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Old April 14, 2017, 08:48 AM
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GordonJ GordonJ is offline
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Default Well, let's begin while we both are up for it. Part 1.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dien Rice View Post
Hi Gordon,

Harvey often talks in metaphors... Sometimes, on a particular topic, it's taken me a long time for the light bulb to flash, and for me to "get it"...

Dien

Harvey Brody thinking, sort of…part 1.
May be more than one post, or not. Anyhow, here is the email I rec’d last week:
*********
I noticed you mentioned in today's episode how you're yet to see " a well thought out concept and plan"
That's why I suggest...
...In one of these final episodes, please unveil what you say is Harvey Brody's secret; HIS THINKING.
Tell us plainly how Harvey Brody's thinking works; maybe even with a nice Pictogrigm to flesh things out
You refer to it a lot on the SOWPub Forum but in parables: putting hair on bald guy, magnets, rung of ladder, etc.
Who knows; you may even start seeing MORE well thought-out plans when people have a clear guide to ...er... guide them
Please give us a detailed guide to the Harvey Brody method for thinking through concepts.
**********

Best thing is to pick up one of Harvey’s Courses on eBay, there seems to be a lot of them. This way, you get the thinking straight from him.

But I get the gist of the question, so here is my interpretation of some recurring themes Harvey and I discussed in almost 30 hours of phone conversations recorded over a 2 year period.

Before I begin, let me say to those who haven’t been around that long, and don’t know me or what I’ve written in the past, you should know this:
As a mentor, Harvey Brody came to me rather late in life; I was already established in some ways and in some circles. I was fortunate enough to have had several really good mentors.

Burt Morgan, Ed Barr and Richard Buchholzer stand out, but before them, I met Joe Karbo while going to college in S. CA. Although I really didn’t have an interest at the time in building a marketer or a mail order business, Joe was none the less, influential.

Burt Morgan founded one Fortune 500 company, and Co-Founded another. A rare feat. His pearl of wisdom for me: work with people of passion.

Ed Barr, serial Entrepreneur; restaurants, gift shops, oil wells, stables and horses, real estate, said: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify.

Dick Buchholzer said; don’t invest in things you can’t control.

Although I had known about Harvey Brody, and spent several hundred dollars on his courses, his biz model wasn’t at the time of interest either. One day he went to work, had an encounter with a foul employee, and basically shut down a very profitable business and worked with his wife and daughter. NO more employees. Then he caught my attention.

A one man (mostly) band, doing International business with only 150 or so customers, all on autopilot just placing orders when they needed his products.

He didn’t touch the product, it was made to his specifications and shipped to his customers who then used their own distribution channels, and he has sold, by my best guess…well over 100 million units of one of his products.

He’s been married to the same woman since they both said, “I do.” Never been in a SCANDAL, never went to jail, didn’t snort millions of dollars up his nose like some of his contemporaries.
No lawsuits, other than spurious and specious ones by patent vultures.

Runs a sweet little biz out of his home office, and does very well. I find him to be a good business model and one most worthy of emulation.

But, I’m suited to be a lone wolf operator. I had employees, hated it. So, this works for me. You may have bigger ambitions, you may want the headaches of employees, and you might want to grow a huge business like Burt Morgan or Ben Suarez did.

YOU get to do what you want. I don’t believe there is a better business model for a one man operation than the “Toll Position” model. Feel free to disagree.
I don’t like slop, mess, PIA customers (you guys are about all I can take, HA!). I like to Fly Low.

You may want to be on stage and center of attention, go ahead. Anyhow, what separates Harvey from so many others is his superior thinking.

He uses the VIEW FROM THE ROOFTOP. If you can do this, it reinforces the point, but if not, you can use Google maps, earth view and see things from above. Go to a tall public building in your area, go as high up as you can and see the view.

You can simply see more the higher you go. Stand at your front door and what do you see? What would you see from the top of your house or bldg. You’d get a less obstructed view of the territory, wouldn’t you?

Harvey’s view from the rooftop, in ordinary, mundane and usually UNacted upon lingo is: know what you want.

What is the goal? Where do you want to get to? If financial, how much? This isn’t new or even unique to Harvey. Most of you have read Napoleon Hill’s THINK AND GROW RICH, the de facto manual on getting rich. Hill’s first step. DESIRE.

Desire is the starting point of all riches. Before this, the book begins with a question; What do you want most? Many people miss that when reading the book.

The first paragraph of the book may be the entire “SECRET” of the book. It reads,
The Thirteen Steps to Riches described in this book offer the shortest dependable philosophy of individual achievement ever presented for the benefit of the man or woman who is searching for a definite goal in life.

I would adjust this for you to read; definite GOALS in life. We will have many in the course of our life.

This, I believe, is the fundamental thought of Harvey Brody, having a goal, seeing an end result and then PLANNING and executing the plan with adjustment as needed.

The view from the rooftop allows you to “see” what the goal looks like, say if you were walking to the park a few blocks away, from the rooftop, you could see the best route to take. May not be the shortest, but it could be. Maybe that Ahole on Elm St. lets his Rottweiler’s run loose and you want to avoid them.
A well thought out PLAN includes the possibility that adjustments will have to be made.

So if you have a clear view from the rooftop, a clear GOAL, then you examine the step off rung. What is the last thing you do before you step on the roof, then BACKWARD CHAIN your way down the rungs of the ladder to the bottom.

The view from the bottom is the same view as from the top, only in your mind, not yet in your line of vision.

OK, my step off rung for the revised APV report was to post a link here at SowPub. That meant it was live. My goal as seen from the bottom, March 21, was to have the report done and for sale by my late brother’s birthday, April 10.

My view from the rooftop was seeing my email with messages from PayPal telling me I had money in my account. I did have a goal, which I shared with a friend, for verification, but it included back end consulting gigs in the BIG VIEW. But, the step off rung onto the roof was when I gave people a chance to buy the report.

What happened after that, was(is) part of a bigger ladder (staircase, like a fire escape up a bldg) which took me to a higher view.

But for the sake of this discussion. Harvey would have me explain what the rung below the step off would look like, what would be the ACTION taken. So here are my rungs of the ladder for the APV revised report.

April 10, Step off rung-Report offered for sale.
April 9. Review all pages, check the process and make sure it works. I did but had a snafu, which I didn’t see until brought to my attention by a few buyers in. It took a few, because they figured out a copy and paste solution and/or contacted me and I sent the report as an attachment.
If I had had a good “pre flight” checklist, like Harvey suggests, I would have caught this error, I should have had one of you actually buy the report, and I’d refund the buy and thank you for testing it. Learn from my mistake.
(continued)

Gordon

Last edited by GordonJ : April 14, 2017 at 09:19 AM.
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