Bruce Wright originated the world’s first client centric business model that focuses on elegant, graceful transitions, exit plans and 100 year+ legacy plans. All of Bruce Raymond Wright’s courses, writings and speeches are designed with the intention of elevating consumer and advisor awareness and effectiveness. Bruce is the author of The Wright Exit Strategy: Wealth how to create, keep it, and use it.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode Bruce Wright about creating your 100-year legacy plans.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How taking the limitations off of your thinking allows you to see opportunities are everywhere.
- Why getting the music out of you and into the world to creates opportunities for yourself and others.
- How covering crucially important topics attracts the right audience.
- How you can use a book to leverage yourself and broaden your reach and impact.
- How to make opportunities fall into your lap.
Connect with Bruce:
Links Mentioned:
macrostrategicdesign.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@ElephantGuide
Facebook
facebook.com/BruceRaymondWright
Rob Kosberg:
Hey, welcome everybody. This is Rob Kosberg with the Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast, excited to bring you a great guest today. Mr. Bruce Wright works with ultra-high net worth individuals in exit planning and 100-year legacy plans. Bruce is the bestselling author of The Wright Exit Strategy: Wealth- How to Create It, Keep It, and Use It. I think you’re going to love the podcast today, especially if you’re interested in an exit planning potentiality for your business, if you’re interested in leaving a great legacy for yourself or your children, your grandchildren, even those that come a far past that. So, Bruce, great to have you here. Let’s dive right in. So many questions to ask you today about your expertise.
Bruce Wright:
Our business is different than a lot in that most of our clients are either owners and founders of Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 1000 companies. Some of the private equity players don’t release any of the information, they easily make that list. And then we do have some corporate executives, what I would describe as sort of the C suite men and women who run the enterprises. And in many cases in their own right, they’re worth 10, 20 $30 million. But most of my business is with the owners and founders of the company.
Rob Kosberg:
Interesting.
Bruce Wright:
One of your guys reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in doing a podcast to help you promote your business. And so, of course, I took a look at your videos and interviews. And I thought this is fantastic, what you’re doing, because I encourage my clients to write books. Almost none of them ever do. A few of them do and have become Amazon bestsellers and stuff like that. At the core of my business is exit thinking and planning. They’re usually moving into a completely newly imagined life and post selling their business. I’m just watching your videos. I thought I just had a breakthrough conversation with one of my clients last week. And, of course, he’s got his team of people on the call, which is normal. When the client finds me, there’s a whole litany of existing advisory level people, lawyers, and accountants and so forth. They’re all highly skeptical. Who is this guy? The fear is that I’m somehow going to come in and replace them, which is ridiculous. I’m not a lawyer or an accountant, which is super protection oriented. Those are great breaks, because the lawyer pointed out three things that this client had done that were extremely rare and could be put into a book. Not only would that bring him a sense of significance and fulfillment to get that music out of him and share it with other people, but it would actually attract buyers for one of the private equity companies that he still owns. I said, “If you write that book in the correct way, it will actually attract unsolicited offers.” Your whole thing sort of fell in my lap, and I went, “Okay, well, I’m never going to do what Rob does. I just don’t have the patience for it,” but I think it’s great. I think somebody someplace needs to do it. I thought your videos were clear and concise. I just thought it was a really cool thing. I almost never pay attention to anybody who sends me emails or calls my office or whatever, because almost all of them are trying to pitch me some bag of crap that I’m not interested in. My favorite is, “We’re going to help you get more leads.” In the early stages, at the very early stages of my writing career, not only was it accidental, from my perspective, it was unthinkable. There’s nobody like you around encouraging people like me.
I happened to give a speech for the Burbank Library Association in Southern California. And in the audience, there was a couple, Ric and Chrissy Madden. And they approached me afterwards and said, “Hey, would you consider turning that speech into a two-part article for our magazine?” They own this magazine that went out mostly to financial people. I said, “Well, I have no idea how to write an article. I don’t think I could do that.” Then they said something that was magical. They said, “Why don’t we just record the next one. We’ll transcribe it. We’ll turn it into an article, and you edit it and help us make sure that it’s accurate, and then we’ll release it.” That became a three-part article. Meanwhile, during the course of about three months while those articles are being released, I did some other speeches, and we turn those into little booklets on a variety of topics related to the financial world. And in the back of their magazine, they offer those, and we sold over 100,000 copies of those little booklets.
