 Welcome to the 21 convention Tampa, Florida. And we are bringing on a speaker that, man, this is something that is really going to work and what the 21 convention is all about. Changing your life as a man, making the right decisions, be able to build your own foundation. And one of those is business and entrepreneurship. This is a gentleman who has worked for over five years with Matthew Hussey. I'm sure you've heard of him, best-selling author, actually former 21 convention speaker, and we're gonna be talking about how setting up a business can be like a dance. Let's bring on the stage, Edward Druse. Thank you, Pa, thank you. Good stuff, good stuff. 21 convention, hello. Hello, it's amazing to be here. I'm gonna begin this talk with a quick story. When I was 15 years old, I ran a gambling ring in school. In the UK where I grew up, the most hotly anticipated sporting events every week are the Premier League football matches. Knowing this to try and capitalize on the buzz, every Monday morning, I would sneak into my dad's office and I'd print out betting slips for each of the 10 games that weekend. I'd hand these out at school, lunch, during breaks, behind teachers' backs, wherever I could, marketing myself on the radar, and I would tell kids that for a one-pound bet, if they could guess all 10 games correctly, I would give them 100 pounds back. Now, to a 15-year-old, these seemed like pretty incredible odds. Everyone thinks their team is gonna win, so that one's a shoe-in and it's just nine more games. And so this was hotly taken up every single week. Little did anyone know that I would gather these in and as something of a Friday afternoon ritual, I would go to an actual bookies with my brother's borrowed driving license, and I'd put them on where I'd get odds of anywhere from one to 800 to one to 3,000, depending on the games. I didn't know if this would go anywhere, it was just a little scheme that I'd come up with, but I decided to run with it. I did it for a few months and I was very persistent, and then one week, someone won. Someone guessed all 10 games correctly, and I had a winning ticket for about 1,700 pounds, so the equivalent of about two and a half thousand dollars. Now I had to pay this guy his 100, there's no getting around that, I had to be a man of my word. But I went into the bookies, I slammed down this ticket on the counter, and I was paid 1,700 pounds in cash. And to this day, comparatively, I don't think I've ever felt richer. This unbelievable experience walking out with an envelope, cash in hand, I don't think I've ever felt richer. And this experience led me to think that I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I wanted to do something different. I'd always had the mindset that I wanted to do something academic, that I could go to college, I could go to university, and I'd follow the very well-worn traditional route. But this experience led me to think I wanted to do something different. Now it's a rather humble story when you compare it to teenagers today with the internet making tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it's really that sense of wanting to do something different that I want to tap into today. And that's what really this talk is going to be about. In the years since, or I should say in the following months, I was really keeping my eyes peeled for how I could break away what opportunities I could get involved with. And I was just keeping my eyes peeled at all times. After a few months, I came across a guy called Matthew Hussie. And at the time, Matthew was just starting out in London as a coach and a speaker, doing events for maybe 80 or 90 people. And I was so utterly captivated with this guy, both with his message and his content, as well as his ability to command and just all a crowd. I'd seen a few of his YouTube videos and I was so compelled and so enthusiastic about what this guy was doing, that I decided I would go along to one of his events. Now being 15 at the time, this wasn't the easiest thing in the world. I had to get the 200-mile train ride from Swansea, a little town I grew up in, Wales. And I had to go to London. There I had to navigate the London Underground, which is a treacherous thing for anyone, let alone a 15-year-old. And I ended up walking around with printouts of Google Maps. This is long before the days of everyone walking around with iPhones. But I went and I was just as awed, if not more in person, by how this guy was able to speak, how he was able to deliver. And I kept going back. Any chance I would get, I would skip the football match I would have on Saturday playing for a football team. And I would go and see this guy speak. And I became something of a familiar face at his events. I kept going. And I was eventually able to befriend a key member of his team. With his friend, I was able to get 10 minutes on Matt's calendar to book in a phone call. The call was at five o'clock in the morning. Because I knew Matt was a morning person, I wanted to say, here, I'm on the same level. I'm a similar kind of guy. And this was show I'm serious. So when the day rolled around, I woke up, I had set my alarm for 4.54, going down with six minutes to go. And I was nervous as hell to make this phone call. I didn't quite know what I was gonna say. I was gonna try and say, I would like to get involved somehow. I don't really know what I can add, but I just love what you're doing. And I would love to be a part of it. And so I'm in the garage in this freezing cold garage so as to not wake my parents and have them wonder, what the hell is this guy doing up at five o'clock in the morning? And so I dial the number for Matt. And I met with a kind of energy and enthusiasm which suggests that this man has just been up since three. He picks up the phone, he says, hey, Edward, how you doing? I've been really looking forward to speaking with you. We chat for a little while. I tell him how many of his events I've been along to. And I say, is there any way that I can get involved? Now to any entrepreneurs we have here in the room, you will agree with me in how unattractive of prospect a 15 year old who lives 200 miles away might be. But I really showed some energy and enthusiasm on that call. And so I was invited to come along to one of his more intensive programs, a three day event at the time that was called Make the Leap. Now I knew at the time because in my delusional young state, I'd been looking at apartment prices in London as well as hotel prices. And for you guys who might not have been to London, all of you, it's a very expensive city. I knew that going along for just three days would eat into pretty much all of the winnings I had from the bookies. But my gut told me that this is something I've gotta do. This is something I've gotta be a part of. And so without a moment's hesitation, I said, yes, I'm in. It's now five years later and I've been working with Matthew ever since. I was able to further befriend that key member of his team. I was invited into his offices to do two or three days worth of data entry that was just so mind-numbingly boring that no one else on the team would ever otherwise have been ever to get around to do it. I really excelled. I showed that I was serious. And I was invited to stay on for a few more weeks. The weeks turned into months. And when my summer holiday was coming to a close, I