# Ep. 0079 - Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference - The Published Author Podcast

Channel: Published Author
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0PhX8qWTG8
Duration: 58 min
Language: English
Words: 9971
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/R0PhX8qWTG8

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[0:00] [Music] welcome to the published author podcast where we help entrepreneurs learn how to write a book and leverage it to grow their business and make an impact i'm your host josh steinle welcome to the published author podcast i'm josh steinle i'm here with chris voss author of never split the difference one of my favorite books i've read it twice and i should probably read it a third time now chris welcome to the show thanks josh happy to be here looking forward to the conversation so today we're going to get chris talking about the story behind the book and how it got written and how it's helped him to grow his business but

[0:42] before we dive into that chris for those of the listeners who may not know you out there can you give us a brief introduction to you and your career before you wrote the book sure i was an fbi agent was the fbi's lead international kidnapping negotiator probably between domestic u.s and international kidnappings worked about 150 cases worldwide just before i left the fbi started getting involved with harvard program on negotiation and law school you know sharing ideas on negotiation strategies we decided we were pretty much doing the same thing right after i left the fbi i was lucky enough to teach negotiation be on the teaching staff at harvard law school

[1:25] and then right after that i started teaching business negotiation these ideas from hostage negotiation for business and personal life first i taught it at georgetown university in their mba program then at usc about five years ago uh published never split the difference a book on negotiating for everybody you know based on the emotional intelligence of hostage negotiators the black swan method is based on that stuff i learned back then and we've evolved it and you know i got a business now and the black swan group teaches and uh coaches negotiations for in business and occasionally personal life so what inspired you to become an fbi agent was that something you wanted to

[2:10] do when you're a kid or how did your path lead to that i got inspired to go into law enforcement when i was about 16 years old originally i just wanted to be a police officer um saw a movie the super cops about two cops in new york city true story was really inspired by their creativity and how much good they did you know and their independence i didn't realize that at the time they were very much mavericks and i just found that story inspirational and so then i became a police officer in kane city missouri and then my father encouraged me to go federal you know he

[2:49] had he paid for a four-year college degree and i went and got a job that didn't require a college degree uh so you know he wanted me to you know continue to improve and aspire and climbed the ladder so to speak and so he thought federal law enforcement would be that gig and ended up applying for the fbi joined there was originally on a swat team with the fbi and then transitioned to hostage negotiation and loved it just loved it and it ended up building my life around it so how much is working for the fbi i mean your book you have some crazy stories in

[3:31] there of things that you were involved with but how much of fbi life is like what we see in the movies the hollywood version and if it's not like that what's it really like yeah well most of what you see in the movies is kind of an aggregation of a lot of different lives occasionally like it would depend upon the movie that you were looking at whether it be for the fbi or whether it be uh as a hostage negotiator most of the hostage negotiation stuff's pretty inaccurate pretty overblown but uh fbi's good stuff i mean you get a i got to do some interesting things i

[4:05] work terrorism and work surveillance i followed people around in new york city you know we arrested bad guys didn't get any shootouts um was prepared uh too and came very close a number of times but the fbi tends to be pretty organized and you know we don't encourage shootouts which means we want to outman and outgun the bad guys so that they see that and they they they give up peacefully so you know arrested a lot of organized crime people a lot of terrorists literally and had a great career traveled pretty much all over the world yeah so at what point did you say i want

[4:46] to write this book what was the original inspiration for it well yeah uh and that's kind of a critical issue especially for entrepreneurs like when i got out of the fbi um i went back to school you know worked on a master's degree in a special program for older students at harvard it was called the mid-career program and you could get in based on your resume you know those of us that don't test well you know the i'm not gonna knock the lights out of any any tests uh to get into a master's program but a bunch of us had good resumes and at that school of government if uh if you

[5:25] were in public service and you wanted to continue to support public service you could apply and so i got in with a bunch of talented people that i was really impressed to be around and one guy in particular said you got to write a book if you're going to if you're going to have a business you got to write a book it doesn't even have to be good you just got to get a book out and i thought all right so there's a certain amount of sense of that but i want to make sure that it's a pretty good book we uh you know my team

[5:53] principally myself a brandon uh who's the president of my company you know again for entrepreneurs you want to go fast go alone you want to go far go as a team you have to have a team and it's really been brandon and i from the beginning as trusted co-workers and he taught with me at georgetown and at usc even at harvard and we want to make sure we had a system end in we just didn't want to put a book out there now it ain't a bad idea to put a book out one one security guy that i spoke to in uh dc when i was there before the

