Jim’s Origin Story and Story Creation Tips – SCCMH [Podcast 8]

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The Transcript

Jim Edwards: Hey guys!!! Jim Edwards here along with…

Stew Smith: …Stew Smith!!!

Jim Edwards: And Welcome to Episode 8…

Stew Smith: Yes! Yes!

Jim Edwards: …of the Sales Copywriting and Content Marketing Hacks podcast.

With Jim Edwards and Stew Smith. I am of course Stew Smith… and that’s Jim Edwards over there….

And so, today we’re going to… what are we talking about today, Stew?

Stew Smith: We’re going to talk about stories….

Jim Edwards: We are going to talk about stories… and what precipitated this episode?

Why are we talking about stories?

Stew Smith: Well, I remember… we had… what was it?

Jim Edwards: We had somebody ask a question…

Stew Smith: Yeah, it was on the Facebook page… and I think we had talked about… you had talked about something about your story.

Remember how when you tell something on video it has to have emotion… has to be all that.

And then someone made a comment like… “I’d really like to hear your story”

Jim Edwards: Right!

Stew Smith: I made a comment “It’s a great one. In fact, that’s our next episode.”

Jim Edwards: Okey

Stew Smith: We’re going to hear Jim’s story.

So, there’s a bunch of different stories, obviously. We have a great story for today that has nothing to do with how I got here.

I think most of the time people want to know how YOU got to where you are today.

That’s the story…

Jim Edwards: And even then, there are dozens or even hundreds of stories.

There are different kinds of stories…

There are different details that you can give with the story…

There are different things, meanings that you can, or morals that people can pull from the stories.

You can tell a story one way and it has one moral…

You can tell the same story a different way and draw out another moral.

And so that’s the thing!

When people say that they don’t think that they have enough stories to be able to tell or…

Nobody’s interested in their story, they’re really selling themselves short because stories can be extremely powerful and…

We really have virtually an endless well of them!

And when people, it was funny, you know, when we were talking…

Well, what story do they want to know?

Do they want to know the story of like my first sales job?…

Do they want to know the story of my first sales letter?…

Do they want to know the first story of my, you know… falling in looove?

Stew Smith: Hmmn… (smiling)

Jim Edwards: Do they want to know the journey of getting in shape?

I mean, there’s all these different stories.

So, what you got to do is kind of work backwards of here’s the point that I want to get across.

So, what story can I tell that will make that point for me?…

And that’s one of the MAGICAL things of stories, it’s that…

When we’re talking about sales copy and we’re talking about content…

Ultimately, we want people to come to a conclusion and there’s two ways they can come to the conclusion:

We can tell them what conclusion to come to or…

They can come to that conclusion on their own.

We lead them there with the story.

The second way, THEM coming to conclusion on their own…

In a sales situation, it’s MUCH more powerful because the DESIRE for what you have to sell…

If they come to the conclusion themselves…

That desire comes from WITHIN rather than WITHOUT.

So, they, in short…

THEY think it’s their idea…

That’s when you tell people stuff, like you told me the story today of…

You tell him real quick what happened with what you were doing and the book and…

People asking about the book that got led up…

It was their idea… to want to know what book they should buy.

Stew Smith: Right. Well, I started off of a podcast, a Facebook live and Instagram live… I did them side by side.

So, I was hitting both of them, all at once. I didn’t really have a whole lot to talk about.

So, I looked at my desk and I have a lot of products and…

I have a couple of services that I really like to use in my training.

And so, I just, I did a whole thing on shout outs.

So, I shouted out, you know… vitamins, I shouted out… hemp oil, I shouted out my sore and tired magnesium rub… and you know… protein powder, you know, whatever.

Then, people started asking questions and they were started talking about the different books and…

Then one guy said, “What would you say your BEST book is?”

You know, that I have a couple dozen of them.

And so, I named these three books: Tactical Fitness, Tactical Strength, Tactical Mobility… they’re my latest ones I’ve done.

And they’re just really a good combo all three together.

And next thing I know, wham, wham, wham was like all these like sales were coming through, you know… just within five minutes of each other.

And obviously they were watching the show…

Jim Edwards: Yes!!

Stew Smith: Which I was like… Damn, that’s really cool.

Jim Edwards: Money! Money! Money!

Stew Smith: Then, I did a separate post of all the things that I shouted out and I tagged all the products that I talked about, you know, in the Instagram post (it’s my latest one today).

And so now people are… I can see that they’re tagging and coming from the Instagram page, you know, to the store.

Jim Edwards: Right!

Stew Smith: So, it’s something that came out of nothing. So, that is a story of today.

Jim Edwards: Right…

Stew Smith: you know, but I think everybody wants to kind of hear YOUR journey Jim.

And I did something similar, you know, after that guy…I’m sorry I’m blanking on the name of who asked the question in the group.