had to sit down with Matthew and said, I'd love to stay on. I'd love to do this full time. I was 17 years old and I dropped out of high school and I've never been back. So in the last, well, in working with Matthew for the last five years, he has become a New York Times bestselling author. He has his own radio show with iHeartRadio and he's worked with celebrities the likes of Eva Longoria, Ryan Seacrest and Christina Aguilera. He's on the Today show every other week on shows like Rachel Ray and he's most well-known for a dating advice company called Get The Guy. So this is dating advice for women, the opposite of a lot of what the guys we have here speaking about today are talking about. Now I'd be lying if I said that it was strategic at this time that I thought this is the missing link. But in hindsight, this experience has led me to think that if you're in that place where you want to do something different, you want to do something entrepreneurial, you don't really know how to do so in the real world. You don't know how to do so outside of school walls and actually put something into practice. The missing piece of the jigsaw is finding a mental. It's finding someone who's gone before you, who knows what they're doing and who you can get access to and look to emulate. Now while this is kind of a fun story as to what a bit of blind enthusiasm can do, if it were the thing I were hanging my hat on to be stood here today, it would kind of be like a lottery winner telling you how to make a million. It's not necessarily replicable. Go down to your garage, make a phone call to a prospective mentor and it'll all happen. However, I've had a really deep fascination with understanding why what I did worked and how you could actually make it replicable. I have friends, I have a brother, I have family members who I'd love to be able to share a strategy with. And so over the last few months, I've already sat down and I've thought, how could someone set about making this an inevitable journey? And I've tried to piece this together and make it as close to inevitable as you possibly could. I've been working on this for quite a while and we're gonna be going through a very, very practical set of steps today. A friend jokingly said that me having not gone to university, this is my dissertation. This is my last four or five years of work so I'm gonna be sharing all of it with you. Now before I just crack into it, I'd love to thank Anthony for the opportunity to be here today. I've been watching 21 convention videos for God knows how long, three, four, five years and they've really helped me. So the opportunity to be here and actually giving something back is a real honor, it's a real privilege and it's great to be here with you guys today. Now the one year that I did in school at 17, I studied philosophy and the one thing I learned or one of the things that I learned there was the importance of beginning by defining your terms. So to begin and laying out my argument today, I would firstly like to define the word mentor. The title of the speech is how to find a mentor in business and when we say mentor, what really do we mean? In his essence, I will argue that a mentor is someone who can help you get further faster in whatever it is you do. Now there are many different types of mentor. There are mentors that you can come along to an event like this and learn from for three days. There are mentors that you can pay to coach you on an ongoing basis. There are mentors at school. There are mentors in your family. The type of mentor that I'm specifically focusing on for this talk today is the type that you can go and work for and the reason for this is twofold. Firstly, it's the one that's really within your control. As a young person, if you're looking to get entrepreneurial, you don't necessarily pick your teachers. You didn't pick your parents. The only thing that's really within your control is picking who you go and work for and who you surround yourself with. And the second, let me just check my notes here, how embarrassing, the second reason is that it will have the greatest return on investment. It's incredible to come along to an event like this for three days and to surround yourself with really amazing minds. However, for real change over a prolonged period of three, four, five years, the way to do that is to get around someone that you can spend every single day with. And without being a weird creepy stalker, I think the only real way to do that is to begin working with someone. Now, why would you want a mentor? If anyone here is on the fence, perhaps you've read about Richard Branson, you've read about Mark Zuckerberg, even looking at Anthony today who's started this event at 17. It's easy to say that finishing school as a young guy, you can go out and you can start something on your own. However, I would argue that these guys have all still had mentors. If you read Richard Branson's book, if you read Screw It, Let's Do It, you quickly start to see that in business, his mom was his first mentor. She raised funds for his first magazine company and she was the person that Richard went to for counsel with a lot of big business decisions. I was recently watching or listening to an interview with a guy called Noah Kagan, who was number 30 at Facebook, and he said that in the early days, Mark Zuckerberg paid much older people to be around him at all times, going into every big meeting with him and helping make every big business decision. He trusted his instincts, but he knew that he didn't have the experience and the reference points to make big decisions. If you look at Anthony, consider all of the incredible speakers that he has had around him since he was 17. These people have all had mentors. Now, some of the biggest benefits that you'll get. Firstly, you will learn through osmosis. In being around successful people, you will quickly start to see that it's not some kind of productivity system or some kind of tactic that's really allowing them to distinguish themselves. Rather, it's that they want it more. It's that they're fiercely passionate about what they're doing. It's that they're determined, they're fiercely ambitious, they're relentless in how they work. In being around people like this, these traits will begin to rub off on you. Now, I'm not gonna stand here today and say that I am as charismatic nor as commanding a speaker as Matthew, as that's a very hard skill. It's something that takes thousands of hours of practice to really get good at. However, things like work ethic, character traits like discipline, these things will rub off on you. The second is that they will push you. A mentor will push you. In all areas of life, the key to growth is really getting outside of your comfort zone and pushing yourself. A mentorship in business is a way to ensure that. You will have constant headaches. You will have more work than you know what to do with. It's a very stressful position if you pick your mental well and this will help you grow. And the third is that it will cut your learning curve in half. If you consider just coming along to an event like this, you instantly figure out the type of diet that will be best suited to you. You could go through a process of trial and error, trying different diets for many years and only get it after 10, 20, 30 years as it's taken some people to actually