[6:30] book came out he self-published a book and uh paid to put it in hudson bookseller um you know that that's a it's a phenomenal place to to to put your book and he's he told me he said look if i didn't know how much business i was going to get this is the best marketing i ever did just getting it in a hudson bookseller business people walked through guy picked it up in a train station read it on the train and hired him so you know there's a lot to just getting a book out showing what your expertise is we didn't quite want to pull that

[7:06] trigger we waited a few years felt like we had the system down end to end taught and refined it the way we taught it in the mba program i made my students apply it in their real life a lot of negotiation courses you know at harvard we did all simulated negotiations and then we wrote about the simulations and there's a lot of shortcomings to that so i thought well you know i'm going to make them do it in real life and then write about it so we and the book is full of real life examples from my students in the different mba programs doing phenomenal stuff

[7:42] on their jobs you know whether or not they were a government contractor or whether they were on wall street so then when we had a lot of real-life actual examples we had the system we went out we found tall rods who is a genius writer i mean read any business book now he's a business writer i wouldn't i wouldn't hire him to write a children's book but as far as business books go probably the best that it ever was and we got all on the go ahead i'm sorry tell us a little bit more about that what made you feel like i need to go hire somebody to help me write this book

[8:22] versus just writing it myself yeah great question um from hostage negotiation i had learned you know hostage negotiation looks easy and it is you got to study it it's like any skill you got a deep dive so i'm like i'm not a writer i'm i'm i'm a teacher i'm a talker i fancy myself a thinker you know dan sullivan a strategic coach said you're a simplifier you know you see how to explain things clearly and my former boss gary nesner one of the most entertaining people i've ever met in my life he wrote his own book stalling for time now his book is good and gary is great

[9:11] and his book is entertaining as it is is nowhere near as entertaining as he is in person you know his the first story in his books about a place called sperryville and i've heard gary tell the story of sperryville in person and he's had me on the edge of my seat every time and i know how it ends and he still has me on the edge of my seat when he tells a story and when he wrote it it was good but nowhere near as good as he is in person so i thought all right i got to get a great writer and the cliche advice is go to the

[9:45] bookstore find the book that you love that you want to emulate and hire that guy and i had been blown away with the book nevered alone keith frazier's book on networking that tall wrote loved reading it emily readable and i used to carry that nevered alone around with me with the different i fired four writers in total in a journey and i'd hand them never eat alone and i'd say write this book this is brilliantly structured it's digestible it's readable everything about the structure is magnificent which is true tall created the structure i didn't realize how smart a researcher he was in addition because he captures the author's

[10:29] voice and finally you know when i couldn't find somebody that could emulate tall's writing style i thought well the answer is obvious i went straight to tall and we made the deal now an established ghostwriter like that is not exactly affordable for many entrepreneurs out there and maybe you can't share exactly what you paid but i'm guessing that it was probably north of six figures to get tall's assistance on this book yeah what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs who might be looking to hire a ghostwriter but they're not quite in that market to be able to hire somebody like tall yeah that's a scary thing because

[11:09] um you're that's exactly right tall's fee was out of my range now like i could have paid his fee he wanted a guarantee we sat down didn't have any money back then well you know i had savings but the business wasn't built okay and he said look you know i i i'd love to do this as a percentage collaboration you know i think it's interesting as hell but i got you know i got a wife i get kids like i'm i'm getting x dollars for these books that's what i'm getting if i take you on straight percentage and that doesn't come true i mean he's going to kill me i got a family

[11:54] and we got the book deal and then i went back and hired him because the book deal uh made it available now he has since told me you know there's some brilliant writers out there that just do proposals and if i had it to do over i'd have hired you know a superstar just to do the proposal somebody who who did business books and then and then and i could have afforded that it would have been it would have scared me but i could have afforded it if you think of two different guys one guy to get you your half million dollar deal so that you can then turn around and get

[12:40] the guy that you want and paul has actually done that a couple times told would actually rather write the book he wouldn't really want to do the proposal and by accident that's how we got him i had somebody else had done the proposal and we got a great deal so that we could afford paul so you did have somebody i would give now so you did have somebody write your book proposal then i did i i my original vision was that this guy was going to do both and it didn't work out that way it would have cost me exactly the same amount of money and not now if i was struggling

[13:14] and starting out i'd say look scrape together your dollars the uh the book deal is gonna be worth it if you if you get to if you get a business writer to do the proposal get the deal and then turn around and get you get to get the star you know if you're doing a if you're doing a business book i'm here to tell you you're not going to find anybody better than tall ross so you hired somebody to write the book proposal you thought they would write the book too with that book proposal then did you go straight to publishers or did you find a literary agent who