Rob Kosberg:
No kidding, that’s amazing.
Bruce Wright:
It was completely effortless. All I had to do was give the speech. They transcribed it. They did a great job. They were very competent writers, so they would write it in a way that was even far more eloquent than I could write it. All I had to do was edit it for accuracy. It’s a piece of cake. My first paid speaking engagement came as a result of one of them. I got a phone call from an insurance company. And they said they’d read this article that I had done on 1035 exchanges, and would I be willing to come and give a speech at their big event. I was trying and no one had ever asked me to do that. I said, “Well, what do you have in mind?” They told me, “And by the way, what’s your speaker’s fee?” I said, “Well, tell me what your budget is and let’s see if we can make something work,” which was my best response because how the hell do, I know how much to charge you. They said, “Well, how does $5,000 sound?” Now you got to remember, this was like, 1985. It was in Palm Springs. I live in Southern California. They gave my wife and I a suite at this fantastic resort. All of our expenses were paid, all of our meals, everything.
You talked about the Kardashian conundrum. You have this universe of people who want to be considered thought leaders, but they’ve never actually had a creative thought. They’re lies, right? One of my friends and I were joking around about this subject one day. His name is Kirk. He said, “Well, they’re thought repeaters, but they mischaracterize themselves as thought leaders.” I thought Rob and I should do a segment on that. If you’re not saying something that’s really, really relevant to a particular audience, you’re not going to attract anybody. The only way to attract an audience, at least in my lifetime experience, is to cover topics that are crucially important to that audience that nobody else is talking about in the way that you talk about it. Use Tony Robbins as an example. He is truly the preeminent thought repeater in the history of the world. And I give him great credit for this massive audience that he has, but it’s like this universe of blind people following somebody who’s slightly less blind than they are.
Once you self-discover and run out of respect for whatever that Guru is offering, then you start to come across other people who are actual thought leaders. My sense of it is if you can’t go all the way through and come out on the other side of the earth in China, you’re not deep enough in the highly discerning space. And so, if you think of it as a pyramid, you’ve got this massive people who think Suze Orman is brilliant.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. I talk about her a lot.
Bruce Wright:
She has nothing to say that’s absolutely brilliant and there’s a whole bunch of people that like her. They’re New York Times bestsellers, many of them and I got Amazon bestseller status without any effort whatsoever because a little company called Merrill Lynch placed an order through Amazon for 25,000 copies of a book that I wrote. And so, all of a sudden, that book was, boom. But in corporate sales, we probably sold 3 or 400,000 copies of that book.
Rob Kosberg:
Is that, The Right Exit Strategy? That book?
Bruce Wright:
Yeah, yeah. We had to take it off of Amazon because people were misusing them. I say, people, financial advisors, were misusing the book, claiming they did what was in the book. And then people would sue the advisors. And then, their lawyers would name my company. My lawyers would call their lawyers and say, “You better drop a certain suit or we’re going to whack you for malpractice.” So, we’ve never actually been sued by any client ever.
The right exit strategy is a class example, poorly written. I had virtually no writing skill at all. I took it and broke it into components, hired high school students, had them give me book reports and until 10th graders could succinctly articulate what was in each chapter, we didn’t release the book. I literally dumbed it down to the 10th grade reading level. Because as it turned out, in my universe of extremely wealthy discerning people, it’s not uncommon for a primary decision maker to only be able to read and comprehend at about a 9th or 10th grade reading level. And even if they had a college degree, it doesn’t mean that they could understand things like the MBA, or PhD will.
Rob Kosberg:
They don’t have time for that. They don’t have time to mess with that. They want to read it and understand it.
Bruce Wright:
I literally put cartoons in the book. We ran a contest at an art college up in San Francisco. And we paid those students for their art, for the cartoons that are in the book. It was fascinating to see what they came up with because I never would have come up with cartoons. I mean, now, there’s this entire universe of people. My most recent manuscript, which is almost done, we did an early sort of sneak peek with it to about 200 people. Astonishingly, I got a phone call from a publisher, from a producer with PBS, and they want to do a PBS special.
Rob Kosberg:
And what is the book? What is this next book coming out?
Bruce Wright:
I probably could release it today. It’s literally like that ready. There’s about four chapters that I want to add before I release, because it’s only like 100 pages right now.
