IDL71 Season 2: Writing the 21 Laws of Leadership

Do you read with two minds? Why is it more impactful to begin a chapter of a book with a story? How can you transfer information from speaking events into book form so that it remains relevant and timeless?

I'm excited to sit down with Charlie Wetzel today, he is the ghostwriter and partner of John Maxwell for over 28 years now. Charlie’s taken John’s spoken words and the outline that he creates during the writing process, and has brought them to life in his books.

Meet
Charlie Wetzel

Charlie is a writer who has produced more than fifty books with John Maxwell. He is also president and co-owner with his wife, Stephanie, of Wetzel and Wetzel, LLC, which offers their services as writers, consultants, and story gurus.

Charlie serves on the board of 12Stone® Church, recognized by Outreach magazine in 2010 as the fastest growing church in the United States. He has served at the church in various volunteer roles, including as a small group leader, coach, and trainer.

Charlie does some screenwriting and also mentors a group of emerging writers. He also wrote the screenplay for the award-winning short film The Candy Shop, which won the Crystal Heart Award in 2011.

Visit The John Maxwell Foundation and connect with Charlie on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and LinkedIn.

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Working on the book 09:00

• Transferring experience into book form 13:15

• Starting each chapter with a story 23:51

• Read with two minds 52:17

Working on the book

Charlie explains that John outlines all his books meticulously.

With the outlines ready, Charlie then steps in as the fellow writer, editor, and researcher, and crafts the pieces of the book together in a way that an audience can experience its wisdom timelessly.

Charlie anticipates how something, a piece of information or a fact or an approach, will land with a reader at some point in the future. This is his skill set, while John Maxwell is skilled at reading the room in a moment, and landing information right where they are at.

Transferring experience into book form

If you are co-writing a book, you need to learn how to transfer knowledge from experience or notes into book form.

Over the 28 years that Charlie and John Maxwell have worked together, they have developed a great system for passing knowledge between them so that it can sound like their own while it retains its power.

Over time, Charlie developed John’s writing voice, which is a combination of Charlie’s perspective and John’s speaking voice.

Starting each chapter with a story

When you read the story you learn the principle behind it, and when you read a second story based on the same principle, your brain can more easily contextualize the story to assimilate it better.

Now, you can apply the lesson, because you have the extra understanding behind it and how it works, what happened, or what it taught everyone involved.

Stories provide nuance to principles and ideas.

Read with two minds

John Maxwell reads with two minds; one focuses on capturing information to put into his speaking and writing, and the other is to capture information to teach someone else within 24-hours.

Charlie reads for self-improvement and to teach that information out situationally proactively.

Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:

BOOK: John Maxwell – The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You

BOOK: Donald Miller – Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life

Visit The John Maxwell Foundation and connect with Charlie on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and LinkedIn.

Meet Charlie Wetzel

Join the Impact Driven Leader Community

Check out the Impact Driven Leader Youtube Channel
Connect with Tyler on Instagram and LinkedIn

Email Tyler at tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com and sign up for the next Impact Driven Leader Round Table Cohort

About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast

The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.

Rate, review and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts or subscribe on Stitcher and Spotify.

When somebody becomes a better leader and has good values, then life gets better for everybody they touch