[13:45] then helped you get the deal how did the deal come about i'd already had the agent um steve ross i'd been i've been to a number of agents and nearly every several agents said this book will never stop there's no appetite for another negotiation book the market's flooded i mean sometimes you wonder why people take meetings why would you take a meeting to just you know badmouth somebody's idea and it happens like it you know shot the tv show a few times we're sitting with a network in new york we spent a lot of money to be there and we sit down with these bozos and the guy starts to tell me what

[14:32] allows the idea of tv shows and i'm thinking like how do you make a living spending your time not doing things and the the agent a couple of agents i we talked to like nah you know this book will never sell nobody will be interested in it and i'm thinking like time is money why are you wasting your time so then uh i stumbled over steve ross steve had uh agented another book business book by a guy named joe navarro what everybody is telling you joe's a profiler wrote a phenomenal body language book and that's how i ended up in steve's office and steve said look i don't know how

[15:13] well it's going to do domestically i don't know what kind of appetite there is but internationally they love anything that's got fbi on it so i know i can sell the heck out of this international which by the way he did and you know we went 36 countries so he agreed he was the first guy that had any sort of positive remarks we pulled together the book proposal now he didn't expect it to be a big deal either and the publishers went nuts like he almost panicked we had so many publishers coming after him and and i'm a keep my word guy and he called he was in new york i was

[15:51] in dc he says look man you got to come up you got to spend two weeks in new york there's so many publishers who want this book we got to make the rounds we got to talk to everybody i said steve i got obligations over the next two months and i keep my word i got one day you know i think he had a heart attack he's like all right well we'll do an auction um you come up and one day i'm gonna stack you meetings in the end we're gonna start at seven o'clock in the morning we'll go to seven o'clock at night you better get a good night's sleep the

[16:26] night before because i'm gonna work you hard while we talk to the publishers and i'm like cool because one of our core values one of my core values is you will not outwork me you may be smarter than me you may have better friends than me you may be more well connected than me you're not gonna outwork me and i'll i'll prove it to you so you know steve telling me this i'm like cool i could do this i'll outwork anybody on the planet and you know we we met up with the publishers and he cut the deal on the auction he says we got to strike by the

[17:06] iron is hot we actually ran the auction uh just before halloween on a thursday and a friday if you're familiar with new york and the literary world they're partying on halloween halloween is probably the biggest party night of the year in the united states i don't know about globally but you know when i was a police officer more people got locked up for drunk driving on halloween than on new year's eve i mean halloween is party time especially in new york and all these publishers like we got a halloween party you know we want to dress up we want to have the office party and steve was like i don't care it's the

[17:43] day the auction is and it went really well and uh we got the deal and the book has has done the agents were wrong and the publishers were right and there's a massive appetite for a good negotiation book so it's interesting how things change there i mean you had all these people telling you there may not be any appetite for this or there is no appetite for this but the publishers got it and they appreciated it and they thought it was going to be a big deal why do you think they got it but the other people didn't you know that's a that's a great question um i have no idea you know what

[18:18] i've you know different mindset yeah you know i i see the the literary world and agents you know it's another aspect of the entertainment business and the number of people in the entertainment business that take meetings to prove to you that they're smarter than you by telling you that your idea is a stupid idea i mean i i believe that human nature is a pretty universal thing and the laws of human nature i mean we call them laws of negotiation gravity when we when we're teaching black swan methods stuff that's just utterly true no matter what i like to think that people in the entertainment world and agents in

[19:00] particular are not dumber than the rest of the planet for taking meetings constantly with the intention of shooting down an idea or taking a meeting with the intention of not moving forward on the project i've been stunned at the number of meetings that i've been in the entertainment world where they want to give you ideas but they have no intention of doing business with you which is an utter waste of time i don't know how that mindset gets started people convince proven to themselves that they're smart by shooting down other people's ideas but it's just it's just at the point now where there's a lot of meetings i don't

[19:39] even take because we're gonna read in advance that's gonna be a waste of time and we're like no no thanks don't wanna talk and the agents the agents are in that mindset i mean many agents are in that mindset so ultimately you went with harper harper collins business uh to publish and there are different factors that go into choosing a publisher to work with when you're in this situation where they're bidding for your project obviously money's part of that but what were some of the other things that influenced your decision to choose harper well it was more what influenced their decision to to outbid everybody else

[20:15] because we'd met with their reps um hollis heimbach and hit it off uh i was really impressed with her when we met and on the strength of that meeting i you know i turned around when the bidding got started and asked steve that exact question that you're posing to me how do we decide and he said what you're going to find out is who puts in the most money is going to be the most committed and then steve and both paul on a follow on connor on the side and especially tall took me off to the side and said look you gotta hustle this book do not rely on anybody else don't rely

