How to Be Undefeatable

Phil has an incurable disease. His esophagus doesn’t work. It gets worse and worse and eventually he might not be able to talk or eat.

But he seems fine. “I am fine,” he told me. “Because of the same method I use to elect Presidents.”

—

“Is this the most important election ever?” I asked Phil Stutts. I asked him because he is one of the few people that has actually helped elect a President of the United States.

For the past 12 months, Phil has been collecting data on hundreds of millions of people. He told me a year ago, “People think they are going to die of COVID. They think everyone is going to die. They want to know they are safer than the media says.”

And because Phil told me that, I upped my podcast from two days a week to five in order to have more epidemiologists, virologists, etc. in order to properly analyze the data and assure people they were safer than they thought.

Throughout the past year I called Phil to ask, “What are people concerned about? I want to help.” And he would tell me. Just like he would tell candidates or corporations.

When everyone was insisting, “This is the most important election ever,” I wanted to know.

I went to newspapers.com, which has an archive of every newspaper article in the past 250 years. I searched for “most important election ever”.

Guess what?

Every election since 1800 was “the most important election ever.”

In 1844, for instance, “The Democratic Party of Perry County…assembled at the commencement of a political campaign which will terminate in one of the most important elections ever held in our country…”

In 1868, “Freemen of Vermont! You are called to attend the polls on Tuesday at the most important election ever held in this country…”

In 1892, “As all of the speakers have told you, this is surely the most important election ever…”

In 1944, “This is the most important election since 1860. It is more than that — it is probably the most important election ever.”

Were all of these headlines wrong? No. They really were the most important elections ever. Just like 2020 was.

Without realizing it, we were also thinking whatever the campaigns wanted us to think. They were spending billions of dollars to spread a message. They use data to figure out what scares us.

Presidents do it. Corporations do it. Media does it. We have to fight it.

For 18 years, Phil Stutts has been on the front lines of using a unique new technique for spreading a message that has impacted tens of millions of people. This technique never existed before. In 1940 it didn’t exist. In 1852 it didn’t exist. Even in 2000 it didn’t exist.

Phil Stutts started working for political campaigns in the 2004 presidential campaign. He spearheaded this new unique technique and it’s gotten more and more sophisticated ever since. Which is why he is among the very first and most experienced to use this technique to help businesses. To even help  people like me.

Phil knows more information about you than you think. Not because he spies on you. But because you give your data to many different companies and services. If you read the fine print, you’ll see that this data is shared with other companies. And political campaigns, led by people like Phil Stutts, get this data, understand it, and then use it to spread a message.

What information? They know when you will buy your next car, they know how many strawberries you ate this month, how much exercise you get, what issues your closest family members most care about. Where you are even thinking of vacationing this year.

With that data, they can send one message to you, and another message to your cousin, and another message completely to a voter who lives on the other side of the country.

If this feels manipulated, it is. And it isn’t. This is now what every candidate does. This is the way politics works. And why not hear about the issues that are important to me?

During this pandemic and the economic lockdowns, I called Phil on a regular basis.

“What’s new?”

Every week he was polling thousands of people and getting data on millions more. Phil is perhaps the first to take the techniques from political campaigns and use them for marketing of…anything. Businesses, political campaigns, even my own personal social media accounts. What do my readers like? What are they looking for?

Businesses listen, I listen, because we want to address concerns that people have. Help people where they need the most help.

Every week, Phil had his finger on the pulse. Sometimes (often) people are worried about their economic situations. But sometimes they were scared of all the misinformation in the media.

Or they wanted to know that their local communities were safe. Sometimes people, as a whole, didn’t care about material goods. They just wanted to know this virus wasn’t going to destroy the world. Other times they wanted to know if their jobs would come back.

Every week it was different. Every week I called Phil. Because he knew the answers.

Phil has been on my podcast close to 10 times. Alongside people like Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, Tyra Banks, Danica Patrick, and even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Phil is my go-to guest when I want to really learn what is going on in the world.

Phil has represented Republicans, Democrats, and now businesses from every industry. What I like is that he is not blindly ideological. He works with data to see what the concerns of the world are and how businesses and political candidates can best meet the needs of the people.

I asked him, “Do people lie in order to fit the data? Do they say what the people want instead of what they believe?”

“No,” he told me. But candidates (or corporations, or writers) believe many things. And they want their message to be heard. So they talk about the issue they believe in that is most important to people at that moment.”