Charlie Wetzel

Podcast Transcription

[TYLER DICKERHOOF] Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This is your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. If you're watching on YouTube, glad to see you, glad you're here. If you're listening wherever you listen to podcast, man, I'm thankful you're listening in today. Maybe someone shared this episode with you, maybe you are a subscriber, if you're a subscriber, great. If not, I'd love for you to subscribe. As well after you're done with this episode, give me a rating, a review. I'd like to know what you thought about this episode, what you learned. I love getting those emails, those messages of what people learned, what they gather from this conversation. Today. I'm excited to sit down with Charlie Wetzel. All right, that name probably does not mean anything to you unless you really know about leadership. Oh, okay, now that's not a punch. That's not a slight. This man is responsible for selling over 32 million books. Well, how's he responsible? Because he helped write them. See Charlie is the ghost writer, the partner, the Batman to the Robin, excuse me, the Robin to the Batman that is known as John Maxwell. So Charlie has written ever since developing the people around you are now over 28 years with John Maxwell. So much as we learn in this conversation that he really has taken John's words that he normally speaks in this outline that he creates during the writing process and has brought them to life in his books. He does a tremendous job of really blending. You'll hear about that in this episode, you'll hear about the whole process of writing and how John goes about it. He and I share a little titbit of what he gets from John to write a book, which is cool. As well, I will talk to you about kicking off this month. This month of May the book that we will go through the 21, oh, that's upside down showing to the camera, 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. If you've ever read any leadership books, hopefully it's one of them. If you've not read it or maybe it's been a while since you've read it, pick up the 25th anniversary issue, the issue, I guess version that's coming out here in this month of May 2022. I hope you guys are able to grab it. It was funny. I actually share this in the latter part of the interview where my copy comes from. It was really something cool that I didn't even realize until today, because I never looked inside the front of the copy. It's always seeing the back part. So I'm excited for you to plug into this episode, listen, watch my conversation with Charlie Wetzel as we unlock everything 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Charlie, thank you very much for joining me today on the podcast. It's a pleasure to see you. As I mentioned, I've been involved in a room that you've been in as part of a project with the John Maxwell company and excited to just have a conversation with you and really share more about Charlie to the leadership world that you've impacted so much that people probably don't even realize that you had such your fingers in the pot. [CHARLIE WETZEL] Well, cool. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here and to get to chat with. [TYLER] So this month, part of the Impact Driven Leader podcast, we are focusing on spotlighting the book 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, which you helped produce to develop with John. But before we get into that book and talking about the 21 laws, we'll go through enough of that, but I want to know for everyone listening in, what is your relationship, Charlie Wetzel, what is your relationship to the millions and millions of books that the John Maxwell company and John Maxwell himself has released? [CHARLIE] Well, I think the latest number that I've heard from John is 34 million books. I've been involved with probably about 32 or 33 million of those. [TYLER] So what you're saying is John isn't very good at selling books without Charlie. You didn't say that, but that's what I heard. [CHARLIE] John is great at selling books without me, he just is not as prolific at writing them without me. [TYLER] Well, I mean, yes, you got to write it to be able to sell it. So yes, that's good. I mean, people need to be appreciated and sometimes it is, and I know there's no lack of appreciation from the whole entire Maxwell team and myself included. It's not to be that, but it's also man, you've made a big difference. [CHARLIE] Yes. Everybody's very gracious about it. I feel like I've been lucky to be on the ride with John and I have been since 1994. So early on when I came to work for him, he hired me as his researcher and I didn't know what that was going to mean. The first thing he did was hand me a manuscript and he said, "Look, the person who worked for me before you worked on this manuscript, the publisher didn't like it, see what you can do with it. By the way, I'll be on the road for the next six weeks. I'll talk to you when I get back." And off, he went on a summer tour of speaking and I worked on this book and I worked on it for a couple of weeks and the first chapter was pretty good. It didn't need much. The second chapter was a lot rougher and I'm working on rewriting it. Then I discover a bunch of outlines in a file drawer and it's John's handwritten outlines because he'd outlined the whole book very meticulously. So I threw out that manuscript that the other person had worked on and I worked from his