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John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Anthony Iannarino. He is a renowned expert in B2B sales with decades of experience and a track record of generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. He’s also the bestselling author of five books, including one we’re going to talk about today called The Negativity Fast Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, reduce Fear, and Boost Success. So Anthony, welcome back to the show.

Anthony (00:39): Thanks for having me back. It’s good to see you again.

John (00:41): So I got a kick out of Seth’s comment on the top that this book actually called the Positivity Buffet. So what gives, is it positivity buffet or is it negativity fast?

Anthony (00:55): It’s negativity fast until Seth says it’s the positivity buffet and then it’s the positivity Buffet. Just one of my favorite people and a great mentor for me. Yeah,

John (01:07): Kind to endorse my first book back in 2007. So he’s been a long time friend and mentor of mine as well. So you’re a sales guy. I mean, can I call you that?

Anthony (01:18): Yeah.

John (01:21): What’s a sales guy doing? Writing. What kind of feels like a self-help book?

Anthony (01:25): It’s a self-help book. And you know what? My friends that put it under sales and selling and management, and I had to ask them to put the self-help on there. So I went to a Barnes and Noble to see if they had it, and they’re like, why is that in business? It should be in personal development. And I’m like, I didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s a publisher, right? And

John (01:44): The

Anthony (01:45): Publisher decided what they were going to do. This has been a passion of me for a long time. I went to college when I was 26 after having two brain surgeries, I decided I should do something with what was left in my brain. So I went to college political science, all you do is argue with people instead of political science. That’s all you do. It’s just constant back and forth. Then I went to law school, which was even more political than school, and I ended up being angry about politics and geopolitics and all the ways I wanted the world to look better than it does right now. And eventually I realized you’re really angry. And I had one of my professors who said, you just have to let go of all this, which is the worst advice ever. How do you just let go? I don’t know how you do it.

(02:37): I’d say it to do it in this book, but I don’t know how to tell you how to do it. And I decided that I was going to do 30 days getting rid of all of the negative sources in my life. So any cable news that’s all gone. Am radio’s gone, everything’s gone. I got rid of all of it. I liked it so much, I did it 60 more days and then I did it 30 more days. And in that last 30 days, I realized not only do you have to get rid of the negative things, those negative sources, but you also have to replace it with something positive. So for me that was Les Brown Zigs, Anthony Robbins, Steven Covey, like anybody who was just positive and future oriented. That’s all I listened to for 30 days. And now I just have never gone back. So I’m now much happier. I’m not political, I’m what I’m calling post political because it’s just hard with all this divisiveness. So I’m not a divisive guy. So I think that the better way to do it is to try not to spend a lot of time with politics.

John (03:42): So I mean, in a lot of ways what you just described there was your fast, right? And that I’m guessing is obviously is what you’re prescribing as a path for many people to at least give a try.

Anthony (03:57): And I have to tell you that there’s 11 chapters before we get to the fast. And most of them I will tell you, is me explaining to you that you make yourself negative. And that’s a hard thing for people to understand. So the complaining that you do, that’s all you. And I wish I would’ve known this earlier when I was doing the research on this book. I cited everything in the book, but if you are a chronic complainer, your hippocampus in your brain will start to shrink and you will not be as good of a thinker as you are and you’ll have trouble solving your own problems. Who knows? That kind of thing. I wish I would’ve known it. It was not in the book, I got it right after that. But it’s us making ourselves angry and unhappy by what we say to ourselves most of the time.

John (04:51): And one of the things to tee another one of those up, you talk about how we lie to ourselves, unpack that idea.

Anthony (04:58): My younger brother is a comedian and he’s always unhappy driving from Ohio to Florida, and then I’ll spend months down there. And he believed that everybody had road rage because they were trying to get in front of him. And people drive poorly in Florida for sure. I know they’re the worst. But one day somebody was trying to cut in front of him and he looked at the guy’s face and he thought, this guy’s too far away from a rest stop and he really needs to get to a rest stop. And I said, now how would you know that? And he goes, it happens to me all the time. And because it’s happened to him now he has the empathy for this other person. And I said, all you did was lie to yourself. You don’t know that guy wasn’t road rage or I don’t know. But he decided that’s what he was going to do. He’s a lot happier. He just lets everybody go. And that was him making himself miserable for 20 years and now just dropping it just like that. I wasn’t prepared to have to put him in my book, but I thought that was a really good addition.

John (06:01): So you talked about how the first few chapters, I think it’s the first 10 or so, talk about the negative things that we do. But then obviously you get into some things like gratitude, I mean habits or practices that you talked about eliminating, but then filling. So what are some of the best filling, if you will, practices

Anthony (06:22): Gratitude’s the top of the heap? I mean, there’s nothing even like it. In fact, as I was writing this book and I was studying gratitude, the claims on gratitude are so many and so outrageous. You look at it and you go, it can’t be true. You will have better cognitive functioning, you will have less inflammation in your body. You will have less of a risk of having a heart attack. You will have less anxiety, stress, depression, all of these things. And you’re reading all these and you’re going, how much work does gratitude do? It does so much work and you don’t know that until you start to look at all the claims. And so I decided, well, I will cite that. And then my editor said, no, cite everything. So every claim in the book is backed by science. I read all the papers. I did my best to distill it and make it a fun book that you’re going to enjoy even though it’s got some science in it, but it’s not a science book. So it’s not a hard book to read. And everything in it is really practical and tactical. I think that’s what I want to write. I want to write something that you can read it and say, I could do that and that would help most people feel better.

John (07:38): So I think a lot of what you’re talking about, I’ve used the word habit, I think already you get into habits, better habits as opposed to the bad habits of waking up and reading CN or whatever. So do you have some rituals or habits yourself that you pretty much say ever