I’m very, very keen to make sure that we don’t give our clients a plan as to what to do. We give them a reason why. We give them a vision. Martin Luther King didn’t say, “I have a plan.” It doesn’t get anyone inspired. So give them that dream. Give them their ideal life. Make it easy for yourselves and your clients. Dreams matter. Dreams are powerful.

We used to do bucket lists for clients. Now bucket lists are a bit boring. “What do I want to do before I kick the bucket?” It’s not very inspirational. So we now start creating experience lists for our clients. It’s a slight change of words, but it allows you to introduce dreams and goals and experiences. You should be able to touch them, taste them, see them and inspire people.

We’ve got some wonderful clients who do some rather wacky things. We try to find inspiration in those things, so we are in the middle of doing a wall of dreams. When clients go to see gorillas in Rwanda or swim in the Arctic, they are going to bring back photographs, so those images and experiences will then hopefully inspire others.

If you’re introducing a new idea to somebody, and you use the phrase “most people,” it gives people a sense of belonging. In the early days, a caveman who went out on his own got killed and eaten by the tiger, but if he went out with a group of cavemen, they managed to kill the tiger and eat it themselves. So most people feel safer in numbers. “I know this idea seems new to you, Mr. Prospect, but most people I’ve offered it to have absolutely loved it.” And it just overcomes that objection.

Remembering someone’s name is absolutely critical for that relationship. If you start stumbling on their name, you’re not going to get very far. So offer your name first, and offer it twice: “Hi, I’m Jerry, Jerry Wellington.” Just allow them to hear it, and then when they’ve used it back to you — “Oh, Tim, it’s really nice to have met you” — make sure you hear it. A lot of it is a problem of hearing and taking it in. It’s not memory; it’s concentration. Use it throughout the conversation. “Well, Tim, what do you think?” Use it as much as possible without being totally overblown with it. You don’t want to use it every five seconds, but the more you use it, the more it’s in the muscle memory in your brain. Review it in your mind as you are having that conversation, especially if you’ve got multiple people. It doesn’t take very long.

Then, as you are saying goodbye, “Tim, really love to have seen you. See you again soon.” And then if you’ve got the chance, especially with someone like this, make some notes about whom you’ve just seen. If you’re going to go to the same conference or the same meeting, review those notes. That’s going to give you some bonus points the next time.

Another great idea to get on the same page is one really good question. At the end of the fact find, you say, “I’m going to ask you now probably my one most important overriding question: What is the one most important part of your life now that you want to have solved?” And let them talk. Then say, “Well, why is that so important to you?” Just get it out in their words. You’ve done all the fact finding. You’ve got all the stuff, all the data on them. Now you just want to get one main priority and focus on that. Then you can start to create a strategy, not a plan.

Attitude is absolutely critical to success. We need to laugh. We need to have fun. I like using professors in stories. A professor was talking in a class and said, “Look, you’ve got $86,400 to spend, and someone takes $10 from you. Are you going to worry about getting that $10 back? Are you going to waste $86,000 to get the $10 back?” I said, “Well, not really. It’s peanuts.” We’ve got 86,400 seconds in a day. We’re sitting in a queue of traffic, and someone cuts in front of us. Ten seconds, it’s not a big problem. But that 10 seconds can be elongated. We allow that to happen to ourselves. Is it worth it? We’ve got such a short amount of time. Time is much more precious than money. We can always work a bit more to earn money, but we can’t get that time back.

Let the little things go. What is controlling us? Things get under our skin. Is it worth it? This to me is the bedrock of a positive attitude, and I’ve quoted it: “All you can control in life is how you respond to life.” We can’t deal with everything. We can’t do it all, but we can respond to it. And that’s all we can do.

Once people realize that, it makes life so much easier. How are we going to respond differently in life? It’s an open-ended question to make you think differently.

We’ve also heard from this chat this morning that Warren Buffett, the most wonderful investor in the world, had a wonderful quote about logic. He said, “You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you.” True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you, everything in life can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.

Life is too short. Time is precious. If we’ve got time to check social media, we’ve got time to complain. We’ve got time to write in our journals. We’ve got time to meditate. We have time to be grateful for life. Make the best use of that time that you can.

Since 2018 Donna and I have worked a four-day week. In that time we’ve accumulated about 160 bonus days to go and have fun, to go on walks, to visit mothers and to better ourselves. I learned scuba diving. If you compound that over 10 years, that will be a whole year of bonus life that we will have given ourselves to have fun and visit the mothers. The cumulative power of numbers is amazing.