But I did something kind of similar and I think one of the rules of when you do tell a story…

Tell a story that is going to be understood by YOUR audience.

Jim Edwards: Right.

Stew Smith: Like, if I told a story about me being 40 and in pain, you know, when I work out and I use this and you know, whatever to help with that, you know, when…

Nothing but 17 and 18 year olds are listening to me.

Then, they’re just going to tune it out.

Jim Edwards: Right.

Stew Smith: So, I did a story the other day on…

Jim Edwards: You’re not 40 anymore Stew… you’re 50!

Stew Smith: that’s true, yeah… So, over 40.

Right. So, I took a picture downstairs on the pool deck at the Naval Academy where I coach.

I was coaching a group of kids that are all going special ops and there’s set of windows up there that tours go through.

And I remember taking that tour when I was 17 years old, right?

And I took a picture from the vantage point of the pool deck looking at those windows.

And I made a comment when I was 17 years old…

I looked down at this pool and I said, “Man, I really want to come here. You know, this is my dream”…

And then that dream turned into actually getting to go there as a student, which turned into…

A nightmare because I wasn’t prepared and got my ass handed to me.

I figured it out… wound up graduating…

Jim Edwards: Stew two failed his first PT test at the Naval Academy

Stew Smith: I did, things just fell apart… It was awful.

And then, you know, I got to serve and do navy seal training and you know… come full circle.

Now, I’m on the pool deck looking up at the window…

And I’m coaching these kids that want to serve.

And you know, it was like living a dream come true!

So, it all was like kind of focused on the dream and you never really stopped dreaming. You know, just keep, keep evolving and coming up with new things.

And that was my story, right?

Jim Edwards: Let me tell you something real quick. I don’t want to lose this.

Real quick, but I want to share with you guys how Stew basically just shared the classic hero’s journey and I want you guys to understand what’s going on here. (moving over to the whiteboard)

All right. This is a good story. Okay. Here I am and this is me. All right? I don’t know. It’s just like, “okay, life’s not too high, not too low.”

Then something happens…

There’s a decision…

There’s an encounter…

There is something that happens and you decide… or there’s an event

Something happens and you go out into the UNKNOWN.

All right?

…And immediately there’s a PROBLEM. There’s some sort of a problem.

There’s some sort of conflict.

Okay?

At this point you think… okay… can’t really get any worse. But then the bottom falls out…

All right, this is where the bottom falls out.

And there’s a “Come to Jesus” moment…

I’m sure, in all these fancy books where they teach story writing and stuff, they call it something else, but it’s the “Come to Jesus” moment.

All right? Or the come to Allah, or whoever you choose to come to… Santa don’t matter.

At this point, there’s a revelation…

There’s some sort of revelation and… we’re gonna apply this to Stew’s story.

And then we’re going to, I’m going to tell a story.

So, and from that revelation there is the TRANSFORMATION…

Then there’s the return home…

And then there’s the ASCENSION to a different level…

Okay.

Now, I’m going to tell Stews story telling this…

I was a 17-year-old power lifter in high school who thought…

Running anything over a hundred yards was long distance.

I took a tour of the Naval Academy and I knew I didn’t want to put my parents into debt for my college education and…

I decided that I was going to go to the naval academy, if at all possible because…

I was inspired on a tour where I saw it… I looked out on this pool deck and I said, “You know what? I really want to go to school here.”

So, I worked my butt off and… I was able to get an appointment to the naval academy.

The problem was I wasn’t ready physically to be able to do what they needed me to do there…

And I FAILED my first PT test and…

I’m sitting there on this field with all these guys and gals around me wondering if I had made a huge mistake and…

If I was ever going to be able to make it through four years.

So, I decided to get some education… to get some help…

And I started working on my physical ability.

I joined the rugby team… I started working on my long distance running…

I got tougher mentally and…

Then, eventually I had a dream that I could actually become a navy seal and…

I was ACTUALLY able to do that.

Then after four years in the navy seals…

I was invited to come back and run the remedial PT program at the Naval Academy to help these kids and…

I found my true calling, which was helping young people get ready for military service and special operations because…

My SUPER POWER is helping other people to get into shape because I love it so much!

And now I’m living my dream of training all these kids at the Naval Academy!

And the other day I was standing on the pool deck looking up at those windows and thinking to myself how far I’d come and…

How many kids I’d helped to live the same dream that I dreamed so many years ago!…

Dude…now that’s like a fricking movie, right?

Stew Smith: Nice work!

Jim Edwards: You got a good story, right?

Stew Smith: You said it better than I did.

Jim Edwards: You got to admit that I know your story as well as you do.

Stew Smith: You know it very well. Yeah,

Jim Edwards: But, here’s the thing, by using this pattern…

I was able to fill in the blanks in a sequence that made an already cool story, even cooler, right?

