Expert Secrets (Russell Brunson) Summary - 5 Most Impactful Lessons

This book, Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, is what first got me started on digital marketing and selling courses and coaching specifically. It's why I'm now making multiple six figures per year. It's why I'm able to work from home, choose my own hours, be my own boss. It's amazing. So you know, Russell Brunson, if you're watching this, thank you, buddy.

And if you're watching this and you haven't read this book, then you absolutely want to pay attention to this. You want to take notes. Even if you have read the book, you know there's probably some stuff that you forgot; there's probably some stuff that is going to be very valuable to you to review again. So you're going to want to pay attention to this too. And these are things in this book that I still teach my students to this day; they're super valuable.

So in this video, I'm going to give you the five most impactful lessons that I gained from this book, Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, that have had the most impact and absolutely transformed my life. The first lesson is called the Big Domino. The Big Domino is the belief that you need your prospects to have; and if they have this belief, then all objections become irrelevant, and they have to buy your product now.

The way that you find the Big Domino requires a little bit of research, which is a little bit of market research, understanding your audience, which is why I'm so big on market research and why I make my students go deep into that. Because if you understand what's in your prospect's head, then you can sell to them much, much more effectively. So the Big Domino statement is the belief that in order to get to the person's goal, then they have to use a certain mechanism; and the only way to make use of that mechanism, or the best way to make use of that mechanism, is through your product.

So what do I mean by that? I mean there's three big parts to that, right? There's—I'm gonna just write it over here—there's the goal, there's the mechanism, and there is the product. Right now, the product obviously is whatever you sell. The goal is whatever is the result that the person wants to get, that the target audience that you have wants to get. And this is the part where market research is so valuable because you want to know what is actually important to people, right? And it may be that your product offers a whole bunch of different benefits, right? But you want to know what is the benefit that people actually care about most.

So, for example, I can show people how to make a lot of money. I can show them how to work from home. I can show them how to live a lifestyle where they can travel wherever they want. I can show them how to work part-time and pay for everything that they want, right? Those are all very good things, but they're all very different benefits. And so it really is good for me to know which of those is the most important to the people that I'm talking about, so I can push that specifically, right? Because if I'm talking about, "Hey, I can show you how to live a lifestyle of traveling," to somebody with a big house and a big family, rather, and like that's very set on their location and they don't want to travel at all, well, it's just not going to get their attention, right?

So I want to know what's their goal, and I want to know specifically too. So I want to know like maybe it's a certain amount of money, maybe it's to make thirty thousand dollars a month, um, right? So that'll be the goal. And then, in order to get to the goal, what is the mechanism that they need, right? And you don't want the mechanism to be your product; you want the mechanism to be some formula or some system, right?

So, for example, let's say that you're—let's say the goal is weight loss, like the person wants to lose 20 pounds. Well, the mechanism could be through a specific exercise regimen, right? It could be through the keto diet. Um, so let's use that for example. Let's say the goal is to lose 20 pounds, the mechanism is the keto diet, and then the product is going to be whatever you offer, so your keto cookbook, for example, let's say. So in order for somebody to buy, what you want them to believe is that in order to meet their goal of losing 20 pounds, the only way, or the best way to do that, is through using the keto diet, and the best way to learn the keto diet is through buying your keto cookbook, right? That's the Big Domino.

Or let's—let's say, uh, try a different one. Let's say the goal is to make thirty thousand dollars a month without having to do to do sales, like one-on-one sales, for example. That would be the goal. The mechanism, let's say, is by selling online courses, and the product is my particular coaching program to teach them how to sell online products. Well, what I want them to believe is that in the only way, or the best way, to make thirty thousand dollars a month without having to do one-on-one sales is through selling online courses, and the best way to sell online courses is by signing up for my coaching program, right? That is the Big Domino statement. If somebody believes that, then they will buy, soon assuming that they're assuming that they're actually capable. I mean, you know, if it's somebody that's living on a van down by the river and they don't have two pennies to rub together, then they're probably not going to buy anyway. But assuming they have the capability, they're going to buy in that case. So that's the Big Domino statement, and I highly recommend that for whatever you are trying to sell, whatever your business is, figure out what is your Big Domino statement for the specific audience that you are after. And again, you want to do your research; you want to know your audience so that you know what's important to them. So that is the first big concept of the Big Domino.

Concept number two is The Epiphany Bridge story, which is also—he describes this as the hero's two journeys—which is a way of telling a story around your Big Domino that shows how you figured out your mechanism, essentially, that people will relate to because people tend to relate to stories and are willing to listen to stories a lot better oftentimes than you're just trying to explain them or tell them that something is true, right? So the best way that you can get people to believe in your Big Domino oftentimes is through an Epiphany Bridge story. Now, what an Epiphany Bridge story is is basically the story about how you figured out your mechanism, or you figured out that your mechanism was the key to your success.

