Joe Polish: Ralph, I have a company called Piranha Marketing. I started out in the early 90’s, actually 1990 to be exact, as a carpet and upholstery cleaner. I knew nothing about the business. I just got into it because a friend actually suggested I go into this business with him.
Joe Polish: So I started with that company. It was called Superior Carpet Care, at the time. I went out and invested in some equipment, business cards, and chemicals. Overnight I was a “business owner.”
Joe Polish: For 2 years, I just struggled painfully as I was trying to figure out how to generate business and get people to hire my services. I received training and I was good at doing the actual technical work of that business; which is actually very hard work.
Joe Polish: Although, when someone hears “carpet cleaner,” it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of sophistication involved. However, there is. In order to do a good job, there is. But that doesn’t mean anything, if you don’t know how to sell it…no matter how good your products and services are.
Joe Polish: I actually got into the world of marketing, direct response marketing, because I needed to learn how to generate business so I could eat, and not because I ever thought I would someday be selling information products, conducting seminars and creating marketing courses for other business owners.
Joe Polish: I started out, really, just as carpet cleaner. More than a decade later, I now find myself not only in that particular industry, being the largest trainer and coach to the cleaning industry, but also in many different service businesses that have utilized my marketing strategies and my processes that were, again, discovered and developed in the beginning, just because I needed to generate business for myself.
Joe Polish: So a lot of what I do today is a strategic byproduct of just being in a state of desperation, at a point in my life, and needing to figure out how to get out of it.
Ralph Zuranski: I know right now you’re coming up with a couple of new projects. You’re working with Alex Mandossian on the interviews that you’ve done with important people and those who have accomplished great things. What’s the name of that one?
Joe Polish: Well, I have a company I founded called “The Genius Network.” I recently made Alex Mandossian, a fabulous guy, a partner in the business, because he brings so much to the table. He knows many ways to expand it and robotic methods to develop and reach new audiences.
Joe Polish: It is a process of me doing interviews. Now I’ll be doing them with Alex, with individuals that have written books. They don’t necessarily need to be book authors or speakers in the field of business, although our primary market is people involved in marketing and business.
Joe Polish: I’ve also interviewed famous athletes and people that I find interesting and have some unique skills, talents, abilities and insights on something that I think would be helpful to inspire people and encourage people and share wisdom with individuals.
Joe Polish: I do interviews with people that I’d want to talk with anyway. Because if you think about it, where do all great discoveries come from in life? They come from discussions with other people.
Joe Polish: Speaking for myself, everything that I’ve learned has come out of a discussion with another individual. That’s how I learn. It can be a discussion in the form of a seminar. It can be a phone conversation. It can be the 2 of us sitting down right now and just talking. It all comes out of discussions.
Joe Polish: I seek out individuals that I admire what they’ve done, and I have conversations with them. I ask them questions. And I’m very much a believer, and so is Alex in the Socratic method, where the question is far more important than the answer.
Joe Polish: I’m always saying, “Okay, what could I ask this person that would cause their brain to seek out something that I’d learn from?” People have enormous amounts of lessons, if you ask them the right questions.
Ralph Zuranski: That’s true! That’s what we’re doing with the Heroes Program. The kids will be looking for heroes in their local community.
Ralph Zuranski: Joe, what is your definition of heroism?
Joe Polish: I guess it would be a big definition. Although to summarize my thoughts right off the top, I would consider a hero someone who’s an encourager. They inspire others. In the face of enormous obstacles they are able to communicate, articulate and lift someone up with their words, their actions and their mission in life.
Joe Polish: As nice as it is to have me as an interviewee in the Heroes Program, I don’t consider myself someone who I would think of as a hero. If people look at me as a hero, wonderful. I hope I do encourage and inspire others.
Joe Polish: I think the real heroes of the world, in a lot of ways, never are discovered in a famous sort of way. They’re doing little things all the time that nobody ever really notices.
Joe Polish: For instance, both of my parents are deceased. The people at the hospice center that took care of my father right before he actually died…those are heroes. Those are people that, day in, day out, are assisting in very sad, very horrendous circumstances for some individuals. And they’re there every day, doing what needs to be done to make life easier for people at the end of their lives. Those are real heroes.
Joe Polish: The people out there that are making the world a better place, protecting children, those, to me, are heroes.
Joe Polish: My mother is an example. She died when I was 4 years old. She was one of the first authors that taught children how to read using the phonetic method. Millions of her books have been sold and they’re still in publication 30+ years after her death. They’re still in circulation.
Joe Polish: So she taught millions of children how to read and continues to do so even after she passed away. She left a legacy. To me, my mother was a hero.
Joe Polish: A hero is someone who encourages and inspires. I want to be an encourager as much as I can. I want to seek out other people that are encouraging, that just offer hope. That’s what drives me and makes the world a better place.
Ralph Zuranski: A lot of times, when people are growing up, they have a lot of difficult problems with self-image. They are fat or short or aren’t very smart at that time. I know I went through that problem and I created a secret hero in my mind, that helped encourage me. Did you ever do anything like that?
Joe Polish: Well, probably not in the same way. While growing up, I have to say now looking back, I didn’t consider my childhood very functional. I was surrounded by an environment, a lot of times, that was negative and was very sad.
Joe Polish: What I did, as I got into my teens, was I started reading a lot. I found an enormous amount of inspiration and encouragement in heroes in books.
Joe Polish: And that’s what I think is so good, because there are so many wonderful books that are out there, that can guide you, that can give you direction, that can give you hope, that can give you methods.
Joe Polish: Right now, in this day and age, which is wonderful, there’s somebody out there that has written a how-to book, has written their story, that is available to each and every one of us if we just access it.
Joe Polish: The library is a wonderful place. If you’ve got no great role models in your life, seek them out. Seek them out in the form of books. I did a lot of that. And books have not only taught me a lot, but they’ve also been my friend when I didn’t have any friends.
Joe Polish: So, that’s kind of how I did it.
Ralph Zuranski: What is your perspective on goodness, ethics and moral behavior? A lot of people say that your name is the most valuable thing that you have. How important is it to have personal integrity in life and in business?
Joe Polish: Well, I think it’s critical. I have a friend named Dan Sullivan, who founded a company called “The Strategic Coach.” I’m in the world of marketing. And what’s interesting in the world of marketing, and I probably don’t say this publicly too much, “To be a really good marketer you have to understand the con.” Some of the best marketers in the world are con artists.
