There’s no such thing as a born salesman, but little tweaks on your habits can make a huge difference on how you perform. In this episode, habit dynamic expert and Habit Finder President, Paul Blanchard joins Dan McCormick to talk about some mind habits that help increase performance among sales professionals. Paul introduces Cracking the Social Code, an online course that will teach you how to create real relationships on social media and convert those leads into increased sales performance. He also shares some of the most important things that he learned from Jack Welch, who is arguably one of the best salesmen we have in living memory. Join in for some great takeaways that will help set you up to do better and be better.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Mind Habits That Create Great Salesmen With Paul Blanchard Of Habit Finder

Paul Blanchard is not only the Co-Founder of The Og Mandino Company and the President, he’s got more titles than I can keep up with. President and Co-Founder of Habit Finder, Paul is considered a habit dynamics expert. He is a professional speaker, a corporate trainer, a business leader, a coach focused on inspiring and teaching creators and entrepreneurs around the globe. We also have a couple of things in common. We both married these incredible women that gave birth to four incredible daughters. We love the Og Mandino brand, the company, and the message of what Og stands for. We love talking about it, teaching it, and hopefully, sharing things that can make a difference in people’s lives. Paul, not only do we have all of those things in common. How are you?

I’m doing great, Dan. I’m excited to be here. We get an opportunity to interact strategically and logistically. It’s super fun to be here to chat and converse.

What I’m hoping for here, Paul, is coming from the seat that you come from. It’s always fascinating when someone hits a new crescendo in their business life. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m sure that the fourth quarter of 2020, the Og Mandino company got a new crescendo, found a new rhythm to impacting more lives at a faster rate than ever before. This is episode number 30. I remember when I reached out to you in 2020 and said, “Why don’t I invite the greatest salespeople in the world every week to come on the show?” You and your dad said, “Let’s do it.“ We got the website up. Everything is working great. I love asking my guests before we get into some other details. What do you think are three things that shaped each and every day of your life before we talk about this masterpiece that you have?

There are three things that I address. I say that deliberately because we almost do things that we think we always do. I don’t do anything perfectly and completely, but I strive for it. There are three things that I wrestle with is how I’ll put it every morning that have served me more than anything else. They’re what I call the three surrenders. First, I want to surrender to control. The great paradox of control and the highest form of control is realizing you have enough that there is no control. I don’t want to let go of control and let it go. That’s like, “I’m going to quit smoking because I’m going to quit.” You’ve got to replace it with something. Only a good habit can replace a bad habit. Only a productive thought process and outcome can replace a destructive one.

I don’t want people to surrender control for the sake of letting go of control because it sounds good, but surrendering control because it’s the only way you can truly influence. People want to take control, but they don’t stop to ask who they’re taking it from. That’s why I want to focus on letting go of control because then I can truly influence. When you’re building a volunteer army, however you might be doing that to get people to believe in your message, your mission, or to be a part of your product or service, the last thing you want to do is have a compliance-based force. You want a committed force. It’s nearly impossible to develop commitment with control. Control only equals compliance if you can grapple down on it. That’s the first one that I tried to shape my life every day, surrendering control.

The second one is to surrender constancy. There are many people who come to the Og Mandino Group and to Habit Finder trying to figure out how to solve the equation of consistency. The challenge is they’re trying to solve for the wrong result. They think they’re trying to solve for consistency. We study this in the human brain. What they’re doing is they’re trying to achieve constancy. They want to be constant. That’s how it’s taught. You’ve got to be on your game. You’ve got to do these same things. You’ve got to do this in a linear fashion. Life is rhythmic. Life is like beautiful music. It has crescendos, decrescendos, staccatos, faster pace, slower pace, and pauses. The magic going to the orchestra, all the wind and brass instruments take a big deep breath and try to blare out one note for as long as they can. That would be constant. We want to be consistent, which allows room to breathe. They realize that if we’re going to drive our lives and drive our businesses, it’s like driving our cars. You can’t do it without a brake and a gas.

Surrender trying to be constant so that you can be consistent, which means we’re not built to be linear. We’re built to have rhythm and diversity in terms of our experiences. Every day is going to be different. I love the sport of basketball and football. You win by scoring more points than your opponent. It’s not, “If you score three touchdowns, you win the game.” At the end of the day, you have more points than they do, you win. It’s the same thing in basketball. That’s true of your life. You’re facing a different opponent every day. Why shoot for three touchdowns when a touchdown was a win that day? Why get a touchdown when you needed five to win that day and you were in a position to take that on? Finding that consistency and rhythm is why I believe in surrendering in constancy which is another term for perfection. That’s what too many people are trying to do.