Rob Kosberg:
And the subject matter?
Bruce Wright:
It’s called, The Apples of your Genius. The subtitle is, Stewardship Over Self and With Others.
Rob Kosberg:
Interesting.
Bruce Wright:
What I do in that book is I teach people this skill set that you might remember from back when you were in the public education system. Until it was purged from the public education system, there were teachers deeply dedicated to teaching us how to think for ourselves. That became conspicuously absent, in 1980s. And it became a sort of the university of leftist programming. And I thought I don’t care what people’s politics are. I try to be neutral on politics as much as I can. I’m grossly offended at the lack of due diligence, the lack of unbiased research, and just sort of the acceptance of programming and how people don’t think for themselves. They don’t think things through. I decided in a book that I’ve never released, which is called, Transcendent Thought and Market Leadership 1.0, the subtitle being, How to Achieve Market Dominance in Any Profession Anywhere in the World. Just by sharing that with about 200 people, it just flooded me with so many opportunities that I couldn’t scale up if I released that book.
So, you’re in a space where you’ve got all these people who can’t scale. They’re coaches and financial advisors, and probably psychologists, and yoga instructors, they’re all over the place. I think if we just sort of gave them some formulaic ways. Here’s something that I would share with your audience, which is when I was writing my first book, called the Wright Exit Strategy, it was an expanded version of a book that we had released about three years earlier, which is called, Seeing the Elephant. We sold hundreds of thousands of copies of Seeing the Elephant, effortlessly, no marketing, no budget, just word got out. I had a couple of publishers that were after me to turn it into a book. I submitted the business plan. They all thought my business plan was insane and couldn’t work. Of course, my response to that was, “Hello, you read Seeing the Elephant. You contacted me and asked me for the business model. I put it on paper and sent it to you and you literally told me it wouldn’t work. Think about it, I didn’t chase you.” A major fundamental cornerstone of my business is the attraction of ideal opportunities rather than the chasing of it.
Rob Kosberg:
Become the hunted instead of the hunter.
Bruce Wright:
You said it perfectly in exactly that way in one of your videos. There’s a formula for doing that. And my formula was really simple. What I said in that business proposal was, so I’m going to write this book, which is an expansion of Seeing the Elephant. What I’ll do is there’ll be an advisor at Paine Webber, who will read it and will think, “I’ve got 30 clients I need to send this to,” and then they’ll buy 30 copies. They’ll get a significant impact with those people. Then they’ll order another 50 copies.
Bruce Wright:
That’s how we’re going to generate massive books. They literally said this was impossible while I was doing it. I was literally doing it. They were telling me it was impossible. I thought these people are idiots. I don’t even know how to break through that level of density. They’re so stuck in their status quo thinking. I signed a contract with the publisher for the Wright Exit Strategy. And we were at galleys. I just had received the galleys from them. About three days later, I got an official notice from the bankruptcy court, publisher had filed bankruptcy. So, now my problem was I had pre-sold 50,000 copies of a book and the publisher was in bankruptcy. I had to have my lawyer go to the bankruptcy court and get the rights to my book back. I had to self-publish that book because I had orders to fill. This is 1996. Self-publishing was almost nonexistent. I really literally had to figure out how to do it. I fulfilled our order for 25,000 copies at Paine Webber, 25,000 copies of Smith Barney. They both came back and ordered over 100,000 copies within a matter of a few months. Merrill Lynch jumped on the bandwagon. What happened was, these things that I wrote were effective Trojan horses. What they did for advisors who couldn’t articulate anything special about themselves, secret is because there’s nothing special without their offerings. They had these books. This booklet and this book, which was just full of transcendent ideas communicated at a 10th grade reading level. So, it worked. It brought clients in the door and created opportunities for them. They originally think, “Well, I’m going to send it to 10 people and see what happens.” Then they would come back and they go, “Okay, I need to send it to another 50 and I think I need to send it to another 300 people.” That’s how we scaled up. And then of course, where we made the real money was in the intellectual property, licensing space of operating systems and business models to those companies. And so, the book sales where you can make a few $100,000 a year net profit selling books, easy. But I want millions of dollars a year in net profit. That was really the IP licensing and the training courses. Back in those days, still a young man and I travel all around the United States, Canada, Australia, and offers to go everywhere in the world and do training courses. Well, now you can just do them on Zoom. Right now, I’m sitting in a spare bedroom in a house. It looks like I’m in Maui. I could communicate with a billion people and communicate the idea. I’m a huge fan of what you’re doing. I think you’re doing it with a grace and elegance, and that is extremely uncommon.
