A late night story session with Russell, talking about more of his failures that built his foundation. On this episode Russell looks back on things he did over a decade ago, and why he is bringing some of those things back, even though they were initially failures. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode: Find out what kinds of things Russell heard were good ideas, which he then tried, but didn’t have success with. See why some of those things he considered failures are coming in handy now that he has Clickfunnels. And find out why it’s important to try things, even if you fail at them. So listen here to find out why even when you consider something a failure, it has been a valuable part of your journey. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Right now I’m walking up my stairs in my house, about to go to bed, but there’s just something too cool on my mind that I got to share with you right now. So I just wanted to share a story that hopefully all you guys will have this same story in ten years from now, or twelve years from now, or fifteen years from now or whatever. But when you’re living it in the moment, it’s kind of annoying, but looking back in hindsight it’s the most amazing gift ever. So let me tell you what I’m talking about. So I first joined my first mastermind group over a decade ago now, and at the time I didn’t know how to do anything. I had a couple of websites, I had a little email list, I was selling stuff and I joined this mastermind group. It was Bill Glazer’s mastermind group. And I get in this group, and at the time, this is right before the real estate bubble popped like in 2008 or whatever that was. So in the group there were 18 people and nine of the 18 people were real estate coaches, teaching people how to make money in real estate. And then the other nine were all sorts of other weird businesses. So it was kind of cool, I came into this room and all these people doing amazing things. I’m sitting there and the first guy gets up and he talks about how he has a call center. I was like, “oh my gosh, I should have a call center.” And then the second guy gets up and he’s like, “Oh, I do live events.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I should do live events.” And the third guy gets up and he’s like, “I do local events.” I’m like, “I should do local events.” The next guy gets up, “I run radio ads.” I’m like, “I should be running radio ads.” And luckily for me at the time, I was super naive and didn’t know that I probably shouldn’t do all of them at once, so instead I’m like, “Dude, I need to do all of them at once.” So after my first set of meetings I go back home and sure enough I tried to do all those things at once. For example, one of them was, I remember there was a guy that was doing these local seminars and he would run radio ads and do direct mail and he’d fill these local seminars and people would come locally and come to the seminar and he’d sell something to them. And then from there he’d take them to another event and they’d have this whole process. So I got home and without even thinking I’m like, “We’re going to run local seminars.” And so we went and booked a Holiday Inn and I went, “How do we fill this event?” This is pre-facebook, pre-myspace, this is a decade plus ago. And I was like, “I don’t know. We could run direct mail.” So I call up some list broker that I found and I was like, “Do you guys have direct mail for people in Boise who want to get rich on the internet?” And they’re like, “Um, sure. We’ll sell you a list like that.” So they sold me a list of 5,000 names. And then I was like I gotta send a direct mail piece out. I’ve never written a direct mail piece before, but I just gotta figure it out. So I remember I made this postcard, and because it was in Boise it had a picture of me wrestling at Boise State. So I had a picture of wrestling on this business seminar. It was like, “Learn how a local