figure things out. And coming along to an event like this, you cut your learning curve in half. Being around people every single day, that learning curve on so many things is cut into a fraction of the time of what it would otherwise be. It's just saying if you wish to be young and wise, you have to learn from the experiences of others. There's a big kind of glorification of failure culture, the idea that you have to go out, you have to make mistakes, and you have to celebrate your mistakes. What I would argue here today is that the mistakes don't have to be yours. You can learn and observe others making their mistakes. A problem with the word mental is that it leads people to think about the relationship in far too formal of terms. People hear mental and they picture some kind of real life Mr. Miyagi. Someone who they live with and someone who is just completely devoted to their success 24 hours a day. They wake up, wax on, wax off, do this, do that, eat this, eat that, and that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about surrounding yourself with someone getting close into my access and being able to observe someone in their element. The second word I'd like to define for my title is the word find. I've titled this speech How to Find a Mental as it's really the language that people are using to think about this problem. You'll see it if you look up the Google search terms how to find a mental. Matthew's book, the book that went on to become A New York Times Bessar, Get the Guy, dating advice to show women how to go and get their ideal guy was broken up into three simple steps. How to find a guy, how to attract a guy, and how to keep a guy. And if I were writing a book about mentorship, I'd be tempted to just rip it off and use the exact same structure. How to find a mental, how to attract the attention of a mental, and how to keep a mental. Now people think, well, women will come to Matthew and complain of not being able to find any guys. There are no men out there. It's a quote a journalist who wrote an article about Matthew. They're all gay taken or weird. And with us being here today, we know that's not absolutely the case. The real problem that Matthew will say is that these women just aren't meeting enough people. They're rarely leaving the house. If you asked them how many new men they would meet in a week, it would be somewhere between zero and one. And I put to you that the real issue here isn't how to find a mental, because you probably have people in your life already who could be a prospective mental. You just haven't seen that they're within your reach. Being here today, oh, Matthew will joke to women, if I could put you in a room full of men who would be perfect for you, you wouldn't necessarily know how to go over and make anything happen. For you guys here today, this may well be that very room of prospective mentors. You right now don't necessarily know how to go over and how to have an incredible impact with someone. That's really what we're gonna be getting into with these steps. The three things that you should be looking for in a mental. The three things that you should really be kind of qualifying and screening for when going and seeking someone out to have a successful mental ship. Firstly, that they make money. Money is the fuel of any company. Peter Drucker said, money, sorry, business is innovation and marketing. The idea of entrepreneurship really is you can have an incredible product or service, but you also have to be able to sell and market that thing effectively. You need to find someone who is doing both. Of course, if you find someone who's really good at sales and marketing, but they have a terrible product, that will probably rot your soul and you won't wake up very happy in the morning. So find someone who's doing both. The second is that they are ambitious. They're ambitious and they're wanting to continue to grow in what they're doing. If you find someone who is lazy and stagnant, it's not gonna go very far. You're gonna be having to convince them for every big project that you wanna take on and it's quickly going to where you outs. A mental ship is a bit like a game of tennis. To have an incredible rally, you both need to be really committed to the point and going all out. And the third is that there is in-person potential. There is potential to go and work with this person in person. That is where you really soak up everything that you can learn. That's where the osmosis really kicks in. Now this isn't an essential step, as there's a hell of a lot that you can learn remotely with someone. I'm now in the position with Matthew where he's based over in Los Angeles. I'm over in the UK and we're not working together every day. And some great freedoms come with that. You control your time, you're working from home, you can wake up in your underpants. However, I have built a three or four year foundation of work ethic and discipline which has allowed me to actually do well in that environment. If I was starting at 17, trying to work remotely with someone, I very much doubt that I would have had the discipline and the resolve to do so effectively. A topic I'd now briefly like to mention here is the idea of passion when it comes to work. There's a question that a lot of young people seem to be asking. Is should I go after something that I'm passionate about? Or should I go after something that I can make a lot of money doing? I'm gonna stand here and argue that when you begin, you will likely have neither. You will likely not have something you're passionate about and you will likely not be making very much money. However, there is a silver lining as if you're strategic in how you go about approaching your career and you're willing to work very hard, you can have both. Now I consider that there are three types of people who get this wrong. We have the cynic, the idealist and the dabbler. The cynic, the idealist and the dabbler. The cynic is someone to whom the idea of passion at work is a fairy tale. Work is a means to an end to this person and the idea that you can have something that you love is really just a fallacy. This person is content with being discontent in how they go and the happy being a miserable old sod. The opposite is the idealist. This person is at the other end of the spectrum. They wake up and consider that every single second of how they spend their day should be this magical, amazing thing. And when it's not, they feel really guilty about themselves. They begin reevaluating what they're doing and they feel horrible. We also have the dabbler. This is someone with many passions. They like rowing. They like reading. They like cooking. They like singing. They like dancing. And the idea of picking just one of these things ruins this person. Now to the cynic and the idealist, I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Taking this from one of Matthew's YouTube videos. If you look up the etymology of the word passion, you'll see that it comes from the Latin party, P-A-R-T-I, which means to suffer or endure. And this is a very different idea of how most of us think of passion today. There's a great line from the artist Pablo Picasso, which went, if they took away my paints, I'd use pastels. If they took away my pastels, I'd use crayons. If they took away my crayons, I'd use pencils. If they stripped me bare naked