Jeff Root:

Taylor Pearson: Thanks for having me on, Jeff.

Jeff Root: Of course. Let’s start here with a little bit about you and what you do.

Taylor Pearson: My name is Taylor Pearson. My background is in digital marketing consulting for about the past half decade. I’ve worked in digital marketing either as a freelancer consultant in the agency or with a company. Over the past year, I have transitioned to working just on my own as a consultant and then moving into scaling that up and doing some more writing and publishing as a way to promote and generate leads for that.

Jeff Root: Awesome. When you say writing and publishing, you’re actually coming out with a book, right?

Taylor Pearson: I’ve got a book coming out the end of June.

Jeff Root: Cool. We’ll get to that later in the podcast. I initially asked you to be on here because I had a request from an industry magazine to answer a question asked by a new agent in the business. Instead of writing a long article about that, I figured I’d talk to the person about masterminds. I’m going to read the question verbatim real quick so we can get some context here in the problem we’re solving here. The question reads, “What is your accountability method? As we all know, advisors often fail because they do not hold themselves for the things that must be done to succeed. What do you do to ensure that you hold yourself accountable, and that you are held accountable to your goals and activity?”

When I got this question I knew right away for me it was our mastermind. You and I have been masterminding for over a year now. On the phone every single week consistently. You’re the expert in this. You put it together, you run it. I’ve heard you talk about it a lot. Let’s get into that. Tell us what a mastermind is.

Taylor Pearson: A mastermind is based around this idea that came from a book called Think and Grow Rich which was published probably a hundred years ago now. This guy named Napoleon Hill went out and he basically interviewed the most successful people of his era, so Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller and all these industrial titans to try and figure out what their secrets to success were, so to speak. One of the things he noticed was all these guys hung out together, and they all competed with each other and used each other for accountability. They had this mastermind trust of other individuals they relied on. They could go to and say, “Here’s what I’m going to accomplish.” They had these people both to help them accomplish that, like sort through and talk through those challenges, but also those people to keep them personally accountable to actually getting the work done.

The mastermind concept today, our mastermind and other masterminds I’ve run, are based around the same premise which is get a small group, usually four to six people, who are motivated and commitment and smart. Set up a weekly call, or some people do it bimonthly. Set up a regular recurring call to get in one place and have goals which you set for yourself that everyone else in that call holds you accountable for. That’s the basic breakdown of a mastermind.

Jeff Root: Yeah. I can tell you that every week you and I and everybody else on our mastermind call, we talk about what we’re going to accomplish this next week and what we accomplished over the previous week to hold ourselves accountable to what we say. I know I hate getting on that call if I didn’t do what I said I was going to do. You know?

Taylor Pearson: Yeah. I think it’s a natural tendency, or what most people seem to naturally believe, is you should just be able to hold yourself accountable. I’ve tried that so many times and never been able to do it successfully. Peer pressure and social pressure just works extremely well. There’s a lot of times where I will do things I don’t necessarily want to do whether it’s making a bunch of cold calls or something that otherwise seems unsavory. I just don’t want to get on the call with five other smart dudes that I respect and be like, “Uh, I didn’t do what I said I was going to do.” It’s like that’s far more embarrassing than actually doing the work.

Jeff Root: Totally. Yeah. What would you say are the major benefits to joining a mastermind?

Taylor Pearson: I think one is what we’ve been talking about which is that accountability. If you set a goal, you said, by next week I’m going to accomplish either X … I like to have it be something that’s either falsifiable so it’s an event. I’m going to do this and then I’m going to send this proposal or I’m going to make X number of calls, fifty calls, a thousand calls, whatever it is. You have something which you can either definitively have or have not accomplished, so the accountability portion is big. Then also problem solving. A lot of times it’s very easy to get caught up in your own head thinking about one way to attack a problem. If you air that problem out to other smart people in your industry who are thinking about the same stuff, they can help you sort through your own thoughts to figure out the solution a lot faster than you doing it on your own.

Jeff Root: Absolutely. For me, also it helps me to keep aiming higher on top of that. To make sure that the stuff that I claim I’m going to do or that I want to do, that it’s not just easy stuff that I know I can knock out in a couple of hours. It pushes me to aim higher and pushes everybody else in the group to aim higher as well. Also, one of the things too is, in our mastermind … I can only speak for us. We all run different types of businesses. We’re all sales/marketing guys. That’s the foundation of what we do, so we share a lot of the same things. I tried to get a life insurance mastermind together and it didn’t go too well. It just felt like the dynamics were off. I had a couple of life insurance agents flat out tell me they didn’t want to share some information out of fear of another life insurance agent stepping in on their market or one of those things. I almost think it’s good to find people outside of your actual industry, for us life insurance agents at least. Find other entrepreneurs that are also sales and marketers. Do you find that to be the case?

Taylor Pearson: It’s often the big, big, wins come from outside the industry. If you stay inside your own industry, everything flows together. If you look at technology start-up web pages, they all look the same and they have the same format. Everyone is copying everyone else. It’s only when someone comes in from the outside and brings out those big ideas. I look at what you’ve done in life insurance. You were in these internet marketing industries, and you’ve brought a lot of that innovation into the life insurance industry. That wouldn’t have been possible if you had just stayed in your own industry.

Jeff Root: Absolutely. It all happened really a few years ago meeting up with our group. I think I met you in Thailand almost two years ago now. Since then my business has completely morphed. I used to be a decent internet marketer. Now it feels like I’m a bad-ass internet life insurance marketer. I feel like I’ve figured some things out. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t get out of the life insurance industry and joined some masterminds and learned from other businesses besides life insurance businesses.

Taylor Pearson: Yeah. I’ve been feeling that a lot lately. I’m always seeking to broaden those horizons. What is it that I don’t know I don’t know?

Jeff Root: Um-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Let’s say you’re a life insurance agent and you want to get started in a mastermind, get this accountability thing going, learn from other businesses, teach other businesses the things you know, that type of thing. How would somebody go about reaching out to people to join a mastermind, other business owners?

Taylor Pearson: Sure. I always start with personal friends, people I’ve met in person, personal relationships. I would sit down. I would make a list of five people who I know personally who are … I think the important things seems to be some sort of shared values. If you’re trying to start this new venture, new business, new endeavor, having someone else who’s out there trying to do something ambitious and make something happen, who are the four to five people that come to mind you can think of that are on a similar path. Then sit them down and just explain this concept. You can either send them this podcast, or there’s plenty of resources online about masterminds and what they are. Say, “Look. You know, I think I want to make this happen.