The third one is a little bit more sensitive. That’s to surrender comparison. A great spiritual mentor, I would say, of ours who has an identical belief system once said, “We will be in awe of the equality of our testing after this life.” That’s Boyd K. Packer. I have never been able to forget that. I had this vision that I’ve never been able to forget. I try to replay it because it’s served so well. I don’t have any judgment for anyone’s belief system. You believe in a higher power of the universe or nature. If you don’t believe in anything higher power than you at all, no judgment here. For those of you that believe in a higher power, more specifically, follow the principle.

I know many of you call that higher power, the same thing Dan and I call it God. I believe that no one will be able to stand before the judgment bar of God and say, “My life was harder than hers. My life wasn’t as hard as his.” We’re talking about a perfect father who set up an experience for us in this life. You think about a recording studio, Dan. You’ve got all the dials, the knobs and the switches, times that by a billion variables. Those are all the things that make our life rewarding and challenging. It’s different for all of us, but it’s equality. When we surrender control, we can influence. When we surrender constancy, we can be consistent. When we surrender comparison, we can truly serve. A lot of people talk about comparison up to the podium. “I wish I had. Why can’t I? If only I,” that victimhood comparison.

What doesn’t get talked about as much, which is as destructive is comparing down the podium. It sounds like this, “At least I’m not that. At least I’m not experiencing that.” Sometimes, it doesn’t sound as petty. Sometimes, it sounds heartfelt. “What do I have to complain about? My neighbor got diagnosed with cancer.” That’s comparison. You’re robbing yourself of the opportunity of experiencing your pain as yours that if you own it and allow it to be there rather than shrug it off, suppress it, bury it or get over it, if you own it and engrave it on your hearts, which is how we add to our character, then we can turn and be so much more available to serve our neighbor that got diagnosed with cancer. If we dismiss our pain, we’re losing one of our greatest assets. That’s the third thing. Surrender comparison so you can truly serve.

I want to thank you. I’ve got so many journals in my office, but the one that’s a few feet to my left here, I started that Monday morning ritual. I wrote down, “Make sure I surrendered a comparison.” I appreciate you answering that question. I’m blessed to be in this chair. How lucky am I that somebody put this in my hand as a nineteen-year-old young man? Somebody that couldn’t read well, didn’t learn well, didn’t have any of those skillsets, and yet it’s been a part of my life for every day since August 5th, 1982.

I cannot think about, “I will greet this day with love in my heart. Now I begin a new life.” Whatever scroll strikes your brain when you say those three things, I know you well enough to know that that’s cool. It’s genuine. It’s authentic. You can speak to it because you live it. A lot of people don’t know the scope of what the Og Mandino company does. Before I ask any other questions, give people an idea who don’t know the company what you do. We think about the Og Mandino company, he’s got a couple of dozen books that have impacted the lives of millions, but there’s a company behind that after he passed away, your dad, etc. Bring everybody up to speed on what you do and accomplish.

Og passed in ’96. He was never a guru. He never tried to be. He had two speeches he gave hundreds of times and wrote a couple of dozen incredible books. All the credit to the genesis of our company goes to my dad who lost everything in 1990. He spent ten years paying back over $1 million in debt, but he did it with film. He had gotten into the film industry a little bit before everything fell apart. He relied on that skillset to get through the ‘90s. He got into directing, editing, and script writing. At one point, he was asked, I believe in ’97, ’98 to write a feature film script for one of Og’s books. It was Og’s personal favorite that he wrote called The Christ Commission. My dad wrote a script for that. It never got produced into a movie. There were conflicts with how the production company wanted to do it. Bette, to her credit, never wanted Og’s writings altered at all and defending his legacy.

In 2000, Bette, Og’s widow, called my dad and said, “Are you interested in the film rights for The Greatest Salesman in the World?” He said, “Yes.” It started as a film transaction, as an opportunity to go try and produce a movie that people have wanted to create for decades, which isn’t processed where Netflix is involved. Good things are happening moving that forward, which is awesome. Shortly thereafter, it was, “Let’s build a company out of it.” He said to Bette, “I love coaching and consulting. I’ve been in that space before, medical management, real estate and other areas. This book was so impactful in my life. Let’s carry it on.” She said, “Sure.”