And the data doesn’t have to be expensive. We can test and experiment and observe all the information around us.

Is a business idea good? Figure out an experiment that can get you data.

Want to start a restaurant? Make all the food and invite people over to try it. Is a book cover good? Do what I did and post it on Facebook with a $20 ad budget and see which cover people click on.

He has helped businesses make hundreds of millions of dollars. He has helped candidates become Presidents of the United States. He has helped me and others write good articles for their readers.

His book just came out. The Undefeated Marketing System, by Phil Stutts. And he was also just on my podcast to lay it all out.

• Get data
• Come up with a plan.
• Figure out how to communicate about that plan.
• Test your plan.
• Launch.

“I used it to find my amazing wife. I used it when I had an incurable disease and I needed help. I use it to help candidates get elected. And I use it with my customers.”

“And you helped me use it with my podcast!” I said.

And now I don’t have to call him anymore. He told me on the podcast and in the book how he does it.

This election was harsh and dirty and surprising. But let’s not forget that many elections in American history have been like that. Let’s not forget that in the 1850s one Senator almost beat another Senator to death in the halls of Congress.

Or that John Adams was jailing journalists in 1800 thanks to the “Alien and Sedition Act” that he passed — and that Thomas Jefferson, in the “most important election ever” swore to overturn.

If elections are going to determine the true representatives of the people, and businesses are going to serve the needs of their customers, we need to determine what those customers and voters want. What are their concerns?

This can only be done with data. Not opinions. This can only be done if you know how to interpret that data. Not just guessing. There are no shortcuts.

It’s hard to find someone you trust. It’s also hard to find someone who isn’t a sucker for all the scripted thoughts inside the echo chambers of social media.

Instead, it’s good to find someone to trust who is unbiased. Someone who has mastered using data to make life-changing decisions for elections and businesses. Someone who is willing to share those techniques with us. Someone who is a friend. Phil.

“Was this the most important election ever?” I asked Phil.

“No,” Phil said, “But the next one might be.”

 

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Don’t Be Better… Be “The Only”

A few months ago, we gave my daughter race car driving lessons… She got into a Formula 2 car with an instructor and after many lessons she now has a race car driving license.

In her first race, she came in second. I’m proud of her.

I hope she stays interested in it. And I also hope she doesn’t die from it. She really loved it but we’ll see. Love needs follow up, as my wife often reminds me if I play chess online all day.

Here’s the thing: She got into every college she applied to.

Now… I told her NOT to apply. I told her all the reasons I think college is a waste of time and a waste of money and a general waste of life energy.

“But you went to college,” she said, “why is it good enough for you but not me?” — says everyone who asks me about this.

It’s because I went to college that I am against it. I try not to have a cognitive bias just because I did something.

But this isn’t about the merits of college.

Here’s why I wanted her to take race car lessons before she applied:

How many kids from the NY-PA-CT-NJ states apply to college? How many of those kids have sufficient grades, sufficient SATs, after-school activities, some sports, and decent essay writing schools?

All of them. 

Nobody can tell the difference. All of their applications look the same. They are photocopies of each other. They are clones begging to be selected by the casino of college admissions.

“But,” one might say, “what if one has an A average and the other has a B+? What if one has 1400 on her SATs and the other has 1300?”

BIG DEAL. Nobody can tell the difference. Even if it’s right there in the numbers. Because when you throw in random after-school activities (this one played basketball, this one worked at a charity, this one wrote a decent essay about her trip to Iraq), NOBODY CARES.

—-

Andy Warhol was a great artist. I’m not talking about his Campbell’s Soup Cans or Marilyn Diptych. Before that. When he actually drew pictures.

He was the best illustrator in his day. There were other good illustrators but none as good as him.

Guess what? Nobody cared.

He was a low-level “drawer” in the advertising industry. People he worked with probably hated him and talked behind his back.

The average person can’t tell if one person draws 20 or even 50 percent better than another drawer. I know I can’t.

Bob Ross paintings look as good to me as Normal Rockwell or Hopper or any other realists. In fact, please tell me who you think is better. Normal Rockwell or Bob Ross. I honestly can’t tell.

Andy Warhol needed to be “the only” to be a famous artist. Not just better. My daughter, Lily, needed to be “the only” to get into college.