outlines and just plugged away at that, brought it to him and he said, "Let's take a look and see what the editor thinks." Gave it to the publisher, he said, yes, it's good. He said, okay, we're good. That turned out to be Developing the Leaders Around You, was the first thing I worked on for John when he hired me and we haven't looked back, it's been gosh, over a hundred books now. [TYLER] So I think that's, one that outline and there's a couple different trains of thought here that I want to be able to hook onto but the first is John's pretty meticulous still about writing all of his books with his four color pen and his legal pad. So I'm guessing that is the outline that you saw. [CHARLIE] Yes, absolutely. As a matter of fact, so I know I'm jumping ahead to 2020, but in his notes that he gave me for the 25th anniversary edition of the 21 Laws, here's John's handy work. You can see, four color pen, fill in the blank, stuff taped in, a little bit of highlighter. That's John. He does that for a speech. He does that for a book. He's very, very disciplined, very meticulous. [TYLER] So what I think is interesting there, and I've heard you mention this before in some of your previous podcasts, but it's also, I guess me for the couple years being around John and just being a sponge and absorbing and see him present and speak and be so well and do so well in front of a crowd and yet I've been on stage with him and see the iPad and it's notes. It's an outline. So what I gather is really his speaking and writing start with the same format of that outline and those bullet upon ideas. As I've seen him speak and present. He just fills in the blanks with the appropriate stories. He does such a masterful job of reading the crowd and reading the audience and knowing, hey, I'm here to speak today, but I also spent a half hour beforehand getting to know everyone so I can pull from those stories that are maybe relevant in the points I want to make. So what I'm gathering is he does that for a book and then maybe hands it to you and then you do all the essentially speaking into the book. Is that a way to look at it? [CHARLIE] I think that's a pretty good analysis. So yes, John's very organized. He thinks in outlined, he thinks some bullet points. He is great with a Turner phrase. He's good at the words that he uses for that. He's very precise, but it all comes across as effortless and off the cuff. Part of that's due to his experience, part of that's due to his preparation. When he is working on a book he's doing the same meticulous outlining. There have been, some of the books he'll actually do drafts of chapters, but for the majority of them, he's done an outline and he's very meticulous. So he's got his bullets in there. He's got his quotes in there. He's got anecdotes in there or jokes, those little things, all ranged the way he wants them. Then I take those and I think, okay, how do I craft this in a way that an audience who's sitting down with this book a year from now, two years from now, 10 years from now, or in this case 25 years from now, how are they going to accept that and experience that? That's the focus that I have. John does read the room, he reads the crowd, he really, one of the things I think he's really genius at is, I always believe he knows what everybody in the room is feeling in that moment. He reads it, he changes because of it, he'll stay someplace and speak about something that he knows is connecting or he senses that is really needed by the people in the room or that the person who invited him wants him to touch on or maybe that even the holy spirit is speaking to him on and he'll stay there. So he crafts it for that moment. You can't do any of that in writing. You've got to anticipate what somebody's going to do far in the future, how they're going to experience it and you're not going to get any feedback. So I think that's probably one of my skill sets is having that sense of anticipation about how something is going to land with a reader, some point in the future. So I like to tell people that like a prize fighter, John has punch. He's got a knockout punch. What I do is I provide the footwork because on stage he will transition with a look, with a laugh, with tone of voice, with a movement on the stage by kneeling, by sitting, by standing up. He does all these things with transition and he does it intuitively, but none of that comes across in an outline. An outline is just dead and dry, so it's my job to put the footwork so that John's punch really is smooth. Otherwise, the rides can be a little bit bumpy. [TYLER] Well, my guess would be, I've been enough audience members of John's and then read enough books to note that that does come across. It took you probably a while to circumvent that and navigate that and really be able to distill it down to bring it out. [CHARLIE] It did. On that first book, I was just trying to finish writing a book because I hadn't written a book before. So in that case, I was just trying to complete it and figure out the process. In the next couple of books, I thought my job was to say exactly what John would say and do it the exact way he would do it. I realized that was the wrong goal. I didn't know anybody who did what I did so there was nobody I could ask. What I finally figured out was, okay, that's not the right goal. The goal is to give the reader the same experience reading the book as somebody got in the audience, listening to John. That's been my target