The first couple of years, we’re creating audio programs out of this book, taking the scrolls and turning them into keys for success and other lessons. It was okay. There were a lot of consultants who had known Og, were friends of his. When they found out that Og Mandino company was coming around, they wanted to get involved. I think we did about $56,000 in three years, which doesn’t pay the bills. My dad asked, “What are we supposed to do?” He got a specific answer. “You’re supposed to create this. I’ve given you the foundation. The foundation you gave Og many years ago in that overnight download where he wrote all ten scrolls in one night. We’ve got the foundation of principles. We’ve got to build a structure on top of it for the 21st century.” All deference to Og into the ten scrolls.

If he was here in this show, he would tell you, “I didn’t write them. I took dictation.” We get to stand on the shoulders of his humility and ability combining to write that book as a foundation. We’ve built beyond that, but it is that foundation that allowed us to do it that was wanting to find measurements. Og said in scroll one, “The other mind that makes us act in ways we do not comprehend that never sleeps, that’s not a fair fight. What is that?” He went on to write many other things in the scrolls that neuroscience has validated in the last decade. It’s crazy to think of the rate of inspiration that he had. We wanted to understand that other mind, habits. What habits is Og talking about? Brushing your teeth? Probably not. You pay attention to the writing. It was talking about the source of habits, which is how we think. We’ve got our behavioral habits. We’ve got our emotional habits. At the core are the neurological habits, the patterns of how your brain operates. How do we get to that?

Og gave us principles that if you relentlessly read them every day, three times a day through neuroscience, what they called density focus, it will seep-in and make an impact. How do we make it even more intentional? How do we make it more exposed and not quite as blunt of an instrument in the philosophical realm of personal development where it’s a-has and things that make you feel good but don’t make a difference because no a-ha in the world has ever done a lick of work? It’s about being able to implement and understand the unconscious patterns that are holding you back. What you think is only a small fraction of what you’re thinking. What you think you think is only a small fraction of what you’re thinking.

You got 50,000 to 80,000 conscious thoughts a day. That’s what we try and wrestle. About 80% of those are the same thoughts we had the day before. We’re wrestling with similar patterns, but we forget all about 1 million to 2 million unconscious thoughts that are going on under the hood and under the surface. We can’t see them. We can’t consciously acknowledge and they’re unconscious patterns. How do we get to that? Long story short, we found the University of Tennessee, the Hartman Institute. Dr. Robert Hartman, another inspired individual. This is my cameo, my opportunity to make me sound way smarter than I am. Dr. Hartman created the formal science of axiological mathematics based on transfinite calculus and the concept of infinitives.

Habit Finder: Only a productive thought process can replace a destructive one.

The only reason we share that is those of you experienced know why. Those of you that are going to experience the Habit Finder, when you get your results and go, “It took me ten minutes or less with no questions online. It’s telling me things about myself that no one would know,” it’s looking at the patterns of your brain objectively. It’s a weird process. It’s strange. For those of you who haven’t taken it, you can go to HabitFinder.com and take it. It’s weird because it’s not a personality test. We call it The Un-Personality Test. It’s going under the surface of all that.

We’ve spent the last several years with over 250,000 people honing how it’s built, its accuracy and its application to practical lives to be able to develop something that gets to the heart of what you’re dealing with in your head in ten minutes that a master coach would need six months of intuitive exploration to start to get hints about. I tell people, “It’s like a Nintendo cheat code. You feel like it’s up, down, left, right.” I feel like it’s cheating because I get to get on with someone in fifteen minutes and get right to the heart of where they’re at. We’ve built an entire company around that. You know Dan, our mission is to make personal development personal again. It became a promotional philosophical marketing game.

We should add the tag to go from personal development to personal, not promotional. I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s so true. It’s an easy thing for people to promote. They can use four–letter words to promote it on the cover of books to get your attention and stuff that doesn’t jive. When I first took the assessment, it was a fax machine. It was $1,800 or $1,200. Dave reaches out to me through a mutual friend. Unfortunately, he passed away. God bless him. Now you’ve got something so simple like you said, ten minutes online, and results come in. The company has hundreds of thousands of data points on the Habit Finder-esque stuff for entrepreneurs.