I’m happy to send clients your way. If you want to do a Zoom and sort of break things down for people, I’ll give you an example. The Wright Exit Strategy, which I never want to open and ever read a single passage in, I cannot get away, can’t get away from it So, one of my friends, probably four years ago, was insisting that I do eCourses on the Wright Exit Strategy. His name’s Michael and he’s down in San Diego. I’m like, “There’s no way I’m going to do that because I’ve completely outgrown that book. It’s not really that relevant to my business model moving forward and it’s so badly written that I just can’t even stand a look at it.” And he goes, “Well, you may feel that way but for lots of people, it’s like life altering.” He had convinced me to take a book that I was working on called Transcendent Thought and Market Leadership, and not simplify it to the 10th grade level, because he wanted to use it as curricula for his international MBA course at Beijing University. Here’s my natural response to try to be transparent with people, I said, “Michael, I don’t speak Chinese, never been to China, don’t ever want to go to China. And I’ve never written a book at the MBA PhD level.” He goes, “Well, the manuscript is MBA, PhD level right now. Just put a cover on it and let me use it as the curriculum.” That was the only release we did.
Rob Kosberg:
So, you actually did go through and allow that?
Bruce Wright:
Yeah, the only book that I’ve ever written that I didn’t officially release or make available in public, although you could get it at Barnes and Noble, and Amazon, places like that.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s available now?
Bruce Wright:
Yeah. They have this print on demand thing, which is wonderful, because back in the old days, I used to have to go print 50,000 or 100,000 copies, and then store them someplace until it was sold.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, what a mess. So much better now.
Bruce Wright:
People are capable of logging in and buying a book. Even people who are 80 years old can do that. So, that book is a classic example. Like somebody shared the art with me. And I licensed the artwork from the artist. And I said, “I think I want this to be a book cover in the future.” And she said, “Well, what’s the book about?” I said, “I don’t know, but I love the art.” If you look at the artwork, it’s this person holding an arm full of ordinary eggs and sitting on the person’s head as a goose that lays golden eggs. I thought most people don’t realize that inside of them, there’s a genius that has the capacity to lay golden eggs. They’re just completely disconnected from it. Their life is so occupied with all the ordinary common eggs and they’re so attached to them that they don’t want to risk dropping any of those eggs. When I was writing this book, I reached out to Leslie and said, “I think I finally am writing the book that’s relevant to your art.” Her take on it, as the artist is, “I never imagined my art being on the cover of a book or that being used in this way, because that’s not what I was thinking at all when I painted it.” She said, “But your perspective on the human psychology of it is completely outside my imagination, but I love it. So, yeah, go ahead with it.” I featured some people in the book. They’ve been giving the book out to people. Some of them, they literally get clients just by saying to the potential client, “When you look at this piece of artwork on the cover of this book, what does it cause you to think about?” They’ll say that they’re featured in whatever chapter and leave the book and they literally close deals off of the artwork on the cover of the book. Those are the kinds of things that we can easily share with people. I’ll say this publicly till hell freezes over, I’m not going to be their guide and help them pick out the artwork for the cover of their book.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, don’t worry. We have our own inhouse graphic artist. He does all that stuff.
Bruce Wright:
I can just turn it over to you. I can feel good about helping other people. I don’t actually have to do any of the work.
Rob Kosberg:
With the people that you’re working with, these very, very high-level successful entrepreneurs, some of them C suite, what do you see as their big motivation potentially to write a book? Is it more about a legacy? I mean, they’re not looking to grow their careers anymore, or maybe they are. Maybe they’re looking to transition into a consulting type practice or what do you see as their potential motivation to write a book?