So, for example, let's say that you know that that keto diet cookbook, whatever—we'll have—we'll make a story around this—we'll say that you know I was 20 pounds overweight. I thought I tried everything, you know, I tried this diet and that diet and this diet, and I was going to the gym five times a week, but that 20 pounds on my belly just wouldn't come off. And so finally, um, I ran into a friend that told me about the keto diet and said that there had been some pretty interesting scientific research about this showing that it was really good for weight loss, and um, blah blah blah. And so that's the Epiphany, by the way—you know, coming out of the story here—that's the Epiphany in the Epiphany Bridge story; it's the thing that you realize. And so, um, to continue the story, okay, so I found this keto diet thing, and so I gave it a try, and then, you know, it actually started working, and it was amazing, and my mind was blown. But after a while, I realized that keeping the keto diet was really, really difficult, right? Because I had to eat a really different way; it was really hard to keep out all the sugar from my diet and be able to eat enough fat and enough protein in order to be able to be able to actually keep this up. And so I started to slip, and I started to eat things that I wasn't supposed to eat, and the weight started coming back. And that's when, um, I figured out that, oh, okay, well, maybe if I put a book of recipes together that I don't have to just guess at it, I just have it at my fingertips all the time, well, that's going to be the—that's going to make it easy; that's going to be what I need to actually be able to keep up with the keto diet and be able to keep the weight off. So that's what I did, as I went and I wrote out all these recipes, and now whenever I need to make a meal, I just grab my recipe book, and it's easy; I don't really have to think about it very much. And so, um, from then on, once I had this this list of recipes, then, um, then I kept the weight off. Now I look great; now I have a beautiful girlfriend; now, um, you know, everybody like turns their head on the street to look at me and like, "What's that guy's secret?" blah blah blah, you know? Now my life is amazing, right? That's the Epiphany Bridge story, um, in a nutshell.

So basically, the elements to this, and it's really good to know how to do this, right? Because whenever you tell this kind of story, people relate to it, and it makes people believe in a way that they would be skeptical otherwise. So the elements to that are: you're going to start with your current situation, like where were you to begin with? So in this case, I'm 20 pounds overweight, and I'm trying everything, and I'm frustrated because nothing's working, right? And then you find, uh, your Epiphany, right? You find something that you had not thought of before that that kind of goes off in your head and makes you think, "Okay, well, I'm going to give that a try," right? So that's your friend telling you—or my friend telling me—about the keto diet, right? And then so I try it; I get some—I get some results; and then another problem comes along—well, it's hard for me to keep up with this, right? And then in order to get over that problem, I have to come up with some solution, um, right? And then after I come up with my solution to that problem, then is like the end part where everything's great and my life is wonderful, and you know that should correspond to exactly what your customer wants to happen, right? So that's it; that's the Epiphany Bridge story. And if you will tell that in your marketing, then it will be like—it will get people's attention, and it will make them believe in what you have to offer, um, much better than if you just tried to tell them. And this is something where the, you know, the mechanism has to be good, right? Like that's the big secret of the Big Dominoes; you have to have a good mechanism, and then you communicate that mechanism through this Epiphany Bridge story. So that's points number one and two, the biggest lessons that I learned so far.

Another super impactful lesson I learned was breaking false beliefs. That whenever you try to—whenever you want to sell something—there's always going to be reasons to be skeptical, and people have a lot of excuses for why they're not going to take action on something. It's kind of our natural way of being that we want to just stay still, and we don't want to start moving. So, and we have like a lot of excuses that are going to keep us from moving. And so your prospects are going to have these excuses that are based on beliefs that you're going to have to help them to realize are not actually true. And so those beliefs come into two categories; there's—he calls them—internal objections and external objections. So the external objections are basically reasons why your method is not going to work, right? People hear about the keto diet and they think, "Oh, that doesn't make sense because, you know, you eat a lot of fat, and fat makes you fat," right? If people believe that, then they're not going to buy your product because they're not going to believe in your mechanism, right? So you have to break that false belief; you have to show them scientific studies of why it works, or you have to explain to them scientifically why eating fat doesn't necessarily make you fat. You can show them your own results; you can show them results from other people who've done it; you can show them study results, etc., etc., right? You want to break that belief in the mechanism before you ever even try to sell your product, right? And so that's an example of an external objection is that, oh, you know, the keto diet doesn't work, right? An internal objection would be, okay, maybe it works for some people, but it doesn't work for me because, for example, I'm not motivated enough to be able to keep up with it, right? This is because, like, you know, if you get through this—almost like there's two layers of false beliefs you have to get through, right? The first is that the method works at all, and then is that will the method work for this particular person. Most people are very insecure; most people have a lot of excuses for why they're just not good enough to be successful in whatever they're trying to be successful at, right? They have a lot of excuses for why they haven't achieved their goal. So, um, you want to show people how they can be motivated enough to do it, or they can, you know, if they think that I'm not smart enough or I don't have the right personality, right? We have this this big laundry list of excuses by—you can't—can't do stuff or we can't be successful at things. And so you want to figure out how to say either like to show people how to create that motivation, how to have that motivation, or better yet, show them why they don't actually need it, right? Like if you have this keto cookbook—doesn't have to be your product specifically—but if you have all of the recipes laid out for you, then it's really, really easy to do this, and you don't need to do it or you don't need to have a whole lot of motivation in order to do that. So that's the third big lesson is breaking false beliefs.