As we move that forward, going to the essence of time, I’m looking at the title on the screen. I’m looking at all these people jumping in. I’m saying, “This is the show.” Talk about how you went from the measurement, which is so critical to what we all want but getting to be the greatest salesman. You had something show up in your life in 2020 that said, “This is going to change our world,” and it has. Bleed into that if you can.

We have been for many years completely dedicated to pure mindset. We allow the client to bring the infrastructure and the utility to the relationship. We’ve always gone to companies that already had utility. They already had a system. We do a lot of work in direct sales. We do a lot of work with solo entrepreneurs and with sole proprietors. We do a lot of work with big sales forces where they’ve already got an infrastructure. However, we’ve had the stitch. There’s some utility that Habit Finder should connect to. When you bring utility to it, it becomes an arena that gamifies working on your habits of thinking. It’s like how they hide veggies in kids’ drinks. We set it up in a way that you’re working on yourself, but you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing because you’re focused on getting these tasks done in the competition of keeping up with everybody. You’re seeing the results come in. Where is this?

Candidly, we looked at Amazon. We thought, “We could find Amazon experts. We could build a utility course for Amazon.” We may still because that’s a great platform, but it didn’t seem to flow the way that we thought it would if it was the right answer. We looked in a couple of other places and then we started to realize we were in some of our group coaching sessions. We were teaching people how to intrinsically validate other people on social media. We’re teaching people how to bring the principles of mental rehearsal and power sessions to the way they showed up on social media, the way they did Facebook Lives, and whatever else.

What we realized is we were teaching people how to put the social back in social media. To be social, you and I were talking about this, it comes from the Old Norse language, the Vikings language that means companion. Social media gave us lightning-speed access to human beings. Somewhere along the way, we assume that gave us lightning-speed access to relationships being developed. Relationships still take time, integrity, and authenticity. We still want to progress them line upon line, precept-upon-precept. That’s how it works. It always worked. Not all of them work out by design. You have one of my favorite MOs in sales period. I make friends and some of them buy from me. It doesn’t get more abundant than that. It clicked. Social media is our arena.

We don’t have many clients, if any, where their influence on social media doesn’t benefit their mission, message, product, or their influence that there’s a reason for them to be there. There are plenty of challenges with social media. We don’t dig into the politics of social media or cyber-bullying. We want to be aware of all those things. The simplest thing I would do to reframe that for everybody is social media is like a grocery store. You may not realize this, but a grocery store is designed to get you to buy stuff you don’t need by putting the stuff you most commonly need in the back. It’s milk and eggs. You’ve got to walk past the tchotchkes, the unhealthy food, and all that stuff by design.

Social media is no different. It’s designed to suck you into browsing, mindless entertainment, trolls, and get into arguments that don’t matter. If you know why you’re going there and you can go right to the back, get what you need and get out, it’s still the best place to go. We had no idea in January 2020 how valuable this journey was going to become. Every other time, Og Mandino showing up at that moment in my dad’s life with the film rights to the scrolls. A dream that my dad had that led to the University of Tennessee and Dr. Robert Hartman. The instinct my dad had in 2007 to withdraw from some of our clientele and some of the things we’re doing that we didn’t believe were in alignment with where the world was heading.

Suddenly, 2008 happened. We had already been entrenched in getting deeper and getting more prepared for we didn’t know what. We were able to hit that curve on the way out of 2008 because we were ready to help people where they were at. As soon as they cut their breaths from getting the wind knocked out of them, we’d spent the year leading up to 2008 getting ready for something we didn’t realize was going to happen. The same thing happened in January of 2020. I was talking to a client of mine. He’s a white hat hacker. The lesson in all of this, Dan, is Hafid didn’t lay in his room dreaming about being the greatest salesman in the world. He got his butt out and went on a perilous journey to go track him down.

Cold, wet, hot, steamy, every possible temperature you can go through. He didn’t know where he’s going to live.

