How To Become A Student Of The Game

John:               00:12 Hey guys, welcome to the show today. We are talking about “Student Of The Game”. How do you become a student of the game? You know, there's a big difference between the professional out there is that do what the greatest, the best even in, in even the NFL, the major leagues. You see the difference between the pros versus the more experienced pros, right?

Craig:              00:34 For sure. In themselves, there's always people who are better than the rest.

John:               00:37 Yeah. And how is that done? And today, we have none other than Craig Lack, who I've admired his way of being a student of the game. I feel like I'm a student of the game. That's how I got good at things that I did. And you know, meeting with Craig and learning from Craig over time, I, you know, always thought, well it's just a smart guy and he knows all this stuff already. And then getting closer to him, being around him on the regular, I started to realize is this guy, this guy's a student of the game. He's doing things on the weekends. He's doing things when nobody's looking. So wanting to talk to you today about why is it so important to be a student of the game in this business.

Craig:              01:18 It's everything. You know, you mentioned, Hey, it's Sunday and we're getting ready for the Cowboys football game. And there was a show, I don't know if it's still on, but it was the pros versus the Joes. And so they had these weekend warrior cats who were like, you know, the best touch football player or basketball player or bass, but it didn't matter. Right. And they'd go against the local hero. Yeah. Recently retired pros and they'd, they'd pit them in a battle against each other. Right. And the pros would just absolutely obliterate these guys because there's such a difference between paying the price of being a weekend warrior Joe and being a professional. And so the show is great. It's a lot of fun to watch. So being a student of the game is just really simple. When I was a paintball coach with my son and we were the national champions, three out of five years, we learned, I had these kids when they were teenagers.

Craig:              02:13 So from 15 to 2021 and you know, I enjoyed the brain science of it and teaching them that delayed gratification was a secret to being successful in anything. No matter what you did. If you could just live with the fact that you could delay gratification and pay the price today, then you could be more successful than all the competition because they're stuck on being comfortable, you know, doing stuff they wanted to do. So I used to tell the kids, I said, so what are your friends? I'll do in this weekend. They're going to the beach, aren't they? Right? They're partying, playing video games. Right? And I said, so every, you know, they practiced at least four years straight, all through high school. My youngest son, Mark practiced every weekend unless I was on vacation with Sandy. I was there every weekend, right? So we paid a price that nobody saw.

Craig:              03:06 Muhammad Ali has a great quote. He goes, Hey, you know your greatest champion of all time. None of these people were around when I was training, when I had to run 10 miles every morning just to wake up before I even worked out, nobody was there. Will Smith as a similar quote. He's like, why would I pay attention to the people who didn't believe in me while I was struggling? Now I'm Will Smith and everybody you know wants to be my friend. So you know the game is, are you willing to do the things that unsuccessful people aren't? Cause that's the secret to success.

John:               03:40 Yeah.

Craig:              03:40 Write that down. Just be willing to do the things unsuccessful people aren't and you will be inevitably successful. It's impossible not to be.

John:               03:50 Yeah, I think it's, you know, I want to go back to my poker days. It was just standard practices. If you wanted to become better, there was only one way, obviously playing the game and practicing, but it was the time off the table that matter. And people say, how do you use time off the table of poker? Well, what is that? That's not odd.

Craig:              04:10 Literally, it was literally the rule of thumb was if you spent 30 hours playing, you supposed to spend 30 hours a week off the table, practicing getting betting, reviewing your hands so you don't make those mistakes again. Moving forward and we talk about this in his business is like, I always use that reference because people don't do that with the sales meetings, prospect meetings. It's like, well how the meetings go? Great. What did you do wrong? Did you ask Missy?

Craig:              04:41 I don't know. I didn't. I didn't ask him, but it's like, how do you ever know if you get better? You come out of there. A lot of times we'd come out of there. We're jacked up. It feels so great, right? Yeah. I feel so good. I'm on my sales high mostly cause you probably talked the whole time. I know you come out there Jack, you think the meeting went well and you really don't know what they were thinking until you go back and you, you listened to a recording, which is a scary thing to do. I'll warn you guys, when you start, when you start looking at listening to recordings, it's very scary to hear your voice, especially video. But when you go back and you go over it, you can dissect the things you did wrong, what you did right and start to, it's just what you did in poker.