Stew Smith: Yeah, I agree.

Jim Edwards: So, you don’t need to read 20 fricking books about the hero’s journey or have a minor in comparative literature in order to understand…

That this is the pattern that a GREAT story follows!

And so, I’m going to share with you guys… So, I interrupted you.

Go ahead and finish your thoughts… but I wanted to just share that and…

Show that when you have the RIGHT pattern…

You can take a good story and make it AMAZING when you have all the elements in it.

Stew Smith: No, that was really good. I don’t have anything else to add to it.

I was just going to kind of differentiate, what stories are again and just say…

What we are about to hear is kind of your transformation story…

Jim Edwards: from what?

Stew Smith: From where you got the idea of like… I think I can do this online.

Like kind of take you from… a little bit of your foundation of like, “this is where I was before the Internet.

Then, the internet came and this is where I am now”

You know, That type of thing. You know… that journey.

Jim Edwards: Okay. Want me to, do you want me to show that?

Do you want me to show the little outline as we go through it or just share the journey?

Stew Smith: I just talk to us here.

Jim Edwards: Okay. I’m going to refer to this because, oh, I want to show you something else…

That I did that…I know you’re kind of into this kind of thing too.

You see this hundred dollar bill up here?

Stew Smith: Yes!

Jim Edwards: That’s a reminder to me that anytime I ever make a video or any type of anything and I come over to this white board…

I better make whatever I show worth at least a hundred bucks.

Every video, I make sure somebody should have said somebody should say that was worth a hundred bucks to me or more.

So, that’s a reminder that whatever I do… I better be creating and providing value.

Stew Smith: I like that. It’s a little reminder. So, good one. Okay.

Jim Edwards: So, um, basically here’s my story in a, in a nutshell.

I’ll do the best I can. Um, I actually, when I graduated from college, I quit or got, I got a degree in history.

And what do you do with a degree in history that go to law school or you become a teacher?…

Well, I majored in fraternity, beer and chasing girls!!!!

So, I wasn’t going to law school…

And originally, I was planning on going into the military but…

Then all the budget cuts from Graham Rudman back in the late nineties.

It was impossible to get in unless you in the service academy or some other stuff.

Yeah, it was really hard to get in as an officer. So, I just kind of abandoned that dream.

And so, if you’re not going to be a teacher… not going to be a lawyer… what do you do?…

You go sell stuff on hundred percent commission.

So, I quit or got from seven different sales jobs in the first 18 months I got out of school and…

It was hell!!!

But it was also the best training ground ever…

Because I had to learn how to support myself on 100% commission sales jobs with no money… no savings… nowhere to live… everything!!!

It absolutely sucked!

But I learned how to sell…

And I was working for Nutrisystem at the time and I was an assistant manager of two different centers.

This is back when Nutrisystem was in strip malls like Jenny Craig.

Stew Smith: Yup.

Jim Edwards: And so, my job was to sell mostly women into a weight loss…

A very expensive weight loss program.

And I was really good at it because I learned real fast that if you can make people emotional…

They will buy!

And in this case, the emotion you wanted to elicit from somebody was to get them to CRY.

If you could get him to cry over the fact that they were overweight…

They were going to hand you the credit card.

Now, that may sound manipulative, but it was the truth.

And if you believed in what you were selling… If you believe that the best thing for them to do was to lose that weight…

Then you wanted to make them cry…

Because it was in their best interest to come unto that uncomfortable place and get past that threshold.

So, one day I sold this lady who said to me… “You know what?… You’d be really good in my business.”

I said, “well, you know, mam, I’ve been in pretty much every business from selling…”

I even sold grave plots… I sold insurance… I sold annuities… I sold trunk radios… I sold cell phones… I sold grave plots… I sold furniture… I sold weight loss…

And she said, “I’m in the mortgage business”

I said, “What’s that all about?”

And she explained to me that it was 100% commission.

I always thought bankers had bankers hours and bankers’ salaries…

Then she explained to me that the mortgage business is 100% or… at the time was a hundred percent commission.

And you were basically out there selling money.

I thought to myself… okay, cool, I’ll sell money!

So, I actually was really, really, really good in the mortgage business.

The way most people did the business was they ran around and kissed ass to realtors and tried to get them to refer people.

That was a good old boy business… a good old girl business… It took a long time to break into that…

At the time, the rates were going down and it was one of those refinance booms.

So, what I did… and I’ve never understood why people go to college and learn all these things and…. then never use them in real life.

I majored in history… I got real good at doing research…

And so, what I did was I went down to the courthouses… in all the counties in the area where I was living and…

I researched all the VA loans because they would actually publish the rate in the documents that were recorded at the courthouse.