Now I want to take a little interlude for you to tell you: buy this book, right? Like if I haven't convinced you already, buy this freaking book; it's life-changing. I'll put a link in the description where you can buy it, and, and yes, you know, for full disclosure, I'm going to give you an affiliate link, so like if you buy the book, I get like a dollar. So in—if you're—if you're really opposed to that—like some people are just have these weird beliefs about money—they're like, "Oh, I don't want to buy that and give that guy a dollar"—if you don't want to give me a dollar, then like go buy it on Amazon or something; you won't give me a dollar. But the link is below, um, if you want to get the book; I highly recommend it. Okay, so that's the first three.

The fourth impactful lesson—and maybe this one's the most impactful actually—is the perfect webinar. I have made almost all of my money that I've made in digital marketing through doing webinars; webinars are freaking amazing because they do all the rest of the stuff, right? And it's all pre-packaged for you, and you have it all on slides, so you don't really have to remember very much; it's just awesome. And he shows you how to create a perfect webinar. And so there's a lot to this one, so I'm not going to go into this one in super depth, but basically, if you're not familiar with what a webinar is, it's just a presentation that you do either live or recorded. Um, if you do it recorded, it should kind of have some some, uh, interaction, like you know you have people type in a chat box and like feel like they're involved in some way, where basically you present your opportunity; it's a free training, right? The idea is that you're giving a free training that's actually going to be valuable to people, right? You don't want it to be just like a drawn-out sales pitch that doesn't provide any value, because then people are going to be mad at you, and they're not really going to want to do business with you, right? I've known people that have done that, and they were actually like pretty proud of themselves, which I thought was stupid; students, like you're basically misleading people—like how is that a way to start a professional relationship? Anyway, um, my opinion—and Russell Brunson's opinion—is that you should give actual value and show people stuff that's really helpful to them in your free webinar. And so you start by essentially teaching, and you teach in a way that does: number one, it explains your mechanism, right? Again, we're back to the Big Domino—your mechanism. So if you're teaching something about the keto diet or how to lose weight, you talk about how the keto diet works; that's your mechanism. And then you also want to address the—he calls it—the three Secrets, right? There's the number one is the mechanism; number two is an internal objection; number two is an external objection, right? And so the internal and external objections were exactly what we're talking about here with breaking false beliefs. So you want to first explain your mechanism, so you explain the keto diet, and then you explain why you don't actually need motivation if you have a list of recipes or something, or you can explain like how to overcome a lack of motivation or how to make it easy so that you stick to it, right? That can be your internal objection secret. And then the third secret is external objection, like it could be related to the person in a way that it's not something they have control over. So, for example, "This doesn't work for me because I don't have the right genetics." And so you could show—you could say like how to adapt it to your genetic type so that you can make it work for you, right? So if you can adapt it for your genetic type, well, now you're eliminating that objection of, "It doesn't work for me because of my genetics," right? So you have three three parts of your training, essentially: number one is your mechanism; number two, overcoming the internal objection; number three, overcoming the external objection. But notice that every part of that is teaching, right? You are actually helping the person to understand the situation better and how they can improve their own lives. And then at the end of the webinar, that's when you actually give your pitch; that's when you say, "Hey, you know, I hope you enjoyed this. If so, if you would like a step-by-step method to do everything that we just talked about, I want to offer you this special deal," and then you go into what, uh, Russell Brunson—in the book—calls an offer stack, which is you have an online course or coaching program that has all of these components. You say, "Okay, well, first of all, I'm going to take you through the diet plan, then I'm going to take you through the exercise plan, and then I'm going to give you this book of recipes, and then, you know," and you have like all of these things—all of these things that are all included in the same offer, and you can put a value beside each one, right? You can say, "Okay, this, you know, the recipes are worth five hundred dollars, and the other thing is worth four hundred dollars," and then at the end you add it all up and say it's worth three thousand dollars. And this is really cool because it—it makes it worth a high price tag, right? So you can—on a webinar—you can sell anywhere from like 500 to two thousand dollars. I've even seen people sell as high as three thousand dollars on webinars, and this is amazing because it—the numbers work out, right? And this is really—when I figured this out—was plus the market research, right? You know, I talked about that before; if this plus actually understanding where your customers are coming from is what absolutely made—made this work for me after two years of struggling. You know, if you don't know my story, I was—I—I quit my job, did this full-time for two years, uh, and struggled quite a lot. I lived in South America for half that time where, you know, it's really cheap to live, and I was just going more and more and more into debt. And eventually, I figured out a system that worked, and, um, and this is not an Epiphany Bridge Story by the way, like at least not intentionally; it just happened to go into that. But anyway, the point is that once I sold like a higher-priced product, well, now I could afford to pay the ads in order to sell it. So my first time I did this, I sold a product for 1495—this fifteen hundred dollars basically—and I spent, I think it was like three hundred and twenty dollars on ads, and I sold two of them, and actually I had an upsell, so it ended up being five thousand dollars worth of sales on my first webinar, um, doing this method that I spent 320 bucks, made five thousand dollars, and was able to just repeat the same process over and over and over again; it was basically like printing money. So like this method works, and and you know I've made some some revisions to this and improvements and stuff obviously, but like the basic outline—this method is absolutely awesome. So that's the fourth most important point.