ever since then. [TYLER] So what steps do you take, again, to me, this is a leadership lesson in and itself. It takes the ability for say, for example, that as a leader is working with one individual is how is that going to then be conveyed to the next step? In other words, if you're communicating this to me, how do I turn around and communicate it to others and being able to really anticipate that I think is a great leadership skill that comes about through experience and through being able to read people, and to me, you were able to watch John and say, okay, this is what he's doing and I want someone that reads his book to feel the exact same way. How did you find the ability to distill that and really understand was it trial and error? Was it personal, yourself, it's like, all right, this is how I feel with John. I want to write how I feel. Explain that to me a little bit more. [CHARLIE] Well, first of all, yes, there was a lot of error. There was a lot of trial and error. Some of the early days I would write a chapter and John would say, well, let me go over this with you a little bit, because you're getting boring here. So not the words everybody wants to hear, oh, you're boring. Yes, I had to try different things. I'll tell you part of the benefit to me was that I was an English major. So I've got a, bachelor's and master's degree in English Literature, which means I have read a lot of really great writing. What's ironic about that is I was not a reader as a kid. I'm the only person --- [TYLER] I'm part of that club. [CHARLIE] Okay, I'm the only person I know who majored in English who was not a reader as a kid. The other kids were reading 50 books over the summer in the summer reading program stuff. I wasn't doing any of that stuff, but once I started reading, I really got captivated by really, really good writing. To be honest, I have a difficult time reading anything that's not well written. It just makes my brain hard and because I'm a slow reader, I don't want to do it. I don't want to read it. But I had read so many great things and had been affected emotionally and intellectually by all those things that I think I started to develop an intuition for what worked and what didn't. So honestly, it's a little bit difficult to describe how to do it. Going to the leadership side, I think one of the challenges is you want to be able to speak the message and the vision of your leader, but you want to be able to make it your own so that you don't sound like a parent and that you have the same conviction and ownership and you deliver it to the people you're leading. The thing I did with John's a little bit different is because I was trying to do his voice, not my voice. But if you look at the books before I started working with John, the voice is a little bit different. So I feel like over the course of time together, over these almost 28 years, we've developed his written voice by my trying to capture what he communicates and knowing his values and trying to please him, because at the end of the day, it's his book with his name on it. It's got to carry his message. I think over time I developed a voice that became his written voice. Hopefully it imitates his spoken voice. And I've had people tell me, oh John's books. They didn't know I was the writer when they said, oh, I love John's book because they're exactly the way he sounds. I laugh inside because I think they totally don't sound the way he sounds in order for me to try to make it sound the way he sounds. But I took that as the greatest compliment that they didn't know I was behind the scenes working on it and that it worked. [TYLER] You mentioned it there and I'd love to know this because to me it's an evolution and growth of every single person and leader and I think you were, you're a guide that has helped through that process and be a part of the process. But you mentioned earlier that John's voice before you guys started working together where you were able to provide more of the finer tuning to that written part of John. Where was that maybe different beforehand? [CHARLIE] So if you go back to John's very first book, which is called, Think on These Things, it's a short book, like a hundred pages. Each chapter is three pages and it reads a lot like a sermon. John wrote those out longhand, but every message in all of its depth was three pages. So one of the things that John did was he would just say something and move on and one of the things I had to learn how to do was flesh out his idea, because so many times on stage, John will say something and he'll say it in a clever way and everybody intuitively knows what he means. But if you ask somebody to explain it, they'd probably say I don't know. I just know it's true. You can't do that in a book. You've got to flesh it out a little bit. So I started to flesh some things out that he maybe would deliver in a bullet line or a turner phrase or in a one liner or in an anecdote and I had to learn how to flush that out. So that's part of it. If you look at his early books, I'm trying to think, this wasn't true for Think on These Things and the winning attitude, which has been renamed. I can't remember what they're calling it now. Those are two early books of his that you can see that are very, very much his style. So he doesn't always develop his ideas with the same depth that he would if he were having a conversation with you but some of his other books they're very listy. John loves lists, he