I found all these people who had VA loans that were nine and a half percent or higher…

Stew Smith: Phewwww…

Jim Edwards: Then I went and I looked them up in the phone book and…

I called them on the phone and I came up with a script.

I had a sales script and I was like, “Hi! My name is Jim Edwards and I’m with Beach Fed mortgage. I was down at the courthouse doing some research the other day. I see that you have a nine and a half percent interest rate mortgage and… I think I could save you…”

And I had this little chart which I knew what their original mortgage balance was and I knew…

I had this whole chart I had made…

So, I could say… “I think I could save you at least four or $500 a month on your mortgage. Would you be interested in knowing more?”

And I was crushing it… I mean I went from down here on the sales board and to being the number one producer in the office overnight…

And I wouldn’t tell anybody what I was doing!

I wouldn’t tell anybody what I was doing.

And really quickly, I went from hustling pizzas for dominoes, which I was always doing part time… I went to making six figures a year.

I was 23 years old… I was making over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

I was driving an Acura that was paid for… I had my own house.

I was also smoking two packs a day and drinking tons of coffee and… I weighed about 135 pounds…

Because I was going on nothing but caffeine and cigarettes.

But that was when I learned about direct marketing.

I learned about… really everything kind of came together… making an offer.

I also learned the real estate agents used content to make friends with people and stay on people’s radar…

Because other people, when they walked around to the real estate offices…

They would show up with what was called the rate sheet…

Where basically they just had mortgage rates every day of what the rates and points were.

Well, I thought that was boring as crap…

So, what I started doing was on my rate sheet… I started having like you remember… Calvin and Hobbes?

Stew Smith: Oh yeah

Jim Edwards: I used to put the cat… I used to Xerox the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip on there… or the far side… or I’d ride a little 200 word article about what was going on in the market…

And all these people started reading my rate sheet like a newsletter instead of being just a rate sheet.

So, I started making friends with all these real estate agents.

But, I also figured out that my niche… I’m just being real with you guys.

My niche was… women over 55… who would look at me like the kind of kid that they wanted to date their daughter…

And so, I targeted women over 55… who would look at me like I was the son they would have liked to have had.

And I treated them like they wished their own kid would treat them.

Stew Smith: Hmmn

Jim Edwards: And these women just loved me… and I loved them too!

I mean, don’t get me wrong.

In fact, one of them…  when I broke up with my girlfriend… this is before I bought my house and I was looking for somewhere to live…

She actually rented me a room in her house for 300 bucks a month!

And unbeknownst to me… that included food!

Stew Smith: Nice!!!

Jim Edwards: I mean, she fed me. Oh. And I mean, I was like her kid.

Stew Smith: Well, that’s awesome!

Jim Edwards: And so, but I figured out, you know… the audience

And not in a way that was manipulative… but just as like, these are my peeps!

…I’m going to take care of the ladies.

Yeah. So, anyway the mortgage business, that was really, really stressful….

I met Terry… I met my wife and I was just, it was, it was just too much!

I mean, it was really… I had a couple of panic attacks…

And it was… it was not good! It was, it was real bad fact!!!

Stew Smith: Yeah

Jim Edwards: This is about the time I started developing my heart problem…

So, I decided that I was going to become a real estate agent.

I figured, you know, they’re making good money… so, I became a realtor.

I was at the time… I decided I was going to write a book.

So, I had written a book… actually took me four years to write the book.

I was going to publish the book… couldn’t get it published.

I published it myself, I said, you know what?… What if I called up all these for sale by owners?….

I’d written a book on how to sell your house yourself.

What if I call these for sale by owners?

And I just I offered them a copy of my book, you know, “Hey, if this helps you… I could use a testimonial”…

because I was trying to get a publisher and “if it doesn’t… if you can’t get your home sold and if I can help you, let me know”

Stew Smith: Good idea.

Jim Edwards: But my first year in real estate… I took 51 listings…

51 listings… I took my first year in real estate with ZERO spend on ads!

I spent nothing on ads!

The only ads that I got run… were the ads that the company ran in the newspaper!

But they were all ads for me because I had all the listings!

Stew Smith: Yeah.

Jim Edwards: So, that was something… I don’t really talk about it, but…

I spent zero on advertising… so I was doing pretty well!

But it was, again, I was just not happy.

And then in 1997… I went to homecoming and… I ran into a guy, a fraternity brother of mine.

I’m going to be real honest… I was not really friends with him.

He was actually one of those dudes… That I was like, you know, we’re in the fraternity…

But, if we weren’t in the same fraternity… I probably never would have talked to him.

And so, for whatever reason I was talking to him and he told me…

He and his dad had just bought a web server.

Now they owned a… and I guess they still own, I don’t know, owned a… advertising agent and agency in New Jersey.

And they had bought a web server because they wanted to start selling web ads.

And I said, “Hey, do you think…”

I don’t know what made me ask this because I didn’t even really understand how the Internet worked to be honest with you.