Now the last one—this one's really cool—is creating a mass movement. Creating a mass movement—so this is creating an almost like a community around what it is you have to offer, like creating a community of people that are driven and motivated and want to do your methods. So you have a community of people that are passionate about weight loss and getting in shape and being healthy and using the keto diet to do it because they believe that it works. And Russell has done a really, really good job of this, you know, I—I go to—I've gone to twice now his Funnel Hacking Live event, which is his marketing event that he has every single year. In the last two years, and the next year actually happens to be like an hour away from my house, so like it's a no-brainer; it's a super cool event. But people are passionate about this, right? This is like changing lives; this is making people rich; it's making—giving people their dreams essentially. And so he's managed to make this community around it of people that he calls funnel hackers, like people that create marketing funnels, and it seems like the nerdiest thing, but people are so, so passionate about it because it's creating this amazing change in their lives. And so whatever it is that you have to offer people, you can create a community around that as well.

Now there are four—four basic parts to this—like there's four steps to creating this community, or four things that you need in order to create this community. The first thing you need is an attractive character; you need somebody who people are willing to follow, right? And that's probably going to be you, right? If you're the one that's teaching here, you're going to be the attractive character; you're going to have some attributes of yourself that people are just magnetically drawn to. And these are things that you can create in yourself, by the way. I mean, you know, if you're like watching me, I—I was a complete introvert; I'm still kind of an introvert, but I've—through a lot of practice—managed to be able to speak on camera, right? It's a skill that I've gained over time; it's not something I was born with. If you look at like Russell Brunson, he's—he's so excited all the time; like if you—whenever he's talking, he's super excited about whatever he's talking about, and it's infectious, right? People listen to him, and they get excited. So he's—and he's super—he's a good guy too, like he has a, um, you know, there's a lot of good things about him, so he's a great attractive character that people are drawn to.

Now the next part is the cause, right? You want to have a common cause that you rally around. And so the common cause can be like, you know, getting people healthy, right? If you have a weight loss offer, um, Russell Brunson's common cause is getting people to start successful businesses without having to rely on Venture Capital funding, right? Like without having to beg people to fund them and give up a big chunk of their equity in return, which is like a lot of people's idea of Entrepreneurship is, "Oh, I have to get a billion dollars of funding from some venture capitalist in Silicon Valley," when that's not true at all. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're thinking that you have to get a whole bunch of money in funding, you don't; I promise you—like, uh, well, there's some—there's some exceptions, right? Like if you want to start a new airline, maybe you have to buy some airplanes, and that's going to cost some money, but for most businesses, you can find a way to do it, um, bootstrapped, which is I think Russell's term, that you don't have to have any outside funding at all; you can do it yourself; you can keep control of your company; you can keep all your equity; you get to keep all your profits, right? So that's—that is the cause behind what Russell Brunson is doing here, and chances are whatever you're offering, you can find a cause to have your movement rally around as well.