Joe Polish: Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean you go out and con people and take advantage of people. It just means you have street smarts. You know that you’re dealing with the world of persuasion.
Joe Polish: If you look at television and all of the messages that are out there, the majority of American society and in many other countries throughout the world, you were saying it before you started this interview, “If it bleeds, it leads.” when you look at the news media.
Joe Polish: The majority of things that attract, entertainment, movies, books, gossip and music, so much of it is negative. It’s murder. It’s talk shows about all of the dysfunctions of society.
Joe Polish: So, how I look at integrity in terms of a business format is that all money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation.
Joe Polish: If a tobacco company came to me and wanted advice on marketing, I don’t care how much money they offered me, I wouldn’t do it because they sell a product that kills people. And I’m not saying from a morality standpoint whether people should smoke or not smoke. People will be healthier if they don’t smoke. However, everyone makes their own decision on what they will or will not do.
Joe Polish: When it comes to integrity, you make your decisions on how you’re going to earn money and earn a living and go through life.
Joe Polish: I know that all of my future revenue lies in the future of my clients that I can create value for. My goal and objective is to always create value over and above what I charge; meaning I want to produce more than I consume.
Joe Polish: I believe there’s 2 types of people in the world. There are producers and there are parasites. Producers make the world a better place. Parasites feed off of the efforts of producers and take advantage of people.
Joe Polish: So, I don’t ever want to be a parasitical marketer, selling things that truly don’t deliver value.
Joe Polish: When it comes to ethics and integrity, I think everyone should wake up in the morning and say, “Okay, what can I do that will really make someone put a smile on their face, that will add some sunshine to someone’s life, and that will increase value for them?” You’ should be able to go out and actually accomplish that. Not only are you doing the world a great service, but you deserve to get wealthy in the process if your goal is being wealthy.
Joe Polish: I say this and I’m pretty serious about it. I did a seminar for my best clients a couple of weeks ago, in San Diego. I said, “I don’t really want to win the lottery.” If I just happen to stumble across it, I’m probably never going to win the lottery because I don’t buy lottery tickets. The point is I want what I earn.
Joe Polish: There’s a satisfaction that comes. It’s like if you win a sporting event, there’s a satisfaction that comes from that. If you cheated in order to get a better grade in school, did you get away with it? Yeah, you got a better grade, but there’s a certain level that you just know – it’s a karmic thing – where you just know it wasn’t earned.
Joe Polish: “That which is earned is appreciated.”
Joe Polish: That’s how I look at the business world. Create value! Go out and do the best you can. From a karmic standpoint, good things will happen to you. They just do.
Joe Polish: Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. I’ve seen it time and time and time again. And when I’ve been in a state where I’m greedy or I’m looking to get my way and I’m not aware of what I’m really doing, the world has a way of getting its revenge on me. I just don’t get what I want.
Ralph Zuranski: Do you think there are consequences for actions?
Joe Polish: Oh yeah, absolutely! And that’s not to say that people are out there that are selling “Girls Girls Gone Wild” videos and various other things aren’t getting wealthy and making money. At the end of the day, are you really adding value to people’s lives? Are you feeling happy about it? Do you have gratitude?
Joe Polish: You’ve got to keep yourself in check. And for me, my world is teaching people how to market, but I’m also a very big believer that money is so important so you can get freedom. It’s not so you become a slave to focusing on money.
Joe Polish: Most entrepreneurs, who I think are enormous value-creators, are the people I want to help. And the reason I want to help entrepreneurs is because they work very hard. There were times in my life where I’ve been so broke and struggling. I didn’t want to go get a job. I didn’t want to work for anyone. Not that that’s bad, just for me that’s not my “MO (Modus Operandi).” That’s not how I operate.
Joe Polish: There are a lot of entrepreneurs who have done incredibly enormous things that society benefits from, that have put themselves through the ringer to do it. And, the more that I can help assist entrepreneurs in the process the better I feel. I want to take their creativity and channel and focus it, not just so that they can make money, but so that they can have independence.
Joe Polish: Independence and freedom is really what people want. When I first got in the business, I thought I got in the business because I wanted to get rich. But what’s the byproduct of being being rich? What does that actually mean?
Joe Polish: To me, being rich means the freedom to have the relationships with the people I want to have relationships with and the freedom to focus my efforts outside of work on things that are important to me.
Joe Polish: Really, I want to reduce human suffering, as much as I can, for entrepreneurs. And one of the other things that I focus on, which will be a future time investment for me, is the world of addiction. I don’t talk about that too much. In this context, I’m happy to have that conversation.
Joe Polish: I believe that the majority of human dysfunctions and behaviors that get out of hand all stem from the same things that cause addictions, be it alcoholism, drugs, or behavioral addictions, from gambling, workaholism, sex addiction, rage, you name it. Those all stem from people’s suffering, that is caused by a variety of reasons, which we could talk about for 10 hours.
Joe Polish: But the point is those are the things that I hope, at the end of my life, I contribute more than just teaching businesses how to sell more of their goods and services. I’ll do a lot of that, and already have. There’s a much bigger picture for me. The entrepreneurial activities help finance my future business and my future efforts.
Ralph Zuranski: There’s always a question about what would you sacrifice your life for. Some people will run into a burning building and sacrifice their life to save somebody else’s life. But then there’s the other idea of sacrificing your life in the pursuit of making money or helping others. What do you think about that?
Joe Polish: I think it’s easier to talk about that type of stuff, than to actually face it…certainly, taking a bullet for a cause, for a person, for your child. Anyone who has children absolutely knows that you would do almost anything to protect your children, to avoid harm getting in the way of your child.
Joe Polish: And if you could get really clear, because I think that question is really, “What’s important to you? What are you willing to give up in order to have what you want?”
Joe Polish: I had an interesting exercise with a group of people, that I learned the other day. People that I coach, they have struggles like, “How do I run an ad? How do I start a business?,” things that are difficult.
Joe Polish: But in the scheme of things, if you have your health, if you live in a country where there’s freedom. In America, our biggest challenge is not “Am I going to eat today?” In most cases, not that we don’t have homeless people and not that there are people out there that are really financially struggling, it’s just that the majority of people it’s not “Am I going to eat today,” it’s “Am I going to eat Chinese food, am I going to eat Mexican food?” We’ve got so many options.