thinks and outlines. So you'll have bullet point A or number 1 and under that, he's got A, B C, but under C he might have another list that's going to be one in parentheses down that. Then there might be a bullet list inside of that point too, so you've got lists within lists within lists. When you're a speaker and you have a written fill in the blank outline for people in the audience, which John used to do, he doesn't do it that much now telling them where you are on number 3 or point D helps them keep track of where they are. If you're reading that in a book, you get to the point where you're going, what list or line again? Point number three, but wait a minute, it's under number, it's under D. I don't remember what this, wait a minute, tis is part of another and your head explodes. So even now, sometimes John will give me an outline that's too detailed and I'll go in and I'll take some of the subpoints and instead of having them as bullet points, I'll translate that into text. I'm still trying to help people figure out where they are, but not get them bogged down, stay more with John's train of thought than more this, as John would say more a thing. [TYLER] I can appreciate that and really appreciate you sharing that because I think one of the things, even for myself and thinking in that context, so often we get buried down in the details that we miss the big picture. And what I just gathered from you there is, especially writing a book, there's plenty of opportunity to go into the detail, but it's telling it in a narrative that people want to consume more of it. It's not in greater detail to give it more depth. It is to give more depth to the actual picture. [CHARLIE] Yes, it's texture. It's understanding. When we worked on the 21 Laws so the birth of that book occurred on a golf course. John's editor at that time, Victor Oliver played golf and, on the course, he said to John, "John, I think you need to write a book on the laws of leadership." And Victor pulled out a book called the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. He said, it needs to be like this, laws of leadership, lots of case studies. So John thought about that and he chewed on it for a while and he thought that might be a pretty good idea. So he brought together three of us with him and he said, okay, I'm thinking about doing a book on the laws of leadership. I want you guys to come with anything that you think might be a law of leadership. So each of us came with a list. I think I probably had about 35 ideas. One of the other guys had even more than that? And these were got, two other guys who had been on staff with John at Skyline. They were good thinkers. John had trained them in leadership and me. So he said, John's like, okay, it's got to be about leadership, specifically leadership. Got to always be true, regardless of culture, timeframe, gender, position. A law is a law is a law. So one of the guys starts talking about ideas and John's like, yes, that's not always true. We are talking about another idea and he goes, that's always true, but it's not specific to leadership? Then he talks about another, he goes, that's pretty good. I think that's might be a keeper. So we did this with, I don't know, 60, 90 ideas. We knew there was just one thing we knew it could not be 22. It had to be something other than 22 because of the 22 Immutable laws of Marketing. So we go through and John, John probably spent five, six months just thinking about what was the law, what wasn't, how is it phrased and we narrowed it down to 21. When I started working on the book, our editor had said lots of case studies. I thought, okay, to me, that means stories. So I started thinking about stories and as I worked on the book, I started researching stories and looking for stories and realized I wanted to open and close every chapter with a story because I thought you read this story, you learn the principle, you read another story and your brain goes, oh, I get it. I can contextualize it. I can see how it worked here and maybe I can look at my own story or somebody else's story and I can apply this law. So the stories really give that context and texture and ironically you might feel like there's less depth when you're telling the story. But if the story is really representative, it actually gives it more depth and gives it greater nuance. People can really grab hold of it because a lot of times if you're teaching principles or data, they can't remember that, but they can tell back the story. [TYLER] I mean that comes to our human nature, is where, if we look back before even the printing press, everything was communicated in stories and that's how people remembered it. I just have a question and thought, as you mentioned that you said, hey, I'm going to take each one of these laws and I'm going to bookend it, this chapter with a story. Was that something that had been previously in the books that you had written or was that a new idea to that book? [CHARLIE] No, that was a new idea. I'm trying to think about what books we did. So we originally did that book, it was published in 98 and we had done Developing the Leaders Around You. We had done a book that nobody's ever heard of, called Breakthrough Parenting So had some stories in it. So we had put a story here, a story there, but we hadn't really been that intentional. And to be honest, John does love to tell a story, but he'll tell a real-life story of his own or he'll tell a funny story, but