Craig:              05:21 It's like, okay, I recognize that mistake, I see it not going to make that mistake again. Sure. You got to review your performance after you're done. Yeah, and you're literally, so if you made 10 mistakes in a program is just like a sales meeting you, you're going to make a lot of mistakes and as you get better, you just keep taking them off cause you still continue to make a handful in the meaning. It's inevitable, right? Nobody's perfect. But if you can limit it from let's say eight to 10 things down to two to four, well the meeting's going to be more successful because you're not going to say those boneheaded things that you say as a salesperson or an insurance broker.

Craig:              05:56 Yeah. The biggest issues are going to be you sound salesy and the worst one of all that most people suffer from, they sound needy and you can't be needy in a meeting because it comes through. Yeah. Yeah. And we all suffer from that in the beginning. Right. It's cause you do need them. You do need this, you absolutely want and need this sale and it comes through you. You know? Now I'm at the point, fortunate enough in my career where sometimes I just don't care. I'm just, I don't really need you that bad. Would I like them? Yeah. Most cases I want the, I want the group, I want them, but

John:               06:32 Yeah,

Craig:              06:33 I'm not needy anymore. Like I need to worry about paying bills or something like that.

John:               06:38 It makes a huge difference. You've gotta be able to walk away, take the sail away and not be needy.

Craig:              06:43 I told you, yeah, I told you the day when it was looking at a car and they, you know, they bring me in there and, and they, they offer me X amount for my, for my trade, and then I get there and they say it's still, we can only, it's two grand less. We can't do that. I go, I go, here's your key. I'll take my key back and I'll steal it. Oh wait, wait, wait, wait, what's going on inside? Within five minutes they were up $1,500 in price and I still walked out because they didn't give me the whole two grand. They told me. Yeah. And then sure enough, the next day they call me with it. So being desperate, right? Yeah. They utilize that against you. And in car sales,

Craig:              07:16 It's what I've said a lot of times. Right. The prospect's actually a better salesperson in the Brook.

Craig:              07:21 Yeah. What did they call it? Buyers are liars. Usually the prospect, either you get sold, so you sell the prospect or the prospect sells you. In most cases we get sold. So we talked about being a student of the game. Tell me a little about what, what does your weekend look like? How do you get better?

John:               07:36 Well, you know, my kids are grown so any day that ends in wise all the same to me. So what would be a Saturday for most people? I'm in the office nearly every Saturday cause it's quiet, it's undisturbed. I can get things done. It helps me focus. And then on the weekends you know, I find that to be the time where I can, if I'm not flying cause I like to read when I fly, it gives me something to do. And I read a lot of books and so on the weekends I like to read, I like to do my prep work. So I need to do research. A lot of times on companies I'm going to be talking to the next week. I need to be able to have a conversation with them about their business, their industry.

Craig:              08:17 Well let's go back to reading for a second. Cause a lot of people struggle with it. I struggle with it. Finding the right environment. I've tried many times to read on a plane. I hate plane. Raj. I travel a lot now. I can't seem to read on a plane for whatever reason. Okay. Is it

John:               08:33 Get audiobooks different? Yeah, everybody's different. Right. So you like we've already talked about this. I like to read. You like to watch videos.

Craig:              08:40 Yeah, I tried the audiobooks. I couldn't get, my mind would wander after 30 seconds and I'm in, I'm thinking about something else. So I, but I think I need to find the right environment. My environment has been pretty much at home. Usually in bed is probably where I read the best, but I still struggle with it. I'm not going to lie. I wish I'd read a lot more. But you can read anywhere or do you have a certain environment that you prefer?

John:               09:03 You know, right here in my patio I like to read here on the weekends or I'm on a plane. That's, those are the two places I read the most. And how often you read? For sure. I read every week and sadly enough, I've quoted this a few times on our show. The average working American never reads a book after college. Okay. I used to do kitchen across the kitchen table sales. When I got into college, I want to be a financial planner and I sold insurance for Prudential 18 months. I did buy new 15 ways to get in the door and sell them something. And that was all kitchen table sales. And so the joke was, you know the TV screens bigger in their library. People didn't have a library. Sure. You know who you're talking to. Powell. And so it didn't take me long to feel like, you know, I'm a little out of place here.