and threw me in a jail cell, I'd spit on my fingers and I'd paint the walls. Now when I first heard this quote, I was deeply inspired. However, when it sits with you, when you really think about it, it can be one of the most depressing things you've ever heard. For who here in this room today has that level of passion? I like reading. I like writing. However, the idea of me going on and writing the next Pulitzer Prize winning novel with my drool is a highly unlikely concept. I think that we need to see passion as something of an oak tree. Picasso is an oak tree. After a lifetime of growing, he has these solid and movable, unshakable roots. But passion really starts as this tiny little seed, starts as a tiny little acorn, acorn, sorry. And the acorn with which it begins is curiosity. What am I curious about? Or am I interested about? And this will reveal itself to you in the smallest of ways if you're sitting here thinking, well, I'm not really curious about anything. I was walking along a high street once with my brother whereupon we came across a bookshop next to a record shop. I wanted to go into the bookshop and he wanted to go into the record shop. And in that moment it hit me that perhaps my love of reading and my love of writing is something that not everyone shares for I had no real interest in the records and he had no real interest in the books. So why not walk along a high street and see what kind of shops pull you in? When you're reading the paper, what kind of headlines attract your attention? The distinction to make with this is that there has to be a creative element. I didn't just want to consume books. My brother didn't just want to consume records. I wanted to write and he wanted to become a DJ. And to the dabbler, the person who fancies themselves is a modern day Renaissance man. Again, this is possible. I only have to look at Matt to say, here is someone who's written a book who does speaking engagements all over the world. He's spoken in front of 100,000 people in person. He's a presenter on TV. He has a radio show. He does all of these different things. However, the way to get this is to get really good at just one thing. It's to get a level of altitude and credibility in just one area. And the reason for this is gatekeepers. Gatekeepers in industries. Whether it's books, we have book publishers. Whether it's radio, we have radio producers. The way to get a shot in different industries is to prove that you're serious in one area. Now you can read a book like Choose Yourself by James Altutcher, which is a phenomenal book when I highly recommend checking out which is really designed to choose yourself and to get away from gatekeepers. However, the principle here is really the same. For with that, you have to develop such a rabid and just devout following that you have people who will follow you anywhere. If you take Sasha, he's someone who has this incredible personality, this incredible persona. He's built that through being a really fantastic dating coach. He's now branching out and beginning to write a spirituality blog. And he has such a loyal fan base that people are going over and beginning to pay attention to this. So you have to get altitude with one thing. And with that, you can branch out and do lots of other things. It only takes looking at someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger, someone who's a bodybuilder, who becomes an actor, who becomes a politician. You get really good at one thing. People will trust you. So to summarize, just on this point, before we crack into the practical steps here, passion is attainable, but it's something you have to work very hard for. It's something you'll not have at the beginning and you have to be very strategic and patient in how you go about building it. So to get into the steps, I'm beginning this with what I'm calling pitching preliminaries, three things that you need to begin with. The first is that you must develop a body of work. Today's job market is so fiercely competitive that you need to be an immediately proven prospect. Whether in the form of writing a blog, having a YouTube channel, if you're a designer getting a really solid portfolio, you must have a body of work that distinguishes you. Now, there are certain stigmas attached to this in the way of people not wanting to put their name out there, that they're fearful that friends and family will see these things. And to that, I would say that getting over this and getting over what people care about is really a lifelong endeavor and that this is a great way to start. In doing so, you will refine your thinking. I was checking out a book called Rework by the guys at 37 Signals in which they have a title of a chapter, hire the better writer. If they're on the fence about a key hiring or a key hiring decision, they pick the better writer because it shows a clarity in thinking. So in doing something like blogging and really thinking about an area, you will begin to understand it better. The second is research. You must research the person that you are looking to contact to death. Now, when I began working with Matthew, I was in quick succession given the reigns of the beast that is the get the guy recruiting inbox. And so over the years, I've read hundreds, if not thousands of emails from people writing in looking to work with the company. I've seen every conceivable mistake that anyone could ever make and I've seen the few gems of people who really do it well. What always amazes me is the number of people who will hear one radio show or hear one interview or one podcast and decide that this is enough to contact the person. You need to be able to distinguish yourself. You need to be able to put yourself out there and you need to really be able to get inside the head of this person. I would encourage you, read every single article this person has ever written. Listen to every single interview. Watch every video. Understand this entire person's body of work. Now, once you have, and this is where we get a little dark, this is where we're really getting inside this person's head, I have a list of 10 questions and I have this as a handout to pass around to everyone at the end, but this is a list of 10 questions which I've stolen from a very world-renowned copywriter, a guy called Craig Clemens. And these are questions that he will use to get inside the mind of a customer for a potential client. So when he's writing a sales video or a sales letter, he will use these questions to get inside a person's head. The way to approach this exercise is to go about it by free writing, to open up a Word document and to spend 10 or 15 minutes per question writing in a stream of consciousness likewise not caring about spelling, not caring about grammar, just spilling out your answers on the page. Now the questions, why did he or she start whatever it is they're doing? What are the main benefits that their followers, clients or customers receive from what they do? What are their followers, clients or customers' biggest problems? What are their biggest frustrations of the person or the people you're contacting in having to provide a solution to this? How can you help and where is your proof? What specifically can you help with and what can you not help with? What tasty tips or information can you give away right away? Why wouldn't they want you to work for them and