There’s just one problem with Michael’s book … he spelled “bigg” wrong!

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This book is about the financial crisis on Wall Street. What we found so interesting is that he doesn’t focus on the names we so often hear in the news – people like Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson – who he believes didn’t really know what was going on until all of us knew it.

He focuses, instead, on a handful of people who predicted the disaster was coming. He says, out of tens of thousands of professionals, there were only ten or twenty people in the whole world who spotted it in time to act upon it.

Not being a doctor is what the doctor ordered

In the 60 Minutes interview, Steve Kroft also interviews one of those people, Dr. Michael Burry. As a boy he had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. When they operated on him to remove the tumor, he could no longer see out of his left eye.

He didn’t let that stop him from becoming a physician. There was just one problem. He also has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that affects a person’s ability to socialize.

Because of that, he found it difficult to deal with his patients day in and day out. So he quit practicing as a doctor and started Scion Capital, a hedge fund. At that time, he had $40,000 in assets and $145,000 in student loans.

Sitting in front of his computer looking for investments was just what the doctor ordered! It sure turned out to be a great prescription!

Discovering an opportunity

As early as 2003, he was tracking the pools of sub-prime mortgages that Wall Street was selling to investors. He began plowing through hundreds of prospectuses (We checked it; that’s the plural!) for these pools of securities.

And let’s face it … anyone who can stand to read through even one prospectus is a very special person!

He noticed that the mortgages going into these pools were declining in quality quarter after quarter. Yet neither investors nor the rating agencies seemed to notice.

Acting on his intuition

He kept watching the market and predicted that disaster would hit in 2007 when the teaser rates on the sub-prime mortgages in these pools reset.

This gets pretty technical. There’s an excerpt of the book over at Vanity Fair if you want all the details. His problem was that there was no good way to directly place a bet on his idea.

But he didn’t let that deter him! He’s a bigg goal-getter so he pressed on!

Yeah, he determined that the best way to put his money on the table would be through an insurance agreement called a credit-default swap. But they didn’t exist on sub-prime mortgage bonds.

So he talked with five investment banks that he thought would likely survive the impending calamity. Two of them were interested. He invested.

Two years later – in 2007 – his bet paid off bigg time. His hedge fund made a profit of $725 million!

Bigg success is about entrepreneuring your life. Here are four lessons in this story about bigg success:

Adversity often leads to opportunity
We won’t go into all the details here. You can read the Vanity Fair article or buy the book. But Michael Burry is who he is because he only has one good eye. His first career wasn’t a good fit because of Asperger’s syndrome. But he landed in a place that fit him perfectly. Look at the adversity you’ve faced for clues to where you’ll find bigg success.

Do your homework
Bigg success is life on your own terms. A key negotiating principle is that you can either set the price or the terms, not both. So if you set the terms, bigg success will set the price. Michael Burry leads us by example here. Remember the prospectuses?

Don’t be afraid to define the world differently than the crowd
And that includes the experts! There is wisdom in crowds but there’s also madness!

There’s a great quote by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi that really helps illuminate this point:

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

Everybody could have seen the same thing that Michael Burry saw. In fact, he was surprised nobody figured out what he was doing. Thinking for yourself often pays bigg!

If the vehicle you need doesn’t exist, create it
This is somewhat of a compilation of the first three. Yet it deserves its own place. This is what entrepreneuring is all about. If it’s beyond your scope, find someone who can profit by doing it and buy from them.

Don’t let some little thing keep you from bigg success. Michael Burry didn’t. He pitched his idea and found a willing provider.

It was worth $725 million. Now that’s bigg success!

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There are five elements of bigg success – money, time, growth, work and play.

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Financial plan

Experts tell us that we need a financial plan. So we go to a financial planner. They help us create a plan to fund major events. That’s a good thing. But it may not go far enough.

Some of the most important questions may not get asked. So the financial plan may be too money-centric.

For example, the best investment you can make may not have anything to do with stocks and bonds and retirement plans.

Your financial plan can suck the life right out of you!

Career plan

We think we need a career plan. It’s what we’re told to do.

