How well do you trust yourself as a self-reliant entrepreneur? Author and Duct Tape Marketing podcast host John Jantsch combines 30+ years of learned wisdom with powerful insights of American literature to create a daily meditation for entrepreneurs, in his latest book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur.
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Resources Mentioned
The Self Reliant Entrepreneur Book [Amazon]
3 Lessons We Learned From This Episode
- [7:47] What it actually looks like to be self-reliant as an entrepreneur
- [16:05] Why American literature written in the 1850’s is culturally relevant to your business today
- [25:42] The curious thing that starts to happen once you let go of your plans
Connect with Jason Jantsch
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Buy Kyle’s Book – Selling with Story
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Transcription
Kyle Gray: (00:08)
Hello and welcome to The Story Engine Podcast. My name is Kyle Gray and today we have John Jantsch on the show from Duct Tape Marketing. John has a brand new book called The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, and is a daily meditations book designed for entrepreneurs to read a little bit of every day to get some inspiration on building their business and enjoying the process of being an entrepreneur, instead of focusing on the results that you want to create in your business.
Kyle Gray: (01:11)
I had a lot of fun in this discussion with John and he is very honest and very vulnerable in sharing his perspectives and ideas, which I always appreciate, especially with someone who has as much experience as John. So without any further ado, let’s turn it over to John. John Jantsch, welcome to The Story Engine Podcast. It’s such a pleasure having you here today.
John Jantsch: (01:37)
Super happy to be here, Kyle.
Kyle Gray: (01:40)
So it’s a big honor. You have an amazing podcast, Duct Tape Marketing, that I’ve had the big honor of being a guest on, and I still, people are reaching out to me because of hearing that interview, because you’ve put together something really, really cool. You’ve built that through a lot of daily practice. But I want to get to know you and what you’re up to right now and this amazing thing that you’re bringing forward into the world. But I want to introduce you properly by asking you about a moment in your life that’s really defined who you are and how you show up in the world today.
John Jantsch: (02:21)
Well, so we’re going to start on a real downer and a little bit, but I think that happens to a lot of people. You have this wake-up moment or something. But I started my own business close to 30 years ago now. Like a lot of people, I hustled work, said, “Yes, sure I can do that.”, having no real specific plan of what I was going to do. About 10 years into it, I had a sister working for me at the time. Somebody came, you know, people used to actually call on you in person. A person came to the door to our office and she came back and said, “Hey, there’s somebody here that needs to see you.” I was kind of busy and she said, “No, I think you really better talk to them.” She hands me his card and it says Chris Davis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
John Jantsch: (03:08)
I had been invited to testify in front of a grand jury. The short story of it was that I had a client that was doing some things that got him actually convicted of several felonies. Fortunately for me, I had nothing of interest to tell them, but the real wake-up moment was, it was pretty obvious to me that they were doing shady things and I was turning the other way and sending in the invoice. So, it was really a moment when I changed my entire business. I changed my whole outlook on what a client was and who I was going to work with and not work with. It was one of those moments where, fortunately I didn’t have something that changed the course of my life that I was in no control of.
John Jantsch: (03:58)
It allowed me to say, “Hey, how’d I get here? This is not who I am”. That was really about the time that I built a traditional agency, but I went all in on Duct Tape Marketing and my approach to marketing and really going all in on working almost exclusively with small businesses.
Kyle Gray: (04:18)
Awesome. So, your ideal client has shifted over the years, is what you’re saying?
John Jantsch: (04:24)
Not only it shifted but my point of view about the fact that I’m in charge of who an ideal client is and that I get to pick. I don’t mean that in a way that sounds egotistical. I just think that so often we, as the person trying to get clients, feel like we’re in this position of, “Hey, I have to please the client and I have to do this to get to work.” It just really changed my view that this is truly a partnership and I want to work with people that respect the value I bring as much as anything.