[21:02] on a publisher don't rely on the agent he said you need to get out there and put the hammer down for at least a year maybe two and i remember hearing that the chicken soup for the soul guys you know they made it a point on their first book to talk to somebody every day it didn't you know i i don't know maybe they're willing to talk to a collection of homeless people but they were going to talk to somebody every day so what i'd heard about those guys and then also the advice from tall again this is up my alley you want me to work hard on this

[21:45] you got it two years i'll give you 10. and to this day we have never stopped hustling on the book you know i'm not sure that i talk to somebody every day but i would bet that i'd do something podcast some talk to somebody just darn close to an average of one a day we just we just we have never let up and that you know there's been a couple of critical turning points also on on that journey that made a big difference um but it was like look don't rely on anybody else you make sure you lead the charge quick break here are you an entrepreneur

[22:28] do you want to write a book that will help you grow your business visit publishedauthor.com where we have programs to fit every budget programs that will help you write and publish your book in as little as 90 days starting at just 39 per month or if you're too busy to write your book we'll interview you and then write and publish your book for you don't let the valuable knowledge and experience you have go to waste head on over to publishedauthor.com to get the help you need to become a published author you've already waited long enough do it today now back to the show so now when you got the book deal the book

[23:03] wasn't written yet right you had the proposal you had the general idea how much of it was fleshed out or structured or outlined uh you know we almost threw out the entire structure previously and that was a cool thing about tall because you know we've we've done a number of other projects in a previous project paul is an artist and he he'd already been proven to write business books so you know brandon and i sit down with tal for basically for 36 hours he comes down to dc stays at brandon's house and he brings two tape recorders and he just downloads everything out of both our brains that he can for pretty

[23:44] much you know 36 solid hours he doesn't let up and then he goes home and we don't hear from him again but we've got a massive amount of material that we've down dumped on him we must have given him videos of 50 classes that we taught plus he did a massive amount of research you know i could tell when he'd read a negotiation book because he'd ask questions for example on stuff from jim camp he'd start asking me stuff with start with no and like i'm i'm i know this stuff backwards and forwards i'm like ah cool you're reading the right books and then he delivered the middle of the

[24:20] book like i'm like we get hit the first chapters i get to review are like five six and seven of a ten chapter book and i'm thinking like okay i don't know how you're starting in the middle and then he wrote the next to the last he wrote the last chapter next to last and he wrote the first chapter last and that was his process but he knew he also knew like the first chapter sells the book right at last it's just so obvious we haven't i haven't worked with anybody since that's followed that i mean we've got a real estate book in progress now that tall is not

[25:03] involved in and we've worked with gone through several writers there and every single one of them wants to outline the ten chapters and it wants to write the ten chapters in order which is the first chapter first the tall is such an artist that you know came through and we just sat back and waited like after the interview i waited three months and then suddenly i get an email and there's this this work of art with took some editing on my part you know i i had i own every word in that book and which is another thing he told me he said like you can't just sit back and

[25:39] take what i what i write you're going to have to own and know every word in this book and be accountable for it and so you know but minimal editing on my part because he got it so this three-month period was this after the book deal then that he started working on that right yeah we uh we got the book deal um about two or three weeks later we had uh um a conference call the publisher paul um me brandon steve it's kind of interesting because at that point in time the publisher didn't know that my son was gonna was involved you know it's my name on the contract and it was pretty

[26:25] cool because we all signed in on the phone and i and in different locations i go chris voss i'm on paul roz i'm on brandon voss online and hollis gets on the phone and she says just so i know what's brain and voice doing on the phone and i go dead sonic because i want to hear what tall is going to say and toggles having brandon around is having another chris involved and hollis is like cool and then we're off to the races so hall comes you know house wants to know that we're going to hit our time marks she hasn't spoken at all yet she knows of him because a dude's

[27:07] reputation and publishing world is huge publishers love it when tall roz is involved because everything he touches is the best seller and you know you're gonna make the time frame how do you feel about this tell us like yeah you know he wanted a year we gave him 10 months and he says yeah but i can hit these marks and we did the interview he delivered you know on schedule the middle part of the book when he delivered the middle part of the book we're about a third of the way into it so i'm optimistic that this is going to happen you know it's tight it's the best writing i've seen

[27:41] he's a fourth writer and when i'm seeing his work product it's just better than anything anybody else has delivered minimal revisions you know other guys had massive revisions and and so then i'm like okay well your work product is this good i don't you know i don't care if you're riding it backwards and upside down it's just good and so then you know we got a couple more chapters and then finally we got the tail in and we finished well ahead of schedule okay so total time from the time you got the deal until the manuscript was submitted to the publisher about how much time was that it's about 10 months