John:               09:48 So I went out on my own at 24 been out on my own ever since. That was a few decades ago. So yeah, reading is really important and rarely does that encompass reading anything about health insurance. It has to do with the people that are going to be my buyers. It's going to be HR, it's going to be CFOs, it's going to be CEOs or private equity guys and gals, and being able to articulate and have a conversation with them. So it sounds like, I know what the hell I'm talking about. Makes them believe, Oh, this guy understands my issues. Their issues are never health insurance.

Craig:              10:22 Very rarely. Yeah. So talk about that for a second. This is the different types of books. I think everybody, you know, not a hundred percent certain what the books to read. Obviously, sales books are great. We're in sales per year. Most of us get no sales training. So sales books are great. Psychology. Yeah. And that's where I was going to say psychology is something that you've studied and I've learned and seen, you've know so much about. It was like, how do you know all this stuff? Well, I read psychology books for years. Talk about psychology for [inaudible].

John:               10:49 I lived in a crazy house growing up, so I needed to figure out how to stop being angry and you know, overcome my past. So I read a lot of books on psychology and learned how to become aware, which gave me more control, which allowed me to make more choices, which allowed me to be a better business person. And so rather than react to everything, I could be preemptive. Kind of funny, you know, most of our clients and prospects that we've talked to, they live in a 100% reactive world. Holy crap, right? The guy we talked to just the other day, but a 19% rate increase. Gee, so how did you shift costs? Reduced benefits or limited access to care because that's the formula for 10 years. Oh yeah. We bought a high-performance network and we're going to shift the contributions and we netted the employer contribution down to 3% wow. Been there, done that Groundhog day movie, right? I mean, what a joke. There has to be something more.

Craig:              11:45 So behavioral economics kind of give the viewers a, an explanation of what that is and why it's so important.

John:               11:52 Hey, a lot of great books on behavioral economics, so we're full of life experiences and so how we were raised and the messaging that we heard when we were little kids, it became anchored in us. And so since 95% of our life is operated on the unconscious, we're not conscious of what is going on unless you really work at paying attention to being aware of why you're suddenly using the fact that you grew up in an Italian house to be reactive in emotional and losing control, right? It's an automatic negative thought and somebody pushes your button and hits the trigger and you go from one to 10 10 being explosive, and so you start to learn, Hey, people are 10 if I stay at a five I'm going to pull him down to my level and then we're going to be able to a rational conversation. So behavioral economics, really simple. We haven't had a software upgrade up here in like 200,000 years, so what do we know?

John:               12:53 We know that human beings will do anything, anything to avoid a loss, not so much to achieve a game, which is why the whole 401k industry exists, right? It's, we know that people, you know in the inevitable you want to buy low and sell high, but that's not what happens when they buy [inaudible] and they sell low because they just are reactive and they're not. They're not thinking. They're very emotional and they lose control. And so if you realize that behavioral economics steers and influences a lot of people's conversations and thoughts in their head or unconscious thoughts in their head, it drives their actions and behaviors. So you take advantage of it. Now, let's just segue that into wellness. Hey, they've been trying for what, 35 years? Shout out to our friend Al Lewis. Hey, 35 years to try and get people to modify their behavior in order to reduce the demand for healthcare services hasn't worked so much as it because it's really hard to get anybody to do anything they don't want to do.

John:               13:57 Even with a financial incentive, $50 a month reduction and you know, outcome-based wellness programs. If you do this, then you get a lower premium. If you do this, we'll give you 50 bucks. If you do this, we'll give you 25 bucks and the stuff only works on a small fraction of people and so when you become educated on that, you can articulate a message to somebody that's different than the talking points that the wellness company gave you and you can call them on the carpet and go, yeah, you've been doing the same shit for 10 years. You just change vendors and every year you lose money and your rates keep increasing because you're missing the point. You're shooting at the wrong thing. He never going to change people's behavior, not if they don't want to chat to you,

Craig:              14:37 Change your, if you're somebody out there that maybe isn't a student of the game or wants to become more of that, how do you chain change or train your mindset that to get into that, that path becoming greater at what you do and competing with the top players in the market.