I really didn’t…

I said, “Do you think I could sell my book on the Internet?”

And he said, “I don’t see why not.”

So that launched me…

So, long story short… that launched me on the idea of, “hey, I need to start selling my book.”

And so, I learned how to make a website.

I went through three different iterations.

I use Microsoft, some Microsoft program, I can’t remember… Microsoft Publisher… which was a piece of crap.

Then, I use something else and it was another piece of crap.

And then somebody said, “you need to use Microsoft front page.”

And so, I learned Microsoft front page from the Microsoft front page Bible.

Remember those big blue books?

You’d go down to borders and by they had the big computer section…

Everything is “Bible”… “Pagemaker and 97 Bible”…

And so, I read that book… learned how to make a website in page maker…

Launched this 20 page website and…

Nothing happened…

I said, okay, I got to have some traffic…

So, I learned how to do search engine promotion and started driving traffic through the search engines…

Remember Altavista crawler?

Stew Smith: Yeah.

Jim Edwards: Web crawler X-ITE on Yahoo wasn’t even Netscape, right?

So, I started doing all these different things… I started getting some traffic and… we started making a few sales.

I said…okay.

So, I remember Terry and I were driving down the road one day and I said… and I remember this…

I said, Terry, “I don’t know HOW I’m going to do it… I don’t know how… But I know that if we’re ever going to get rich… it’s going to be because of this internet thing… and a need to figure this out!”

So, again… just kind of fast forward a little bit.

I decided to start a web design company with a fraternity brother of mine.

It failed miserably…

I developed a heart condition as a result of all the stress I’ve been under for so many years.

Found out later, there’s a family history but…

It’s exacerbated by two packs a day and tons and tons of drinking of liquor!

No, no exercise or any of that…

Stew Smith: That tends to do it…

Jim Edwards: Ended up bankrupt living in a trailer park…

And I went to work for a company… I had all these skills….

And it was weird! You know, you look at one side of the story and…

It’s like amazing… and the other side it’s like you’re a crack head living in a shack.

But, I also managed to become a syndicated newspaper columnist in that time.

I started in 1998… I started writing a column called the net reporter.

Which is a whole another story… how I got that Gig.

But, that’s probably too much detail right now.

The bottom line was that I went to work for a company… that did search engine promotion…

And because of my eye… I could promote to the search engines like crazy.

I just didn’t understand direct sales all that well…

And, I knew how to sell over the phone… I knew how to sell…

I had the credibility of being a newspaper columnist.

And so, my self-worth was in the toilet so badly that…

I actually went to work for this company for $1,500 a month!

1500 bucks a month was what I had gone from… that shit hot mortgage broker making $10,000 a month…

To making $1,500 a month… and living in a trailer park.

But this is where everything kinda hit warp speed because I went to work for this company and…

I said, “We need some sort of a product to sell”…

Because there they were world famous for getting people great placement in Yahoo.

And so I said, “We need to create something that we can sell.”

And so, this was back in the days of video professor, you remember video professor?

Stew Smith: Mmnn Hmmmn

Jim Edwards: Okay… They advertised on TV.

The bottom line was nobody at high speed Internet!

And so, the only way that you could do training videos on computer stuff was…

To either burn them to CD Rom or to VHS.

Nobody had DVDs back in 2001.

Stew Smith: Yeah. Right.

Jim Edwards: So, what I did was… I figured out how to create a course on CD.

This is the course that we created…

It’s called the search engine directory promotion basic applications… how to generate serious targeted traffic to your website.

And I mean… we manufactured all of this by hand.

This is a CD Rom with a paper label on it… that we pressed on there ourselves.

You can even see the burn… And so, what happened was… I had to figure it out.

So, in short order… I figured out how to write a sales letter.

I went to this… we went to a conference… we got invited to speak at a conference in Boulder, Colorado.

My boss couldn’t speak, so he had me talk and I met a guy, his name was Marlin Sanders and he was talking about one page sales letters.

I didn’t know anything about this, but I watched him explain how you could take a website and…

Turn it into a one page sales letter and force people to make a decision.

So that night, at the hotel… I went and converted my 20 page website to a one page sales letter…

And sales went up 250% overnight!

So, I took what I learned from that… and I wrote the sales letter for this…

And got it up to the point where… in three months, I was making this guy $100,000 a month… in CD sales…

And then he fired me!!!

Stew Smith: Hmmmn!!

Jim Edwards: And at the time it was June… I’ll never forget, it was June of 2001, I got fired from my job…

Because he was getting pissed because I was… people were seeing me… his name was Jim also.