he doesn't do these long narrative stories. That wasn't just style on stage. So I think he was a little bit skeptical of it in the beginning because it didn't match what he does on stage, but people connected with it. I think he very quickly realized, okay, this really helps the process when somebody's reading it and he was all on board after that for us to do that in the other books. Now it's become our signature style. [TYLER] Which honestly, I think a lot of authors have now seen the value in that. It just got done reading Donald Miller's latest book Hero on A Mission and very much of that is that style of a point, but stories surrounding that point, that really describe all of that point with depth. I think that's probably, your work at that has really changed the style of a lot of, I would say informational non-fiction because it is almost fiction in itself because it's a lot of stories, but those stories are real life as opposed to being made up. [CHARLIE] Yes. It was really interesting working on that book because I think our editor suggested Ray and the McDonald brothers, but that was really the only story in that whole book where he said, oh I think you should include this story. So I went and read a book called Beyond the Arches to read about the history of McDonald's and learn about Ray Crock and I drew on that and I thought, okay, how am I going to use that to teach the law, the lid, leadership ability determines your levels of effectiveness? I'm like, okay, so I've got to pick and choose the narrative of that, that really makes that principle come alive. So it was interesting going out and trying to find stories because it's a lot of work finding 42 stories. [TYLER] Well, yes. I mean, as I'm sitting here and I'm thinking about the question I want to ask is all right, which law was the hardest to find a story or which one did you like? Oh, there's so many stories. I got to pair this down. [CHARLIE] Well, it was really interesting because as I was on the, I would go on the search for a particular, a story for a particular law and sometimes I'd read one and I'd go, okay, I could use that for two or three different laws. To be honest, to try to remember, gosh, okay, so now I'm trying to remember which of the stories was the hardest? I mean this was --- [TYLER] Yes, it was a few books ago. [CHARLIE] Probably The Law of Intuition because it's not as tangible as some of the other ones. That can be tricky. We ended up doing a story on Steve Jobs for that, which worked, but in the original book, John had a story about how he's intuitive when it comes to speaking and how Margaret's intuitive when it comes to close and decorating. Did it work? Yes. Is that a really satisfying leadership story? No. That's why I didn't make the cut in the 25th. It was like, okay, that's one, that's got to go. Yes, we're going to get rid of that one. I ended up doing research on Jamie Kern Lima and her story replaced that because part of, for her was the intuition of knowing that her makeup line was really something that could work for women like her and her. So there was that her conviction that it was needed in the marketplace, her conviction that women needed a product that made them feel beautiful, whether or not they looked like a supermodel, her conviction that when she did do advertising to not use these beautiful young models, but to use real looking women of different ages and sizes, and then even in her intuition to wait to sell the company until she could sell it for a billion dollars. So it had all of these iterations of intuition, which is like, okay, that is so much better than John saying, I just know what to speak because I have an intuition for speaking and I can't dress myself, but Martin can dress me. [TYLER] Well, I appreciate that. That's good. Knowing Jamie's story and absolutely it's that I know that I know that I know that I know. It is that intuition and then when you continue to see that play out, it's that belief that comes from it. I appreciate. Which one of the laws as we go back and now we're talking a little bit more about the 21 laws, the 25th anniversary, which one of the laws over time said, wow, this was a bigger law than we realized? [CHARLIE] Oh gosh, that's a tough question. It's really funny with the laws. When we started out one of the things that John said was just these laws can stand alone, they don't have to build. So you take any law and you embrace it and it can make you a better leader. So that's been the case. I think if John said that he would probably say the Law of The Inner Circle was the biggest, those closest to you determined your level of success because it has continued to play out in his life, I think. He discovered that in his forties or late thirties, early forties, when he was at Skyline and he realized that you've only got so many hours in the day, you can only do so many things yourself. He realized he had to train other leaders at another level never than he ever had before and to train more of them and to expect more of them. So some of these laws just stand just as a truth, that leadership is influence, but something like the law of the inner circle feels very, very personal and really determines what happens in your life. It's not as abstract, it's not as remote. It's not just something that you can teach to somebody else. It's something that you have to live or you're not going to accomplish what you want to accomplish. [TYLER] Yes, no, I get it. To