John:               14:56 You have got to take five minutes out to think. Einstein had a great quote, I've got 60 minutes to save the world. I'm going to spend the first 55 minutes thinking on the last five minutes taking action. You know what brokers do in this world? They spend 59 out of 60 minutes doing stuff, right? So if you could just take out 15 minutes a day to look at, where am I at now? Where would I like to be? If there's a gap somewhere spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, then you have to decide, do I have a reason why I'm willing to delay gratification and do stuff that I haven't done before in order to fulfill my potential? Because at the end of the day, that's what this is about. I don't know anybody who doesn't feel like they have so much more potential than they actually realize. And so if they could just spend 15 minutes taking the time to think about the gap between where I'm at today and where I'd like to be in, in these different areas of my life, and commit to just one of them, forget the whole thing.

John:               16:12 Find one that you're really hot and passionate and emotional about. Get behind it and start to do things that change your behavior. And in about a month you can change your behavior. So it becomes an unconscious act. You don't have to think about it at first. You have to make yourself sit down and read for 10 minutes. You got to think of it, you gotta make yourself do it. You set a timer and you go, I'm doing this for 10 minutes. I'm not gonna let my mind wander, right? And then pretty soon you 15 then pretty soon you can do 30 and then you can do an hour and you don't have to think about it. It just becomes part of your routine and what happens? Here's what happens. Same thing happened for my kids. And painful, you make your own luck. It's a coincidence that the harder you work and the smarter you work, the better you get and the more successful you are for whatever it is that you were in search of. It is inevitable. It is the way the universe works. So if you can just find the button that's going to make this heart connect with the brain, you will do that stuff that makes you more successful than everybody else. Cause everybody else is taking the easy way.

Craig:              17:16 Yeah, they're there. Relax on the weekends. I, I knew, I think it was my fourth, four and a half, five years in was when I, I took a lot of time to educate myself and get better at certain things. And it was, it was a struggle to do it because you'd give up the prospecting time or you give up some of the time in sales and the focus there to get better at certain things. Yeah, I think it was a Michael Jordan and I heard a story about one time where they were like, he's allowing the passer, he's a lousy defender, laws defender. And then he became defensive player of the year every single year, the best defensive player in the league. And that was all driven from him wanting to get better and things. Now obviously it's cause they said he wasn't great probably at those things. So he said, all right. Yeah, I'm not good at these things. I'm going to spend time and focus on getting better at these things. And then just inevitably he became not only the greatest player that I'll be ever, but one of the greatest defenders ever. So I guess focusing in on it on what you're not great at to get better. I was the same thing in, in the poker game,

John:               18:16 There's two different philosophies there. I will tell you that there's two schools of thought and one says, screw your weaknesses, focus on your strengths and just be badass. And then there's another group that says, well, you know, if you focus on your weaknesses then you know your average will go up, right? You'll, you'll perform a little better. And so I think you just got to figure out what makes you tick and do what works for you. Ultimately, you know, there's 7 billion people. There's a lot of variation there. I mean you can't,

Craig:              18:46 The thing, it's like if you're in sales and there's certain things that you're doing wrong, I think you got to get better to get your whole, your talk down and your presentation down because maybe your public speaking's not so great.

John:               18:58 Yeah. Don't read books from the eighties and nineties they didn't even know about brain science. Then find modern books on what they know on how human beings make decisions. Understanding the brain. What trigger is, was it NLP? They talk about, sure. Neural linguistic programming has been around for quite a while. It's already advancing. It basically takes advantage of the fact that they know that the human brain makes a decision emotionally, not logically. The logical only dictates the emotional decision that was probably made here in your heart. What's interesting, if you read more about the brain, it talks about so when a thought

Craig:              19:32 It comes through, it essentially comes up the back of your neck and goes through your head and the process, the logical thinkings in the front, but in order to get there, what does it have to pass? The emotional side, which is in the middle. And that's why so many people make emotional decisions because they can't allow it to get through to the logical side. Cause the customer emotions, emotions, rise blocks. It never gets to logic.