Joe Polish: I did this little exercise where I said to the group, because they’re having challenges with how do you use free recorded messages to robotically automate your business. We were having all of these obstacles happening. I had everyone get up. I said, “Okay, everybody stand up.” So they all stood up. Then I said, “Okay, I want you to close your eyes and sit back down.” So they closed their eyes and sat back down. And I said, “Okay, now grab your pen on the table but don’t open your eyes. Find your pen.”
Joe Polish: They had to fumble around. And if people are listening to this and they’re not driving, you could even try this exercise right now. Let’s actually try this, if you’re not driving and you’re listening to this.
Joe Polish: Go ahead and grab a piece of paper and a pen. Write down your first name. And then, what I’d like you to do is switch the pen to the other hand, that’s your non-dominant hand. So if you’re right-handed, put the pen in your left hand and write down, “This exercise is really easy,” with your left hand.”
Joe Polish: Now, you’re doing this with your eyes closed and your left hand. The point is open up your eyes and look at what you wrote down. It’s probably all over the page.
Joe Polish: Now, imagine if you didn’t have your right hand. Imagine if you didn’t have your eyesight. We have gifts that, most of the time, we don’t even think about. But think about an individual that has to get through life that loses their limbs, that is in a tragic accident, that has a disease. Sometimes, I have to give myself a reality check.
Joe Polish: So, to go back to your original question of what I think of what you’re willing to give up, just even thinking about that causes me to think about, “What am I willing to give up?” I could have everything in life that I want, if I’m willing to give up all of the things that I hate.
Joe Polish: Hopefully, I won’t be put in such a dire situation to where I will have to make that difficult decision. However, certainly there are things that I know I would give up. There are people that I absolutely would sacrifice for. It’s a whole list of things. But I don’t have a simple response to the question. It’s something to think about. I think it is critical to not spend my life determining what is not important but what’s most important.
Joe Polish: Let me add one last thing. I might be going on a tangent here, but I have a friend named Ken Glickman. He talks about “important versus most important.” He says that if you’re on the Titanic and the ship is going down, and you have 50 people that are all your friends, that are going down with you, and they’re all floating around in the water and you have 2 life jackets, then you’re put in a situation of determining the difference between “important and most important.”
Joe Polish: I think there are times when we all get to that point. I think the best thing that I could maybe speak to, that is it’s really good to know, before you’re put in that situation, what’s really important, so you don’t neglect them.
Joe Polish: I don’t like funerals all that much. Who does? Not that I know anyone who likes funerals…but it’s just people say all of these nice, wonderful things about people after they’ve died. When, in reality, how much more meaningful would it be to say those things to that person while they’re still alive.
Ralph Zuranski: Boy, isn’t that true? That brings in the question, “When was the lowest point in your life, and how did you bring yourself up from that low point?”
Joe Polish: Well, I’ve had several low points…a couple of deaths of people close to me. There are some horrendous ones that I actually don’t even want to talk about because they’re kind of personal.
Joe Polish: The way I dealt with them…there’s the quick answer versus the real answer.
Joe Polish: One of the ways that I’ve dealt with things, in the beginning, is denial. I just didn’t deal with it. I allowed suffering to take place in my life, which manifested itself in negative thinking, negative behavior and self-sabotage. It’s the destructive things that have happened to me that really forced me to learn coping mechanisms and to seek out people that could help me. I surrendered to thinking I could do all of it on my own. Pursuing spirituality was also a part of the solution.
Joe Polish: But there was no quick solution to some of my issues. A lot of it was life hit me with a ton of bricks, and there I was, squashed on the ground, figuring out, “Well, I’ve got 2 choices: I either live in misery or I don’t.”
Joe Polish: There’s 2 types of suffering, as my friend Dan Sullivan said. “There’s short-term and long-term. You decide which one you want.”
Joe Polish: I have chosen, at times, the long-term route.
Joe Polish: What I do now is to hopefully have this sound optimistic. When something bad happens to me right now, I have a much better perspective, knowing that all of the lessons in life, all of the progress is only going to come out of things that don’t work.
Joe Polish: Dan Sullivan is a friend of mine. I learn from Dan. Dan learns from me. And he says, “Life is broken up into 2 areas: things that work and things that don’t work. That’s it.”
Joe Polish: If you think about your life, we have areas that work and things that don’t work.
Joe Polish: The areas of life that we learn from really come out of those things that don’t work.
Joe Polish: Whenever I have a setback or something doesn’t quite work out right, heck, we’re human. We are constantly making mistakes.
Joe Polish: Speaking for myself, I’ve made an ass out of myself numerous times. I’ve said things I wish I didn’t say. I’ve made decisions that haven’t helped me, that haven’t helped other people. I’ve done things that have hurt me. I’ve done things that have hurt other people. I would like to think whenever anybody has been directly or indirectly hurt as a result of my thinking, my behavior, my actions that it was not intentional. It was just me really not knowing what the heck I was doing.
Joe Polish: I’m a lot less forgiving of myself now, because for one, I know that I’m human. And second, whenever anything bad happens, I now have a process for dealing with it. And that is, for one, realizing that if an area of life isn’t working, that’s kind of like God’s way of saying, “Hey, pay attention to this. How could you do it over?”
Joe Polish: You can fail, but the only way you fail is if you fail to learn the lesson. So now, when negative things happen, I have a group of people, I have certain individuals in my life that I’m very close to, that I talk with, that I bring my misery to, that I bring my complications to. And some of these people, I pay. I have a client relationship with them. And a lot of this is business stuff. Heck, I don’t consider myself a great manager. I seek out lots of training in that particular area.
Joe Polish: Some of these things are small issues. Others are life issues that require very intensive, private godfather conversations with people.
Joe Polish: But I try to be resourceful. I was not resourceful in the beginning. And the more that I go through life not being resourceful, the harder life is for me.
Ralph Zuranski: How important is it to have a dream or a vision that sets the course of your life?
Joe Polish: One of my favorite quotes is “A goal is a dream that is taken seriously.” So, I have an expectation of how I want my life to turn out. Everybody has expectations.
Joe Polish: A goal, to me, is when you really say, “Okay, I wish I had something.” It’s not what we will do to achieve our dreams or to pursue our dreams, or what we can’t do. You’ve got to decide “Is this important enough for me?” A wish is one thing, but really saying, “This is a goal and I’m going to make this happen.”