Kyle Gray: (04:56)
I love that. That’s actually been a challenge I’ve been experiencing in my own agency, as separating myself from the process of who we even work with sometimes. Because there’s people who, maybe I like and I want to work with and I want to please, but it’s not really aligned with what the business is trying to do. Now that I’m no longer just working on my own, you have to consider the whole needs of the agency and how it all fits together.
John Jantsch: (05:30)
Yeah.
Kyle Gray: (05:31)
Yeah, getting clear on that’s very powerful.
John Jantsch: (05:33)
I tell you the one thing that really clicked for me, is also not just who can I get business from, who can I actually help the most? So, a lot of times when I’m analyzing whether or not to take a client, because it’s always a gamble when you’re taking a new client. Is this going to work, not work? I really look, I really assess. I know what we’re good at doing and I know the problems that a client has that we can solve quickly and well, and that to me, is what makes an ideal client.
Kyle Gray: (06:03)
Absolutely. I think having that kind of clarity, again, it helps you, helps you draw good boundaries.
John Jantsch: (06:11)
Yeah.
Kyle Gray: (06:12)
One of the challenges I’ve found is, there’s a lot of great talents. You can provide a lot of value in a lot of different areas, but you’re right. Once you find that problem you can solve quickly, you can create a lot of value and you can just focus there and then turn away the good opportunities to just focus on the great ones. I think that’s when an agency can really start to thrive.
John Jantsch: (06:36)
Yeah, I agree.
Kyle Gray: (06:39)
John, you have built an amazing agency. You’ve been in business for 30 years. You’ve put together Duct Tape Marketing and I have hundreds of questions on how that could all, how that has all fit together. But I want to hear about your new project and your new book that you’ve got coming out.
John Jantsch: (07:00)
The name of the book is The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. It’s my sixth book. My five previous books have been squarely about some aspect of marketing, how to do stuff. I wanted to write a book that … I mean, I’ll admit that part of me was burned out, writing another book about marketing. I’ll be honest about that. So, I wanted to write a book that allowed me to reflect my personal views on not just how to do stuff, but maybe why to do it. I think being an entrepreneur, owning my own business has been one of the most joyful, freeing things that I could do. But I see some people that aren’t experiencing it that way. So, in some ways this book is an, and I’m no-bones about it, it’s my beliefs, my experience, that I’m reflecting.
John Jantsch: (07:47)
But I think, my hope is that it can be helpful to keep people on the path of, why they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s the self-reliant part is that, self-reliant doesn’t mean go it alone, do your own thing. It’s about, trust yourself enough to follow your path. That you don’t have to listen to others, that you can’t control many aspects of your life. All you can control is how you show up and how you respond to everything that goes on. And if you focus on those couple things, that’s what I mean by being self-reliant.
Kyle Gray: (08:21)
Well, gosh, John, that’s not exactly easy to do. That’s something I’ve struggled with a lot trying to figure out, “Okay, this is me and this is how I show up in these are my talents and abilities.” And being able to really trust in those and also trust the journey on this. I think one of the things as entrepreneurs that we forget or that I often forget is, I’m always doing something to push my limits on. So I’m always right at the edge of comfort. So, I’m always feeling uncomfortable, but I always feel the same. But the reason I’m feeling uncomfortable is slowly changing, but you’re just like, “Oh man, we haven’t made any progress.” And you just forget to enjoy the journey.
John Jantsch: (09:04)
Yeah. Yeah, and there is no question. I mean, I can talk about all these things until I’m blue in the face and maybe I’m successful 20% of the time. I mean, because this stuff hits us in the face. We have spent a great deal of our life reacting to things. So, I think what, the idea behind this book is you’re not going to pick this book up and read it cover to cover and go, ” Whoa, got that down now.” I mean, the idea behind a daily book like this is, that if the idea of practicing on yourself and embracing a couple of core concepts about trusting yourself. I mean, you talked about being uncomfortable. I would suggest that if you aren’t feeling that way you probably are just phoning it in.