John:               19:59 Right? And that's the little thing about the size of a Walnut called the amygdala in your brain is that thermostat we've talked about before. It's your air conditioning thermostat in your brain that says, you know, I like 71 degrees and boy that thought that just came in. Whoa. Hey, what's that? That's making me uncomfortable. You know what? I don't need to read right now. I need to check the scores and eat right. I need to check my fantasy league scores. And so this is what happens with your whole life. You just find distractions on why you're not going to call that client back. Cause you read that Holy, Oh man, I God, I don't want to call that guy. You just got to get it over with. Right? And then it's done. It's like, you know, when the kids are little, you know, you've got to convince them on, look, you just got to face the music. If you don't lie, just face the music. It's over. In 10 minutes it'll be resolved. But when you lie, then it leads to another lie and pretty soon it's a week you're stressed out and eventually it always comes out. And so you know, every, all the good stuff in life is a paradox. It's not exactly the way we think it is.

Craig:              21:03 So do you, I talked to you about, I like to, I like to watch videos late at night, YouTube, things like that. Do you do any video learning? What do you, what things do you watch to get better trainings?

John:               21:14 Yeah. I have very little video learning that I do. Sometimes it might be somebody talk. Mostly it's me reading. Yeah. Yeah. I like, I like it at all or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. I watch TV. Yeah. That's a game that anybody can play. It's like, okay, so the military did a study. We can only keep 150 people's names in our names and faces in her head. So you go and you ask somebody, what's your favorite TV show? Everybody has one, right? Who's your favorite character? Oh okay, great. So they're in your top one 50 do you have a single prospect where you're in their top one 50 cause you prospect to them all the time and they remember your messaging and your blogs and your emails and your videos and your book and your bestsellers do anything? No. Oh maybe that's a problem if you're not in the prospects one 50 right?

John:               22:03 So maybe there's this big fricking gaping hole. So pick your favorite character and you know, act that way. You're having a hard time. You're, you're afraid of public speaking. Heck, I was nervous just six years ago. I mean I was scared to death. I'd done hundreds and hundreds of open enrollment meetings in front of him, but for some reason I had told myself that being on stage is different. Right? Just a little message that I hadn't written the right software code in my brain. And so I signed up for everything that made me uncomfortable and I got over it. And so you know, everything in life is a paradox. Don't run away from it, run towards it, you'll fix it.

Craig:              22:41 What do you do to prepare for these calls? So you, you, you talk to more prospects than anybody. People are teeing up phone calls for you. What your solution, the Syrah, if you don't know sometimes you call it the Sierra, the Trojan horse. Yeah. What do you do to research and prepare for these calls? What does it look like? Why

John:               23:00 I'm looking to try and find a hot button with whoever I'm going to talk to. Right. So last week we talked to a company who made guitars. Well, I did some research and I knew that at some point in time they were called the Stradivarius of guitars and I segwayed healthcare into a conversation about how they negotiated with probably a very limited list of providers of the wood that they would need to make their special guitars and how challenging that was to have such a shortlist of vendors that they could buy from somewhere in the world. And we had a conversation, I talked to a food company the day before when I said, so you know, what percentage of your business do you use? Are you delivering your own private label food? Is there more margin in that then than just facilitating, you know, vendor A's, foodstuff to some other place.

John:               23:51 And you know, I researched what the food delivery industry was all about and had conversations with them. I had another conversation with a company who's got a million commercial washing machines and I was like, Oh, that's really interesting. You know, it reminds me of casinos I've worked with for 20 years. Your washing machines are just like a slot machine. If they're not working, you're not making money. And I said, I can remember 10 15 years ago they would tell me that a slot machine could make them 150 bucks a day net. I said, so how much does a washing machine cost? Long pause. Guy kinda chuckled and said, that's an interesting comparison. Yeah, they are pretty similar. He goes, we make 10 to 60 bucks a day per machine. He knew his number. He just never, you know, nobody had kind of tied those two together.

