May 10, 2019 – Choose to Win Tom Ziglar and Demo Duck Colin Hogan

May 10, 2019 – Choose to Win Tom Ziglar and Demo Duck Colin Hogan

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Tom Ziglar – Speaker and Author of Choose to Win– Read interview highlights here

The future of our country is on the backs, in the minds and in the hearts of small business owners. When the economy does well, it’s because small businesses are winning.

Tom Ziglar is the proud son of Zig Ziglar and the CEO of Ziglar, Inc. He joined the Zig Ziglar corporation in 1987 and climbed from working in the warehouse to sales, to management, and then on to leadership. Today, he speaks around the world; hosts The Ziglar Show, one of the top-ranked business podcsts; and carries on the Ziglar philosophy, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”Choose to Win shows you how to achieve massive change without massive upset. It all starts with identifying your why, which reveals the how that opens multiple doors of what. His revolutionary plan guides you through making one small choice at a time through a sequence of easy-to-follow steps in seven key areas: mental, spiritual, physical, family, finance, personal, and career.

Colin Hogan – Managing Director of Demo Duck

Make your marketing and promotional videos as evergreen as possible.

Collin Hogan was initially called to Chicago by the sirens of opportunity in the business and comedy world. After successfully navigating his way through management roles in the corporate world (banks, tech startups, etc.) and semi-successfully trudging through the comedy industry, he stumbled upon Demo Duck in 2014. Making the career move to video production, his lifelong passion was exciting and daunting. Finding his footing relatively quickly, he was soon leading projects with international brands located all over the world. In 2017, Colin was handed the reins of the company when he was promoted to Managing Director – talk about imposter syndrome.

Highlights from Tom’s Interview

In the last book that that we did with dad, called Born to Win, there was a story in the book of two identical twins. One was serving a 40 year prison sentence. And they asked him, “How do you explain being in prison?” And he said, “How could I not be in prison? My father was an alcoholic, abusive person; he did everything he could to sabotage my life.” And then they went and interviewed his twin brother. And they said, “Hey, you own nine companies, you’ve given millions to nonprofits and charities, and you’re an icon in the community. How do you what do you? What’s the reason for your success?” And he said, “Well, obviously, it’s my father; I’ve spent my whole life trying to do the exact opposite of him.”

Here are two people out of the same environment, same parents, and they both made different choices. That’s what Choose to Win is about. We originally toyed with the idea of calling the book Live to Win. And then we realized that might be hard for some people, because of the circumstances that we come out of. But sometimes as a consequence of bad decisions, that a lot of times are beyond our control, Choose to Win puts you in the driver’s seat. It allows you to understand that you have the power right now, no matter what’s going on in your life, to make a choice that will give you a better chance for success in the future.

There’s three things that I think most people want, they want success, they want significance, and they want legacy. Success is when I have more of the good things of life. It’s what I do for me. We’ve got to have the right definition, because I know a lot of “successful” people who are depressed, they’re on medication, they don’t have any friends. In the book, we talked about what success is. Then there’s significance, significance is when you help someone else be, do, or have more than they thought possible. Significance is powerful, because that’s how we pour into other people and help them grow. And then finally, there’s legacy. Legacy is when you teach and transfer knowledge, wisdom, God’s truth to other people, so that they can make good decisions that ripple through eternity. Legacy really is pouring into somebody else, your family, those you love, your community, that enables them to make good decisions. And here’s the reality, we are all going to leave a legacy. The only question is, is it by design, or by chance?

I’ve got an illustration, it’s kind of a metaphor. Here’s the quote, a tree’s fruitfulness depends on its root fullness. As an entrepreneur or as somebody who just had a start up, you’re bootstrapped and you’re struggling, but you’re living your passion. The first thing I would like for you to do is draw a tree, and then draw the fruit that you want on the tree. For me, my tree has dollar signs on it. My tree has peace of mind, good physical health, great family relationships. These are all the fruits that I want in my tree. Now here’s the key. In order for me to get those fruits, I’ve got to nourish the roots. And every tree in our life has seven roots: the mental, the spiritual, the physical, the family, the financial, the personal, and the career. Here’s how you nourish the roots, nourishment is simply positive habits that nourish your roots. In your career, what are the habits that you can create in your life, and that route that’s going to produce the fruit that you want. That’s really the subtitle of the book, you can transform your life one simple choice at a time. I have, it is simply a choice made over and over again. I’ll start with a habit that applies to every route. This is the number one habit that I learned from my dad Ziglar: Choose the right input.