John Jantsch: (09:56)
So, you just have to realize that this is a work in progress. This is not something that you do or ever do, get done. It’s just if you are intentional about at least witnessing how you react, that’s the thing that I think is the first step. A lot of people talk about, “Oh, they pushed my buttons and I got this and I always react that way.” If you start actually stepping back and witnessing, first off, how you responded, but also how that felt, how that felt to the other person. I mean, that’s when I think you start making progress.
Kyle Gray: (10:31)
I was just at an event this weekend with a guy named Yuri Elkaim, very, very smart guy. He was talking about growing a business and encouraging people to really want to desire to grow something that could make a big impact and even make a lot of money because, not because having a lot of money is good, but because of the process of going through and building that kind of business, the person that you have to become in the process is the treasury in its own right. Like what you were just saying there of being able to watch yourself and how you respond, is excellent advice for an entrepreneur. But that’s something that anybody in any walk of life could benefit tremendously from. So, that’s the process of entrepreneurship is this self-
John Jantsch: (11:24)
It is.
Kyle Gray: (11:25)
Self-improvement and self-honing that I find really magical.
John Jantsch: (11:31)
Yeah. And I’ve had more than one person say, “This book could just be called The Self-Reliant Person. The reality is, it is. It’s talking about working on you. I guess I’m saying it may be a little more focused in the context of, a better you, makes a better business.
Kyle Gray: (11:46)
Now, as an author who has three how-to marketing books. I don’t know if my first one really counts as a marketing book, but I’ve had this same thought. I’ve written fiction chapters as well
Kyle Gray: (12:01)
About people running through Morocco and weird things like that. But I’ve been confronted with this as well, where I’ve wanted to create something, I don’t necessarily need it for the general population, but something that is not quite as how to oriented. What was the process of this?
John Jantsch: (12:32)
Yeah. I mean, my last book was, I think is going to end up being about three years ago. And I felt hopefully readers didn’t feel like this. I felt like I was regurgitating some of the same stuff. Just because my publisher said, what’s your next book? And so, I really did say, I’m going to step back from this because I’m not enjoying it as much. And so that was the first step in the process. And then I have a tremendous literary agent, and he was an editor and publisher in his previous career for Harper. And he actually curated and published or acquired, he didn’t curate the content. He acquired a book called The Daily Drucker, which some of your listeners, viewers may be familiar with. And it’s the same format.
John Jantsch: (13:28)
Somebody went through and took all of Peter Drucker’s work, this is after he had died, but took all of his work and created this kind of daily format. And so he was the one that really encouraged me to pursue it. And the vein of literature that I actually dove into, and we’ll probably talk a little bit about that, was all literature that was written in the mid 19th century.
John Jantsch: (13:53)
So every entry starts with me curating some of what I think is, still today, the greatest entrepreneurial writing ever produced, even though it wasn’t produced for that purpose. So every day starts with that, then me kind of riffing on it. Maybe contextualizing it for today and my experience. And then I leave you with a question every day. So my hope for this book is to accomplish a lot of things.
John Jantsch: (14:20)
It’s going to introduce people to what I think is some amazing literature, some of which we were asked to read in high school and college. It’s going to hopefully help them collect their thoughts for the day and center them for the day. And then my real hope is the question doesn’t just become something that you look at and you go, oh, that’s interesting.
John Jantsch: (14:38)
In fact, we even put a couple lines underneath the questions for each day so that you can actually write your thoughts down. But my hope is that you carry that into the day, and you can use it as a bit of a centering thought for how things happen. And you start paying more attention to the things that come at you all day long.
Kyle Gray: (15:00)
That is fascinating. And I’m really interested in the research process, because you must have gone through a tremendous amount of writing, and not all of it made it in. And so how did you decide, and how did you put this in an order that made sense and could flow?