Nothing amazing happens to people in the parking lot. It happens on the trail. All these things happen on the trail. We’re on the trail of growing as a company. I’m talking to my client. He’s a white hat hacker, cyber-security expert. He’s a big deal. His office smells of mahogany and leather-bound books. When the White House has issues with cybersecurity, they call him and his firm. He’s had offices in the oval office. He’s been overseas, dignitaries, places, kings and queens, you name it. That guy is amazing. It happens to Moonlight as a Facebook actor. Not that he tries to hack Facebook, he impacts the algorithm, tries to figure out how to get around it, get past it, how to get to the eggs and the milk in the back of the grocery store, and get back out.

It’s still in a world where social currency is critical for goodwill and for sales. Facebook is still the bank of social currency. People want to talk all day and spin things about losing. Look at the stats, people. Everyone wants to say, “This is the latest and greatest,” but people aren’t leaving Facebook and all those other apps aren’t relevant until they add the share to Facebook button. We’re going to stick with that one. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon, for good or for bad. However, this guy showed me how we can get to the back of the store without having to get distracted by all the other stuff. Get more eyeballs. Even the people that hate Facebook are on Facebook saying they hate Facebook. They’re still there.

He started telling me some things. “Paul, do this at this time of the day and then do this with it. Do these few things and watch what happens.” We do it and be like, “How did that happen? He’s heat mapping. He’s studying the types of posts, all these different things. Why don’t you teach this?” He said, “I can’t. I choose not to.” When you live in the dark web and you live in cybersecurity, you do not have a public profile. You don’t put yourself in a high-profile position in any way. It’s not even in the same industry. I said, “That makes sense. Can I teach it?” He’s like, “That would be great.” He came to have a fighter for a reason because he wanted to work on his mindset. He wanted to work on his patterns of thinking to develop those habits that Og was talking about.

We weaved our principles into this arena of social media. We spent most of 2020 building this out. We launched it in November. Little did we know when we were ready to launch how incredibly necessary it was going to be when the world shut down. Not looking like it’s epically changing anytime soon. An opportunity to reframe some of our opportunities to be social, bring life, love, and intrinsic connection even to a digital platform. That’s what we created. It’s called Cracking the Social Code. It put us on a different trajectory. We never had a utility course. We were hoping it would be good. We had no idea it would be this good.

I had no idea. When you first told me about it, I had you come to speak on my personal page. I didn’t repeat it very well, but a couple of people started using it and started saying, “I can’t believe that I’m getting coaching on how, when, where, why, and making posts that don’t make sense sometimes.” You’re saying things like, “We don’t want you to comment.” All these little nuances to Cracking the Social Code, which is streaming across the bottom that is going to help you become the greatest salesperson in the world. It’s interesting to tie in philosophy for living in life and a system for living in life that ties into your business where 2.5 billion people are connected right there on Facebook. Get out of the pond.

In my pond, it’s thousands of people that can go to hundreds of thousands or billions of people. If people can go to Cracking the Social Code, what do they get for that $297? This is the time of the show where I do the commercial. You’re the guy that wrote the commercial. I‘ll let you answer the question of what does someone get if they want to become the greatest salesperson in the world? They want to get the ocean working for them out there in social media. What is entailed in that $297?

I’ll start with this. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing if no one knows that you’re doing it. That’s what this provides, influence, reach, eyeballs, ears. What you choose to do with that is up to you, but you’ll have a hard time doing it if you don’t do it with the principles that Og taught. Og Mandino gave us ten of the greatest keys for building success on the planet, truth, love, persistence, miracles, urgency, stability, laughter, vision, action, and guidance. That’s a complete foundation. If you violate those, Cracking the Social Code won’t for you. You can go on, get the algorithm hacks, and try them out but we’ve built it in a way that if you want reach and influence, it is a prerequisite that you care about people.

Habit Finder: Social media is like a grocery store. It’s designed to get you to buy stuff you don’t need by putting the stuff you most commonly need at the very back.

It’s not about getting followers. It’s about connecting to priceless and intrinsic human beings. There’s strategy involved. We want you to get a lot of followers. We want you to get a lot of eyeballs, likes, and comments but we want them to be quality. We want them to give you an opportunity to connect. What we do is we give you simple, bite-sized things of what to do every day, five days a week. We’ve found out from our cyber ninja. We call them my client. The cyber ninja said, “You only have to be intentional on social media Monday to Friday.”