This is an extremely powerful habit. Because when you choose the right input, what you listen to what you read, who you associate with, the places that you go, the things that you invest in, the seminars that you attend, the radio shows that you listen to, the podcasts that occupy your automobile, university time… When you choose your input, it impacts your thinking. Your thinking and your believing go hand-in-hand, and action is soon to follow. The habit of right input can be applied to every single one of those seven routes. Mentally, what kind of input do I want to have? What kind of belief system, what kind of things? Do I want to set my sail spiritually to the same thing? What principles and values do I want to build my life on? Physically? Am I going to read about nutrition and health and so on? We can go all the way down the list.

One of my friends and one of my mentors is Dan Miller, who wrote 48 Days to the Work You Love. I was having dinner with him, and his grandson was there, Caleb Miller. And Caleb said, “Tom, how do you know if you have a bad habit?”

What he really asked was, “How do I know if spending hours on Twitter is a bad habit?” That’s a pretty deep question. Because here’s the reality, unless you have a clearly defined dream goal or aspiration, unless you know where you’re going, you don’t know if that’s a bad habit.

For example, is smoking a bad habit? Well, if your goal was to get lung cancer, it’s a great habit. The first thing you’ve got to do, is you’ve got to say, what’s my goal? Do I want to grow my business by 50%? Do I want to travel the world get in great physical shape? Whatever it is, then you step back and you say, will spending three hours a day on Twitter take me closer to or further from my goal?

And if it’s taking you further from your goals, then it’s a bad habit. That’s where we’ve got to have wisdom, because here’s the reality. Most of our businesses today benefit from appropriate use of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Depending on what kind of business we have, is it a few minutes at a time, is it a couple of times a day, most of us can get a win from that. So a good habit can go to a bad habit very quickly. And that’s the way you measure it, is all of this time taking me closer to or further from where I want to go.

On the way that we approach it, we have three, mental, spiritual, physical, and then we have family right in the middle, and after family, we have financial, personal and career. Family’s in the middle for a reason. First, in order to have the right influence, we’ve got to be the right example. That’s why mental, spiritual and physical come before family.

Let’s say we’re doing those three things right. We’re getting the right input, we’re working on our health, we’ve got our qualities of success all lined up. So now we really want to focus in on the family. Here’s the real simple thing that I would ask, what do you want people to say about your family behind your back? What are the words you want others to describe you and your family? Is it loving? Is it kind? Is it compassionate? Is it courage, is it honesty and integrity? You get to pick the words. Remember that picture of the tree that we talked about earlier, what you do is you take those core words, and you write this fruit on the tree. Now let’s say courage is something I want my family to be known for. Well, now we make that word a part of our everyday language. And at the dinner table and on walks and on family trips, and in conversations, we talk as a family about situations that go on, and we say things like, “Wow, that’s the way the school handled it. Was that courageous, the way the school handled it? Or would there have been a more courageous way to do that?” We go into detail on that in the book. But the reality is we need to be intentional about what we want our family to be known for. When we do those two things hand in hand, then we create a legacy.

We have a very specific system that we cover in the book, The Ziglar seven step goal setting system. And here’s something that I learned about a year ago, about 80% of the population doesn’t get fired up about goals, they get fired up about solving problems. Most people like the checklist, they want to get the to do list out of the way, they like to solve problems. But here’s the good news. If you interchange goal setting for problem solving, it’s the exact same system. In other words, my goal could be to weigh 185. My problem is, I weigh 200. So the action steps and the things that I’ve got to do to get to 185 are exactly the same whether I’m a problem solving focus person, or a goal achieving person.