However, you can’t look at your career independent of the other elements of bigg success. For example, your career affects your money and your money affects your career.

If you’re not careful, your career plan can suck the life right out of you!

Personal production plan

The experts say we need a personal production plan to get the most done in the shortest amount of time. It’s definitely important.

However, it’s really easy to get really busy doing a whole lot of things that don’t take you where you really want to go.

Before you know it, your personal production plan can suck the life right out of you!

Put life into your plans

The bigg idea behind bigg success is synergy. Among other things, you want to find synergy between the five elements of bigg success.

It’s easy to lose sight of the bigg picture; it’s easy to forget to look at your life holistically. All too often, we focus on one specific area at a time.

We think one reason for that is because there are specialists in each area who focus on that one area so we get focused on that one area. Another is our need to organize. Sometimes it seems easier to compartmentalize things.

The problem is you end up with a plan that sucks the life right out of you!

So let’s look at two steps to put life into your plans:

1. Visualize the life you dream of living.

Think about the house (or houses) you want to live in. What does it look like? Where is it? Picture it in detail – the style, the color, the number of bedrooms.

What do you want to drive? Do you want to drive? Maybe you want a chauffeur.

What do you see yourself doing day-to-day? Are you working or are you playing? How much are you working? What type of work are you doing? Where are you doing it?

Think about your time away from work. What are you doing then?

Where are you vacationing? 

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I can see it now, George. We’re in the Caribbean, walking on a beautiful, white sand beach. It goes on and on. I can smell the water as a gentle breeze hits me in the face. I can hear the birds. I can picture some kids playing up ahead of us.

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You want to get a clear picture of these things in your mind, using all of your senses. Let your mind go. Don’t put any restraints on yourself. I always find it helpful to write the ideas down as they come to me.

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2. Ask yourself Why?

Why do you want the things you visualized? Why are they important to you?

This seems like a simple question on the surface. But you’ll see that it raises some complex issues.

What you’ll find is that, upon reflection, many of the things you pictured in Step 1 aren’t really that important to you. They may be nice. However, they may not be worth the sacrifice. Or one thing may be in conflict with another.

Here’s where the life comes in. Let’s say you did visualize that chauffeur-driven limousine. It’s an investment that can pay for itself if you need to drive a lot.

Non-productive time can now be productive time.

But it means that you have to make more money to end up with the same amount of money. You may decide you don’t want that stress.

You may start visualizing other ways to make your drive time productive.
Now you’re putting life into your plans. That’s planning for bigg success

How do you put life into your plans?

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I have to ask, Douglas. How do you do it all? My gosh…

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I get that question a lot. I'll give you my secret. I tell people, especially when they're getting into podcasting, that you have to integrate it into your life. The fact is, we produce content everyday and we throw it away! We don't record it on video or audio or we don't have our iPhone on us. When I write a column, it comes directly out of my own life, out of the dealings I've had with a client or a peer that day. It's just the point of capturing what you already do and then having a mechanism – a place to put it. You have to have a blog or a podcast set up so that when you do capture something it's easy to say "Here it is".

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That's something you do really well with Careers in New Media, combining career tips with free online tools to help people market themselves and showcase their specialties.

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Career success depends on it

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My whole thing is about visibility. I stumbled across that idea about three years ago. Success of your career depends on you making what you do and how well you do it visible to as many people as possible. Using new media – online video and audio – is a great way to do it. We have the ability these days to reach out to whatever audience we can find and let people know what we do and how well we do it.

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Your New Media Interchange site is a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to learn how to start using these tools to promote their abilities.

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You bet. I get so many questions throughout the day from so many different people – people who have the ability to pay, people who don’t have the ability to pay, people who are just getting started and people who are experienced. So I put together New Media Interchange as a way of bringing people together around the concept of new media. It serves two purposes: first, to show people what new media is, what it is all about, and what it can do for them; second, to allow the community to share information both from me and amongst themselves about new media, how to create it, how to make videos, post them online and stuff like that.

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And Douglas, one of your more recent endeavors is CareerCampLA. Tell us about that.