You can hop on there Saturday and Sunday. I would be more personal if you do and spend more time noticing what other people are doing because that’s when they’re being more personal. It tells you exactly what to do that day, when to do it, simple stuff. I had one of my clients come back to me and say, “Paul, I’ve invested over $50,000 in social media training. This is the first time I’ve ever seen one where you don’t take 45 minutes to explain a 5-minute concept. Thank you.” There is a little bit of a game and over-pontificating so that you can sound more valuable. We get right to the point so you can get to results.

I want to emphasize that because when you say that right to the point, it’s interesting. A lot of people would like to be on social media less. That’s the point of Cracking the Social Code is to be on social media when it’s win-win for you and the people you’re connecting with, not just hanging out there all day long. It has a specific purpose, a point at a time, and a place to do business.

That’s what we focus on Habit Finder. We don’t want your coaching with us to feel like you’re doing more. We want it to turn into you getting to do less because you’re being more intentional, clearer, and efficient. It’s the same approach across the board.

It’s amazing the people that are reading. There are some skilled people. There are some high net worth individuals that create astronomical amounts of business. You’ve been able to tap in with their life as a coach or the Habit Finder course. Coming the HabitFinder.com/SocialVIP. Cracking the Social Code is the right way to say it. One of my mentors, Sterling W. Sill said, “Everybody wants more, but few people are willing to spend more time on the system to get more, to create the bigger funnel, to get into the ocean.” For a few dollars a day, you’re giving people this opportunity. It’s a six-week course. You can opt into the pro-course after that, correct me if I’m wrong. Talk a little bit about that.

If you’re fairly new to social media, you don’t have much of a following or you’ve been inconsistent, you can go through the first course. They always start on a Monday. Any Monday you want to start, you can start. You purchase the course. You’ve got eight weeks to get through the six weeks. If you want to go back through it several times, a lot of people do to continue to layer and stage their social proofing and all the techniques we teach in there. You also get a lot of high-touch support when you’re actively a part of the course.

We give a live launch call every week to new people. We give a live support call every week to people to give high-touch support. That’s how we’re built. We want to see you succeed, not just leverage you for, “At least we don’t have to do any work for that. We got some extra dollars.” We’ll never build anything like that. You get those things. It’s $49 a month if you want to keep going through it and keep layering. You can opt-in if you feel you’re prepared to into the pro-course, which takes it even up another level.

You gave me the idea to surrender to comparison. I’ve been writing that down. I get to talk about this thing called The Greatest Salesman. Often I get the most amazing people. This is the first time anyone from The Og Mandino Company has come on to talk about this. Here we are on a show. Who knows that people are going to read this? Years from now, they’re on TheGreatestSalesman.com page. Maybe they’re on Apple or iHeart. They say, “Cracking the Social Code.” They can become a part of this. Rarely do we talk about this word salesman. You come from one of the great CEOs in the world, Jack Welch. This guy was so good systematically, but he was a genuine, authentic leader in a unique way. How can you tie that into what Og writes about from Jack Welch’s mind?

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for twenty years. When he retired in 2001, it was the biggest, most profitable company in the world. No company had reached the heights that General Electric had. They were worth over $400 billion. That was unheard of in that time. I had a couple of fortunate things happen. One is I got a call that said, “You’re on a shortlist that people were thinking about that Jack wants to be the director of the Jack Welch Management Institute.” I was like, “That’s amazing. Who’s Jack Welch?” I didn’t know who he was because those weren’t my circles. That was knee deep in Og Mandino, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, dream creators, entrepreneurs and stuff like that. Jack was a corporate guy.

I remember I got winning straight from the gut and read through them as quickly as possible on the airplane and the hotel. I’m in a conference room sitting across from Jack. I’m glad it happened that way because I got the unique opportunity after his career, this was a decade after he retired, to get to know the man before I got to know the media. Grant Cardone said that if no one hates what you’re doing, no one knows what you’re doing. When you hit the profiles that Jack hit, when you retire and they give you $750 million retirement package, you’re a high-profile target.

There are a lot of people that didn’t like Jack. There are a lot of people that the media was constantly trying to turn them down. Interestingly enough, they call them Neutron Jack because they thought he was there to fire people. They would constantly try and find people that he fired that were shocked they got fired and they could never find somebody. He also preached everyone as good on the way out as you did on the way in. I got to know this man. I got to know this person who most people didn’t know had a PhD in Chemical Engineering. He was a numbers guy. He was an engineer mind. Nobody knew that. He spent his entire career trying to get better with people.