[28:21] okay so you did hit that target so then how much longer after you submitted it to the publisher until it actually was in your hands as a physical book yeah well the publisher told us they said they want you know they we want to know that we have a finished product six months before launch so we're not going to guarantee you a launch date until we not only do we have the product but it's been edited you know everybody's been through the editing process i mean we're ready to go to print and that probably took that may have taken another month because you know um they you know they did they did their

[29:00] own run-through they had a couple questions the book because i was a retired fbi agent had to pass through the fbi's pre-publication review which i expected that to be painful and it was not you know the turnaround time was great the guy at the bureau that i worked with was phenomenal they had a couple of minor glitches stuff that i had to fix and um tiny i i expected but i had done my homework in advance so i'd anticipated and already handled headed off all the problems so that went smooth and it was probably from from the time we gave the manage manuscript to the time

[29:42] that they were ready to pull the trigger to begin the printing process was probably about a month i would guess and then at that point in time it's just them energizing their distribution network and they said we need six months for this you know because we can't energize the distribution network if we can't guarantee a product to put in their hand on a certain date then we you know then we were making a call on a target date you know they they were leaning in the direction of springtime you know late spring and we ended up launching in may all right so the book launches in may

[30:18] what were your expectations for what would happen immediately after the book went live or was released and how did that match up with reality yeah you know i i don't know that i had a lot of expectations we we had a traditional publicist and i ended up being um you know they were okay they did a couple of good things um you know everybody that i know that's that's that's doing well in books you know they they really are standing up their own network as much as they possibly can you know the publicist i was a complete unknown at that point in time and they did a nice job getting some placement in

[31:05] some magazines and that was helpful you know we were trying to we were trying to blow out the um pre-orders so that on day of launch ideally we could hit some kind of best seller list the biggest boost overall is has been amazon amazon is just just a phenomenal partner you know they they know that the harder they hustle for you the more money everybody makes you know i i if if you if you were to criticize amazon i don't know what it what you would criticize them for but i mean like they will do whatever they can on the day your book launches to try to

[31:48] categorize you number one as something like um you know this book over here ego authority failure which um derek gaunt you know we sponsored derek derek's on my team hostage negotiator wrote a leadership book based on our same principles now he went we did total self-publish wrote route with derek he wrote it we went through a completely other process any any other process with him uh his process they put him on amazon and amazon found a way to put him in a category as a best seller in this category on day one so amazon is a phenomenal partner the traditional publicist got us in a couple of magazines that was somewhat

[32:35] helpful um they got us on tv day of launch on fox that ended up being massive you know the only time that you can really get on tv for your book is the day it launches and any decent publicist will will pull that off for you nearly every publicist wants to become a dependent you know they want a six-month deal to hustle on your behalf what we found almost all of them do is they're going to knock themselves out for you the first month and then they're going to coast for the rest of the time and beca and having learned that the hard way we went back and i and i

[33:20] engaged in other publicist and i said i'm paying for a month and they said well we want to be we want six months i'm like no and you know one of our negotiation techniques is a no warranted question instead of yes would you like to do this are you against doing this and i said to them so you're telling me that you're against allowing me to hire you for a month because i'm not going to hire you for six you refuse to allow me to hire you for a month and they go no no no no we're not against that we're not going to refuse that and so we got the deal for a month

[34:03] and this explicitly to get me into the media and tv and uh it was hard for them because it wasn't launch and thank god i only hired them for a month because it's harder for them if it's not your opening day how do they interest you know every media outlet wants you on opening day if they can't tie you clearly into a story any other time they really don't want you because it's not interesting to them and this publicist really struggled with that we found out for them for you know tv and media appearances thank god i didn't hire these guys for six months because they had trouble

[34:41] delivering for for the first month and they were working that day long so then what was the reception like i mean it's become a wall street journal bestseller it's been on other bestseller lists but did that happen immediately did it grow over time what was the path to that best-seller status yeah doing doing uh hiring the right publicist to put us on podcast so opening day it blasted out really good because the the uh two different fox appearances one on fox news one fox business bang it it i mean it went through the roof we made top 10 amazon which is kind of arguably top 10 in the world all

[35:24] categories because amazon is the biggest marketplace and then it just started falling off a cliff after that it it it did not sustain like tall said ideally you're going to be in the top 100 for the first month and we fell out of the top 100 like within a week like oh god you know what we got to do and so then i was taking any podcast i could get and we were kind of sustaining it because you know the book hadn't been out that long and it at that point in time it hadn't made any best seller list you know top ten on amazon one day is not

