Persuade Yourself to a Better Life with Ray Edwards

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like Finding Founders. Today, we'll be breaking down how to persuade yourself to a better life. To drop these value bombs, I are brought to Ray Edwards and the EO Fire Studios. Ray is a communications strategist, copywriter, and author. Ray's marketing expertise and persuasive writing has helped generate an estimated$400 million in revenue for clients like Tony Robbins, Michael Hyatt, Dan Miller, Jeff Goins, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hanson, Jeff Walker, and many more.

0:38And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about being saved by a sales letter. We'll talk about read this or die. We'll talk about how to use persuasion for a better life and so much more. And we have so much great stuff to talk about as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

1:15Ray, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, what's up, Fire Nation? And I'll tell you something I believe that I think most people disagree with. I know they do because I've watched their behavior. That is wishing doesn't make it so. People believe in the power of the law of attraction. I do too, but I think the law of attraction has to be made with action. And I think so many people just wish things would happen. They visualize it, they fantasize about it. That's what they're really doing, fantasizing. And it doesn't happen the way they want it to, and then they blame something else outside themselves.

1:49I think that wishing is a good place to start, but you gotta marry that together with action. Fire Nation, we're action takers. Let's live that truth. And we're talking today about persuading yourself to a better life. And Ray, you may not say this yourself because you're a very humble individual, but you're a copywriting genius. But this title is next level. Read this or die. Tell us more about how you came up with a title for this book and what it means to you. Well, I'll tell you the story of the title of the book is kind of funny because it came very late in the game. I am a copywriting nerd.

2:32I don't know if I'm a genius, but I'm definitely a nerd. And I was at a Jeff Walker conference many years ago and I met a guy in the back of the room. He was being ignored by everybody. He was an older gentleman and I may be in his age range now. I don't think about it. The time I met him, his name was Jim Rutz and he was one of the best copywriters on the planet. He did missionary work and he'd go back home to New York City every once in a while, get paid a hundred thousand dollars or more to write a copywriting campaign and you take the money and go back to the field and do mission work again and one of the pieces he wrote was for a health newsletter about how to heal yourself and get better naturally and the title of that newsletter was read this or die and so I had that title stuck in my head and I was I was at a point in my life where I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at age 46, and I became, as the disease progressed and I became more and more disabled by it, I became more and more depressed about it, and I reached a point where I was, I didn't even want to live.

3:38So I thought, until I came face to face with the Grim Reaper and came very close to death and considered how easy it would be for me slide into that. And I realized I do want to live. I've got other people I want to live for. I thought about my wife, about my son, about my employees, about my customers, about all the people who would be affected if I let myself slip away like that. And I realized I had to live or else I had to die a failure, failing to meet my most important values in my entire life. So I sat down. I tried everything, John. I tried self-help rallies. I have many self-help gurus who are clients of mine, people like Tony Robbins and Jack Canfield.

4:21I revere them. I honor them for what they've brought to my life and to the lives of others. But those things didn't help me with this particular problem because Parkinson's is incurable, so they say. It's irreversible. It's degenerative. It just gets worse and has a predictable outcome, very predictable outcome, which is not very pleasant for most people. And so I was faced with that. And I had to either figure out how to live, regardless of what happened to me in terms of the disease, what kind of person I was going to be, or else I was just going to have to go ahead and give up and die of failure.

4:53So I decided to live and I did what I knew how to do. It wasn't a self-help rally. It wasn't a miracle healing service. I tried those things too. And I'm a spiritual guy, but I tried every spiritual thing I could. attempt to get cured of this disease and it just wasn't happening. So I turned to the only thing I knew how to do, which was persuasion. And I'd spent decades persuading people to buy things that made their life better, whether they knew it or not. And I had perfected that skill set. So I decided to persuade myself. So I wrote myself a sales letter. And the headline of that sales letter to me, to one person, to Ray Edwards, was read this or die.

5:32I want to dive more into that story because in your own words, you were saved by a sales letter. And you for years and years and years, I mean, you know, decades, in fact, you know, have been helping people with copy. Like you said, you're a copywriting nerd. I call you a copywriting genius. I mean, you've helped people like Tony Robbins, Michael Hyatt, Dan Miller, Jeff Goins, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hanson, Jeff Walker. I mean, over$400 million in revenue for those individuals and others. You've written sales letters. You've written copy. You've persuaded other people for so long, and now you had to persuade yourself.