Joe Polish: Again, going back to my world of teaching business owners, a lot of people come to me because they want to learn how to make more money. They want to be a millionaire…whatever. After I made my first million dollars, I realized it’s not that difficult to obtain. It was difficult when I wasn’t taking it seriously.
Joe Polish: But as soon as I get focused on “This has to happen!” I pretty much get most of the things I want in life, when I care enough about them.
Joe Polish: It is important to have a dream, because you don’t have any direction without one. The worst thing in the world is to have a wonderful map that will show you how to get to Florida, and you’re ¾ of the way there and you realize I really didn’t want to go to Florida, I really wanted to go to California.
Joe Polish: It doesn’t matter how good your skill level is or how great the resources are around you, if you don’t have a direction.
Joe Polish: So, I think having a wish and a dream is critical, and something that you’re passionate about and something that you really care about. However, having a wish and having a dream is not enough. All potential means is “you haven’t done it yet.” Every human being has potential.
Joe Polish: There is one of exercise that I do with my clients. They want to learn how to make more money, in many cases. That’s my area of specialty. I ask them to imagine that their wife, their husband, their children, one of their best friends or a loved one had a life-threatening disease and needed a heart transplant in 3 months. Most people, no matter what, if they cared enough about the individual, would tap into that part of them that is resourceful enough to figure out how to make that happen.
Joe Polish: Everyone has the ability. The question is, to go back to dream or vision, do you care enough about it to direct your behavior, to direct your mind, your talents and your skills to focus on that?
Ralph Zuranski: Does it take courage to pursue new ideas? I know that in a lot of people’s lives their peer group looks at you in one way. And if you decide you want to change your vision for your life, you have to make changes. And that threatens everybody else. What do you feel about that?
Joe Polish: I think courage is critical. I’ve never been in the military, although Dan Sullivan, for whatever reason I’m thinking about him right now, he had a drill sergeant that said, “There is a difference between courage is fear. Fear is when you’re peeing in your pants. Courage is when you are doing what you need to do with wet pants.”
Joe Polish: We all have fears, whether someone admits it or not. You see all of these shirts from the company “No Fear.” I think people that say they have “no fear” are delusional. Or maybe they just have a brain that’s wired not to have fear. And I think they’re also dangerous people, if you don’t have fear.
Joe Polish: I think fear is nature’s way of saying, “Hey, this is important! This is a big issue! Be careful!”
Joe Polish: I have no fear. I’m going to jump off a cliff. I don’t think so. Call me normal, I have a lot of fears.
Joe Polish: Courage is facing that which you fear. If you don’t face it, it controls you. That which you fear and you face, you can someday, in many cases, control it but maybe not completely control it.
Joe Polish: And when I say control, there are certain things that I don’t want to control. I think control is a word that can be taken out of context.
Joe Polish: In my company, I’m in charge but I’m not in control. We’re moving my company right now. We’re doing a big move. I’m not there. I have a staff that I put my trust in to do what needs to be done. And they may make mistakes, and that’s fine, because they’re human. But the point is doing anything in my life that was worth doing took courage.
Joe Polish: I had a huge fear of public speaking when I first started. I still get very nervous when I do public presentations, even though I’ve done a lot of them. I just said, “I know that my life will be better if I do this so, I will grow.”
Joe Polish: Courage directed in the right area is smart. Creativity is an interesting thing. There’s a lot of people that are so creative. They figure out all kinds of creative ways to destroy their lives. So it’s all how you channel it.
Joe Polish: When I’m talking about courage, I mean in the context of pursuing a worthy objective that’s going to hopefully leave you in a better place…leave whoever you come into contact with in a better place.
Joe Polish: I think anything worthwhile, absolutely, you’re going to come up with mental barriers, real barriers and obstacles. But within that obstacle is all of the raw ingredients that you need to get to where you want to go. And every worthwhile human being that has ever transformed the world in a good way, in many cases, took enormous acts of courage or just needed to take action.
Joe Polish: Most of the things that we need to do that are going to make our lives better, I don’t think, require us to have to really face our deepest fears and put ourselves in life-threatening situations.
Joe Polish: In most cases, we can do enormously good things for the world just by getting off our butts and doing something, and constantly maintaining as much gratitude as one could have.
Joe Polish: I think a lot of motivation to pursue dreams comes out of gratitude. You appreciate what you’ve got. Your brain is interesting. If you ask your brain, “What do I really hate about my life right now? What are all of my obstacles that stand in my way?” Your brain is going to fill you with a bunch of answers.
Joe Polish: If you said, “What opportunities are available to me? What strengths do I have? What people are in my life that can help me get there? Who is something or someone I can go and work with, that will make me feel good, that will help me, that will support me?”
Joe Polish: Your brain will go in any direction you want to direct it. The questions you ask yourself are far more important than the answers, including the questions that you’re asking me. Every listener should answer them as if they were being asked these questions. I think they’ll get a lot of insight into themselves.
Ralph Zuranski: I agree. Do you think that it’s important for people to understand that when they do pursue their dreams, that they are going to experience a certain amount of discomfort and they’re going to have to deny themselves, that it isn’t instant gratification, that sometimes it takes a long time before their dreams become reality.
Joe Polish: Yes! Yes! I believe that you can live in a fantasy world or you can live in the real world.
Joe Polish: I have a friend named Dave Kekich, who’s been in a wheelchair for over 25 years. In spite of that, he’s very wealthy and one of the most positive, enthusiastic individuals that I’ve ever met. He’s in his 60’s.
Joe Polish: When he was 35 years old, he was working out. He doesn’t blame working out or exercising. It was just a freak accident where he had a slow bleed in his spinal cord. The doctors he went to at the time weren’t advanced enough where they could fix it before it paralyzed him from the chest down.
Joe Polish: He has these things called “Kekich Credos.” They are 100 rules of life and business that he wrote.
Joe Polish: What I’ll do, just as a gift to your listeners, I’ll actually get permission from Dave, where you can actually reproduce them on the website and make those available. As long as Dave Kekich is given credit, that’s fine. We just ask that nobody goes out and uses them without giving credit to Dave.
Joe Polish: And a lot of the things are not all his original thoughts, but he credits where some of his thoughts and ideas came from. But truly, they’re some of the 100 best thoughts and philosophies on life that I’ve ever read.
Joe Polish: One of them is “Life is easy when you live it the hard way and hard if you live it the easy way.”