Bruce Wright:
I think it’s all across the board, Rob. It’s everything you just described. For some people, it’s purely an ego play. They want to say they wrote a book and they were a bestselling author, and they checked that box. It’s on the bucket list. So, there’s that. But there’s other people that are really looking to make a profound difference in the world, maybe they want to raise, maybe they’re associated with an organization like Doctors Without Borders, and they need to attract financial sponsorship to what they’re doing. A book would make that much easier. Of course, in my universe, the client might be willing to put 2 or 3 or $5 million of their own money into furthering a mission like that. If they said to their wife, “Honey, I want to take 50 million of our 100 million and put it into my …” The wife will think it’s a harebrained scheme. They can get 5 million and they just need to figure out a way to leverage that. I think what you’re talking about is how you can use books to leverage yourself and broaden your reach and your impact. So, it’s just a mixed bag of that. I go back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and I love how he used a pyramid to simplify the visualization of it. When you’re moving up, elevating towards the top of the pyramid, it becomes self-actualization, “Am I living the life I really want to live on my terms?” If you’ve got $300 million and you’re not living the life that you want to live, I guess you have to look in the mirror and ask that person in charge, “What the hell’s wrong? What are you attached to and what’s going on that’s causing you to live a life below your potential. It can’t be about money. You got other people who are living off social security and they’re just super happy and they feel fulfilled and significant enough and so it’s not about the money for them either. People wake up and they look around the mansion, one of three, and they say, “Is this all there is?” I think there’s like so many entry points for what you’re doing that’s about playing their music out of them and helping them imagine what their impact could be. And the writing of the book is essential. Most of them have zero writing skills, which brings me to like the third point you make on your videos, which is you don’t have to be a great writer.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s like Chris Rick Madden. They wrote those articles. All I did was, I gave the speeches. I’ll take credit for it. I designed the speech and delivered the speeches and then, they turned them into well-written articles, which I did not, at that time, have the skill sets to do. That was how I learned to become a writer. Every week, I get an incoming inquiry from somebody who wants to write a book that they can make a lot of money off of. The essence of their comments is basically this, “Bruce, I’m a way better writer than you are. I’ve got a garage full of books. I can’t sell any. What am I doing wrong?”
Rob Kosberg:
I’ve had people say that to me directly. If you’re sitting there trying to write poetic prose, okay, but that’s not the kind of writing I do, and I’ll be blunt about it. I think the Apples of Your Genius will sell at least 5 to 10 million copies. It will be effortless for me because all I have to do is show up and shoot the PBS show and sign some of the corporate licensing deals. We’ll sell millions of copies of the book. How do you make that happen? How do you write in such a way that people not only value it personally, but they want more copies that they can give away to colleagues, and family members, and friends because it creates an elevated dialogue, an elevated perspective on life or business or finance or whatever your topic is? I think I kind of discovered a formula for that. I’m sure you did, too. There might be some differences in our formulas, but I think that’s the great thing about having multiple voices. I’m excited to see what the books are going to be that are coming out over the next 5 or 10 years. You moved to Florida. I’m going to be blunt. You picked Florida for some really good reasons. One of them was you’d be able to execute your business without the government coming in and hammering you with bullshit policies, which they claim is all about science.
Rob Kosberg:
Not the least of which is 13.3% tax rate in California and cost of living through the roof and all those things, all of the above.
Bruce Wright:
You have this totalitarian takeover of the world. I just read today that George Soros and Bill Gates have bought out the number one COVID testing platform in the world.
Rob Kosberg:
Did they? Oh, my gosh. Let’s put the foxes in charge of the henhouse.
Bruce Wright:
There are people that actually think those guys are philanthropists and good Samaritans. Oh, my gosh, yeah. Look, it’s obvious for guys like us who can perform and do perform critical thinking. We’re always looking sideways at everything the government ever says about anything. I’m in the process of relocating out of California. I’m in Simi Valley, which is in Ventura County. We’re trying to decide between Texas and Florida.
Rob Kosberg:
Those are the spots, are they not?
Bruce Wright:
I was down in Florida a few months ago looking at some real estate in Port Lucie area. I haven’t really made up my mind yet. I’ve been all over Florida and I’ve looked at properties and I want to be on the water. Eventually I’m going to sell my intellectual property business. I want 200 million for it. I’ve got an opportunity right now that I think over the next four or five months before the end of the year, we’ll sign a deal with them, which will probably be about a $20 million licensing deal. The goal is, of course, to have them once they get a taste of it to contact and then pay the bigger price and you don’t get the whole thing.
Rob Kosberg:
Is this a company that’s using your IP for financial service advisors?
