Dan Kennedy’s 10 Rules for Life
The Amplified Impact Podcast
December 25th, 2023
I’ve been exploring the strategies of an influential figure in marketing and advertising…Dan Kennedy.
Ever heard of him? This guy shaped an era when direct mail response was the big thing.
His insights on sales letters and tactics back in the day hold valuable lessons for today’s world of online shopping.
So, let’s delve into his ten rules for success, unpacking them one by one.
From taking decisive action to the importance of intellectual curiosity, these rules are timeless and worth dissecting.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Perfection is the enemy of done. One is better than none.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
You. All right. So, in the world of marketing and advertising and copywriting, there is one guy in particular who. I don’t know if I’d say he stands above all the rest, but he stands very high up on the mountaintop. He’s a guy that influenced a generation of direct mail response advertisers. So what that is is back in the day when we didn’t have the Internet, and you can just click a button, buy the thing, and have it delivered to your doorstep. Well, what advertisers would do is they would run an advertisement in a magazine, or they would cold mail. They would send cold mail to your door.
It was back in a time when people would actually open their mail, and in that mail, you’d get a letter, and the letter was really just a sales letter trying to sell you something. Maybe a refrigerator, maybe a book, maybe some throat loss inches. I don’t know, all sorts of things. And so you could imagine this is a very, very hard way to make a sale, because for that person to want to then buy the thing if your letter is incredibly persuasive, and they’re like, wow, this is an amazing widget. I need this widget. Well, they can’t just push a button, give you their money, and then have the thing delivered 24 hours later. No, they had to fill out a form. They had to mail it back to you with money to a stranger they didn’t know and hope that you would send back the product, and maybe they’d see it in, like, a month or two or three.
It’s a crazy world to actually think about. And yet this guy managed to make a lot of money doing this. And this is where copywriting really was honed, what tactics and techniques and strategies were effective, because if it worked in this environment, in what has to be the hardest sales environment I can imagine, well, if it can work there, it can work in any environment. And so you imagine now, with Internet and landing pages and one click shopping, it is so much easier to get somebody to make a decision to buy a product, and we get to stand on the shoulders of giants. This guy is one of those guys. His name is Dan Kennedy, and he passed away a number of years ago. He wrote a number of really great books I really enjoy called the no BS Guide to. And there’s all sorts of different subbooks.
So no BS guide to marketing to affluent individuals or the no BS guide to price structures. Right? Read a lot of these. Very prolific guy. And he died a number of years ago, but his legend lives on. And his work lives on, and I think there’s a lot to learn from this guy. I was just kind of reviewing some of his older stuff recently, just kind of brushing up, because I think it’s good to revisit the classics. And he had ten rules for life that I heard in a podcast once, not a podcast in a keynote that he had given. I thought we’d just break them down together, because, again, we can learn so much from the people who came before and accomplished so much that we can apply to our own life.
So let’s take a look at these ten rules for success that come from Mr. Dan Kennedy. Number one, losers wait until they have time or money. Winners make it happen. Now you must have a do it now attitude. Be decisive and act quickly. 100%. Couldn’t agree more.
I think the thing that I’ve noticed as a recurring trait amongst the most successful people I know is that each one has a bias towards action. The amount of time between when they get the information, they make a decision, and then they take meaningful action is incredibly short. Sometimes spin your head short, you’re like, wait, that has to be too fast. You’re moving recklessly, but better to move recklessly fast and not at all. Number two, never take no for an answer. Well, I don’t love this one. It will get you very far. I think better, though.
What I’ve adapted to is never assume the answer is no. So never accept a maybe, never accept silence. Keep pushing until you get an answer definitively yes or no. A lot of times we send our follow up emails, our phone calls, our whatever, and we think after the 6th, 7th, 8th, nine time, the person’s just ignoring and they’re uninteresting. And it’s very easy to just say, oh, that’s a no. But I have found in working with investors that quite often people are just busy. And the thing that you’re sending out multiple times, it gets missed. And they meant to follow up on it, but life gets in the way and you get busy.
And so I have had it where I’ve reached out 9th time on a deal and had an investor come through and invest $100,000. So never assume the answer is no. Just keep pushing until you get the answer one way or the other. Number three, if you can just show up, you are a massive step ahead of others. I agree 100% with this. I like to say that 80% of success in life is just showing up, and the other 20% is simply doing what you say. Show up. That’s it.
That’s such a low barrier to success, but it’s the one that, like 99% of people refuse to do. It’s crazy to me. Number four, intolerance. Be very tough on yourself and others. Yeah, I think first you need to have a high standard for yourself. Nobody should have a higher standard for you than you have of yourself. That’s number one, be incredibly hard on yourself and hold yourself to the highest of standards you. And if you can do that, then it’s reasonable that you can hold others around you to a high standard, too.