John Jantsch: (15:19)
So I started with the two authors that I was most familiar with. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two authors that I didn’t really even connect how connected they were or the time period or anything. I just liked Walden, I liked Self-Reliance, I mean, I liked his essays, Emerson’s essays.
John Jantsch: (15:37)
So I kind of started there, thinking, well, let’s go see what’s there. And what I discovered was an entire vein of literature that all tied together. And so Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Poe and Twain and Louisa May Alcott, I mean all wrote in that same time period. They all wrote or had some themes that I think we’re really, really consistent.
John Jantsch: (16:05)
If you think about what was going on at that time, 1840s-1850s, we were on the cusp of the civil war. America was very fractured. Divided politically, culturally. Women were marching in the streets demanding the right to vote. We’re trying to abolish slavery. It was the first sort of counterculture period in America. And a lot of the writing that came out of that period was suggesting, hey, we can create social reform if we create human reform.
John Jantsch: (16:32)
This was some of the first writing that said, you don’t have to listen to your preacher or the politicians or even your parents. You need to follow your own path. And so some of it was overt. I mean, Emerson was saying do your own thing, you don’t have to listen to others. But I also found that in Little Women, Jo March, Louisa May Alcott’s character, was a huge think for yourself person.
John Jantsch: (17:00)
And so a lot of those messages were kind of buried in the protagonists of even the fiction. And so then I started digging deeper and I started uncovering a lot of authors that many of the readers of the book will not be familiar with at all, but they were all kind of singing a little bit of that same song. And so I dug into the period, that led me to all these authors, then I dug into their work.
John Jantsch: (17:23)
And then one of the things that as a writer, other writers might appreciate, was I then came quickly to the realization that this was just going to be a mess. I realized I had to figure out a way to organize it. I think that there’s a sort of seasonal approach to being an entrepreneur. As you evolve as an entrepreneur, there are sort of seasons that you go through. And obviously, that metaphor works so nicely for an annual book like this. And so I broke up the book into four quadrants, or four seasons. And then each season has the things that I think are going on in that particular season. And what that did from a practical standpoint is, it gave the book an overarching thread, but it also gave me a way to organize all of the readings. So instead of just reading something and thinking, that’s nice, I think I’ll put that in the book. It actually allowed me to go out looking for themes.
John Jantsch: (18:33)
So I would go looking for writing about trust or about love or about failure or about congruence, which just happen to be a couple of the themes. And that allowed me to actually have an organizational structure for the readings and curatings.
Kyle Gray: (18:48)
Can you tell me about something that, through the process of writing and learning this book, that you do differently now?
John Jantsch: (18:57)
Yeah. Part of the reason I wrote this book is because the themes that are in there are things that I’ve pursued for 15, 20 years. I mean, I didn’t just wake up one day and say, I’m going to be more mindful. That’s stuff I’ve tried to pursue for years. And so that’s really what the appeal for me was.
John Jantsch: (19:15)
I think that having what’s going to be close to a year and a half journey with this material, and I’m sure it’ll go beyond that, I’m just less stressed. I know that I was guilty of wanting people to say, notice me, look at all the followers I have, I’ve got books. I like to think that I wasn’t as bad as some people, but I certainly had that.
John Jantsch: (19:44)
And it really taught me that I have, regardless of how anybody else would define it, the control that I have over what I want to do. The joy that I have in what I’m doing, is my definition of success.
Kyle Gray: (20:00)
That is beautiful. Yeah. And finding that, finding your own definition of success. Because I think it’s so different for so many people. And where and how you define it. Nobody can create something that will fit for you like you can.
Kyle Gray: (20:20)
But it’s quite a challenge, and maybe it’s just a path of like, you have to go down the path to discover it. My definition of success when I first started out on this, is very different than what it is now. It’s kind of changing, or if not changing, then being discovered. And we’re kind of peeling back the layers to what ultimately, we’re looking for here.