[36:01] good enough to make any best seller list but we continue to scrap and hustle and talk to anybody homeless people you know i didn't care people in the airport you know i didn't care wherever we could i mean doing everything possible every bookstore i went by i went in and signed copies i'd signed two copies you know sign everything i could get my hands on and so the first month we were lucky enough to get into as some category as the national bestseller and i i don't even remember you know what book list it was it wasn't wall street journal wasn't new york times by any means

[36:39] but it was a national bestseller so you know we you know it might have been jack and jill children's books you know i didn't i don't know what it was it didn't matter but it was legitimately our category where we could we could put that out there so now we got a little interest um but then the real key point was i went to ryan holiday and his company brass check ryan has written a whole bunch of books and he also has not only written books but he also has a book promotion company and a book publishing company and i and and i'd heard of ryan i didn't

[37:14] know him personally at the time this ended up being the best money i ever spent ryan says all right so probably what you really need is you need good placement on on a high level podcast you're going to find that people have a tendency to put you on their podcast if somebody else in their categories already had you on as an interview so i you know i got some connections i can put you at at a good level and he gets me on lewis house lewis has a great guy and a talented interview interviewer and it's really invisible because you know you got to watch several of lewis's

[37:53] interviews to really understand how good he is at talking to people and bringing out the best in people and he does he does the interview he's an interesting decent human being plus he does it with video and then he's smart enough he hustles the heck out of it himself because it's in his interest i nailed the lewis house uh podcast and bang now we're now we're hitting podcasts they're kind of at the same tier as lewis howes and then the book sales are picking up now the thing that was cool about ryan was he said this is what i'm going to charge you and you're going to hire me for a month

[38:32] so ryan did not want to become a dependent he wanted to work for a month he knew that if he could provide value he could do it in a month and that was all he needed to do get us launched into the stratosphere and not continue as a dependent unlike all the other podcast or publicists who want to be a dependent for at least six months so they could coast i've found this to be universal issue anybody that wants to go on a retainer for six months or more they want to coast they want to knock themselves out for a month and then they want to chill

[39:08] for five and ryan didn't want that not so much so that when i came back to ryan a year later because i'm thinking like all right so a year ago ryan gave us a phenomenal boost what can he do now and i went back to ryan and i said that same thing i said look look man i mean what you did the shot in the army gave us a year ago was phenomenal let's do it again and ryan said no i did my thing for you you could hire me for a month i could charge you the amount of money again for a month and it wouldn't do you any good i

[39:46] already did my thing i'm not gonna take your money and i was like wow like you are so rare you are only going to take money if you can actually help somebody and and to this day i mean you know we've crossed paths occasionally we've spoken at a couple conferences i got a couple of mutual friends uh that he has much more interaction with my mutual friends but i got so much regard for this guy because he delivers value it doesn't work for you that's great so you got on these podcasts and then the book sales started climbing uh how long did it take until you got

[40:30] onto the wall street journal bestseller list because that's a serious achievement to get on that list yeah it was pretty cool we didn't we didn't get on that list until after the first year i mean you know sometimes you just got to wait for the stars to line up and you know and every now and then in really odd ways the stars are going to line up and so we just continue to hustle uh the book sales were solid we started you know i heard little other hints here and there from people about how to hustle the book you know there's uh there's a phrase uh

[41:01] never take advice from somebody you wouldn't trade places with um or you know similar to that you know never take directions from somebody who hasn't been where you're going another friend of mine eric barker wrote a book called barking up the wrong tree which i highly recommend it's about um actual success in life eric's a regular guy he doesn't care what it takes to be successful but he's going to do the research on what it takes to be successful and he's going to tell you that's what the book is about he's got a a blog that i read all the time by the same name barking up the wrong

[41:37] tree and i'm sitting with with eric in la one time and he says look this is what i do on a regular basis on the postings that i do this is how i structure my blog so that uh which affects my book sales like one thing eric said that uh is is it was critical to me he says like first of all people are gonna criticize you and for every every troll every critic you got at least 10 fans so take every critic as a sign of success and if you're not getting criticized you're not working hard enough you're not doing well you should be scared if you're not

[42:11] getting criticized he says i'll give you a case in point in my blog the very first thing in each one of my blogs is a link to buy my book he says i've gotten a massive amount of criticism from the trolls for putting that first oh why are you putting it here you're interfering with me reading your your blog you know it's disruptive you know just critical stuff he says every time that i pull that out of that position my book sales drop and when i leave it in that position which people complain about my book sales are always higher and i'm like wow cool you know don't be

[42:54] gun shy of the trolls if you're being criticized there's a pretty good chance it's an indicator you're on the right track you want to live a life where there's not some where nobody's throwing rocks at you you are not living in a real world especially in today's social media where the media and the social media specialize in finding people who throw rocks at you to try to intimidate you out of doing what is in your best interest and eric was one of the first people that pointed that out to me and i pointed it out to a number of entrepreneurs you know i've spoken to people

