea is that over the years we've been taught that you have to become good at just one thing, and then be really amazing at that. The fact is that probably isn't going to work. People who get good at two or three things learn the ability to evolve and to change with the times. You asked me a question before we started this interview, "If you could change one thing or if you could give one piece of advice, a recommendation, or an idea that was the difference between a success and a failure that you learned a long time ago, what would it be?
Another answer to that question would be this: I used to have a school, I owned a school, I taught therapists how to do hypnosis, and that was my specialty. I did that for seven years, from 1990 to 1996 or something along those lines. We taught therapists; it was really cool and it was fun. We had this great advertising resource. It was very inexpensive and provided a very nice income and a lot of revenue. Then one day it dried up.
The company that owned the catalog that we advertised in didn't want to take advertising anymore. They wanted to have all of their products and services advertised and no one else's, which I totally understand as a website owner; I get that. My heart sort of stopped too, because I wasn't ready for something to go wrong. I didn't realize that other people could affect the game.
I had all the goals lined up; perseverance has never been a problem. Everything was in line with all the books, but there were no books that would tell you how to deal with something like your only source of revenue is now dried up. The revenue is not the people who walk in the door; it's not even the people who you do business with. It's your marketing, the ability to communicate with the potential clients to develop those relationships. What I had done was this enormous mistake.
I had put all of my eggs into one basket. I trusted one way to communicate with a group of people who might be able to use my product or service. It was an enormous, dumb, rookie mistake that everybody makes. You really want to focus on two or things. Be like Barbara Sher and 'refuse to choose'. You don't have to have, "I want to be an Internet marketer," or "I want to be successful in selling this," or whatever it is. Say, "That will be fun, and I will do that as long as it's fun, as long it's exciting, and I'll evolve."
When you evolve, you evolve up. You transition. You always learn. You're constantly learning and constantly filling your mind with knowledge, information, and all of the stuff you possibly can that excites you. Then you have the huge advantage over everybody, which is this. You're doing something that fascinates you. You're doing something that is exciting or interesting, and they're all doing something that they're frustrated with, are bored with, or because they have to.
They don't really like it; they're not really passionate. I hate to use the word passionate because it's a word that's used so often over and over, and it's almost become trite, but it is true. If you have something that you're passionate about, if you have something that you're excited about, think about the people who come up to your door on Saturday afternoon. "Katie, go answer the door, would you?" It's either one of five groups of people who are at the door.
Let me ask you a question, Ric. Dave Lakhani came up with this thought. One time, he said to me, and I'm asking you the same question, "If you wanted to just go and find salespeople and marketing people and you could only pick one state, where would you go?" I'll ask you the question. Any idea?
RIC THOMPSON: What one?
KEVIN HOGAN: One state, and that was the only state that you could look in for people who you were going to find marketing skills. What state would you go to?
RIC THOMPSON: It's a very interesting question.
KEVIN HOGAN: Can I tell you what I said?
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