what objections might they give? What is the dream and what they're working towards? What is really getting them up out of bed in the morning? And lastly, what is the nightmare? If you answer these questions, if you really take the time to do this, you'll have a profound level of understanding for this person. And once you do, we'll move on to, we can call this step zero, pitching preliminaries. So research and get inside the head Step one is to meet this person in person. You'll notice from my story that I'd gone along to four, five, perhaps even six events of Matthews before I even got on the phone with him. He knew how I was, I was something of a familiar face, and so I'd encourage all of you to find some sort of organized event that you can go along to to meet your prospective person in person. Now when you do, it's great to go and be able to make an impression with this person. This isn't an easy thing to do when you're going along to some kind of organized event, but I'll tell you a quick story of how I was able to do this recently with someone that I wanted to learn from. A friend a few months ago, or this was coming up to the end of last year, turned me on to a guy called Owen Cook from Real Social Dynamics, someone who you'll mostly know as Tyler. We have Alex here from Real Social Dynamics speaking today, and Owen is the founder of that company. Now, Owen has a really incredible YouTube channel. He has videos on success, on motivation, on working really hard, and I really wanted to meet this person. I was in Toronto towards the end of last year, and he was doing an event in New York. It'll be an event for 400 or 500 people, but I decided I'm gonna make it my mission to go along to this event. I'm gonna meet him in person. I'm gonna leave a lasting impression. So I went through all of his videos. I asked myself these questions, and I identified that problem he had was a personal problem. He had had a shoulder injury for two months. Now I've read very widely around athletic performance and injury prevention and rehabilitation, and I decided that I would get him the book Becoming a Supple Leopard. This is by a guy called Kelly Starrett, a really fantastic book. And I went along to the event. I had the book in a bag, along with a little lacrosse ball, which is one of the necessary tools for applying Kelly's formula. And at the event, I realized there was gonna be no appropriate time to do this. This is an event for 400 people. They're all here to see Owen, and there's no way I'm gonna be able to do this. So when he'd set the group up, the audience up with a two or three minute audience, oh, we've got a lacrosse ball here in the audience. Very cool. When he'd set the audience up with a two or three minute exercise, I walked up to the side of the stage. And again, at this point, I'm nervous. I'm shaking. I'm almost trembling for doing this. But I tap him on the side of the arm, and I say, hey, Owen, I just wanted to introduce myself. My name's Edward. I'm a huge fan of your work. I really appreciate everything he'd do. And I just wanted to give you something as a token of my appreciation. Now he pulled the book out of a bag, and when he did, his whole face lit up. He called across his girlfriend, who's on the other side of the stage, and said, pull out your phone and show Edward the text message that I sent you earlier today. She pulled out her phone, and lo and behold was the text message that read, check out this guy, Kelly Starrett. He's amazing. We have to buy his book. I was in awe. But I knew why it happened. See, I've been following him on Instagram for a little while. I had seen that he'd been hanging out across the gyms. I knew that he was going to be recommended this book by someone, and so I got the book just a few days ahead of him. If you ever see a prospective mentor reading a book, get your hands on it. Read the book a few days quicker than they do, and you will see the other books that this book recommends, and you can buy it for that person. It's getting inside their heads on this crazy, crazy level. The second part of this, kind of one B, if you will, is to charm their assistants. Going back to my story with Matthew, you'll see that it was really only from befriending a member of his team at the time that I was able to present this opportunity for myself. There was someone I was recently looking to interview, and I'd been sending them an email after email after email, and I couldn't get any response. This guy was doing an event in London, so I decided I would go along to the event, and at this one it was impossible to get this guy on his own. He was speaking for six, seven hours straight, and so rather than battling for this guy's attention with 50, 60, 70 people, I went to the back of the room, and I decided I'd make friends with his assistant. She was in London for her first time from Los Angeles, and I said, I'll take you out, I'll show you a few things. I did, and then when I email her next week, it's gonna be that much easier to book in the interview. This sounds kind of sneaky, this sounds kind of manipulative, but I don't think it is, because if you're going out and you're providing value to people, and you're gonna be a fun, interesting person anyway, then it's just being strategic in what you're aiming at. I got this point as well from a book, Never Eat Alone by Keith Farazzi, another fantastic book I would highly suggest, where Keith the author was going along to an event that Richard Branson was speaking at. Rather than trying to go and meet Richard Branson himself, he identified Richard Branson's mom at the back. He went over, he began chatting with her, and when Richard was finally done with all of the crazed fans in the room, he came over and he met Keith, and then from there, the three of them went out for drinks. Keith now knows Richard Branson. Meet and charm the assistant, this can become your lifeline in all that we come back to. Now, as soon as you have, get on this person's email radar, send an immediate follow-up to say thank you. In advertising, there's a principle known as the mere exposure effect, which says the more exposures someone has had to a product or a brand or a company, the more credible and trustworthy they will see it to be. You need to treat your approach here like a mini product launch for yourself. When Apple come out with a new iPhone, they don't just want you to watch the keynote. They want you to hear about it on social media. They want your friends to tell you about it. They want you to hear about this new phone from as many different angles as you possibly can. You need to create this same effect for you in directly targeting this person. Now, to get very practical, this email should just simply be a message of appreciation, something that shows a specific level of detail. You can reference a specific piece of work and show a deep understanding for what they do, but you're not gushy, you're not saying, you're not becoming across as a real by-hard fan. You're just showing appreciation for what they do. Now, when you've done this, we really get to the fun part. We get to the pitch. So at this point, you began building your body of work. And at this point, I'll add the caveat. If you've come along to this event today and for the first time ever, you've been exposed to the ideas of getting your health in order, getting your