[43:32] carolyn rim is a phenomenal motivational speaker out of philadelphia she was getting some vicious criticism on facebook once and and i emailed her and i said thank god you're getting criticized you know for every critic you get 10 people that love you if you if you haven't got being criticized as sign of success and she was kind of like she's taking it personally i mean getting some vicious personal criticism people trying to tear her down and we're not on her side anyway but you can listen to these trolls and it distracts you from the fact that you're actually doing the right thing so fast forward to today it's been about

[44:09] five years since the book came out how have sales gone over that five year period have there been ups and downs has it consistently sold more uh has it turned into one of those perennial sellers like ryan holiday talks about well it's a perennial because you know we're we're relentless the perennial nature is how we relentlessly we are now there had been a couple of ups and downs it spiked into the top 10 on amazon two separate times after um uh the opening and i like one i tried to duplicate and you know both were complete accidents like i get an opportunity to uh to speak

[44:50] at the global leadership summit in chicago which is affiliated with a church it's supported by a church it's a non-denominational and spiritual conference and my daughter-in-law maya cuts the deal and i got no idea what what i'm stepping into at the time um it's there are it's in an auditorium of 7 000 people and then simulcast to a hundred thousand people and then they repackage the simulcast they put it all over the world i got no idea i'm walking into a venue this big and you know we've gone back and forth with them they've been very supportive you know they were wonderful and and they were dealing with the troll of

[45:36] their own at the time and when i got the gig a friend of mine sheila heen wrote a great book called difficult conversations said all right so i i recommend that you do this and know that they have a critic out there who has criticized them over some stuff that may have been legitimate they made their adjustments and tried to make peace with this person because they fixed you know they they corrected all their sins if you will and this person this troll has has so defined themselves as being a critic they're unwilling to stop criticizing so you know there's nothing wrong with these people they're good people

[46:20] and you're going to take some heat and because this person has so defined themselves as being a critic they can't be a decent person so i'm like cool you know i'm willing to take heat with the right people especially if they've made whatever adjustments they need to make so i walk in and these are phenomenal people this conference is phenomenal and i and i i'm looking at book sales that day and the number's climbing and i'm like what's going on here uh so that was a delight and it's it spiked one other time when i did a reddit ask me anything because the stars happen to line up you know i

[46:57] did uh read it subsequently and didn't get the same results so you know the bottom line is like like keep hustling keep doing the right thing you know don't get deterred if you try something and it has no impact because i did a reddit once and it spiked into the top ten and i did it again a year later and there was no impact and you know because we've refused to stop hustling then it has remained it it's remained steadily you know to i checked the numbers every day and i checked our you know where we are in relationship to other books because i'm trying to get a feel for where we

[47:36] are and we're hovering in about the 200 ranked number 200 these days you know it's gotten as low as 3 000 but we're we're staying in a ballpark of about 200 to 500 because we just don't give up that's phenomenal now the 20 million question here is how has this helped your business to grow what impact has it had on black swan group no better no better marketing tool none no no better marketing tool and and way back to the the security guy that i was talking about that self publish a book and put it in hudson books he said this is the best marketing money

[48:18] i have ever spent ever and you know i got another guy that um he does marketing uh on a much smaller scale in la and and he put out a self-published book and it's it's you you think is uh a business owner if you're a consultant with expertise that like look i'm the same dude before this book you know but your your clients they want to see that you got a book i mean it's it's the best business card there is business cards are are useless hand somebody your book i mean there's nothing as a consultant there's nothing that touches it tall has written books with ceos

[49:10] and you know they dumped a lot of money into hiring tall to write the book and it has put those ceos on them on the map in ways that nothing else would have so the you know the guys way back when before before i would write a book who told me get a book out no matter what you do get a book out they were right it's also an indicator a book project is the serious project in the end if you can get a book out you've proven that you have an amount of expertise in and around the area that you're trying to get hired for so

[49:53] there's there's no substitute for it uh you mentioned that lewis howes was a great interviewer is there any one thing that he did that was stand out i'd love to learn if there's some tip that i can apply from your interview with him i'd love to know if there's something that he did that i could implement that would improve what i'm doing here well i don't know there would necessarily be an improvement for you but what lewis does real good is he does like minimal paraphrasing which gently steers the conversation um and effectively it's a little bit of an interrupt but most people they get interrupted