Joe Polish: And going back to your question, yeah, you’re going to deal with obstacles. Some days in business, it’s just, “Let’s just figure out a solution to this problem.” Sometimes, I have no clue what I’m doing. I don’t know where to get the answer. And I am stuck in a very frustrating, stressful situation.
Joe Polish: You’ve got to get to a mindset where you realize it’s part of life and how do you deal with it? Are you reactive or are you proactive?
Joe Polish: There’s a book that I would highly recommend to everyone to read, written by a guy named Stephen Pressfield. It’s called “The War Of Art.” He also wrote a book called “The Legend of Baggar Vance” that they ended up making a movie out of. And I’ve gotten to know Steve pretty well. I’ve interviewed him for my “Genius Network.”
Joe Polish: He wrote this whole book about resistance. And whenever you’re getting towards something that’s an important goal and it’s taking you to a higher place, be it an improvement in health, a spiritual advancement, doing anything that’s good for humanity, you’re absolutely going to face hurdles and obstacles and barriers.
Joe Polish: Whenever you want to go and pursue a lower level of humanity, meaning you want to go hang out in clubs and drink yourself into the ground, and smoke and do derelict behavior, life doesn’t really throw up a lot of obstacles. That’s easy to do. It’s easy to sit down in front of the television and watch some mindless news program or some talk show, or whatever. To volunteer to go work at the children’s hospital on the weekend…there’s resistance to that.
Joe Polish: My point is that in the book “The War Of Art,” he talks about being an amateur and being a pro. Amateurs wait for inspiration. Professionals do it with a headache.
Joe Polish: When you become a true pro in life, you realize that there are some days you’ve got to just gut your way through it. But, if you know what you’re doing it for and you’re not trying to adopt someone else’s value system, you have created your own value system based on what’s right and wrong to you, you’re going to put more of yourself into it.
Joe Polish: So, absolutely. If people think that they’re going to get rich or accomplish anything worthwhile, with very little effort, it is very unlikely to happen.
Joe Polish: Do things get handed to people because of luck? Absolutely. To deny that luck is a factor is stupid. There are some people that are flat-out lucky. They’re born into wealth and they have functional parents, even though they’re wealthy. Although, most people born into wealth are completely dysfunctional.
Joe Polish: An interesting documentary to watch is a movie called “Born Rich,” that was done by a kid who’s 21 years old. He was born to the “Johnson & Johnson” family, and he decided to do this whole documentary, interviewing all of his rich friends and see how their lives are. It’s a very interesting movie.
Joe Polish: But some people are lucky. Some people aren’t lucky. Right now, as we’re sitting here speaking, someone who’s a great person lost their loved one in a car accident. That’s very unlucky. What do you call that? Should they have a positive attitude?
Joe Polish: There are things that life hits us with. However, I think that I’m pretty darned lucky. And I focus on it. I was born in America. I have all kinds of opportunities that other people in different parts of the world don’t have an opportunity with. I don’t have any major health crises and challenges.
Joe Polish: According to an MRI, I’ve got 4 herniated discs in my body and I’m only 37 years old at the time of doing this interview. But, whatever. I’ll work around it.
Joe Polish: You work with the deck of card you are dealt. For me, I’m exercising every day. I eat as clean as I can, and I take care of myself. But, the mere fact that I have the opportunities to do what I do, I consider myself a very lucky individual. I think if most people sould focus on that. Yeah, we have challenges. Yeah, we have obstacles. But you know what? All of the things that I’ve got in my favor, at least speaking for myself, far exceed the things out of my favor. And I think attitude has a lot to do with that.
Joe Polish: We can go interview 100 people right now, and say, “Is life working or you? Is it not working for you?” And a lot of that’s just attitude. It simply is just what you decide to feed your brain with.
Ralph Zuranski: Don’t you think that fear and doubts paralyze people? How do you suggest that people overcome the doubts and fears that can cripple people from doing anything?
Joe Polish: That’s a good question. Absolutely, fears and doubts cripple. They cripple me. Whenever I don’t operate well, it’s because I have a lack of self-confidence in a certain area.
Joe Polish: So the way that I do my best is to deal with it. People can look at what I do. I want everyone to take this with just I’m a normal guy that had a vision and a goal and a dream to do certain things. I’ve accomplished some of them and I’m still pursing others.
Joe Polish: The things that I don’t pursue or that I have the capabilities to do is because of fear and doubt.
Joe Polish: So when I say capabilities, if you have the skill but you don’t initiate it, then do you really have the capability? You may have the technical capability, but you may not have the mental capability.
Joe Polish: The way that I work on fear and doubt, which I think is more a mental issue than it is a real physical issue, is constantly focusing on my strengths and do more of what I’m good at and eliminate my weaknesses.
Joe Polish: Again, my friend Dan Sullivan, he talks about if you spend your whole life trying to improve all of the things that you’re weak at and no good at, at the end of your life you have a lot of really strong weaknesses.
Joe Polish: I do is two things that are important to me…confidence and gratitude. There’s nothing that I do really well, unless, again, I’m lucky, if I’m not operating in a state of confidence.
Joe Polish: So I try to put most of my behaviors, business-wise, focusing on what I’m good at. I’m really good at marketing. So, I spend the majority of my time in that area. I’m a starter. I’m not a finisher. I have very poor follow-through. So I’m going to have more doubt if I try to put myself in areas where I have to finish things in order to make it work.
Joe Polish: I shorten the curve by surrounding myself with finishers, so that they can take a lot of my crazy ideas and make them reality.
Joe Polish: If you focus on confidence and improving areas of confidence, you’ll have less fears and doubts because you’re operating with a more functional, more capable state of mind. And if you focus on gratitude and appreciation, you can enjoy life.
Joe Polish: No matter how much money you have, no matter how much opportunity you have, no matter how good-looking you are or whatever, if you don’t have gratitude you’re still not going to be a happy individual and you’re not going to be much of an encourager and inspire other people.
Joe Polish: So, I think confidence is critical. The performance and gratitude is critical to happiness and enjoyment.
Ralph Zuranski: How important, do you think, forgiveness is? There are people that offend, oppose and upset you, and just downright screw you. What do you think about the idea of forgiveness and also holding people accountable for the wrong things that they do and helping to bring them to justice?
Joe Polish: Well, that’s an interesting question. What’s the saying, “Forgiveness is the realization that forgiveness is giving up the hope that you’re going to have a better past.”