Bruce Wright:
This is how this stuff just falls into my lap. I wrote the Wright Exit Strategy a bazillion years ago, came out in 1997. I finished it in ’96. I get this email from a guy named Steve, says, “I’ve read the Wright Exit Strategy 13 times. I used it as the core of my business. I built a family office, multifamily office business and I sold it to a large banking institution, but I’ve got some other private equity holdings. I feel like I should have hired you before I sold the company because I think I was missing some key things.” I talked with him over the phone, delightful guy, I basically said, “Look, Steve, it seems to me like you know pretty much all the same things I know. I’d have to charge you a minimum of 50,000, pay any attention to this. But if you want another brain looking at it, that’s going to be your decision.” His wife then said the same thing in a subsequent phone call. So, he hired me anyway. Of course, I went back to Delaware and spent two afternoons with them. About two hours into the first afternoon, he goes, “You know, you already earned three times what I paid you.” The next day, I gave him a quantum leap, which in fairness occurred to me when I was in the bathroom at night before. I had this great conference call with him. He said to me, “You know the company that bought my company.” So, he’s now still the managing director of the family office and runs it. He goes, “We need these things at our family office and a big, giant bank just bought us. They just completed a buyout on a private equity deal that they paid a half a billion dollars for, and they don’t have a plan, an integration plan for it. Would you be interested in doing that and maybe licensing some idea to them?” So, that’s how that came about. In his email, he said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I was in the course you taught in Tampa, Florida about 20 years ago.” He said, “It changed my life.” He said, “My boss was there,” because the company he worked for was one of the sponsors of the event. He said, “I realized that I could learn whatever I was going to learn from my boss, but he was not going to be thinking about these kinds of things that you think about.” He said, “When the time came for that to sort of run its course, I just took the book and used it as the template moving forward. I love it. I don’t know if you remember me, but 20 years ago, I was sitting in the audience with 300 other people.” He was not offended when I said, “Steve, I got to tell you, honestly, I don’t remember meeting you but it’s nice to reconnect.” So, that’s kind of like the normal story of my life. As you know with tangible physical books, they’re far more likely to be read. Every year, I have least one or two gigs where people will say something like, “I’ve had your book for years, maybe for 20 years. It’s on my bookshelf and I never read it, but I kept noticing it either at my office or at my house. I just kept seeing it. Finally, I decided to take it home and read it over the weekend. I wish I would have read this when it was done and how do we work now?” You can’t do that with an eBook. It’s very hard for people to throw away.
Rob Kosberg:
They can’t do it. They can’t bring themselves to throw away a physical book, but you can delete an eBook like that, nothing to it.
Bruce Wright:
I have a project in Arizona right now, a financial services company. They’re distributing Seeing the Elephant, which came out in 1992. They emailed it out to about 200 people. And next week, I’ll be there doing back to back to back meetings with a dozen of the wealthiest people in their community, with the exception of half of them who are clients. The other half are people that will never give them the time of day, by using a book, a little booklet that I wrote 1992. That’s how I get licensing deals. I give people a little taste of something that you would think it’s past its prime. What is funny when I was writing that, I decided intentionally to keep anything out that would date it too badly. When I did a rerelease of it in 2007, I did a little update at the beginning in an audio and at the end, and a very slight rewrite where I basically said, “All this has changed. You need the updated version. You need to talk to your CPA, your lawyer for the updated version. This is just for illustrative purposes.” That was it.
Rob Kosberg:
I’ve enjoyed it. It’s now just over 10 years that I’ve had bestseller publishing. We’ve worked with about a little more than a thousand authors at this point. Like you said, people come for all kinds of reasons, all kinds of motivations. The next book, I have my Publish. Promote. Profit book, which is a Wall Street Journal bestseller, but my newest book, I hope to publish in the next three months. That one is on legacy, writing your legacy book. I feel like that is, kind of like exactly what you’re talking about, I feel like there’s this huge element of people that are very successful and that are not leaving the lessons that they’ve learned over a 30-year, 40-year, 50-year career to the world and even to their family, to their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren. I have a relative. My ancestors came from Russia right at the late 1800s escaping persecution and came through New York and my last name is Kosberg, and a good part of my relatives stayed in Russia prior to it becoming the Soviet Union. Long story short, I have a relative, Semyon Kosberg, who was basically the number two man in the Russian space program. Books have been written about him, even a more recent movie. There are all kinds of legends. He received the Order of Lenin, which is the highest civilian award in the Soviet Union. There’s nothing that I have from him. My middle son actually works for NASA as a scientist. I thought, “If only there were something that he left, a book, notes.” Now, of course, in the Soviet Union, it might have been destroyed and lit on fire, but hopefully, not in America. Hopefully in America, if you have wisdom to pass on, you should pass it on. I’m excited about that element of my next book for people like the people that you’re talking about.