6:12And you, again, by your own words, by your own admission, were saved by a sales letter. Let's dive deeper into that story. Parkinson's disease is bad. I don't want to paint a light picture of it, but it's not the worst thing that could happen to somebody. and whatever problems people are facing in their own lives, those are the biggest problems they've ever faced. Whatever their biggest problem is, it's the biggest one you've ever faced. So I don't mean to make, mine's not special is what I'm trying to say, but it was special to me as it is to each of us. And I realized if I was going to live and have any joy in life and have any respect for myself, I had to persuade myself life was worth living to start with.

6:49So I had to start with what was hurting. What was hurting was all the unleft, unfinished business I was leaving behind. Unpaid bills, unaccomplished goals, unhonored promises. I promised certain things to my wife when she married me that I, some of which I still have not delivered on. One of those is a trip to the Netherlands, which is the homeland of her family. And we're taking that trip this coming February. We're going to the Netherlands together with her sisters. It's going to be a great trip, a trip of a lifetime, as she describes it. There were these things I wanted to honor, and it was hurting me that I was going to leave.

7:25I could leave my pain behind, but I would leave those people, my wife, my son, people that work for me, people who are my clients. I'd leave them with the pain of having to figure out what to do with the promises I had not kept. So that was what motivated me. Because what motivates us, I believe, John, is first and foremost pain. It's what gets us to do things. We might aspire to certain things in our life, but it's the pain that gets us to get off the couch and get something done. So that's where it started for me was writing myself that letter. Just like I'd written sales letters to people to sell them vitamins or books or seminars or travel or hair replacement systems, all the things I've sold to people.

8:00This was the most important sale I ever had to make, which is selling myself on living and living in a certain way. I love this story. And that's why just about a week ago when you and I were having a one-on-one phone call, I asked you to come on and talk about this because I think this is a message that a lot of people need to hear. And if you're not one of those people, Fire Nation, that needs to hear this message right now, I bet somebody you know is. This is important. Help spread the word. We have more to talk about, all about persuasion, when we get back from thanking our sponsors. I remember back in 2013 when Entrepreneurs on Fire was scaling fast.

8:36And in those early days of our business, we sometimes found ourselves struggling to keep up because we couldn't find software solutions that were easy to use and that would grow with us. Wasting time worrying about software that's complicated, a pain to use, and that doesn't do what you need it to do is not fun or productive. So what do we wish we knew back then that we know now? That a powerful all-in-one CRM platform that will accelerate your business growth is a HubSpot CRM. Unlike a lot of solutions we were using back in 2013, HubSpot's CRM grows with your business. Whether you have an MVP or you just IPO'd HubSpot CRM is built for scale because your tech stack should work for you, not against you.

9:18And with over 1 ,300 flexible apps and integrations, you can customize HubSpot's CRM to the way you do business. Get started for free at HubSpot.com. That's HubSpot.com. Ray, we're back, and I want to talk specifically now about persuasion. You've used persuasion for a better life. You've actually used persuasion to save your life. You've used persuasion to help other people's lives, help better their lives. Let's talk about how we, Fire Nation, our listeners right now, can use persuasion for a better life. Love to. It's my favorite thing to talk about right now and probably going forward because I've got a surprise ending, the missing chapter from the book that I'll share with you toward the end.

10:05but there's a formula I created for writing sales copy to sell stuff to people, whatever stuff you sell to whomever. It's called the pastor process or method. And it's not about being a preacher, it's about persuasion. The letters P-A-S-T-O-R stand for these faith phases or components of persuasion. And I chose the word pastor because originally what it meant was not preacher, it meant shepherd. And I think, what does a shepherd do? Shepherd cares for the flock, protects them, keeps them safe from predators, leads them beside the still waters to the peaceful grass, so they can rest and be easy and be at ease.

10:40That's how I think of us dealing with our customers. As a copywriter, as a marketer, I want us to take care of people, lead them to good decisions for themselves, even if the decision is not to buy from us, maybe, in some cases. So I had to pasture myself, if you will. So real quickly, the formula goes like this, P-A-S-T-O-R, P stands for pain, you have to start with what hurts. So that's what I did for myself, identified what hurts for Ray, what motivates me to want to do something different with my life, what motivates me to want to keep living, what motivates me to want to live in a certain way.