me is, there's a lot of intention with the inner circle. It just doesn't happen. None of the laws happen, but yet you can find people that are more gifted in some of the laws than others. As John talks about in the book, you could be in that inner circle and there's one person that is really strong in five or six of the laws and maybe not as strong as the others, and that's how the benefit of that inner circle, but I believe it's with great intention do you surround yourself with people that balance that out, that bring all facets of the 21 laws as opposed to, well, I'm going to find myself and I'm just going to be in a room with a lot of people that have a lot of intuition and we're just going to go on intuition and we're not going to focus on some of the other laws. Well, you're going to end up in a bad spot. To me --- [CHARLIE] You need a lot of navigation in that place. [TYLER] Yes, totally. I think one of the, as I was again, preparing for this and thinking back over time, the law that probably I look at and say, wow, I didn't realize how important this was the law of empowerment. I say that because of a lot of personal growth, but seeing the downfall of a lot of organizations and how many of them have fallen and especially over the last two years, because of this lack of empowerment, meaning if I'm not controlling you, I feel unsafe and I don't have a place. To me that was pretty interesting. So I'd love for you to share where are maybe in your discussions with John and Mark, where are you guys saying. I see how this really added value to people because they got better because of this book. [CHARLIE] It's funny, every now and then John is at a conference or at a leadership training and he typically hangs around to sign books for people. If you have a book with John's signature, it's worth no more than a book without a signature, because he has signed millions of books for people, just out of kindness to do that. But every now and then you'd find somebody who'd come with a book that's tattered and beaten to death and is all filled with notes and they've said, yes, this is my fifth time through reading it and I've studied this backwards and forwards and I'm waiting and I've really made this the roadmap for my life and all that. It's just, you just never know what's going to strike for people. I think the most significant books in my life are things that I read that I needed at the time that I read it. Sometimes you recommend a book that you've read to somebody else and they go, but you hand it to somebody else and it's a life changer for them too. You just know with these books. It is a lot of timing, it really is. And the law process, because we're trying to grow and change and develop too, so gosh, it's a hard one. One of the things that's a challenge for me is I'm always behind the scenes. So very rarely am I hearing on the front lines what people are saying about the books and what they're doing for them. I remember, God, this is more than a decade ago, having an email forwarded to me, I think it was by Linda Edgars, John's assistant. It was from a guy in the military who was like a squadron leader for pilots. And, ah, gosh, I don't know how many years ago, there was a plane and I think it was Marine jet that was flying in Italy and it flew too close to a gondola and snapped the gondola line and some people that were in the gondola fell to their deaths. There was this inquiry and all this stuff and this was the commander of that squadron. He wasn't the pilot who had done the accident, but he was the one, I think he probably, I don't know if he ended up having to leave the military or what it was, but this letter wrote about how he read Failing Forward and how it helped him regain his confidence and realize his life wasn't over. I just thought wow, that's just extraordinary. You just don't know when you're working on a book if it's going to really make a positive impact and with a lot of people or if it's just going to be something that goes out there that people just don't connect with. It's really strange. [TYLER] I mean, I understand that and I think that's, I mean, that's, what's so hard compared to writing books, compared to speaking. Speaking you can get a little bit more of that feedback and in writing it, there's just a lot of faith and a lot of belief that it's going to hopefully impact someone or you're going to learn and get better the next time and be more impactful. One of the questions, one of the thoughts I had here, and as you've written a lot of books, you've written books with John, you've written books with your wife, you've done other projects, you've written a short a film, how often do you need to just take ideas that are streaming through your head and just set them aside and let them simmer and come back to them? Meaning if you're, say at any given time, you might be working on two or three different projects and that's just because of things that you have happening and you'll go through a day and it's like, all right, I'm going to focus on this one. I have a lot of good ideas then I stall out what. I'm going to go, I'm just going to put that to the side. I'm going to let it set. I'll go work on something else. Maybe I'll go for a run. Maybe I'll go outside. Maybe I'll go get inspiration. How important is that into your writing process? [CHARLIE] It's very important. One of the things that I'm constantly balancing is when to just put my nose to the grindstone and