body in order. And at the same time, you've learned about attraction, how to go out, how to meet people and how to spark things. You would be very foolish to wait until you have your body in perfect ideal condition before you begin doing the latter. The two need to be done in tandem and they will feed into each other. Going to the gym will make you want to go out and meet people more. And going out and meeting people will make you more motivated to go and hit the weights hard. Or going out and doing whatever it is you want to do. Going and pitching people will give a rocket under your ass for getting your body of work together. And putting your body of work together will make you want to get it out in front of more people. Do the two in tandem. So at this point, you're building that. You're researching this person and you're going through this exercise of getting inside their head. You've met them in person. If they have an assistant, you're beginning to charm them. You're getting on their radar and you're sending a follow-up email. Your mindset when sitting down to craft this email is simply to ask the question, how can I make this person more successful? You're not asking for anything at this stage. I wasn't going to Matthew and saying, hey, I would love to learn these things from you. Can you coach me on this, this and this? I was simply trying to diagnose a problem that he had and help him with it. You're asking for nothing at this stage. How can I make this person more successful? Now emailing people like this is really something of an art form and it's something that hundreds, if not thousands of books have been written about. I'm going to try and distill right down to just three steps that you can use to write this email. This is copywriting 101 and it's something that you can use throughout your life in any sort of persuasive email that you have to write. The first step is dream. What is this person's dream? The next problem. What is a problem that they have? And lastly, solution. What is the dream? What is the problem? What is the solution? Dream. I know that you would love to become a New York Times best-selling author. Or I know you would love to automate your business and be able to go off salsa dancing around Argentina. Or I know that you would love to dominate your industry and build an empire. Whatever it is, whatever you've been able to identify from asking these 10 questions, state it at the very beginning of your email. And again, if you go through these 10 questions, the heavy lifting for this has already been done. You're simply just moving things around to craft this email. Problem. Now this gets a little tricky. In any sort of persuasion, the way to really motivate someone is to build a small level of pain. You have to really get in and build a level of pain with someone. I was reading a book the other day called Predictable Revenue by a guy called Aaron Ross, who was a consultant for Salesforce for a number of years and built them up to becoming $100 million a year company. Now when trying to sell Salesforce to other companies, Ross said that companies consider that their problem is that they need new marketing software. However, Ross pointed out that this is in fact not a problem. This is a desired solution. Problem, desired solution. Getting inside this person's head, the way to really push someone's buttons is to get to the root cause of the problem. So in this instance, the problem was that their systems were in shambles, that they could barely send an email to all of their contacts and their email marketing was a mess. Another example, if you are going to an events company, I need more people at my events. That is not a problem, that is a desired solution. The problem is that you're running on very thin margins and you might not be able to continue doing things the way you are if you keep doing what you do. To really hammer this point home just for purposes of clarification, the problem is that you do not have a girlfriend. If I was speaking to a female audience that you don't have a boyfriend. The problem is that you're lonely and you're unattractive. Really hammering that out. Now the solution, the solution to all of this. The solution is you. How can you help this person with this specific problem and where is your proof? The solution here really is your call to action. Now there are three other components to add in and this is the icing on the cake. Add in a single line of intent at the very top and the reason for this by the way is firstly it gives context to the rest of the message that you're about to send and also when you open any sort of newsletter email you'll pretty much always see that it's a single sentence at the top. It just makes the email that much more digestible and makes the chances of someone responding that much more. At the bottom, objections. What objections might this person have to you coming to work for them? Would it be paying you right away? Would it be them fearing having to babysit you in their office for a number of weeks? Would it be the idea of commitment right off of the bat and signing a year-long contract with someone who's really unproven in their eyes? What would the objections be and how can you disarm them? So saying something to the effect of I would love to work with you in person however to get things going I'm willing to do a two week trial period unpaid, remote, if things don't work out no hassles, no problem at all. Make this as much of a no-brainer as you possibly can. And to round things off, a bonus. This can come as the PS to your message. In psychology there's another idea, there's another principle called the recency effect. The idea that the last impression you leave someone with is the one that will be most memorable. Now you can think of going along to a terrible film but if the ending's kind of okay you leave with a better impression of that film. The bonus here is some sort of tasty tip or information that you can give this person. Some sort of small thing. It doesn't have to be professional, it can be personal such as my getting O in the book, it can be sending a link to a funny video, something that helps them with a small problem. This will leave the taste in their mouth of you being someone who helps them. That will be the last impression that you leave them with. Now some of the mistakes that people make what are some of the big mistakes? And I've said I've received hundreds if not thousands of these emails. Firstly, spelling. I wish I didn't have to say this but judging from my inbox, I absolutely do. It astounds me the number of people who still don't know the difference between you and you are. The number of people who will write into Matthew and spell Matthew with one T or Hussie with one S. I will delete an email like that as soon as I see it. The second, do not write LOL. Do not write ha ha ha ha. Do not write anything which would suggest that this is a text message to your best friend. While being over the top formal is just as much of a mojo killer, you need to find a subtle balance somewhere in the middle that's warm and friendly but that's not in any way sloppy that still maintains its professionalism. One smiley face to get really practical with that. One smiley face, that's your limit. Next, use and mutual funds. Now this sounds as though we're really getting into minutia here but I