You knew he didn’t need to work on his numbers. He didn’t need to work on his spreadsheets because that came naturally to him. He spent more time trying to understand people. He got to this point where he could feel people as he would say in the marrow of his bones. He cared about them. You may have some emotional preferences that you don’t like the way he demonstrated that care at times, but people certainly appreciated it. He knew that one of the best ways to care about people was to help them win. I got the opportunity to spend time with him, building a top 25 MBA program.

When I started learning about what the media would say about him, I could definitely see how that interpretation could be taken across. I could see why someone might think that Brad Pitt’s a jerk because the one time they saw him in Park City and walked up to him to get an autograph, he was like, “I’m busy. I’m with my family.” “What a jerk.” It’s not hard to see somebody on a bad day when you don’t see them often. I talked to Jack almost every day for the years that I worked with him. He cared. He’s one of the most intuitive people I’ve ever met in my life. He understands that the greatest weapon in the world is love. Sometimes, you felt like he loved you enough to kick your butt, if not more than sometimes. You never have to wonder why and if he cared about your wellbeing.

I remember I went to dinner with him once in Florida. He asked what I was up to. I said, “I’m training for an adventure race, training for a trail run.” It’s 26 miles, 5,600 feet, and elevation changes. It’s crazy. He started asking me about it. We went on in the conversation. I was in dinner with him in New York six months later. Do you know what he asked as soon as we got to dinner? “How was the race?” As if he had been taking notes and send a note to his assistant, “Remind me.” It’s all a muscle he’s developed because of how much he cares about people. They matter to him. He’s known for being candid. If you get behind the scenes with Jack, candor is a two-way road.

There are lots of people out there who claim to be good at candor because they can tell people like it is, but if other people can’t feel like they can say it back, you’re not understanding what candor is all about. If they’re not feeling understood, you’re not connecting with them and allowing them to feel like the most important person in the world in front of you, even if it’s a tough conversation. I watched Jack day in and day out do this. He would do a live call every semester with our students in our MBA program. They would all ask about strategy, negotiation, hiring, and all this stuff. He always brings it back to, “You’ve got to care about people. None of that stuff matters if you don’t care about people. It’s all going to fall flat. It’s building your house upon the sand.” I heard him ad nauseam. He’s trying to get this to sink in.

That’s when about the same time that I felt like it was time to move forward in my career. I got to participate in building something amazing. I didn’t think they needed to pay someone what they were paying me to stick around. I didn’t stick around just to maintain something. We’ve done some incredible stuff. Thunderbird has shut down. It’s one of the biggest MBA programs in the world. We were growing 40% year-over-year. That’s what I was brought in for, to grow it. We have grown it significantly. I called my dad and said, “FYI, catching up on life. By the way, I’m going to move on in my career.” He said, “That’s interesting. I need a partner I can trust.” I was like, “Good luck with that.”

Do you know what one of the kickers was for me? It’s watching Jack try to help people understand how important people need to be up to you and not being able to teach it the way he could teach strategy, negotiation, and hiring. I’m looking at my dad and going, “My dad can teach what Jack instinctively knows is the most important thing there is. I want to go and be a part of that. What I’ve been a part with this man, what I’ve seen that he’s created that you can care about people and create a $400 billion company. You can run a company, not with 200,000 individuals that all feel like you know their name.” I want to go get into the brain, patterns, and habits that prevent people from being able to do that more intentionally and be able to, if anything, pay homage to what allowed Jack to be great. That’s caring about people intentionally and successfully. I came on board with Habit Finder and the rest is history. Jack passed away in 2020. I miss him. Thoughts are with Suzy constantly.

They were amazing partnership. They worked together and were amazing in all the contributions that they did.

There’s a lot of judgment around that partnership. I get it in terms of some of our moral and religious conditioning. They were beautiful companionship.

It brings tears to my eyes when you hear about the real human condition, the backstory behind the story. I wonder in closing if we could take it in this way. I’m talking to the audience, those that will read this, years from now. You talked about the three surrenders. When you look out into your company and your clients, what’s the first thing that comes to mind on the show for you? You mentioned all the scrolls and all those things. What comes to mind if I say, what are you thinking about?

Habit Finder: When you stand in the face of truth, some of your truth needs to die.