John Jantsch: (20:47)
And I don’t think, I mean maybe this makes you uncomfortable, Kyle, I don’t think that’ll ever stop. I mean, in fact if it does, you’re probably in trouble.
Kyle Gray: (20:55)
I think that it’s somewhat of a masculine thing to want to be like, okay, well when the problems solved, then we can relax and collect the checks. And there’s definitely still some of that mentality lingering in my life, that more and more I’ve been like, what you’ve been recommending, is just trying to enjoy every day, and trying to enjoy the process. And making what I do today the things that energize me and get me out of bed and get me excited to make an impact in the world.
Kyle Gray: (21:29)
So tell me if we’ve got one really good example of these, or a reading that you could share from us, that kind of gives us a sample. And maybe can give us an idea of what a daily meditation looks like..
John Jantsch: (21:48)
Yeah. I think that it’s kind of a luxury to have this, due to the fact that it takes me two minutes to read a page so that we really give somebody value. It’s the marketer coming out and the free sample they’re not going to give today. But every day has a title and then a reading that I’ve chosen. Then I riff for 150 words, and then I’ll leave you with a question. So here we go.
John Jantsch: (22:14)
The Force of Nature. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a person does not keep pace with their companions, perhaps it is because they hear a different drummer. Let them step to the music which they hear, however measured or far away. It is not important that you should mature as soon as an apple or an oak. Shall you turn your spring into summer? That’s Henry David Thoreau from Walden, 1854.
John Jantsch: (22:43)
Nature has no desire to succeed. One season inevitably folds into the next. A year marked by changes in weather, ecology, and daylight. No matter how much force we might exert to contain it. If we attempted to mimic nature, one thing is for sure, we would release the need to control any aspect of our lives. We would give into what naturally needs to happen. This is a fundamental element of self-reliance. And ironically, by releasing the need to control, we eventually find that we gain access to far greater control.
John Jantsch: (23:17)
Think about the last time you forced or tried to force something to happen. How did that feel? How did it turn out? If you succeeded, did the result last? Now think about the last time something came into your life by way of what felt like luck. Isn’t it possible that your lack of control actually created what you characterized as luck? Your letting go, created your fate.
John Jantsch: (23:42)
Day, as you journey through life, consider the many things on your path that worked out well for you, even though you didn’t or couldn’t control that. Listen closely for this tone for it is your beat, the beat of a different drummer. Your challenge question for today,
John Jantsch: (24:00)
Can you describe a time you benefited from luck? What does luck feel like?
Kyle Gray: (24:11)
Yeah, I feel lucky and many, many times. It always seems to hinge around a big leap forward in my life that was provided somebody who I knew well enough to be like, “Hey, let’s let them work at this workshop and invite them out to this thing.” Do you have a specific one that you think of?
John Jantsch: (24:36)
I suppose if I really sat and thought about it, I just really embrace that idea so much that what it does is it allows you to release some things. I always use this example. I’m one of 10 children, so I have seven brothers and two sisters. My father was a bit of a worrier, and there were many, many times where I don’t blame him. It’s like, “I don’t know how we’re going to get all this done,” and my mom on the flip side of that was never stressed out.
John Jantsch: (25:05)
It was always, “Oh, something will turn up. It’ll happen. Just wait for it. It’s going to happen,” and she might’ve said that that was God or that was what she prayed for or something and then let it go, but I think that it was the mentality that I think when you do this long enough and you do experience letting things go and not stressing out about it, you just start seeing examples of you were supposed to do this thing, but it doesn’t come through, and the next day, you got a call and they wanted you to do something that was twice as big, but you wouldn’t have been able to do that had that other thing worked out.
John Jantsch: (25:42)
I think when you start going, “Oh, that was supposed to happen,” then when you get that thing that you feel like is a disappointment, instead of saying, “Oh, I failed,” it’s like, “Oh, I wonder why that was supposed to happen. What’s going to happen next?”