learned this painfully myself. When I was once a number of years ago first contacting a guy called Ryan Holiday who at the time was Director of Marketing for American Apparel, I decided that I would use Comic Sans. And the reason I did this is because when I first began working with Matthew and the company there was one person who kept writing to us in Comic Sans and they were memorable so I thought if I apply the same principle and I write to this person with Comic Sans it will leave a memorable impression. Now Ryan, not one to mince his words, responded to my email. He responded to my message but he added a PS at the end. I would seriously consider changing your font. When I opened this message I thought it had been sent from a teenage girl. Use and mutual font. Do not use the word mental. Do not use the word mental. Doing so is kind of like going to a bar, approaching someone and in a serious face in a straight tone, will you be my girlfriend? Or will you be my boyfriend? Again, to a few moments. No one wants to be your mentor. The thing you're going for is proximity without the label. Do not ask for them to be your mentor. Again, you're not asking for anything. You're just saying how you can make this person more successful. Do not sign off or have your message sign off sent from iPad or sent from iPhone. Again, going to the recency effect here this will leave the impression that you just hammered this out in five minutes in the back of a taxi. Now if you've gone through all of the steps that we just went through it might have taken you a week or a fortnight to craft this email. If you have it sign off with that it kills all of the hard work you put into it. And lastly, do not in any way suggest that you are gonna become this person's competition. If you're writing to someone and saying I'm looking to become you, I'm looking to become your next big competition. Why is that person gonna wanna train you? If you have big plans, that's fantastic. Keep them to yourself at this stage and really when you're working with them as well is there's no reason that they should know your big plans. With all of this said, you must pull the trigger. You must pull the trigger. Do not let the enemy be the perfect of the good as the old saying from Voltegos. You must pull the trigger. And it's gonna be scary as hell to do. I remember I was trembling when I phoned Matt. I was shaking when I handed Owen the book. Hitting send on this email is gonna be no different. You're gonna worry, is there still spelling mistakes in here, am I doing this, am I doing that wrong? At the end of the day, the only way this is actually gonna pay off is if you take the risk and take action. You must pull the trigger. Now, the last two final steps with this. Who here hates waiting? Whether it's a text message from a girl that you've just sent and you're waiting for a response. Whether it's exam results. Whether it's getting a response back from an email like this. Waiting fucking sucks. I truly believe, and I'm stealing this from a Samsung advert, that impatience is the virtue. Not patience, people got it the wrong way around. That impatience leads to innovation. It brought us jets. It brought us phones. It brought us faster cars. Impatience is the virtue of a very impatient person. And so the idea of waiting for a response like this near kills me. The way to overcome this and the way to put yourself back into a position of power is to go and get more options. Matthew's brother, Stephen, wrote a fantastic article about this very idea. This idea of fretting, anxiously waiting for things. And in this article, he told the story of the writer-director Kevin Smith and how Kevin Smith had just turned in a big script to a big Hollywood studio. And he was sitting around on his hands just trembling as we, or fretting as we so often do. But he decided to sit down at his laptop and begin working on his next script. He worked very hard on it for a number of days. And after he did, or just in a matter of a week, he had something he was equally, if not more excited about than the one that he had just turned in. If you go out and you're really anxious and nervous about a girl that you're just texting, go out and meet more people. Get a broader base. This is the way to get over it. So as soon as you have sent this message, as soon as you've hit send, begin working on your next. With that said, you must persist. You must be persistent with this person. Now persistence can be your friend. If you take it too far, it can be your enemy. Your mindset has to be that this person has no obligation to respond. Despite all the work that you put into such a message and all the work you put into understanding this person and really getting inside their head, you have to appreciate that it's still work for them to respond. It's still work for them to bring you on and open a conversation here. With that said, how willing you are to keep putting yourself up to the top of this person's inbox can really be the defining feature of whether or not they respond or whether or not they get back to you. To persist, getting real practical again, you can send something to the effect of, hey, I know you're incredibly busy. I know you have a lot going on, but I'm just bumping this up to the top of your inbox to see if I could possibly get a response. I hope you're doing great. If any other objections have come up since sending this first email, include them. If you have any other bonuses, as ammunition up your sleeve, use them at this point. Again, going back to the idea of having a single line of intent at the top, sending a chaser like this can make it all the more easy for someone to actually digest the email and then respond to it. Again, getting very technical here. Do not send a second email. Do not use a new email. Respond to the one that you've already sent so they're not having to look it up in their inbox and go back and find you and creating extra work for them. So to recap here, I'm gonna lay down a challenge. For everyone here in the audience today who is dissatisfied with the work that they're doing, with their career, with where things are going, as well as everyone watching at home, if you're dissatisfied with what you're currently doing, I'm gonna challenge you in the next seven days to get real practical and to carry out these steps. To begin building your body of work, to really get inside the head of someone who you'd love to work with. And hopefully for you guys here today, there's gonna be a speaker, that can be that person. I'd encourage you all to begin with someone whose work you are already familiar with. From there, go and meet them in person. From there, follow up, immediately follow up and then put together your pitch email. Begin as soon as you send, right in your next. And if you keep doing this in a matter of weeks, you will have a position with someone that you would love to begin working for. Now in life, we can hear great ideas, we can hear great action plans. However, it's only from really following through that results will come. Matthew in his dating work is very fond of the saying, the most dangerous thing about regret is that we don't feel it yet. It's kind of a cheesy line, but I think it's very true. You do not wanna come to a conference like this and not put the techniques of the likes of James and Sasha into practice in your