I had bad grades. I had OK SATs. And I had no after-school activities. Why stay “after school”? I never understood that concept.

But I was “the only.” I played chess. But a lot of kids did. I was my state’s high school chess champion. When I showed up for my interview, we spent the entire time with me teaching him some nuances in the Taimanov-Fischer match of 1971, which, by coincidence, my interviewer had been studying.

Here’s an image taken from the July 30 edition of “The Home News” about the upcoming US Open and my participation in it.

 

When I applied for a job as a computer programmer at HBO I failed the interview. I had no idea how to program for the Macintosh or how to do network programming. I knew nothing.

But I was “the only.” Turns out the group I was applying for was very competitive with another group in chess every afternoon. I got the job.

—-

I suggested to Lily five different things she could do to be “the only.” I wanted her to be aware of the choices so she would do something she loved.

If you don’t do something you love — but just to get into school or be famous or make money — then you screwed up.

Anything worth getting good at is very hard and very unpleasant.

Learning is hard. When you first start learning something you screw up a lot and that’s unpleasant. You lose car races or tennis games or people think your art is crap or your standup comedy is not funny or you lose chess games.

When I was 18 if i even lost one chess game I would cry. One time I was losing a game and rather than hold out my hand and congratulate the winner gracefully, I swept my arm over the board, knocking all the pieces onto the ground.

I’m not saying this is a good thing. Being a sore loser will ruin improvement. But you have to love something if you are going to return to it after being constantly shot down.

Every time I tell people, “Oh, I’m taking my kid tomorrow to race car driving lessons,” they always respond, “Really? That’s the coolest thing! I wish I had done that as a kid.”

So she was “the only.” There were no other people in her class her age.

When admissions officers got her application, I know for a fact it went into a different pile. It went into “the only” pile instead of the pile that a committee would have to decide who is better than who.

When Andy Warhol wanted to be “the only” his first plan was to make paintings of sugary romance comics. But then Roy Lichtenstein started doing it. Andy Warhol thought to himself, “I can do it better.” But he knew that “better” is BS and “only” is what creates a new genre of art.

It wasn’t even his idea. A friend of his, Muriel Latow, suggested almost half-jokingly that he paint Campbell’s Soup Cans. She wasn’t an artist. She was an interior designer. And she liked soup.

Warhol loved the idea. He asked her if he could pay her for the idea so that it would be officially his. He gave her $50. Which in today’s money would be about $300.

One of his original soup can paintings recently sold for $32,000,000. He was “the only.”

—-

Was the iPhone a better phone? Some say yes, some say no. But it was the only phone that had every song ever written on it.

Was McDonald’s the best restaurant? Almost definitely not. But it was the only restaurant chain in the 1950s where, no matter which one you went to and no matter where it was, the food tasted the same and the restaurant was clean. It was the only chain that had those features at that time.

Was Betamax better than VHS as a videotape? Yes it was. But VHS destroyed Betamax and became the dominant brand. Betamax was better, but nobody cared and that’s all it had going for it.

Is my daughter the best student? I have no clue. But she’s definitely in the category of “only.” Particularly if she keeps pursuing race car driving. That’s where the love part comes in.

Think about where you can be “the only.” I promise it will change your life, save your life, ruin your life, and transcend your life.

—-

When I was 16 I was really into break dancing. I know… cliche. But I was obsessed with it. I wanted to be a professional break dancer. My dad asked me how I was going to get into college with that. I said I didn’t care. Ok, he said.

But then I was asked to play on my school’s chess team. I barely knew how to play. I took a book with me on the way to a match our school was playing. I was the fifth board, the bottom board, because I barely knew the rules.

I remember the book, How to Think Ahead in Chess by Fred Reinfeld, and it recommended playing the Stonewall Attack. I memorized it on the way over there, played the Stonewall. And won. My teammates were happy and I was happy people liked me. I was hooked.

Marcel Duchamp was one of the most original artists of the early 1900s. But when he was 31 years old he quit art, left NY and moved to Buenos Aires and basically spent the rest of his life playing chess. It’s addictive and he was an addict.

He couldn’t stop. People begged him to get back to his art. But he said, “I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art — and much more.”

Did he make the right choice? I don’t know. I’m an addict. I still play every day and maybe a bit more than I should.

But for a long time, it helped me. I hope, in my own way, I’m still “the only.” But now I think I’m just an addict.

 

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