Joe Polish: Am I really good at forgiveness? I’ve had wrongs done to me sometimes. Other times, I’m not even aware how much I allow resentment to dictate my life, my behavior.
Joe Polish: I hope, as I get older, that I’m able to forgive and not necessarily forget but learn…learn from it.
Joe Polish: There are some injustices that are so bad, that I’ve not had happen to me, that I couldn’t even begin to speak on them unless they happen to me. It would be much easier for me to say, “Well, if someone murdered my loved ones, would I forgive them? I would hope so. I have no earthly idea.”
Joe Polish: What I do know is that absolutely nothing of value comes out of hanging onto resentment. What’s done is done.
Joe Polish: Many people let their past absolutely destroy any future happiness and any future value creation they could add to people’s lives, because they live in the wrong that has been done to them, or the perceived wrong.
Joe Polish: Holding resentment or anger is like revenge, like drinking poison and hoping the other person gets sick. That absolutely is true.
Joe Polish: Just to give you my opinion on it, since you asked me the question, I think forgiveness is crucial if you walk around being jealous, being angry that someone did something wrong to you. Maybe you were a victim. Maybe someone really did treat you wrong. And certainly, I’ve had things that have been done to me. When you asked me about what’s the worst things, I’m just not going to bring some of the stuff up because they are just really bad. I’ve had people violate me in ways that I could not even fathom ever doing to another person.
Joe Polish: Now, if I walked around saying, “I’m a victim,” it may be true. There is some validity to that. But you know what? There’s no power in that. If you say, “I have been done wrong, and therefore I’m crippled and incapable,” you’re still being hurt by the hurt. The hurt happened. It’s done.
Joe Polish: And you know, maybe someone has taken everything away from you. Maybe toward the end of what you perceive the end of your physical life on earth, you’re just sitting there in a really rotten place, what do you do in a situation like that?
Joe Polish: You’ve got your life. You decide what you’re going to do. You tap into the resources that are available to you. It’s internal.
Joe Polish: Most of the answers that people need – and, again, I’m just saying this is what I believe, it’s my belief – everyone that’s listening, they have to obviously apply this to their own situation. I can only speak for my own experience. You’ve to sit and think, “Well, where’s this going to take me? What am I going to do? I’m going to live anyway, so you can either make the choice to let the past destroy and dictate your life and beat you down, or you can tap into the internal stuff.
Joe Polish: I believe that all of the answers we need are inside of us, if we remove the fog and we access them and don’t try to do it all alone. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Joe Polish: People say, “Financial independence,” which is kind of funny. There’s no such thing as financial independence. Everything that I’ve done to have any sort of financial success I’ve had has never been done independently. It’s always been done through the assistance of other people.
Joe Polish: So there’s no such thing as independent happiness, independent encouragement. Everything in life depends on others. When you try to do everything yourself and think that you’re the one and only creator of everything… Good luck! To me, that’s a recipe for misery. And if you’re down and out and you’ve had bad things done to you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that happened to you. There are things that happened that are just flat-out miserable and unfair. However, if you’re still alive, if you’re still functioning, there’s people that have it worse than you.
Joe Polish: What I would say, if you’re stewing in resentment, if you’ve had really bad things done, “Volunteer at an AIDS clinic. Go volunteer at a children’s hospital, veteran’s clinic, whatever.” Just the mere act of helping others is one of the best things to change a bad attitude and remove wrong-doing.
Joe Polish: There’s parts of the world right now that horrendous things are being done. I went to the holocaust museum in Washington, DC recently, and they always keep updates on other things that are happening throughout the world, that are tremendously horrible.
Joe Polish: If things were done to us that were wrongdoing and there are some people that do evil things and there are some people that are not all that evil but just not pleasant people, they’re jealous! They’re prone to conflict. They love being argumentative, getting in your face and being difficult.
Joe Polish: The way I think about it is “Karma” has a lot to do with it. Those people’s revenge is their own existence.
Joe Polish: If you want to be a bad person, the world has a way of working it out. So just do your best to do good things. Surround yourself with encouraging people and inspiration. Listen to all of the stories of other people you’ve interviewed on your “Heroes Program.” Listen to the stories of other people, because we all have a story. Some people have done something about it and others have not.
Ralph Zuranski: Then you think that service should be a great source of joy for everybody…serving others?
Joe Polish: If it’s truly serving others, yeah. I can’t see how it could not be. I think to really do something and see a smile on someone’s face or have someone give you a testimonial or say, “You know, you made my life better!” is great. What better things are there?
Joe Polish: At the end of your life, who cares that you’ve got a garage full of Ferraris and a bunch of nice clothes? The real significance comes from what you’re able to do to put some sunshine in other people’s lives.
Ralph Zuranski: Isn’t that true? And we come to the question, “is there a God and is He going to have any opinion about how you led your life?” So what do you think about the power of prayer in people’s lives?
Joe Polish: Well, I don’t want to get into what my beliefs are, just because they’re my beliefs. I think there’s a huge difference between religion and spirituality, in terms of being spiritual.
Joe Polish: If you were to take religions as a whole, no matter what someone’s belief system is, the good parts of all religions are teaching kindness and compassion.
Joe Polish: I think there’s a lot to be said about speaking to a higher power. Speaking to God or whatever God is to you helps you gain direction, being clear on what you want your life to represent, what you want to do and where you want to go, and really allowing yourself to get to a place of knowing that is deep inside you. There is a source that has abilities so beyond what most people think are there. They will assist you if you simply engage them. Prayer is one way to engage that power.
Ralph Zuranski: I know you like to laugh a lot. So how important is having humor in your life?
Joe Polish: Critical! If you look at relationships of people that are really enjoying each other, they’re the ones that laugh together. I use humor to gauge the value of a husband and a wife’s relationship, parents and their children, friends. How much do they laugh together?
Joe Polish: I hang out with people that I can not only laugh with and smile, but I’m like cracking up with…rolling around on the floor thinking, “Oh my God, they’re so funny!” That, to me, is enjoyable.
Joe Polish: One of my acronyms that I use is ELF, Easy, Lucrative and Fun. You can have a HALF business, which is Hard, Annoying, Lame and Frustrating, or an ELF business, which is Easy, Lucrative and Fun.