Kyle Gray: (25:56)
I love that. There’s lots of times, again, in an agency kind of model, and there’s time where you get these big proposals and these big clients and you’re like, “Oh, I hope this works,” and you’re really swinging for the fences, but something I can learn from that and that I’ve been working on a lot is when you have something like that out there and just, again, learning to let go of your control. Hey, you put it out there and not worrying so much, because there would be times where I’d be like, “Well, if this doesn’t come through, I have no idea how I’m going to keep the lights on,” but I’ve never not been able to keep the lights on.
John Jantsch: (26:32)
I think that I’d be naïve to say that that just happens overnight. That happens because you have some experiences with it, but I think the shift is instead of being bummed out about it, it’s almost more like, “Oh, something better is supposed to happen, I guess,” you know?
Kyle Gray: (26:53)
Yeah, exactly.
John Jantsch: (26:55)
That takes time, but when you do that, all of the sudden it re-frames.
Kyle Gray: (26:59)
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative), but yeah. It takes time, but it can be a matter of a simple of a choice, you know?
John Jantsch: (27:05)
Yeah.
Kyle Gray: (27:06)
You know the good advice and it’s there and your brain’s recalling it and you’re like, “I don’t want to have good advice,” you know?
John Jantsch: (27:17)
Yeah.
Kyle Gray: (27:17)
I want it to be bad.
John Jantsch: (27:19)
I want to sulk.
Kyle Gray: (27:20)
Yeah.
John Jantsch: (27:22)
Right. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kyle Gray: (27:26)
That’s really brilliant. Can you tell us about some of the other people you’ve worked with? Were you just having other writers that were acting as curators, or were you the-
John Jantsch: (27:42)
Of this work? No. I had a research assistant that helped me collect and organize, but essentially, all of this material is dated enough, and I really wanted to dig into. I don’t cringe too much, but I cringe a little when people call this a quote book, because I really wanted to go deeper than Pinterest and Instagram quotes, you know?
Kyle Gray: (28:09)
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: (28:11)
I got into not just the works that you might be familiar with like The Scarlet Letter and Walden, but I also got into their letters and their journals and their diaries that are publicly available now. One of the things that was really fun for me was a lot of these authors were good friends, as well, and so they would communicate with each other, and so they have entire books of letters that they wrote back and forth to each other, and I found that really fascinating, but also just the form of a written letter from that period was pretty amazing. They were so formal and almost flowery. There wasn’t any LOL or any emojis in any of them at all.
Kyle Gray: (29:00)
Wow. How did they do it?
John Jantsch: (29:04)
That was really a great source because a lot of times in those letters, they were just talking about how they felt about something, and so it wasn’t meant, at the time at least, to be shared even publicly, probably.
Kyle Gray: (29:17)
It reminds me from a different, but somewhat similar time period, like Marcus Aurelius’-
John Jantsch: (29:26)
Oh, sure, sure.
Kyle Gray: (29:26)
… meditations, I guess, is just him, almost his personal journal. I read that, or I’ve tried to read it. It kind of feels like reading the Old Testament [crosstalk 00:29:37].
John Jantsch: (29:36)
Yeah, it’s a little chewy.
Kyle Gray: (29:38)
Yeah. I’ve come across him from other daily readings like The Daily Stoic from-
John Jantsch: (29:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to suggest Ryan Holiday’s going to a great job of bringing that literature to the masses.
Kyle Gray: (29:55)
Absolutely.
John Jantsch: (29:56)
There’s a little bit of that in this. My hope is that there are going to be a lot of people that get interested in the literature that’s in this as much as anything.
Kyle Gray: (30:05)
Is there anybody that you put in the book or a quote or something like that. I know this is mostly your personal experience and your philosophy, but maybe there’s things that you’re like, “Well, I kind of disagree with this or I’m not all the way with this person, but this information is good and I believe it.”