So, people would call into the office and ask for Jim…

And he’s like, “Oh hey, this is Jim”…No, no, no other Jim, the one on the CD

And that that torked him off… And then I’ll be honest…

I was not as good at being a team player as he wanted me to be…

But my wings were starting to spread, man… I mean, I wasn’t just going to be the behind the scenes guy…

And so, he came up with a reason to fire me.

Terry and I had just moved out of the trailer into a little 1200 square foot house…

That we hadn’t even made the first house payment… and he fired me!

So, do you want me to keep going?

Stew Smith: Yeah.

Jim Edwards: Okay.

Stew Smith: So, take us to when it all turned around…

Jim Edwards: So, when it all turned around was… I actually got fired and I’m thinking this through…

I got fired on my way home… in rush hour traffic on interstate 64…

And this is back in the days when you didn’t have unlimited talk.

So, I was paying 50… 36 cents a minute to get fired over the phone!

So, I made it quick!!! There were a couple of “F” bombs dropped… but I didn’t give a shit.

And so, I got home and I told Terry what happened.

She said, “Well, you gotta look at it this way…

You’re making that guy $100,000 a month… If you could make one quarter of that for US over the next year…

We’ll be better off than we’ve been in in years… But you got 30 days to do it or you’re going to have to go get a job at Lowe’s” (and she just pulled Lowe’s out of her ass)…

You have to go get a job at Lowe’s or something…

And then some really interesting things happened…

And this lets you know that there really is a universe at work…

I had a lady that… a real estate agent, I’d done some work for who called me.

I’d actually made her website… And this is no shit within two hours of when I got home…

She called me and said, “Hey Jim, my assistant just quit. I need somebody to run my computer for me… do Competitive Market analysis… all this other stuff…

Do you know anybody?… And I thought to myself, well, you know, I just might.

Well, I said, “I’ll tell you what… I’ll come to work for you… but it will be under these circumstances…

I will… you got to pay me 25 bucks an hour and I can only work for you four hours a day.

I’ll work for you from one to five… Monday through Friday.”

I was thinking she’d tell me no… And she said, okay, “When can you start?”

I said, “Monday. All right, cool.”

So, within two hours… I more than replaced my income because I was now making $2,000 a month.

Plus, I had freed up my time because instead of working and having this huge long commute of an hour each way…I had a 15 minute commute.

And so, what I did was… I started getting up at four in the morning and I worked from four in the morning until 12 for myself.

Stew Smith: Niiice.

Jim Edwards: And I’d take a shower and go to work for her from one to five…

And then I’d come home and usually work from like six to eight.

Stew Smith: Niiice.

Jim Edwards: So. that was the one thing…

So, I covered my short term… and then… I was still making money off my real estate book.

So, that was making me money… And then, I had another guy that I had met at that conference that I’d emailed him…

And said, “Hey man, use this email now because, I got fired from my job” and…

He called me at like nine o’clock at night. He’s like, “Dude, congratulations!

Stew Smith: I love it! I love to hear that!

Jim Edwards: He says, “Congratulations, the universe just finally kicked you out of the nest.”

What the hell are you talking about man? He said, “You’re ready for this! This is your Independence day!”

And we talked for a while, you know, I was telling him what I was working on…

He said, well, we ought to do a project together…

Long Story Short, we sat down and I, you know, I’ve been doing this… I just been doing it for other people, right?

And so, we wrote… we outlined this book that became 33 Days to Online Profits…

Which was a big time classic… back in the day, back in 2001… 2001 and 2004 everybody had that book.

And we ended up… within three months… we had it done.

We got it launched… we came up with a video version of it based on what I learned from this…

I learned… we turned it into a video thing.

And, I also wrote a book with a guy named Joe Vitale called The 7 Day Ebook: How to Write and Publish Your Own Ebook in as little seven days…

Based on what I’d been doing for years with my books.

Long story short… that year between September and December…I made $400,000

Stew Smith: Damn! Nice!

Jim Edwards: Which was more… grossed… I grossed $400,000 in sales.

Okay… which was my net… It was way more than I had made the previous four years combined!

Stew Smith: Sure.

Jim Edwards: So, my point in all of this… and the numbers may be a little off cause maybe 400 was the next year.

And I mean shit… this is 18 years ago… so maybe it was 200,000.

The next year it was 400,000… I don’t know.

You know… your results may vary. This is not an income claim.

These are for illustration purposes only. How about that?…

But you know, over the course of the next year…

Just building on what I learned… I was able to the very next year make enough money right at the end of the year…

To pay off the house.

So, I was able to pay off my house in 18 months by creating a course that was a bunch of CDs with stuff.

And went on to do coaching programs and membership sites and other things like that.

And then today where I got in… I’m basically a software developer now and you know…

We incorporated software and tools and everything…

And I’m able to help others now moving forward with that 22 years of experience.

Now doing this, you know, we learned principles along the way that… yeah, the names might change.