Joe Polish: I think that applies to things other than business. Who are the people who are battery-chargers versus battery-drainers? Surrounding yourself with people who are funny and make me laugh, I think is a great recipe for making life that much more enjoyable, especially when things are really difficult.
Joe Polish: And what’s funny about laughter is that you look at some of the world’s best comedians. Many of them had horrendously adverse lives. How did they become such good comedians? They were able to transform that horrible experience into what’s funny about it. That is a coping mechanism.
Joe Polish: So even if things are horrible, say, “What’s funny about this horrible situation?” As hard as that might be to fathom, I can look back at things in my life that, at the time, they sucked. They were terrible. But I look back at them now and some things were actually pretty darned funny.
Joe Polish: What was more funny was some of my responses to some of the things that I thought were these supposed injustices, whatever. But humor’s great.
Ralph Zuranski: You talk about your mom and Dave being heroes in your life. Are there any other heroes in your life?
Joe Polish: Oh man, yeah. Most of my heroes are not well-known, famous people. They’re people that have encouraged me when I needed encouragement. All of my clients, in some way or another, are very important to me. My team, my support staff at my company, I couldn’t do anything without the wonderful people that have devoted their time and their lives to helping me pursue my missions, be they entrepreneurial activities, whatever.
Joe Polish: I think one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous is a hero. I’m not an alcoholic, but I definitely have parts of my mind that are addictive thinking. I’ve gone through stages of workaholism and various other things that one day I’ll write a book about.
Joe Polish: In the world of marketing, I get hired by “shrinks” a lot. I see people in the how-to businesses. Take all the for-a-fee psychiatrists and therapists and inpatient and outpatient hospitals, and all of the book authors that are selling “how to live a better life,” and more people have overcome horrendous life problems in 12-step programs, which is not really organized. They are loosely held together by addicts, not through promotion but through the contributions of that group. Look how much positive change has been created. I think that’s wonderful.
Joe Polish: So I would say people like that absolutely have changed and transformed the world in a big way. There’s a lot of people out there: Gandhi, Mother Teresa. You name it. There’s a lot of real heroes. You can walk out the door and see them everywhere, if you’re not looking for it.
Ralph Zuranski: Why are heroes so important for young people?
Joe Polish: Because a lot of times, young people have a parental influence that is not always positive. They have life circumstances that are not always that positive. Things such as an individual just giving a child a little bit of encouragement in a time where it’s really needed, can absolutely change that individual dramatically.
Joe Polish: So it’s important, because everybody benefits when they’re given a dose of confidence and belief in themselves and just saying, “You can do it,” even when they believe they can’t.
Joe Polish: So going back to 12-step programs, I think everyone should read “The Big Book Of Alcoholics Anonymous.” It’s a very interesting book. It’s about individuals who are suffering from an addiction, which is basically doing something they don’t want to do but they can’t stop, going into a place where they’re beyond hope and surrounding themselves with people that believe in them more than they believe in themselves.
Joe Polish: A lot of times, no matter who you are, if you’re dealing with a problem and you don’t have any hope, to be around someone that believes in you more than you believe in yourself is important.
Joe Polish: So going back to “Why are heroes important to children?” for that exact reason, there are a lot of children out there who are hopeless. They need people that believe in them more than they believe in themselves. A terrible thing to have happen is to go through life where you never, ever believe that you’re worthy, that you deserve it, that you’re capable. That can manifest itself into very, very horrendous things.
Ralph Zuranski: That’s so true. That’s the reason why I created the “Heroes Program.” It gives people hope, and especially helps young people find a pathway through life. They don’t have to go through and make all the mistakes that we did as kids. Nobody’s really putting this information out. It seems that the schools are just turning kids into robots and employees, and destroying any hope they have for ever attaining their dreams.
Joe Polish: I really appreciate you taking this time to give this valuable information to the young people who are out there, that are desperately looking for answers.
Joe Polish: If you had 3 wishes for your life and the world that would instantly come true, what would they be?
Joe Polish: Well, one would be, at the end of my life, to have transformed entrepreneurs and the way their businesses run. This is actually a business-related goal.
Joe Polish: One of the things that I’m doing is with “Ethical Services.” I have a website called “www.EthicalService.com.” It’s right in in the embryonic stage. It was featured on the www.ABC.com website, when I did a show with Barbara Walters and Arnold Diaz back in 1999.
Joe Polish: But, really the point of that business venture is to connect consumers that are looking for ethical companies with companies that are ethical, and offer to guarantee their work, carry proper insurance, not employ people in a manner that forces them to do high-pressure selling to make a living, and they refuse to have any misleading or unethical advertising. So, they don’t do bait-and-switch.
Joe Polish: I’ve started it in the carpet and upholstery cleaning industry. My goal is to take it from industry to industry to industry. I actually think I can transform – not think, I know – that I can transform the way that consumers find companies that are those types of companies that really care about their consumers so they are able to locate each other.
Joe Polish: I want to create the ultimate win-win situation in the business world. I think I can create a better way for people to buy things, so that they can find companies that are more trustworthy and companies that are really good and ethical. They’re not forced to have to get into the low-priced pit with everyone else, and use manipulation and to figure out how to sell the goods and services.
Joe Polish: So, that’s one wish that I would absolutely love to have come true, and work very hard with a lot of people backing me up to do it.
Joe Polish: The second is, at the end of my life, to know that I have reduced suffering for enormous amounts of people, just by facilitating making contacts, because I’m really a connector.
Joe Polish: And the third is just be an encourager. I went to a funeral a couple of years ago now, by a friend of mine named Ralph Blass. He was just this great guy that was in the cleaning industry. He had built a company called “Steamaway International.”
Joe Polish: Everyone at the funeral, if there’s one thing that they all said, it was, “He was a real encourager. He was a real encourager.” And it was true. And it made me think about times where I’m sitting here being grumpy and complaining about stuff.
Joe Polish: If I can walk through my day being an encourager, not only does it help other people but I pretty much feel good the whole day. It may not be rub the lamp and have a Ferrari and $10-million in the bank. So what? That would be nice, too. However, it wouldn’t be nice if I wasn’t an encourager and if I didn’t have a lot of gratitude. So that’s kind of my off-the-top-of-my-head list.
Ralph Zuranski: Do you have any good solutions for the violence in our society today, like racism, child and spousal abuse, violence among young people?
Joe Polish: A solution? Don’t support it, meaning don’t sit in front of the news station all day long and watch violence and people abusing each other…watching movies all day long about violence and stuff like that.