John:               24:37 And so I just have the ability to do that because of my experience. Probably being a retail broker for so many years, dealing with so many different kinds of industries, I never had a niche. I'm a big fan of riches and niches now. Now that I'm a lot more experienced, but back in the day, you know, I just got experienced knowing about a lot of different businesses. But when I read, I tried to read with the intent of being able to have a conversation that never has anything to do with health insurance but has to do with the visual way to segue into healthcare based on how their business functions, ways just to give, allow them to understand it. So here's a couple of quick examples. When your having a hard time keeping workers to drive around the country and service a million commercial washing machines because the best employees you have are old or you know, in health insurance terms, they're old.

John:               25:29 And so that means their claims are going up and it's really hard to find young people who want to do that. And yet young people could do it easier, cost you less money and you have to pay him less. So because you have an aging workforce who have higher health claims, it eats into your profit margin. And so once we talk about the pain that that causes the dynamic of their demographics and the lack of ability to recruit new talent, what does it lead to? Will it lead to a health insurance conversation? When I led the conversation. And so you use their business struggles tied to what we already know. Everybody knows who's listening. Healthcare kills the profits of every single company out there. Now some companies make so much money they don't care. Like I had an energy company in Houston a couple of years ago. Tell me, son, I don't lose sleep over $25 million problems.

John:               26:18 What am I going to say? Thanks for sharing that with me, right? I don't want to waste your time or mine. Have a nice day. What was I going to sell them? So yeah, you have to be able to meet them where they're at. Meet your prospect where they're at and guess what? Almost none of them. Let's face it, guys and gals, one out of 25% you got the meeting cause they got a problem with health insurance. I mean no, they got a problem in their business. Recruiting, retention, turnover, profit, margins, operating leverage is negative on and on and on. There's just an endless list of problems that they have to deal with. Now, the question is if you can get them to share that with you, you can now segue why healthcare is making that problem worse. I mean, if we could impact healthcare, couldn't we have an impact on this and this and this and this that you just told me?

John:               27:11 Well, yes we could. Well, that's why you're here to help them solve their problems, not your, they don't care about you. They don't care what you have to send your calls. You're right away just going to try to test them on where's their problem. Here's what I know about your industry. Here's what I researched and just have a conversation around their business and what they want to talk about. Because in the end, that's all they really care about. It's all they really care about. And I've even said just straight up, I just read an article. Right, and what do you do? You do Google it if it's not publicly traded. Are you looking at or, well, if it is publicly traded, you're looking at financials. Yeah. So a lot of the publicly traded companies have all of their most recent quarterly presentations to their investment community online.

Craig:              27:54 You can see their PowerPoint, it's got all their talking points on there. Okay, perfect. So easy. Otherwise, some of the best places are websites of the prospect. If they keep their news section current, you can find out, otherwise, yeah, you do Google searches, you're looking for news, you're looking for stories. You always know what industry they're in and you just do. You just do, you know, a search on the industry they're in and in a few articles, you can sound intelligent about any industry.

John:               28:27 You know, I notice you, you always come up with new sayings, new talks or new ways to spin things. How do you, how do you come up with all these things? You always go in with something interesting.

Craig:              28:37 I have a brain that works. I like metaphors and analogies. So anytime I'm reading anything like that chart I came up with at that, at the Heads Up Adviser event right now we'd ever seen that before.

Craig:              28:51 Right. But I got that idea from reading another book. And so when I read books, I've always found that every book has at least, and I mean good books have maybe five or 10 or 15 fabulous ideas I can make money with. And so I read and it always makes me think of something that I could go, Oh my gosh, I could use that to say this, to, to convey this message so that it's clear. And so that's why I'm always coming up with new stuff because I read and it gives me ideas.

John:               29:25 And how many, so if you were to just estimate how many hours a week you think you spent off this business getting better, what would it be?

Craig:              29:32 Hmm. eight to 12 hours. Okay.

John:               29:38 What's the formula for success?

Craig:              29:40 Oh, it's so simple. Everybody. Just be willing to do the things that unsuccessful people won't and it will inevitably lead to your success.

John:               29:51 That's it folks. That's it. Well thanks. Thanks for the show today. You got it. Student of the game. Go out there. Get better, get better where you do become a pro and we'll see you in the next one.