Getting attention with a shotgun

Published: Wed, 03/11/20

Perry Marshall tells the story of how his friend and associate John became a card shark in Las Vegas. Apparently, as a young man, John decided that playing poker might be a good way to make a living. So, he set off for Nevada and looked for opportunities to win money in card games. However, John might have been a bit crazy, but he wasn’t stupid so he found himself a mentor who had been surviving as a poker player for many years. The first lesson the mentor taught him was who to play against and who to avoid sitting down at the table with. The classroom turned out to be a noisy club with girls dancing on podiums and a few dozen people drinking and generally enjoying the Las Vegas experience. John’s mentor always carried a sawn off shotgun under his coat (which was probably a lesson in being a card shark in itself). He slipped the shot gun under that table and told John to watch what happens next. Then the mentor broke open the
shotgun and ‘racked’ is shut again with the characteristic click which only a break action shotgun can make. Even in the noisy room several people had obviously noticed the sound and looked around to see if trouble was imminent. The vast majority of punters noticed nothing at all. The owner of the joint came over and sat down with John and his teacher and asked if everything was okay? Yes indeed said the owner of the shotgun, just giving this young man a lesson in finding marks. A ‘mark’ being someone a card shark wants to play poker with because taking their money will be easy. The kind of person who can pick out the sound of a shotgun in a noisy club may also notice that they are playing against a top of the poker food chain predator. Everyone else would likely be easy prey.

This story teaches a fundamental lesson which is important on several levels. Perry Marshall has made ‘racking the shotgun’ one his his fundamental business principles. Don’t treat all potential customers that same, do something which is the equivalent of racking the shotgun and see who notices. If the incident described above had been about finding customers for a bodyguard business, then those who noticed the racking of the shotgun would have been the ones to approach. The rest of the people in the room would probably just say. ’Danger, what danger? What could possibly go wrong?’ The words for this principle are qualification and disqualification. Those who heard the shotgun were disqualified as marks, but they may well have been qualified in other ways.

Are you the kind of person who notices things that most other people don’t? If you are reading this then very likely you are. You may not realise it but quite a complex process of qualification brought you to the point of opening this email and reading this far. That makes you a rather special individual and I would celebrate that, just I am privileged to have you on this list.

What is it that makes one person notice something that another person is completely unaware of? There is a part of our brain called the reticular activating cortex (RAC) which processes the vast amount of information which our senses receive all the time. The RAC is an unconscious process which selects what to bring to the attention of the conscious mind and what to simply disregard. Everyone in the club where the shotgun was racked would have ‘heard’ the same sound but only a few people had their RAC calibrated to bring that particular sound to their conscious attention. Why does your RAC make that particular selection? It will be to do with the emotional connection to the signal. Those who noticed the shotgun being racked had a desire to stay alive and their unconscious minds recognised the potential danger of a shotgun being loaded. The rest were just tourists.

How do we get qualified people to take an interest in what we have to offer? How do we disqualify the people we would be better off not getting involved with? Find a way of ‘racking the shotgun’ and see who reacts. The clever bit is being able to do it intentionally and then have a way of following up that interest. I would like to do a little experiment here by asking this question. What does 144 mean to you? If you don’t know but still wonder what I am getting at just ask.

regards

Graham

PS I will be teaching in Somerset on the 4th of April and it looks like the event will be pretty full. It seems like racking the shotgun in Somerset is quite effective.

We are also planning to do a seminar in Illinois on the last weekend of May, getting interest in that event is proving more difficult. If you think you might be interested please check it out. We will be making it possible for people to just attend part of the event, just the martial arts training on the Saturday https://iceandfire.org.uk/usamay2020ma.html or the whole training which will cover the runes more widely. Full programme here https://iceandfire.org.uk/usamay2020.html