Bruce Wright:
I talked about this idea of multigenerational stewardship and thinking about what are the universal truths and principles and wisdom that we want to pass on to the next generations. It was really fascinating that at the time, and I stumbled upon this idea of having a 100-year plan, because early in my life, I was a martial artist. I was studying Zen Buddhism and eastern philosophy. They have long used a 100-year plan to accomplish a goal. It turns out, certain American Indian tribes also did that. Turns out that the wisest Greeks and Romans also did that. I didn’t originate the idea. What I did was refreshed it and put some legs on it in a way that no one had ever done. When Seeing the Elephant came out with a 100-year plan, it was transcendent. The vast majority of the engagements that I’ve had since then have been, “How do I not ruin my children with this massive amount of wealth that I’ve created because there’s a condition called sense of entitlement.”
Rob Kosberg:
It is. I totally agree. It’s a completely different problem than most people have to face. It is gigantic to not ruin the future generations. Bruce, I found the Wright Exit Strategy online. Where can other people find Seeing the Elephant and the other things that you’ve written? Do you have these somewhere?
Bruce Wright:
Get that at macrostrategicdesign.com. They can go in and download free copies of Seeing the Elephant. I did a workbook for our three-day licensing course called Macro Strategic Planning Your Life and Your Business. That’s available for free. I’ve written hundreds of things. One of my favorites, I just pulled this out of the archives 10 days ago, it’s called an article called Playing God. I’ll send it to you. One of my favorite books is Acres of Diamonds.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that book, great book. Simple, great idea.
Bruce Wright:
I give away, in any given year, a thousand copies of different books. There’s always a method to the madness. I’m going to be doing a series. It will be an eCourse. The working title right now is, Acres of Diamonds and Quantum Mind. What I see very frequently in the Playing God article as part of that curriculum, is that what we do naturally as human beings, like, for example, I’m a Neil Diamond fan. So, if I get a new Neil Diamond album, my tendency is to think, “Who else do I know that might like the new Neil Diamond album, and I’m going to tell them I bought it and I thought it’s great. You should be able to listen.” Then I thought, well, why would I limit other people from getting that same message? Why don’t I just send the message to my entire universe, my databases, my LinkedIn connections, et cetera? Why don’t I just give everybody the chance to experience it and decide for themselves? So, when you think about and think the article, I don’t use Neil Diamond, but I use a CPA firm, who’s got a particular tax strategy and they think, “Okay, well, I’ve got 37 clients this would apply to. I’m going to send it to them.” Well, in quantum multidimensional thinking, we realize that if we send it to everybody connected to us, some of those people are going to be connected to ideal clients for us, and they will pass that article along if it’s well written, which is the same strategy. When we think of things in quantum multidimensional ways, we realize that every person is a majestic, colorful soul on this grand adventure we call life. They each have their own ecosystem. Even though they may not personally find something that we’ve written in an article, or a book, or whatever at the moment, they might have an uncle or an aunt, or a cousin, or a friend, or a boss, for whom it would be a revelation. They will pass it on, especially if it’s physical, and therefore, transferable, like a physical article. The whole purpose of articles, don’t play god. Don’t presume that who will get it and who will appreciate it and who won’t. Just do what god actually does and send it to everybody. And see who picks it up and runs with it. That’s the gist of that article. It plays directly into Acres of Diamonds, which I’m sure that the heirs, who inherited the benefits of that book, are not doing anything like this. Of course, I have to get their permission. I’ll do a revenue share with them. I’ll have my lawyer figure all that stuff out. I’m going to write the course. I’m not going to handle the contracting or any of that. The idea is how do we take Acres of Diamonds, refresh it, and present it in a way that helps every entrepreneur, every author, every consultant understand that not only do they have rough, uncut diamonds in their own acre of universe. But so too does each person, they each have their own ecosystem. Within those ecosystems are where your greatest opportunities and deals are going to come from. Why would you limit from participating in those opportunities?
Rob Kosberg:
Let everybody have an opportunity.