This is what we do in the book, we make sure that we are setting the right goal, we actually go through a filtering process to make sure that you’re setting the right goal, because one thing I’ve discovered is there’s only one thing worse than not setting a goal, and that’s setting the wrong goal and achieving it. And we see that all the time. I mean, how many people are in careers, they went to school, they’re a doctor, they’re an attorney, they’re a CPA, and they’re no longer doing that anymore. They set the wrong goal. And so we go through that filtering to make sure we get the right goal. And then we put it in perspective, the things in life that we really want to be, do, and have. And so we go through that. But you’re on track, from what you said about your goals. And you know, the difference, the way the chapter of the book is called career, because that’s the most common name that people understand. But I have a different word that I use, that’s your economic engine. So you could be a real estate investor, you could own your own business, you could work at a corporation, you could be a teacher, but your goals in each area are the things that keep you on track, and allow you to judge whether you’re making progress on a daily basis or not.

One of the most common questions I get is where do I start? What do I do first? How do I get this thing rolling? How do I change from bad habits to a good habit? How do I transform my life one choice at a time?

Besides the right input, which is the key, the most powerful thing you can do is what I call the perfect start. This is something I invest at least 90 minutes a day in, but I didn’t start that way. I started with about 10 minutes. So for those of you who are like, “Oh, no, I don’t have 90 minutes,” don’t worry, 10 minutes is fine. All you do is set aside the first 10 minutes of the day, before you look at social media, before you check your text messages, before you look at email, and you carve those 10 minutes out. The first steps are pretty simple. I like to have some positive input, could be a quiet time, could be a devotional, that’s what I do. I read something uplifting, and that’s three or four minutes. And then you plan your day.

In the book, we talk about the goal setting system. So you set your goals. Now what you do for five or six minutes is, you work on your goals, you plan what you’re going to accomplish that day. And you continue to do this every day. And what you’ll find is that that 10 minutes turns into 12 minutes, turns into 15, turns into 20. And it becomes that sacred, most valuable time that you have.

One of the things that I love is, do you happen to live, or does life happen to you?

When we have that perfect start, when we take control the first minutes of the day, we’re now intentionally causing things to happen in our lives. And so mine grew. Now I have five minutes of quiet time, then I’ll read my devotional. And then I go into my goal setting and planning. And then I do not what I call the mental model. This is kind of cool. This is where I have written down my phone conversations, my face to face conversations, my speeches and presentations, I might have four or five and a day when you add it all up. I spend one minute thinking through each one of them and how I want it to go. My vision for what are the challenges of the group? What are the personality styles of the people? What’s the main message I need to get across? What are obstacles that might come up? And that little one minute exercise on each of these important things dramatically impacts the productivity of my phone calls and meetings for the day. That whole section takes about 45 minutes when it’s fully fleshed out.

The next 45 minutes I devote to my one thing, what’s the one thing, the most important thing that I can get done that day. So that’s how my next 30 minutes is wrapped up. But I didn’t start there. I grew into it.

Sometimes it’s urgent, sometimes it’s time critical. In an ideal world, it’s extremely important, but not urgent. It’s the thing that if I get this thing done, it lifts all the boats in the harbor, it makes everything that I do more successful. And the other thing that I didn’t get into is, my perfect day starts between 5:00 and 5:30 in the morning. I get up early, because I want to be ahead of the game, before my email and my texts and everything starts blowing up. Lots of people are like, “I’m not a morning person, I can’t do that.” You can do this at any time of the day. But here’s the challenge, you’ve got to do it every day. And so the easiest time and the way to get started, is just set your clock 10 minutes early. So whatever time you normally get up, just get up 10 minutes early and start building this muscle. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

Here’s the thing, we’re all in this journey called life. And all of us seek to have more fun, have more free time, get more done in less time. And so each of us have to figure out what works for us. For example, in the career chapter of Choose to Win, I’ve identified 50 different habits that you can use to increase your performance. And there’s a simple little assessment that you can take, where you write yourself on these habits, these are all habits that are well known and proven to up your performance, and the results that you get, no matter what business you have. But what you need to work on is going to be different than me. This assessment makes it easy. You just go through there, you measure yourself, and you go off, that’s the one or two that I want to work on. It’s same thing here, I would definitely just focus on that. Perfect start, identify those and just make sure you’re being consistent, and it’s getting you the results that you want.