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CareerCampLA is, in this case, a hybrid conference unconference. An unconference is almost the antithesis of your typically planned conference where you have all the speakers lined up, it's very expensive to go to and it's held at some fancy hotel where you have to spend a couple hundred dollars a night. An unconference is organized by a few local organizers and then the conference program – what’s being presented – is actually defined by the attendees. With CareerCampLA, we have a few planned speakers – I am one of them as are the two of you – but the majority of the schedule, both for speaking slots and breakout sessions, is going to be determined entirely by the attendees who come that day.

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That sounds wonderful! How can people get the information that will be shared if they can't be there?

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We won't be able to live stream there. It's being held at the Congregational Church of Northridge. They do have internet but it's your typical standard DSL. But, one of my big things about any conference is that you should capture all the content you are creating and share it as widely as possible. So we're going to make a bigg effort to capture as much as possible and then put that up on the website. So even if you can't be there in person, you will be able to get some of the great content that will be there.

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The most important part of creating your own unconference

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Douglas, before we let you go, there are a lot of people out there who have great ideas and who could put together a community. Do you have any suggestions for anyone who wants to create their own unconference?

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The best thing about it is finding like-minded people in your area. Over the last five or six months, I've run into several people (like you guys) who are dedicated to helping people with their careers. These include career consultants and entrepreneurial consultants. We were sitting around at one of the other events I do called LA Friday Coffee …

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That's just your excuse to go drink coffee!

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Well, yeah! Actually it is my excuse to get out on a Friday night. But anyway, we were sitting there and I realized, we've got a half a day of conference content sitting right here at this table. So why don't we do something! Once it hit me that I had all this content in my back pocket it was easy to say, "My dad's got a barn, let's put on a show!"

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So reach out to your network and put your minds together to make something happen.

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You bet. The great thing about unconferences is that it doesn't take some splashy personality and it doesn't take a lot of money. The hardest thing will be finding a venue, which we were lucky to find easily for this event. But I'll even tell people to not forgo the city park because the most important thing is getting people together and getting them talking. Everything else is secondary.

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Now Douglas, one last question … is 7-Up the only soft drink allowed at an unconference?

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Oh geez, because it's the uncola!

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Ba-Dum-Bump!

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Thanks Douglas. We’re looking forward to CareerCampLA!

Douglas is a great guy who gives and gives to his communities. We highly recommend him to you. Here are some additional places to find Douglas online: DouglasEWelch.com or WelchWrite.com

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Bob, you really helped clarify something in my mind with that answer about the short- and long-term. So being a Go-Giver doesn’t mean being any less assertive; it just means being assertive in a different way?

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Being a Go-Giver should never be confused with being a martyr or a doormat. It doesn’t mean you’re giving away your stuff for free. There’s a time and place for that of course but it’s to establish value or charity. As you know the first law is to provide more in value than you take in payment. I’m always cautious to make sure people understand that being a Go-Giver doesn’t mean you sacrifice your own needs.

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There’s the Law of Receptivity.

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It’s important to be able to receive. When someone says, “I’m a Go-Giver in four of the five laws. I just don’t make any money.” Well, they’re really not a Go-Giver. They may be a giver. But they’re not serving others by not making money because the fact is that you make money in direct proportion to how many people you serve and how much value you add to them.

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There’s a term you use often in your new book. What’s a MacGuffin?

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A MacGuffin – great question. Believe it or not, a MacGuffin is not a breakfast food!

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Mary-Lynn ordered an Egg MacGuffin this morning!

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Well, I was hungry!

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A MacGuffin is actually a movie term. It was so dubbed the late British film director, Alfred Hitchcock. A MacGuffin can be defined as the object around which the whole story focuses. For example, in the classic The Wizard of Oz, the MacGuffin was Dorothy’s quest to get back to Kansas. In the movie Rocky, the MacGuffin was the fifteen-round heavyweight championship fight with Apollo Creed. In the movie Titanic, the MacGuffin was a really bigg boat. But the funny thing is that when you get to the end of the story, you realize that thing the story’s about isn’t really what the story was about. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy always had the power to get home; the story was really about four friends who came to realize that what they most desired and thought they lacked, they actually had. They just had to step into it and embrace it. In Rocky, the MacGuffin was the championship fight but really the story was about an internal struggle – a guy who at first thought he was a loser who turned to really have a lot of value to offer the world and those people he loved and who loved him.