But do not hold people to a higher standard than you hold yourself. That is a recipe for disaster, and it’s one I see a lot of people make. I see a lot of people make that mistake. In business, they’re a boss that shows up late, they don’t stay until the end of the day. They aren’t working hard around the clock, and yet they’re asking their people to do that. No, don’t ask anybody to do something. Don’t hold somebody else to a standard you won’t hold yourself to. Number five, you must be impatient.
This goes back to the bias towards action. You have to be able to take quick action. But again, this is also towards holding other people accountable to deadlines and whatnot. And instead of saying, by end of week, we can condense the iteration and action loop simply by saying, let’s get this done by end of day right now, instead of waiting five days to get the result, now we get it at the end of the day and we can move that much more quicker. Number six, you’ve got to do the work. To be good and fast. You must start with badly and slow. This is 100% true.
You’re not going to be great right out of the gate. The only thing that’s going to improve over time is through the repetitions. So the quicker that you can get through the repetitions, the quicker that you’re going to improve. Now, there are three things within what I call the learning loop that you need to have in order to master a skill or to improve at a skill. You need to have feedback, which is some way of saying, did it work or not? You need to have active reflection to look and say, okay, what do I think happened here? Have come up with a theory or a hypothesis for what might have led to the result. If it was negative, what can you do different next time? And then the third step is to iterate, to take the reflection, that hypothesis, and to apply it. And when you do that, that leads back to feedback and the quicker you can get through this learning loop and cycle through it, the faster you’re going to develop a meaningful amount of skill. And so you’ve got to do that.
That’s the only way to improve. Before you can get good at anything, you have to put in a lot of reps. And I think we often underestimate how many reps it takes to get good at something. Number seven, Dan says your business must change every six to twelve months. I agree with this, because I think a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we think that we can do one of three things, that we can either shrink, we can stay the same, or we can grow. Now, most entrepreneurs want to grow. They want to avoid shrinking. But there are a lot that still think, I’d be happy if I could just maintain.
And that’s an illusion. There is no such thing as maintaining, because to maintain is actually to fall behind. If you assume that the market and inflation is continually growing by 3%, then every year the markets continue growing. That means your market share, your percentage in the sway, is going to be reduced. Right. So you actually have to continue growing just to stay put. And so to continue growing, you have to continue evolving and continue learning and going through that learning feedback loop, which means every six to twelve months, you’re going to look very, very different as a company, as your individual capacities within that company, than you did six to twelve months prior. And if not, then you’re not iterating fast enough.
Number eight, you need to learn to compromise quality to get things done. This is an interesting one. Learn to compromise quality to get things done. Perfection is the enemy of done. One is better than none, right? There comes a point when real artists ship. These are phrases that come from some of the biggest minds. Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Dan Kennedy. And it’s so easy to fool ourselves into thinking it’s just not ready yet.
It needs to be made better. And you got to figure out, what is that threshold of quality that your customers are expecting, that you can deliver and then ship. You got to figure out how to ship, because at the end of the day, if you don’t do that, you don’t have a business, you just don’t. Number nine. But again, going back to number eight, you have to learn to compromise quality to get things done. It’s a balancing act and it requires a lot of judgment to be able to say what is an acceptable decrease in quality, what can you accept? What is unacceptable. That takes time to figure out, and you’re going to make that mistake. You’re going to get that one wrong a lot.
Trust me, I’ve been there. Number nine, you must have a high degree of intellectual curiosity. Always be asking questions. Read, read faster. Study. Yeah, this is straight out of like Charlie Munger’s book, which is to say that in his entire life he has known no wise people who did not read and read a lot. You have to be curious. You have to be constantly seeking, connecting dots so that you have the raw materials necessary to deploy creativity later, which is the ability to connect dots.
If you have no dots to connect, you got nothing, nothing to deploy your creativity against. So you have to be curious at all times. Number ten, it is extremely rare to find a self made millionaire who is not an expert in selling. Yeah, actually, come to think about it, I don’t know if I know any millionaires who are not good at selling inherently, whether that’s good at selling customers or employees or other people on their vision. Selling is the master skill that kind of underlies everything. And selling is really just a subset of communication. Right? I don’t know any self made millionaires. None who are not incredible communicators.
And I think to be an incredible communicator requires clarity of thought and then also an understanding of human psychology and communication tactics and how to actually speak and how to write. So 100% agree with that one, Dan. But those are all ten. Those are all ten of Dan Kennedy’s rules for a successful life. And I like these. There’s maybe one or two in here that I’m not a big fan of. Specifically when you said you have to be intolerant of others and hold them to this incredibly high standard, I think you do have to do that, but you can’t be willing to hold somebody else to a higher standard than yourself. So there’s some things that I disagree with there.
But in general, these are good rules. If you can apply them to your life, you’re probably going to do pretty well in your business. So go do that and then report back in and let me know how it goes, guys. It’s going to do it for me. I appreciate you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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