That’s the thing I think about the most when I look at this book. It’s not the scrolls. It’s the impact that truth has on us that we underestimate. Right before scroll one, how feed has given the ten scrolls. It talks about what they feel like the leather is alive. They’re in the cedar chest that I can only imagine looks quite majestic. Pathros has trusted him with these. He’s looking at a real live example of someone who has more money that could ever spend and was given the steps to being able to do that. His first order of business is to slide them under his cock, curl up in the fetal position, and cry, feeling so overwhelmed that he’s not going to be able to do it.

A lot of people call that a fear of failure. It’s not. It’s a fear of success. When we stand in front of truth like the scrolls, like what the Habit Finder reveals, it is terrifying for the brain to be that exposed, to try to reach for its excuses, it’s rationalizations, and have them fall apart like sand through your fingers in the face of truth. That’s a fear of success. Your brain wants to keep you safe. Keep you predictable is what it means. When you stand in the face of truth, some of your truth needs to die, the truth that’s kept you stuck, the truth that’s kept you comfortable, the truth that’s kept you playing small. You’re small. You’re comfortable. You’re stuck. It’s different for everybody. Some people are stuck at millions of dollars. Other people are stuck at dead broke. Some people are dead broke spiritually and have millions of dollars. Some people don’t have much money and are so incredibly abundant in other areas.

We’re talking about across the board to be able to find this space that you’ll know you’re finding it because you’re going to run into tremendous resistance from yourself, trying to protect yourself. That’s a fear of failure. We talked about that constancy. You start reading the scrolls. You start implementing the principles that Habit Finder teaches. You start seeing results but then you start to sabotage yourself because the brain is like, “Is it going to be this hard every day?” They’re not realizing that it gets better. It gets more natural over time. That’s why I’ve talked about habits. That’s the hard now, that’s easier later. It’s hard to build new habits but once they’re built, you get dividends on that for the rest of your life.

There are some people who will comment that this is a hard day. They’ve had a rough day. I’m so appreciative that you chose to go there. It’s the page I opened to. No kidding. I had no idea what you’re going to say. I turned to that page and he says he threw himself on his cot, weary from his travels, and sobbed until he slept. I know there are people reading that don’t know where those next sales are going to come from. We know that Hafid felt, to some degree, this gigantic failure. Here’s this star following him all the way and the whole world lights up. That’s the point. To follow Cracking the Social Code.

You don’t know where that star is shining, where that contact is out there in that ocean that might grab a bite of that hook and reach out and say, “We ought to connect.“ You’re a genuine, authentic, real person. You’re not like all these other promotional hopium people on Facebook. You’re giving me something of value here. I’m so glad you went there and closing. I love that. I know our readers love that. I feel like we can talk for another hour. We can’t, due to time. You mentioned the mission statement of the company, but do you have something that you’d like Paul Blanchard to be remembered by?

The only thing that comes to mind is something I’ve been sharing lately in terms of getting on some of these new platforms and stuff like Clubhouse that you told me about. I don’t want to be your expert. I don’t want you to think what I think. I want to have the humility and the courage to help you stop thinking the things that you’re thinking that are holding you back, finding a familiarity, a draw to being in the conflict of life, and in the hypocrisy of life. In the counterintuitive area of life is where it’s beautiful. The book I was reading said, “One of the most destructive human conditions is believing that we’re a finished product.” I hope everyone wakes up every morning and goes through every day, not trying to reach a finished product but being curious about your humanity. Being curious about who you are and who you’re becoming when you didn’t even realize you were becoming it and getting an opportunity to find that truth that creates that resistance, that requires old truths to die so that you can continue to grow and be reborn and you can begin a new life.

Thank you. What a terrific time it’s been to spend with you. For all of our readers, how about that? We get to go inside the mind and inside the office at the Og Mandino Company, and get a little depth of granularity. A little clarity here on the three surrenders from Paul Blanchard. Paul, thank you very much for being here. Episode number 30 is truly going to be one for the ages. I believe in I begin a new life. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us. Please like the show, comment on the show, add the page to your followers, leave us a comment, and a review on the show site. Signing off on behalf of all of our readers and my good friend, Paul Blanchard. Have the greatest day of your life.

Important Links:

• The Og Mandino Company
• Habit Finder
• The Christ Commission
• Cracking the Social Code
• HabitFinder.com/SocialVIP

About Paul Blanchard