You may call it Facebook now instead of other stuff… but it still comes down to knowing the principles of creating value… and adding value to people’s lives…

building relationships… coming out with content… coming out with products…

And there’s other stuff that happened in between doing cruises.

We’ve been able to go all over the world.

We do the Jim boat cruise.

We, you know, I’ve spoken on multiple continents, recently…

It’s fun to do new stuff.

Like last month… I spoke at funnel hacking live.

They had 4,500 people… I never did hear an exact count…

But it was between 4500 to 5000 people in the room when I ran out on stage…

In a blowup Unicorn suit.

Stew Smith: pretty classic entrance.

Jim Edwards: Yeah, for me.

So, I’m many people could pull that off…

I would just say that we’re really blessed but the best thing is that by the nature of the Internet…

And the fact that things change… we’re never going to run out of cool stuff to do.

And with the attitude of trying to help people, I really see myself as becoming like the Grandpa of digital marketing…

I’m like the guy that people go to when they can’t talk to anybody else…

They can talk to Grandpa… grandpas is able to give them cool advice.

Stew Smith: Yeah!

Jim Edwards: And I am a real grandpa in real life too, so I know what I’m talking about.

But that’s the guy I want to be the venerable elder statesman of digital marketing..internet marketing… publishing…

And so that is it… I’m fashioning myself as that… which means I’m a nice guy and I’ll help you…

 

But don’t piss me off because the old man can still take you out.

Stew Smith: Yeah, I love it.

Jim Edwards: So that’s my story.

Stew Smith: That’s a classic one.

But you know, like you said it… it goes along the same outline as you showed us at the beginning of this video…

You had an idea and everything falls apart…

Jim Edwards: Everything goes to shit and then it really… and then it really goes to shit

Stew Smith: Bottoms out.

Jim Edwards: You have a revelation and then there’s the transformation…

And then you kind of return home changed and then you ascend to a different level.

Stew Smith: It’s funny, you know… in physiology that is the actual growth chart of training.

Jim Edwards: Really.

Stew Smith: Yeah.

I believe that it goes the exact same way because… you start training and you know… everything hurts and there’s pain and…

You start doubting yourself and then eventually… on the backside of it….

Jim Edwards: Then it hurts worse than you need a knee replacement.

That is this how we grow there.

You get there. That’s a growth chart.

So, that, I mean the cool thing just to kind of wrap everything up… that we’ve talked about…

Think about what conclusion you want somebody to come to…

Based on what you want them to do in the sales cycle or…

In the… let’s call it the influence cycle… wherever you are.

And then what you got to do is… just find a story in your own inventory that you can model or…

That you can mold… rather mold to draw people…

To that conclusion

Stew Smith: To that audience.

Well depending on what your audience is… that story will change.

Jim Edwards: Yes. Audience specific.

I mean you can… when you start creating… one of the things that we’ve started doing is creating a story inventory…

We actually have a Google spreadsheet… Google docs spreadsheet that my whole team has access to.

And as we think of stories from my life… from my business… from stuff…

We put it in there!

So, that we have an inventory of stories that we can draw on… which is a cool thing.

And you have tons of stories!

The other thing that you need to understand is that you can tell stories from your own personal experience.

You can also tell stories as an observer of others and other events.

Stew Smith: Oh, absolutely.

Jim Edwards: A lot of people will tell the story, for example… everybody can tell you the story of where they were on 9/11…

at least everybody in the US… anybody in western the western world…

that’s an ally of the United States, can tell you where they were on September 11^th…

What was going through their head… who they were with…

What kind of TV they were watching on.

Where… they can do it.

Stew Smith: Yeah.

Jim Edwards: So, you can tell stories of observing other people…

You can tell stories that you pull from history and whatnot.

You can even pull stories from fiction…

One of the stories that a ton of people draw from is Stew’s favorite movie, which is rocky.

Uh, I don’t know if that’s your favorite movie was one of your favorite movies.

Stew Smith: That’s a good one.

Jim Edwards: You know, I can tell the story…

I can tell a story real quick of Rocky 2…

Not the actual movie… but when I went to see it

A lot of people don’t know this… but as a child I was very, very sickly.

For four years I had a form of cancer and…

I had my cheek cut off my face twice!

I had the entire sinus lining on the left side of my face… pulled out… almost lost my eye because of a staph infection.

And one… my parents used to… I spent months in the hospital months and months.

My parents used to spring me from the hospital every once in a while, even for an afternoon just to get me out of there and to, to have some semblance of sanity.

Stew Smith: Nice.

And so, my parents took me to see rocky 2.

I had never seen… I didn’t see Rocky… but they took me to see Rocky 2.

And I’m this little wasted away kid… I was like 4’10”… I weighed 65 pounds and…

I was just skin and bones.

I looked like a little… you know, people would have wanted to make UNICEF donations because of me!