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Yo, Adrian! Sorry, just had to throw that in.

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In Titanic, the MacGuffin was the unsinkable ship that sank but that wasn’t the story. The story was about two kids on opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum and how it would work out for them. Not real well, by the way, for Jack. Your product is your MacGuffin. If you sell insurance, that’s just your MacGuffin. What you really sell is security and peace of mind. If you’re in real estate, the houses are just your MacGuffins. What you’re really selling are future memories. So the product isn’t what the sale is about. What it’s about is what’s going to result in a happy ending for the customer.

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Thanks Bob for sharing your time and wisdom with us!

Don’t miss out on your opportunity to learn more from Bob. Go get Go-Givers Sell More!

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Related posts

Bob Burg on Go Givers Sell More Part 1

Bob Burg on Go Givers Sell More Part 2

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Bob, let me throw this real world obstacle at you. I have a friend who’s a hair stylist. She worked at a company where she built great relationships and always had a full book. But she also had some upsell quotas that she had to meet. If she didn’t meet those quotas, they would write her up. I think a lot of people in sales face these behind-the-scenes pressures.

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If it’s a quota in terms of upselling, the challenge is with the leadership. An upsell is a great thing when it’s of value to the consumer. When you walk into a McDonald’s and you order a hamburger, hopefully the person will say, “Would you like fries with that?” If that sounds like a good idea – great. That’s something you didn’t think of before. If they then say, “Oh by the way, our hot apple pies are just wonderful today. Would you like one?” If that’s something you would like – great. But I would hope that the person at McDonald’s wouldn’t be docked because the person said “no”. An upsell is there for the benefit of the customer and, of course, it benefits the company because it’s a great profit center without any additional expenditure. It works for both. Unfortunately when you have a quota for that – which means that you have to force that into the situation – now we’re talking about a negative thing. When you’re offering it because it’s genuinely of help to the consumer – and they have a right to say “yes” or “no” but it’s about them, not about you – now we’re talking about a positive.

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Short-term and long-term

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Is this more of a long-term rather than a short-term strategy?

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I would challenge that. By the way, you’re not the only one who has said that; many people say it. There’s a premise there that using these Go-Giver strategies means it’s not going to be as bigg a payoff in the short-term because you’re focused on the other person. I don’t agree with that. You’re focusing on adding value to the other person. Salespeople don’t do well when they’re totally focused on themselves. The prospect can sense it. You can pressure some people into buying but you’re not going to do business with them for long and they’ll probably rescind the second they walk out the door. In the book, we take a realtor who’s trying to sell a home and look at a negative and a positive process. In the negative one, the realtor is argumentative. The client says, “I think the house is too far from town.” The realtor says, “Actually it’s only ten miles away; not very far at all.” The client responds: “We like to feel really close to where everything is.” The realtor comes back: “Not a problem. You’re only twenty minutes away.” That’s not effective.

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Right, they aren’t listening.

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So that’s not even good in the short term. That was arm wrestling, not questioning. Let’s say the client says, “I think the house is too far from town.” The realtor says, “How so? What are you thinking?” The client responds: “We love the home but we like to feel really close to where everything is.” The realtor comes back: “Sounds like that’s really important to you. So when you say ‘where everything is’, are there some specific things you’re thinking of?” Now that’s a whole different thing. Who’s that person going to be more likely to buy from? In my opinion, they’re going to buy from the person who seems genuinely interested in them, not the person who’s trying to argue them into a sale.

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We highly recommend Bob’s book but why take our word for it? You can download a free chapter of Go Givers Sell More and test drive it for yourself!

Next time, we’ll wrap up our conservation with Bob (see Part 3). He’ll tell us what a Go-Giver is not and explain what a McGuffin is.

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