Bruce Wright:
It’s just blocking yourself from those opportunities. It’s limiting others because you’re not sharing great ideas with other people.
Bruce Wright:
Take the limitations off your thinking. Think about the universe as a whole series of intricately connected, multiple angles, ecosystems. How do we take an uplifting narrative that benefits people and help it go viral? Well, if you only send it to seven people, I’m sorry, the probability of viral is very close to zero. If you send it to 17,000 people, your probability of it then growing to 50 or 60 or 100,000 people, you just need one champion. I discovered this very early in my life. I used that insurance company. They got a reprint of the article through Ric and Chrissy Madden’s. They paid them X amount of money for the reprint, for the people that were coming to the event. Then they went and they bought another 50,000 reprints and used it as a way to go get new business and form new relationships with people. There was an exponential effect in that. It wasn’t just about paying me a $2500 or $5000 speaking fee. It was how do we sort of come down to this realization. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “What can I do to make Bruce Wright more successful today.” What they do is they wake up and they think, “How am I going to make myself more successful.” Guys like you and me give them the how. We give them the path. I tell everybody that’s buying my stuff, “Look, you can use my stuff however you’re willing to pay for and however long you’re willing to use it, but start singing your own song, and you got to get the music out of your soul and put it on paper. The cathartic effect of that is you become a much better messenger. It will grow you and expand you in some really important ways that are unimaginable. Right now, you have to go through the catharsis to get the impact. And you can start by giving away other people’s books. But the best path is to create your own content.” I’m besieged with people who want to help me make an extra $1,000 a month on LinkedIn by becoming a bestselling author missing the point that I became a bestselling author through actual book sales.
Rob Kosberg:
What a unique way to do it.
Bruce Wright:
Nobody picks up my stuff and cares whether it was bestselling or not. All they care about is the audience. Do you have something for me that’s directly relevant that nobody else can do for me. That’s it. It has to be entirely about them. That’s the recipe when I’m writing. Every single page has to be resonant with the reader in a personal way. Every page has to do that. If you can’t do that, you got to go back and rewrite pages until they do. You’ve got to have this really compelling resonant series of ideas and details and how to, these kinds of things. Let’s be blunt, most people who don’t do that, they simply provide broad strokes and then you’re supposed to figure it out for yourself. You know Michael Gerber?
Rob Kosberg:
Sure.
Bruce Wright:
So, Michael and I were having this friendly debate one day. This has got to be 25 years ago. I brought him in to do some speaking gigs on these multiday events at some of the really big companies. They were trying to connect with entrepreneurs. Michael serves a segment of the market that I don’t have any interest in. He said to me, he said, “Wright, you call this attention to all these little micro details. It’s like, just stop doing that. Just do the broad strokes. Just let them figure it out for themselves.” And I’m sitting there thinking, Michael someday might sell this company for $5 million. I’m going to sell mine for hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m pretty sure my recipe is better than his. But you can get hyperbole in broad strokes everywhere, but can you get relevant, personally relevant dynamic action steps? And the answer is yes, you can if the source is capable of delivering that. That’s the space where I think you guys will do a great job in sort of the vetting of the material. I’m not willing to read the manuscripts so I’ll just be blunt.
Rob Kosberg:
I understand. Don’t worry. We have teams of people that can do that.
Bruce Wright:
Every month, I have probably four or five people requesting that I read their manuscript and write a quote for the back cover of their book. I have no interest in opening the manuscript. The other thing is that if I do open their manuscript, they’ll later say something I wrote that I plagiarized from them. That’s a real problem in the music industry. It’s why most successful musicians will not listen to your mixtape that you create of the songs that you wrote. They don’t want to be accused of plagiarism down the road. It’s really hard with friends or family members. I kind of have to be nice to them and I kind of have to look at what they write, and I want to be supportive.
Rob Kosberg:
Now for the conclusion. Bruce, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Great to have you here. For those of you who are interested in learning a little bit more, perhaps getting Bruce’s books, you can go to macrostrategicdesign.com. You can get a copy of The Wright Exit Strategy or Seeing the Elephant or any number of the books that were mentioned on the podcast today. Please go do that. You’ll love connecting with Bruce. He’s been a fantastic guest and somebody that has a wealth of understanding and knowledge in this area. Bruce, thanks again so much for being with me today.