romantic lives. You do not wanna go away and not sort out your health. You do not wanna come back and wake up in 20 years with all the consequences of eating crap food. Likewise, in 10, 20, 30, 40 years, you do not wanna wake up with an unsatisfying career. Mentalship is a lifelong process. I myself am really just getting started here. But I hope this talk has been helpful in getting you on the first step of your journey. Thank you. Awesome. Ed Bruce. Great stuff. Who's got questions? Well, could I also just add, I've put together a guide for everyone who's really serious today, and I wanna go and take this on. I've put together a guide, the nine steps to getting the most out of a mentorship. So, when you really get started, or if you're already in a position, these are the nine things I wish I'd learned at 17 or I'd known at 17 to really get started. And you can get this at attractemental.com. It's just for you guys here today. The first thing I wanna say is, I really feel like people should believe themselves a lot more regardless of how old you are. Because just a quick story about me. When I was in college, I decided that I didn't wanna work for anyone. So, I told my teacher and my role models that I was gonna leave. And they all said, it's not gonna work. And I said, watch me. So, I left school and about three months after, I'm making one of my school teachers. And it's all because I took that chance. So, I think your talk was great. Thank you, that's awesome. And just to make very clear for everyone here today, I'm not saying that you can't go out and do that. It's clear that you can. However, you must still bring mentors into your life in one way, shape, or form. If there are people who already have mentors in their parents or in their teachers, use them. This is really for people who, again, they want to do something different, but they just don't know how to get that first step on the ladder. So, with the numbers game aspect of mentoring, obviously, you can't just hit up 20 people and hope that one of them wants to be your mentor. Where's the good balance there? So, in just the terms of the number of people you go after. Yeah, so if you're looking for a specific mentor, maybe on business, how many people would you contact one at a time or two or three or 10? So, this approach, if you're going through all of the steps, if you're literally consuming everything that this person has ever put out, that's gonna take you at least a week to do. If it's taking more than, let's say, two, three, four weeks, you're probably going after two bigger person. If I go and I try and contact Tony Robbins, who's been putting out material for 50 fucking years, I'm not gonna get a response no matter what. You have to pick someone who's at the right level. You have to try and get in the shadows of someone who's moving, ambition being a key thing. But if you're doing this, it shouldn't take more than, I would imagine, two, three, four, five attempts max to really get in with someone. Hey, Ed. Hello, Sash. I really don't have a question. I just have a statement. I've known this guy for four years, actually since he was 17. And even back then, he was always asking questions and really listening intently. And he was never shy to just get in there and be like, what do you think of this? What do you think of this? And he just had an awesome energy and curiosity. And I just want to say I'm really proud of you, you've done fucking great. Oh, thank you. Thank you. That's lovely to hear. We have a question here on discipline. What, could you expand a little bit more on discipline and the need for that at a young age? I think it's a very interesting concept. I really buy into the idea that habits, that you have a finite amount of willpower. And if you're looking to build discipline, you have to automate habits. I have this idea that you should try and get healthy before you get rich, as it's much easier to automate your health than it is to automate your business in a form. You can automate habits, such as eating the right things, going to the gym. People differ on the number of days it takes, some say 21, some say 28, some say 66. But you have to try and get to a level where you're focusing on just one thing, that you're really devoting all of your willpower to, and then from there, moving on, automating it and putting your energy into something else. So you want to get to a stage where it's not, it doesn't really feel like discipline, it's just something you do. So with work for me, I've been working, well, working with Matthew, if you're being forced into a position where you're working really damn hard every single day, that just becomes the norm. It's not something that you're necessarily exerting yourself over and above the norm to do. Ed, you and I were talking earlier, I wanted to see if you could follow up with a little bit about finding a mentor, their values versus yours, and where you distinct the line between monetarily what they're doing, literally what they're doing, and the importance of those. This is a really interesting idea. When you're working with someone, at times there will be areas that you disagree on, there'll be points of friction in the way that they do something and the way you would like to do something. Now, it's easy for someone to say that this is the way and for someone to get really brought into this person's idea. But these points of friction are your unique selling point. When you go on to do your own thing, should you wish to, they're gonna be the difference that will differentiate you from that person. So don't in any way buy into, as James was saying earlier in his talk as well, do not buy into just being into everything this person is saying. However, take the parts that work for you and adopt as much as you can. Great speech. I have a question about, I think a lot of people will have that question back home. You said that you dropped out of high school. What, have you had any negative consequences from that? Any negative consequences. I would say that if you're not very wary of building a solid social life in going out on your own, that can come back to bite you. And it did bite me a year or two ago where I found myself, I was in London and I'd really become a bit of a hermit in a lot of ways. College, going to college, going to university is an amazing chance to make friends, to meet people and to build connections. I think I could have been a lot smarter in the way that I went approaching things, so I would say that's something to watch out for. Just being very wary of being proactive in building social connections. Not in no way. I'm in no way against college and university. This is a very sensitive subject as for a lot of people, it's a necessary stepping stone. You can go, you can have an amazing time. You can learn a lot. However, there are certain people that I just don't think that it's necessary for. What I'll add is that if people, again, watching at home here, if you choose to go to college, that is putting yourself at the bottom of the food chain. You should still be building your body of work, you should still be writing a blog, keeping a YouTube channel and doing things that will allow you to differentiate yourself from someone. Great stuff. Man, Ed Druse, awesome. Beautiful speech, let's give him a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you.