John Jantsch: (30:22)
Yeah. I would say that from a personal stance from a belief that would border on being religion. I don’t identify necessarily with any religion. I believe very much in a source of connection for everyone in the world, and that was true of a lot of the writings of this period, actually, but there were certainly a lot of preachers who were writing in kind of an old- fashioned sense of people’s relationship to God. There were some things that I thought were useful that wouldn’t be anything that I would espouse myself.
Kyle Gray: (31:11)
Well said, and I was wondering how that would come to play, but I found I’m not religious myself these days, but even some of the other thinkers and writers like Jordan Peterson does a really good job at presenting old Christian stories and not necessarily as a moral parable. It’s kind of like a lesson to be learned and a framework for life, and so I’ve been finding more value in things like that if you can remove the tones of it.
John Jantsch: (31:57)
While I didn’t find anything that had them specifically referencing these texts, to me, I felt like a great deal of the writers at that time had clearly started diving into some of the Eastern wisdom traditions like the Bhagavad Gita, those kind of ancient texts from Hindu and even Buddhist texts. I think the themes came in from those that I think-
Kyle Gray: (32:25)
Absolutely.
John Jantsch: (32:26)
Yeah.
Kyle Gray: (32:27)
Yeah, yeah. I can see that emergent in many of the writers that I’ve read from that time. John, it’s been so much fun exploring-
John Jantsch: (32:37)
Yeah, thanks.
Kyle Gray: (32:37)
The different angles of your writing process and your philosophy and taking a break from the how-to tactical discussions of marketing that have made your podcast phenomenal, by the way.
John Jantsch: (32:52)
Thank you.
Kyle Gray: (32:52)
Anybody who hasn’t, I’ll have to jump the gun on promoting your show, Duct Tape Marketing.
John Jantsch: (32:58)
Thank you.
Kyle Gray: (32:58)
Excellent, excellent podcast, but John is there anything, any thoughts you’d like to leave us and then let us know where we can reach you.
John Jantsch: (33:06)
Sure, sure. Well, one is if you do listen to the Duck Tape Marketing podcast, Ryan Holiday is my guest next week on the show, speaking of The Daily Stoic. Of all the writing, the thing that’s come down to, kind of been a mantra for me, and this is one that you will find printed on T-shirts probably somewhere, but is Emerson’s call to action to insist on yourself, never imitate. I think that that would be my advice for anybody who’s doing it, trying to do it, thinking about doing it, that you hold fast to that that you are enough right now. You have enough right now. You have everything you need. You just have to really experience life enough to figure out what it is.
Kyle Gray: (33:54)
So true. So powerful, and again, tell us where we can find the book.
John Jantsch: (33:57)
Sure. If you can spell this, selfreliantentrepreneur.com, or get close to it and Google will direct you to it, but you can also find more about everything that I do at Duct Tape Marketing, which is ducttapemarketing.com.
Kyle Gray: (34:14)
I’ll admit that I’ve probably only been able to start successfully spelling the word entrepreneur in the last year and a half or something like that. It’s taken a lot of practice.
John Jantsch: (34:23)
George W. Bush famously said, “The problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” So true.
Kyle Gray: (34:35)
I was thinking of him again. Fool me once, can’t get fooled again. Anyway, before we go too far down that rabbit hole, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a total pleasure, John.
John Jantsch: (34:48)
My pleasure.
Kyle Gray: (34:49)
Thanks for listening to the Story Engine Podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes and resources mentioned on this episode and every other episode at thestoryengine.co.
If you’re looking to learn more about how to use storytelling to grow your business, then check out my new book, Selling With Story: How to Use Storytelling to Become an Authority, Boost Sales, and Win the Hearts and Minds of Your Audience. This book will equip you with actionable strategies and templates to help you share your unique value and build trust in presentations, sales, and conversations, both online and offline. Learn more at sellingwithstory.co.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.