Joe Polish: In terms of a solution to it, I think the solution to it – and, again, this is only Joe Polish’s version of where I’m at in my life – is being a more conscious individual. Where does violence and all of that come from? There’s a disconnect somewhere.
Joe Polish: I think if the whole world, and I’m trying to be careful of what I say, became more spiritual and lived their lives based on creating value for others and focusing on their strengths and their talents, there would be less of a reason for people to be violent.
Joe Polish: I think violence and out-of-control behavior is just the manifestation of someone living a life of suffering, and not figuring out what works in their life.
Joe Polish: So, it just gets worse and worse and worse, and pretty soon they explode. So it’s kind of like an out-of-control individual when they snap.
Joe Polish: There’s different types of violence, too. Sometimes, violence is a reaction of dealing with being attacked. That’s one thing. Sometimes, you just have to do what you need to do, if you’re put into a threatening situation.
Joe Polish: Other forms of people that are beating their wives or just verbally abusive, those types of individuals, if they were aware, would see that there’s a disconnect and there’s something going on, then that frustration would no longer be a frustration.
Joe Polish: Anger is okay. Anger is an emotion that everyone feels and it has a lot of benefits to it. It’s when it becomes rages that it’s out of control.
Joe Polish: So when things reach a state of rage, the first thing is having the awareness, “Why is this happening?” and then “What are you going to do about it?”
Joe Polish: I’m probably not the best person to say what the solution is. My solution is, “Pursue a spiritual path. Ask God what’s going on here.” I just don’t want to use this type of format to tell people what my belief system is, because it’s my life. I do it the way that I want to do it, and it may not work for others.
Joe Polish: For me, when in doubt, “Seek God!”
Ralph Zuranski: I do that in my life, also. What do you think about the Heroes Program and its impact on the youth, parents and businesspeople? It sounds sort of like your ethics website.
Joe Polish: Here’s the truth, Ralph. I don’t know much about it. Although from the times that I’ve met with you and when I see what you’re doing, knowing very little about all you’re doing, I think it’s fabulous.
Joe Polish: Whenever you can sit down and have conversations with people that can encourage others and give them direction and your motivations are to help children, to me, that’s very positive. I think everyone that would pursue anything along those lines is adding a lot of value to the world and is doing a lot of great things.
Joe Polish: And I really hope that your “Heroes Program” does help a lot of people and gets a lot of messages out that, you know as well as I do, aren’t being broadcast by the news media.
Ralph Zuranski: I think the world needs hope. People like you that are successful, that have such great wisdom are important. The foundation of the program is based on Earl Nightingale’s teachings. He said that the true success in life is somebody who pursues a worthy ideal and does it with every ounce of their strength and with every bit of excellence within them.
Ralph Zuranski: If they can achieve a level of service and create a quality product that is so valuable to society they will achieve their financial dreams. Each person’s dreams are unique. As long as they are willing to have a goal and pursue it with excellence they will succeed.
Joe Polish: Absolutely. I really like Earl Nightingale, too. It’s just cool that you said that.
Joe Polish: I’ve listened to a lot of improvement programs. “Lead The Field” is one of Earl Nightingale’s programs. It is still produced by “Nightingale-Conant.” Everyone would get a lot of value out of just listening to that.
Joe Polish: Earl is great. The whole “how-to world” owes him a lot.
Ralph Zuranski: They do…”The Strangest Secret Of The Mind Of Man.”
Joe Polish: “The Strangest Secret” is great.
Ralph Zuranski: That’s really super. In parting, what do you think is are the things parents can do that will help their children realize that they too can be heroes and make a positive impact on the lives of others?
Joe Polish: Let them know you love them. Encourage them. Say, “Yes more than you say no.” Be a battery-charger, not a battery-drainer to them. Realize that even when they’re rebelling against you, that sometimes it is them gaining their own footing.
Joe Polish: I went through a very rebellious stage. I don’t have any teenagers. I can’t imagine from that perspective. It’s a lot easier for me to say things not knowing, than it is to know it.
Joe Polish: All I can say is, “Be a great role model.” I was told a lot, “Do as I say, not as I do.” That’s horrible advice. “Do what you do. Say what you do.”
Joe Polish: If you say things but you don’t do it, what you’re doing is you’re teaching your children to be a liar.
Joe Polish: And more importantly, there’s a lot of toxic things in the world… toxic thoughts and toxic stuff. If you constantly have your head and your body filled with toxins, the byproduct is you’re going to be toxic.
Joe Polish: So eat healthy. Don’t feed your children garbage. Watch the movie “Super-Size Me” with your whole family. I do a lot of work in the nutrition field. Exercise. Take care of yourself. Your health is so critical.
Joe Polish: We have a society that is filled with garbage. We also have a society that’s filled with so many good, healthy foods that are available to everyone. And what do most people do? The majority of what consumerism is spent on entertainment, which is garbage. Consumerism is with food.
Joe Polish: So don’t feed your kids mental garbage, verbal garbage and food that’s garbage. If you don’t do that, I think your kids are going to grow up to be a lot better people than the ones that are not given that opportunity.
Ralph Zuranski: That’s great advice. I really appreciate your time. Thanks, again.
Joe Polish: Yeah, you’re welcome. Thank you.
Joe Polish is the Founder and President of Piranha Marketing Inc., and the creator of the Genius Network Interview series. His marketing expertise has been utilized to build thousands of businesses of all sizes, from small mom-n-pop cleaning companies to large multi-national corporations.
In the cleaning and restoration business niche, Piranha Marketing has been the #1 marketing and business-building resource provider and coaching organization in the industry for more than a decade.
In the general business market, Joe’s marketing audio program with Nightingale-Conant, “Piranha Marketing”, has been their #1 selling general marketing program for the past 5 years. Joe’s Genius Network interview series has tapped the wisdom of some of the greatest entrepreneurial and marketing minds on the planet. Best selling authors from Bill Phillips to David Bach, marketing pioneers from Joe Sugarman to Gary Halbert to John Carlton, and perhaps the best known high-adrenaline entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.
Joe’s passions today are developing his high level Genius Network Mastermind (a.k.a. the 25K Group), a marketing “brainstorming” group for highly successful entrepreneurs, and his charitable fundraising mastermind (the Centurion Mastermind) which the past year has donated a half million dollars to Virgin Unite.