[50:37] they used to you know the person is interrupting them is to take over the conversation and show how smart they are like and and one an example that really stood out to me was um andrew huberman is a neuroscientist out of stanford has his own podcast that i listen to uh whenever i get the chance almost daily and plus i've caught andrew's interviews in other places and you don't do this but i heard him being interviewed by another guy and the guy that was interviewing him wanted to show that he was as smart as andrew or tim ferriss definitely wants to show off how much he

[51:18] knows um and and use big words and you know ferris likes to talk as if he had a phd himself and really talk about complicated which hubermann got a kick out of but it made the interview that much harder to listen to now i i listened to him on lewis and i'm like you're ten times better here than you are on your own podcast what the lewis doing that makes such a difference and i focused really in because i hadn't even seen it lewis is constantly paraphrasing lewis is not really there to show you how smart he is or to prove that he's done the research

[52:03] he doesn't prove that at all he listens intently he's got a good instinct for the really interesting stuff and since he frequently jumps in with the paraphrases you know you don't you don't get a 20-minute answer out of andrew huberman that you get out of him on his podcast or you know uh andrew likes andrew will run down a rabbit hole or he you know he'll throw every every cautionary thing out there he says just because i do this doesn't mean you should do this you should talk to your doctor and you know you know i'm a researcher i profess i'm not a doctor you know andrew was real

[52:41] careful about nobody claiming that they sued him because they followed his advice so lots of filler lots of tangents yeah yeah which is important on his own podcast but that's uh ultimately that ain't that interesting it's distracting in an interview lewis doesn't allow that stuff because he's constantly gently jumping in there and guiding the interview and i thought wow i've been interviewed by lewis twice and i haven't seen him do this i have noticed that he did this yeah that's great but those those bad habits man you don't you know like um you i did not get the sense that you were busy trying to prove here how smart you are

[53:16] or how experienced you are you know you you know this this i enjoyed this interview i was actually kind of surprised at the the direction and how you got me talking about everything i'm really kind of surprised about how you got me talking about everything so one last question i've been wanting to ask was your book really makes good use of stories the way that you weave your stories into the practical content was that a discussion that you had with tall was that an idea tall hat or how did it happen that way that you decided to weave your stories into the book in the way that it happened

[53:50] paul really picked the stories i mean we we exposed tall to a massive amount of information um and you know we let him choose now we wanted i'd seen previously uh a great way to illustrate a point and i and i learned a lot of it also i took some speaker training from the national speakers association and to be a keynote speaker and the training that they gave me actually is what how we created the chapter that sold the book and the really the illustration was on a single given point to get people to get it you needed to illustrate it three ways you needed two or three stories

[54:32] so our original design was for example the effectiveness of summarizing somebody's perspective and getting it that's right out of the person which is a game-changing moment i mean just absolute game-changing moment so we tell a hostage negotiation story where it changed everything getting a terrorist to say that's right then a business negotiation story where it's not me but it's one of my students from georgetown or usc where they get it that's right and the other side gives them the deal as soon as they say that's right and then a personal story where i get a match right out of my son brandon and it changes his behavior

[55:16] so we knew that basic structure required stories and probably several stories to illustrate the same point so i already knew i had that and that basically is the structure of the book where we illustrate everything and then paul being both the uh the technical genius and the artist then we relied upon paul to pick the best stories i there were a number of them that i recommended you know we had him organized i had over 200 stories we narrowed it down to 30 business schools student stories in specific categories i categorized them in advance and then told us the artist picked out the most compelling ones well chris voss

[56:02] thank you so much for being with us here today once again chris boss author of the best-selling book never split the difference if people want to reach out and connect with you find more out more about you and the black swan group where's the best place for them to go yeah you know the best way to learn the black swan method for us to help you to for the black swan group to meet you where you are is to subscribe to our newsletter which is complementary but better than that it's actionable uh email will come to your email uh tuesday morning you know get monday behind you

[56:36] get ready to get down to business on tuesday wherever you are in the world you get a tuesday morning early send a text message text to sign up function which only works in the united states but the number is 3377. the number you're texting two is three three seven seven seven to learn the black swan method send the message black swan method three words spaces between each word to that number you get an email back asking every text back asking for your email the newsletter takes you to the website it's a gateway to everything website happens to be black swan ltd.com newsletter is a gateway to everything we

[57:22] have we got a lot of free material so you can get your feet under you to get you to the ready to go to the more advanced levels with us we'll meet you where you are perfect thanks so much chris for being with us here on the show today it was my pleasure if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to subscribe and if you want to spread the word please give us a five star rating review and tell your friends to subscribe too we're available on apple podcasts spotify and everywhere else you listen to podcasts and if you're an entrepreneur interested in writing and publishing a non-fiction

[57:58] book to grow your business and make an impact visit publishedauthor.com for show notes for this podcast and other free resources [Music] you

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