The third part is a new opportunity; there needs to be a new opportunity for something great for the person, right? So, for example, for somebody who has been trying everything, or they think they've been trying everything, to lose weight, they're probably a little down in the dumps because nothing's been working, and then you come along and say, "Hey, what about this keto diet thing? You ever heard about that?" Well, that is a new opportunity, right? And so people will get excited about that; people will rally around that new opportunity, which you might notice that the new opportunity sounds a whole lot like your mechanism that we were talking about before on the Big Domino, right? That's something that is exciting to people, and so not only do they want it for themselves, but they will create a community around it. And then finally, the last part is an opportunity switch. So this means that not only is it a new opportunity, but it's a new opportunity in a way that doesn't require the same negative aspects of the old opportunity, right? So, for example, if it's—we'll do the keto diet again—you can use this keto diet now; you don't have to work out for five days a week and like starve yourself; now you can eat everything that you want, and you can just work out occasionally, and, and you know, I don't know if the keto diet works this way, by the way; I'm just totally making this up, so don't take my diet advice, please. But, um, you're—you're saying that the things that you hated about the old way, you don't have to have anymore. And so this is actually—when I was talking about—about making money or starting a successful business without Venture Capital funding, well, that's kind of an opportunity switch, right? Like you don't have to get funding from a venture capitalist anymore, right? You can have the result that you want without this thing that you don't want—the Venture Capital funding. So this is how to create a mass movement.

Now I wanted to, uh, take another example that I thought of just because when I think of mass movements, like the most recent one that I can—I can think of that was really, really impressive was the movement around Donald Trump. And again, this is going to be purely from a marketing perspective; I'm not taking any political position here. But Trump gets like massive crowds; he fills stadiums; people are absolutely crazy to listen to him, and even still, right? Like even still, he's—he's got these massive rallies, and, uh, for actually like a lot of people hate him too, but that tends…

To be the case, right? If you, you are very charismatic, then you're going to get a lot of people who love you, and a lot of people that hate you. It's, it's kind of, kind of inevitable. But anyway, so the attractive character in this case, obviously, is Trump himself, right? And then the Cause, right? Everybody knows what's Trump's cause: Make America Great Again. Right? This is a cause that is very attractive to a lot of people because a lot of people have a Nostalgia about how America was in the past, when there were more jobs, when a family could get by on one income, before they shut down all the factories, before there was a, like, high crime rate. Back then, when there was much more social cohesion, people trusted each other more, people had family values. And so people think about how it used to be, and they, they want to go back to that; they want to make America great again, as it was in the past.

And so what's the new opportunity? Well, the new opportunity is a, a new kind of politician. Essentially, in the past, the politicians were always very polished, and um, and they all just kind of conformed to the system, and they'd have little, little bickerings among each other here and there, and then the Democrats and Republicans would argue against each other. But then Trump came along, and he was nothing like the Democrats or the Republicans; he was something completely different. And he would come, and he would call out the media, and, and you know, call out the lies of the media, and he would call out the rest of the political system. And like one of his best lines in one of the debates was, he says that, like, to all the other politicians, he says, "I know that you're all corrupt because when I was, you know, running a business, I gave money to all your campaigns so that you would favor me." It's like he was part of the system, and now he's exposing this system. So it's this, like, amazing new opportunity that people just never seen before: a new kind of politician. He was, he was going to drain the swamp.

And then the opportunity switch is just: elect the politician, right? And this is true of, like, any political campaign; the opportunity switch is: "Hey, you can vote for me, and your life is going to be much better than it was before, without you really having to do any work on yourself." Which, by the way, is almost never true. I mean, it's true to a small extent, but really, even, you know, even the best president in the world isn't really going to make your life that much better. Like, if you're a loser, if you sit around and, and drink beer and watch Netflix and eat crappy food, and, and you're fat, and you're in bad health, and you're poor, and like your life sucks, well, the best politicians in the world aren't going to change that, right? So I mean, that's kind of the implicit opportunity switch, which is why people get so excited about politics, when really they would be much, much better off focusing on their own life than focusing on politics, no matter how good or how bad the politician is. Ultimately, it's going to come down to your own self; it's going to determine the quality of your life. But anyway, that's kind of a tangent, but you can see how this is so powerful, right? Like how this attractive character, a cause, like a common cause people can get behind, a new opportunity, and then an opportunity switch where the new opportunity is better than anything that, that we thought of as the old opportunities—this is really powerful for creating a mass movement of people that are super energetic about something and obviously going to be far more likely to actually buy your products and spread the word about your products to everybody else that they know. So definitely buy the book; this is super helpful. And then check out this video next where I show you my super secret plan—well, not really—to get rich in the new economy.