11:09Then I go to the A, which is amplify, which is how much worse could it get before it gets better? It doesn't get much worse, John, than violating your own values and leaving unfinished business behind and unkept promises to people you love most. That hurts a lot. So then after you amplify the pain, you look at how bad could it get, what's the worst case scenario, you have to find a different story of a better future. Because I was depressed, and somebody wants to define depression as the inability to construct in your mind a hopeful future. That's where I was. I became so disabled at one point that I could hardly walk across a room by myself.

11:49I couldn't eat my own food. I had to have somebody cut my food up for me. I stopped traveling because I wasn't able to travel, even with help. I traveled for a long time with an assistant who helped me with things. He got so bad I couldn't do that. There is a happier ending to the story, so I'll get to that in just a bit. But I had to find a different story. And the story was, I looked to, okay, who's had a worse problem than I've had? Well, Christopher Reeve had a worse problem than I had. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He was Superman one day. The next day, he was a man who could only function with total dependence on other people and on a machine to help him breathe.

12:23I looked to Beethoven, who most people don't realize this, most all the symphonies we know of Beethoven were written after he was completely deaf. Couldn't hear a note. Wrote it in his head. The greatest symphony ever written, most people will acknowledge, is the Ode to Joy and his Ninth Symphony. And he couldn't hear a word. He couldn't hear a word. He couldn't hear a note. He couldn't hear any of that symphony, which is his greatest work. The most complex symphonic piece ever devised, orchestrated. So then after finding a different story to tell myself, which the story was, if these people can overcome those things, I can surely overcome the minor, by comparison, challenges that I face.

13:03So what's the transformation? I had to find evidence of that. So I began looking for stories of people who had overcome Parkinson's and worse. Of course, Michael J. Fox comes to mind. He's managed to maintain an acting career and win acting credits despite and maybe even because of the battle he had to fight with Parkinson's. It could be argued he maybe got his best performances because of the challenges he faced and continues to face. Then there's the opportunity. That's P-A-S-T-O-R. The O is opportunity. Where can change happen? Well, it had to happen in the place that's the hardest place to make a change, which is in our own brains.

13:35I had to examine my own beliefs. One of my beliefs was I thought wishing did make it so. This is why I don't believe that anymore. I tried that. I put that to the test, my friend, and it didn't work. wishing to not change the situation I was in. What I could change was maybe not the external effects of the disease or the problem I faced. Like when we all got locked down a few years ago, we didn't have a choice. It happened. It was external to us. It was enforced upon us. Whatever you believe about any of what happened, you had to follow the rules because you were forced to. But you could be in control of what happened in your own head, how you thought about it, how you approached it, what your attitude was.

14:14It's like in that book, Man's Search for Meaning. where Viktor Frankl says the last choice we have to make, the last freedom that cannot be taken away from us, is how we respond to things that happen to us. And that's the final piece of the puzzle, the response. Set up a system that makes transformation stick. It reinforces what you've determined, will help you actually change. That's what the book is all about. I walk you through the process I went through. I tell the story of the progression of my disease and how I dealt with it. I had to examine all my different beliefs in life, the ones that were working, the ones that weren't.

14:43Like the wishing makes it still a thing. I had to finally face up to the facts that, you know you have to do something you can't just wish it away and it helped me turn my life around and i believe anybody who reads the book there's at the end of each chapter i walk you through how to write your own letter to yourself your own sales letter to yourself to sell you on whatever change you need to make whether it's it might not be as anything as big or as small as parkinson's depending on what you're facing you might think that is a big or small challenge but whatever the change is you want to make maybe it's you want to stop smoking or maybe you want to eat better or maybe stop just having stop just having pop tarts for breakfast maybe that's I mean for somebody who's challenged that may be the biggest thing they're having a problem with is what they eat that's the biggest challenge they have and this is how you change it it's all based on psychological principles that I've used to sell things for decades but this sale I was making was the most important one I'd ever make which was to myself if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them I'll tell you the final missing chapter from the book oh yes we are in pins and needles for that I just want to kind of go back Fire Nation and just re-amplify what Ray was just sharing, specifically pain, amplify, story, transformation.