And I remember sitting in that movie theater watching that fight and…

Looking up and I was literally going like this (making fists)

And I’m going to get emotional about… I don’t want to…

But I remember visualizing that… I was going to fight that same way inside my body against the things that were attacking me.

Stew Smith: I love it.

Jim Edwards: And I mean… it’s just that if I’ve ever been low… like really low… I will go…

And just fast forward to the final fight scene in rocky 2 not rocky.

Stew Smith: Yeah.

Jim Edwards: I mean fuck that… He lost…

Stew Smith: He won. Okay. Yeah, him coming back was a classic, right?

And he comes back and he won.

Jim Edwards: And that’s a hell of a story to tell about rocky… That has nothing to do with the story of rocky.

So, I mean that… there are stories everywhere.

You just… the biggest thing… and Stew said this is…

You gotta make sure it’s RELEVANT to your audience.

The reason people say that story sucked or…

That story dragged… was not because…

Well, for two reasons… why people would say the story sucked or dragged.

All right… it’s gotta be relevant.

I hope I spelled that right.

And it’s also got to follow the pattern…

Because that means there’s going to have a point.

Okay.

And the point of it is over here… when I say the point… the moral… the point or the moral that makes sense.

Your audience has gotta… it’s gotta make sense to them.

You got to follow this pattern and walk them through it.

And the point or moral has to be there…

And has to make sense for your audience.

I’ll tell you one other thing real quick.

It was last year, not this year, but last year…

I was at funnel hacking live… and there was a guy there telling a story…

And it was a very, very, very emotional story about his wife who had is still struggling with Lyme disease.

And it was a very, very, very powerful story.

But the problem was there, at least in my mind, there was no…

There was no moral and it was obvious that the guy was in a lot of pain.

It was obvious that this was an emotional story…

It was obvious all of this, but through… I’m sure no fault of his own… because he was, he was like in the middle of the middle of dealing with all this stuff…

But the moral wasn’t as clear as it needed to be.

So, everybody gone into this heightened emotional state…

But there was no… there was no conclusion…

there was no moral… there was no…just a feeling of at least completion or WHY.

Stew Smith: Right.

Jim Edwards: And that’s, you got to have that because you can get people all worked up and then you don’t finish them off.

And everybody’s just kind of left looking at each other like…

What the hell just happened instead of with the right conclusion…

with the right moral… with the right… drawing it together…

They could have raised $1 million for research… for Lyme disease.

If he’d been… you know but it didn’t happen.

So, you gotta make sure that it’s relevant…

That it follows a pattern and…

It’s got to a point or a moral that drives people on to the next step.

Stew Smith: Yeah.

It almost has to have a like a little victory or a solution or…

Even or just a moment of contentment.

Right now… I have found my calling.

You know, something like that. You know, it’s got to finish with, you know, something in that genre.

You know… to be effective… if you’re right.

Jim Edwards: Exactly.

I think next time or in the future.

I’d like to talk specifically about origin stories and…

How you can find different origin stories for different stuff.

It’s everybody thinks that your origin story has to be like rags to riches or something.

And an origin story can be as simple as what you talked about today at the very beginning…

With you being in a situation where you were just giving shout outs for stuff.

And then you realized by getting people to ask questions and then talking, tying it to your book.

You were able to make a bunch of sales and it was in that moment that you realized that… and I mean that’s an origin story.

If you were to go forward and why you’re teaching people to do that or…

Why you’re doing things a certain way.

It’s the origin of why we’re doing what we’re doing.

It doesn’t have to start when you were in high school.

It doesn’t have to start…you know…at the site of some of a roadside accident or something.

It’s simply just…

Stew Smith: It could be what you did today.

Jim Edwards: Right.

It’s really what… an origin story. It’s a why… It’s a why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Right. Everybody wants to know the answer to the reason why.

So, we can talk about that in the future… I think it’d be cool.

Stew Smith: Yeah, absolutely.

Jim Edwards: Cool.

Stew Smith: So, I think we have taken our listeners’ time.

Jim Edwards: No…we haven’t.

We have given them a valuable gift…

Worth at least a hundred dollars and they should feel damn good that we deigned to do it.

How about that?

Stew Smith:

We appreciate their time.

Jim Edwards: Yes. We do. We appreciate that. Be Wise enough to spend their time with us.

And those of you that aren’t group members of the Sales, Copywriting and Content Marketing Hacks group on Facebook… need to be checking it out.

If you want to know more about my story, head over to the JimEdwardsmethod.com and…

if you want to know about more about Stew’s story, they should go to StewSmithfitness.com

Stew Smith: That’s right…

Jim Edwards: And there you go.

All right, cool. Great jobs Stew! Next time I’ll let you talk…

Stew Smith: Sounds good Jim…

Jim Edwards: We’ll see you later!