There’s a great quote by my dad, and he says the number one reason that people don’t reach their goals is they trade what they want most for what they want now. That is so powerful. No matter what it is in life that you want, that you want to achieve, it’s got to be clear, it’s got to be like a magnet, just drawing you towards it. And in order to make that happen, you have got to look at all the decisions you make, and ask yourself that question. “Am I trading what I want most for what I want now, financially?” It’s the same thing. You know, do we want a debt free house? Do we want to live in freedom, and yet, we look at our credit card bill, and we’ve got all these impulse buys. And we’ve got trips and steak dinners that we’ve been paying for for five years. We gotta get our priorities right, and make our decisions based on what we really want, not what we want right now.

Here’s the reality. This was a friend of mine, Rabbi Daniel. And he says, when you solve a problem, you are offered and rewarded with certificates of appreciation, we call that money. And the more problems we solve, the more money we get. And here’s what’s really cool, this is the tie down. God is never happier with his children than when they’re solving the problems of his other children. And so first and foremost, I’m sure that everybody who’s listening has a business that solves a problem, and therefore what you do has an incredible moral value to it. Because the more problems we solve, the creator of the universe smiles.

One of my friends, I was actually coaching him, and he had an HTC business. And he was thinking about buying a plumbing business. And I said, “Why do you want to buy a plumbing business?”

And he said, “Well, here’s the reality. My business is seasonal plumbing, this is year round. I can keep my people busy all year, which means I can pay them more and do more good.”

I asked, “Do you like plumbing?”

He said, “No, I don’t like plumbing.”

I said, “Well, do you like HTC?”

He said, “No, I don’t like HTC, either.”

So here’s a guy who owns an HTC business about to buy another business he doesn’t like, and I said, “Josh, what do you like?”

He got this big smile, and he said, “Well, Tom, God’s gifted me with the ability to run a great business in this area of work. My greatest joy is helping my people achieve their dreams.

“So I’ve created an environment where I help them grow. And we set milestones and we help them get whatever their dream is. And by doing that, I reach my dreams.”

Ultimately, if we’re in business for the right reason, if we’re solving a problem, if we love developing our people and helping them reach their dreams, then that famous quote, you can have everything in life you want. If you just help enough other people get what they want. That rings true.

Here’s the reality, the future of our country, it’s on the backs and in the minds and in the hearts of small business owners. When the economy does good, it’s because small business owners or big corporations grow. When the economy is hurting, it’s because small business owners are hurting. So the economy rises and falls on the backs and the hearts and the minds of small business owners, and small business owners, when they transfer principles and values and the way to help other people and to serve other people by solving problems, we build a business around honesty and integrity. And we provide an experience and a product or service that has value. That’s the greatest impact we can have. In our country, the government’s not going to fix it, education is not going to fix it, we know that the media is not going to fix it. So it’s in big business. My goodness, they’re in trouble. So it’s up to us. We’re the ones that got to do it. And it starts with the principles and values that we believe in.

Go to Ziglar.com, and get some of our free gifts. That’ll get you on our newsletter, and we’ll send it to you. We’re doing conferences here all the time. In fact, we have a conference coming up May 2 and 3. Well, I guess we’re not going to get that out in time. We have conferences all the time. It’s coming up late in the summer. In fact, every two or three weeks we have one. So yeah, check us out at Ziglar.com. And if you want the book, and I know you do, you just go to choosetowinbook.com, you can get it from us there. You can get it from Audible. You can you can get it from Kindle, Amazon, all the links are right there. But the reason you want to go to that link is there’s some free stuff, when you tell us you bought the book. Free stuff is always good. We love free stuff.