In a recent post, I used the phrase, “Success leaves clues.” I didn’t realize somebody had colonized my mind and those words were not my own.
This phrase, as far as I could find, goes back to Tony Robbins. It makes sense he would say it. After all, the idea of success leaving clues is basically the central idea of neuro linguistic programming — NLP — and NLP is where Tony Robbins got his start.
I’ve been curious about NLP for a long time. Unfortunately, from what I see, the field is filled with blowhards and snake oil salesmen.
The first, the blowhards, are people who use fancy words like “Primary Representational System” to impress their seriousness and authority on you.
The second, the snake oil salesmen, make ridiculous claims like “if any human being can do anything, so can you.”
That’s a shame, because NLP is interesting and in my experience works. The reason I know is that I’ve gone through and applied Tony Robbins’s Personal Power, which is pretty much NLP for the masses.
And that’s my message for you for today:
If you can take a dry, inaccessible, but useful topic, and simply sexy it up without venturing into snake oil territory, you can become a star. (Maybe not Tony Robbins, but you know what I mean…) The good news is that right now, there are more such dry but useful topics than ever.
Let me leave you with a quote from the book Positioning by Jack Ries and Al Trout. This is basically what I’m trying to say but more concise — just swap “blowhardness” for “poetry” and “credibility-destroying hype” for “creativity”:
“For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.”
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