B. U. G. S.

I was called in in the late seventies to advise Ronald Reagan about the 1980 election.

A major point of his campaign came from me. He took a point I made about emphasizing the qualities of the American people THEMSELVES and went with it, instead of staying on the abstracts like the Constitution and so forth.

He took a few sentences of what I said and he made it into something one would not immediately connect with what I told him.

He also ignored at least 99% of what I said, which gives me a good percentage for high-level advice. After all, I was talking to a former elected head of the Screen Actors Guild, a twice elected governor of California, the man who had the 1980 Republicans nomination about sewed up.

My regular employer at the time was Congressman Ashbrook,, who had been elected nine times to his seat. And this is what makes high-level advising very different from lower level advice.

Giving advice to John Ashbrook or Ronald Reagan on getting elected was a lot like telling Don Juan how to get girls.

If you are advising a brand new candidate you have a lot to tell him. But when it gets big-time, you are talking to a person who knows a LOT more about what REALLY WORKS than you do.

I got a Skype call from people who had used the Mantra in Norwegian and got 100,000 hits! The total audience is about nine million!

So when they called ME for advice, I got that nervous feeling I used to get when called to advise someone who has been reelected nine times about elections.

Let me tell you a little secret about Reagan. All the “intellectuals” portrayed him as ignorant. He would interview somebody for an appointment in, say, the State Department, and he let them talk. He would ask questions which anybody who was half bright would know he knew the answer to.

It’s a technique called, “Let them hang themselves.” It is easy to forget you are talking to man who has been elected president of a huge union and Governor of the biggest state in the Union twice.

You see, one of the main things about high level advice is for you to keep rigidly in mind WHO you are talking to. If you are looking for a high-level appointment it’s easy for someone like Reagan to let you make an absolute fool of yourself.

So when I am talking to someone who has gotten a full percentage point of his entire linguistic audience, I want him to keep doing whatever it is he is doing. Advisors screw up a lot of successful people if the person PRACTICING success takes them too seriously.