Yesterday we talked about that instead of chasing fly-by-night tactics, mastering fundamental principles of success is the surest path for taking your business from where it is to where you want it to be.

Today, your humble servant will begin giving you “eternal truths” about entrepreneurial success.  Your moneymaking assignment for this week, should you choose to accept it, is to look at all of the eternal truths, and see which ones you’re living and which ones you’re not but should be.

To begin, let me tell you a quick but highly instructional story.

WARNING: If you’ve been a Dave Dee follower for some time, you might think you know this story and not read it. That would be a mistake because I’m taking it in a different direction than in the past.

Thirty-something years ago, a young Dr. Dee would spend a lot of time studying and practice the art of magic. I would read books, watch VHS videotapes, listen to cassettes all about becoming a better magician. In my mind, I was going to become the next David Copperfield. (Actually, Doug Henning, but I’m not sure if you’d know who that was.)

Can you guess what I didn’t put any time into studying?

Give yourself a prize if you said the business part of “show business.” I was under the false belief that if I became an excellent magician, shows would start flowing in.

Then I heard Dan “The Man” Kennedy say, “It’s more important to be a master marketer than it is to be a master of your craft.”

That thought hit me like a ton of bricks. In fact, at first I didn’t want to believe it, so I dismissed that “eternal truth” but the seed had been planted into my thick skull.

It wasn’t until I became desperate, did I decide to embrace the idea of changing my focus from being better at my craft to becoming a top-notch marketer. Instead of continuing to be a serious student of magic, I would become a serious student of marketing.

By “serious student,” I mean I studied direct response marketing as my life depended on it. And in some ways, it did. I read, listened, watched, and took notes from a wide variety of experts. Most importantly, I followed Jim Rohn’s advice of taking “massive action.” 

With the meager marketing funds, I had available, I bought rolls of stamps, wrote terrible lead generation letters, and sent them off to prospective customers. I placed tiny ads in local parenting magazines with nothing more than the headline “Make Your Child’s Party Unforgettable,” along with a couple of lines of copy, and my home phone number. I did free shows at daycares in hopes of booking future gigs. The bottom line was I did as much as I could do with the resources I had available to me.

Most of what I did didn’t work because my execution wasn’t that great. BUT, I realized that the only way to get better at marketing was to start doing it. I understood that you’re not going to be good at something the first time you do it. (That eternal truth holds for everything. For example, the first time I performed a new magic trick was nowhere near as good ad the 100th time I did the trick.)

Most of what I tried didn’t work, but there was a slow trickle of results. I could have been impatient, quit what I was doing, and jumped to the next new thing, in search of that elusive “homerun” out of the gate. Fortunately, I didn’t do that. Instead, I kept working at getting better at implementing fundamental principles. The better I got at that, the better my results were.

The rest of the story is that within three months, I had to increase my booking by 733.33 %. (I used this calculator to figure that out!) That seems lightning-fast now, but at the time, when I was in the thick of it, it seemed slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter.

Here are the four eternal truths contained inside of my little tale:

#1. To make more DEEnero, your focus needs to be on marketing and sales and not on getting better at what you do.

#2. Take massive action doing all you can with what you have.

#3. You’re not going to master something the first time you try it.

#4. Be patient. Results take time when you are doing something new.

Tomorrow, in part three of the “eternal truths” series, you discover the ten commandments of direct response marketing.

Have a DEElightful day.

Dave “Still a Serious Student” Dee

P.S. Miss one of the previous “episodes?” Do not fear, Dr. Dee is here!

Part 1: Well, THAT was ugly