15:50How can you go through that process in whatever you're struggling with right now? And just like Ray went through that process. And again, now he is where he is today. And we're going to be talking about this final chapter right now, which as he alluded, it's kind of a good ending. It's a pretty darn good ending. And the best part is it's not the end. It's the beginning. Here's what happened. I became so disabled I could not take care of myself at all. And I finally began to consider something that had been proposed to me a few years ago, but I completely flatly denied I would ever do it. It was brain surgery.

16:24There's a surgery called deep brain stimulation where they insert these electrodes into your brain and you have a little power pack that centers the skin just below your shoulder. It's kind of like a pacemaker for your brain. And the theory is it cancels out the bad signals that get sent to your body by your brain, which cause the symptoms, most of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, the shaking, the inability to walk, the inability to speak, and so forth. And I just thought it was barbaric when I first heard about it. When you become desperate, you consider all sorts of things, even the barbaric things.

16:56And once I decided, okay, I'm going to give this a try because it's the only thing I have left to possibly change the physical problem I'm facing. And I made two decisions when I made that decision. followed up with two more decisions. One decision was if it doesn't work, I'm still going to stay positive. I'm still going to maintain that I can have freedom to choose to have joy and whatever I'm able to have joy about, whatever the symptoms are, whatever the ending may be for me, I was going to face up to it with courage and with gratitude. The second decision I made was it was going to work. I was going to do everything I could to make it work, including I was going to eradicate all negative thinking about the possibility of it not working from my mind.

17:33so I refused to watch any videos that criticized the procedure. I refused to hear any stories of people who had it and didn't get the result they wanted. I only listened to positive success stories and watched them every day on YouTube leading up to surgery. I had them scheduled the surgery as quickly as possible so I wouldn't have time to think about it anymore. Once the decision was made, it was going to happen. That was it. I want to do it as fast as possible. So we did it and I'm happy to report there's a viral video on TikTok of me the day they turned the first to install it, two surgeries are required to install it.

18:04You have to heal up, wait 30 days till it's all healed up and they turn it on. I have video on TikTok when they turn it on and it's, I can only describe it this way. It was a miracle. They turned it on. I could suddenly walk again. I could speak. I could feed myself. I could dress myself. I could drive again, drive my own car. Things I took for granted before. Things I'm grateful for every single day of my life now because I persuaded myself it was possible. Fire Nation, I hope that you are hearing these words that Ray's sharing and understanding that these type of transformations are absolutely possible.

18:40Again, I love the process he talked about pain, amplify, story, transformation, and focusing on that. And Ray, you've written, which may very well be your masterpiece. Tell Fire Nation a little bit more about the book and where they can go to pick it up and learn more. Thank you, John. It's called Read This or Die, Persuading Yourself to a Better Life. It's the book that chronicles the story of how this all happened. The things I had to question, I ended up questioning everything in my life. Now, I didn't throw away everything in my life. Many of the beliefs I questioned, I found to be useful and true, and I stuck with them.

19:16Some I didn't. You can read about that in the book, and you can also read the process I went through to write the sales letter to myself that changed everything. I write one of these every year now to myself, depending on what I want to change next. And I give you the outline of how you can do the same for yourself. And I even share the letter I wrote for myself in the book so you can read it and see exactly what I said to myself. It was kind of brutal, the things I said. It was me facing up to the truth for once, for the first time really in my life, about certain things I had done and not done.

19:44So I think it's powerful. I think a lot of people who've read it have said that it helped them make changes in their own life. You can find it at readthisordiebook.com. and if you order a copy, whether you, depending on when you listen to this, you may be listening to during pre-order time or even afterwards, we have a free six-part video mini course that goes along with the book that teaches you how to do this process for yourself in addition to what's in the book. So it's readthisordiebook.com. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with R-E and J-L-D today, so keep up that heat.

20:21For links to everything we talked about here today, visit eofire.com. Type Ray in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And one more time, Fire Nation, readthisordiebook.com. Ray, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Fire Nation, do you want to master productivity, discipline, and focus? Well, how about using my Mastery Journal? The Mastery Journal will help you master productivity, master discipline, master focus in 100 days. That's what we do. Visit themasteryjournal.com, and I'll catch you there or on the flip side.

21:09Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.