Keep Knocking and Eventually the Door Will Open

I want to share an interesting story that happened years ago and it has to do with the fact that if you keep knocking, eventually the door will open. Okay? If you keep knocking, eventually the door will open.

The Magic Of Being Persistent

If you have kids, you probably know what I’m talking about. They are incessant at asking for what they want and I want to encourage you not to beat that out of them. Maybe beat is not the right word. We don’t want to strip that of them because there really is an amazing quality if you think of it. Most people in life struggle because they fear what other people are going to think of them. If I asked … I don’t want to piss someone off or upset them because I’m too persistent or I’m asking too much. Kids don’t care. They just do it, right? Because they want what they want and I want to encourage you to have that level of tenacity.

A number of years ago, my first book,  The All Day Energy Diet was coming out and I was hellbent on getting this book to number one on the New York Times list and I invested a huge amount of money, $300,000 to be exact. Now here’s the thing is that I didn’t have $300,000 sitting in the bank. I took a risk and I said, “You know what? I believe in myself. I’m going to figure this out.” By the way, I don’t recommend doing that. There’s smarter ways to invest your business or your money.

You’ve Got To Believe In Yourself

I made the commitment to invest $300,000 and partner with some marketing/distribution firms for the books and so forth. I had an acquaintance who said he would lend me half the money because I basically had half. I needed the other half. He said, “Yeah, I’ll lend it to you.” We set up a contract with the basic repayment, interest and so forth, and two days before the money was due, he pulled out.

Now that was probably one of the most stressful couple days of my life because when he dropped that bomb on me, I was really pissed, super pissed because if you’ve seen any of my other videos, I can’t stand flakes, which are people who back out of commitments, whether it’s a relationship or a business commitment or anything. So the reason I’m sharing this with you in the sense of like if you continue knocking, the door will eventually open. And to put this in context, this happened on a Friday. The money was due on a Monday. Most banks aren’t open on the weekends, right? They don’t do a lot of stuff on the weekends. So it’s a Friday just after lunch. I’m in panic mode for one or two hours and then I said, “Listen dude, get yourself together and figure this out.” And so I got super uncomfortable like I’m talking about like the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been because I started making phone calls and sending text messages and emails to literally every single person I knew and I was basically asking for money. I said, “Listen, I’m in a really tight situation. I need to borrow $150,000. Can you do that for me?” More or less, right? Not in that exact tone.

Talk about uncomfortable. Talk about super, super uncomfortable, but I kept doing it because I knew that there was no other way. I had to make this happen and it was a Friday afternoon. It was like, I had nothing else I could do. So I just started calling in favors and getting super, super out there and uncomfortable and I will be forever grateful to the two people who stepped up who lent me the money that afternoon, wired it to me. And here’s the thing is I promised them that I would pay them back in seven days. That’s a big promise. That is a big promise. And the only reason I was able to promise them that was because we had tested the heck out of this funnel for the book, and we knew it was working and converting well. I said, “Listen, I promise you this money will be coming back to you in seven days.”

Now some people might be like, “Well, I don’t believe you.” Whatever, but I’m a man of my word and that’s really important to me. And so they lent me the money. We sent the money off on the Monday morning. Everything worked out well. The best part about this whole situation was not that my book hit number two on the New York Times list, which was great, but for me, what was most important was how I was able to repay those two individuals within seven days, just like I promised. So the moral of the story is this is sometimes you just got to keep on knocking. You have to keep on knocking if you want something badly enough, and if you don’t, the door is not going to open. If you don’t ask enough, you’re just not going to get it. So I want to encourage you in your life to, whether that’s to follow up more or to continue pushing when things don’t work out or you hear a lot of no’s or even if it’s something as simple as you have an opt-in page.

If you have an opt-in page that isn’t converting as well as you want it to, you keep testing, you keep testing iterations of it. That’s the lesson. Hopefully it serves you, hopefully it inspires you. No matter who you’re listening to or learning from or looking up to, we’ve all had our dark days and we’ve all had really challenging moments and I think this is part of the wisdom I’m able to help our clients with is that, listen, I don’t have all the answers, but I can certainly shortcut the path to success based on a lot of the stuff that I’ve been through, the failures and successes.

If you like what I’m all about, if you’ve watched some of my stuff and you want help growing your health or fitness business, you want to get more clients, you want a simpler, more predictable, arguably a smarter business model to get clients without working yourself to the bone, then go to WorkWithYuri.com and let’s book in a time to have a chat. Because if what you’re doing isn’t currently working, even if you’re doing pretty well, there are very simple things we can do to improve your situation, but let’s get on the phone. Let’s figure out a game plan for your business and then let’s see if there’s a fit to work together. And if not, totally cool. If there is, we can certainly help you with that as well. So that’s the deal.

Keep on knocking my friend, keep on knocking.