persevere and when to shift gears. A lot of beginning writers automatically want to shift gears. The reality is if you give up too easily, you're in trouble. So I did a lot of writing in school. I had to write a master's thesis, which took me four years to do. I finished my classes fast and it took me four years to do it, because I honestly, I didn't like writing. So when I was working at a college, they assigned me the duty of writing a self study, which was, eh, it's probably about 150 pages, which I look at that now and I think, huh, that's nothing. Back then it looked like an insurmountable task. They sent me home to work on that self study. They said look, once you work at home on Mondays and you can write because we've got to get this thing done. So I remember the first Monday that I worked at home to write and I sat at my desk, it's the same desk that I've got sitting back there now, I sat at that desk the whole day, eight hours because I felt like I was working since we working on the clock. At the end of the day, I had one sentence to show for it and it wasn't even a good sentence. I mean, I typed a lot of stuff and scratched it out, typed stuff, scratched it. I'm just, it was a terrible, terrible day but I had to learn the perseverance of, of sitting in the chair. That's really what a lot of writing is. It's the grind. But the reality is sometimes when you're grinding away, you're not getting anywhere. So there are times, there's a benefit to working on multiple things at the same time, because you can go, all right, I'm making no progress on this. Let me work on this. So at least you're getting progress somewhere. Sometimes you just have to grind it out and go, yes there's a deadline here and even though I'm not making progress, I got to make progress. It took me probably five years to get to the place where if I have to produce, no matter what in a compact amount of time I can do it. But I am constantly trying to capture ideas, think of new things, jot down stuff. If I'm working on a project, sometimes if I'm working on chapter two, I'll have an idea idea for chapter 10. I got to get that down in some way so that I don't lose it when I get to chapter 10. I've started carrying a little bitty, I just remember I took it out of my pocket before I sat down here, it's over on my desk, a little bitty notebook that has a pen with it that I stick in my back pocket. I used to email myself writing ideas or I would text them to myself. A lot of times I would end up not capturing them. Now I capture them in this little book and I've got an idea for a short story. There's a novel that I've been playing around with the idea in my head for about 10 years. I got a little breakthrough insight for that, which I wrote down and I went, oh, that could be good. So I'm constantly working these things in my head. I'm an introvert anyway, so that's where I'm where I'm at and I'll work things on my whiteboard. I've got an eight foot by four foot whiteboard over on that wall over there, so capturing ideas is something you've always got to do. John is great at this. He used to carry, he used to have a little, gosh for years, he talked about how next to his bed he had a little notebook with a pen in it. When you pulled the pen out, the light came on, so he could write it down in the middle of the night. People wanted to buy them and all this stuff and now John, he has an iPhone or iPad. So he writes stuff down there. He's really good. He's always been good about capturing and filing quotes and that sort of thing. So yes, I would say absolutely, you've got to find a system that works for you. You've got to try to get this stuff down and you got to find a way to keep moving forward, especially if you want to write anything. [TYLER] I think from the extent, again, extrapolating this and connecting it to leadership is that's a big part of having a vision and conveying a vision is understanding, am I capturing these ideas to be able to share with others? I heard a gentleman, John Houston was a previous guest, he shared this, Rob Hoskins was talking to him, i's like for every idea, it's either for you to keep, it's for you to partner with someone else or it's for you to give away. I think that process, even as you're talking about, I'm writing down these ideas, I know there's probably been a moment that John's either done it for you or you've been around this situation just like, here's this idea. I don't know if it's for me or maybe it still will get incorporated somehow, some way into the entire world because it's relevant to what's going on. I know that's the case because I've seen it happen and I think that's pretty important to just have a process and a system. I am very much, a one of digital world, whereas I'll write it down on, I have a notebook here, I write down ideas, but it's real hard to file them in regards to, oh, where is that one? Whereas my iPhone? I can write it in there and then all of a sudden, I can search for it and like, oh, I wrote it five years ago, whatever, here's the topic. Oh, that's not relevant or, oh, that, wow, I thought that five years ago. That's pretty awesome. That's what I've personally found. [GUEST 1] Has John ever shared with you his system for how he captures quotes and stuff from books? [TYLER] Maybe, but maybe not. I'd love for you to share. [GUEST 1] All right. So when John reads a book as he's reading and he doesn't, I don't think he reads anything digitally on a screen, I think he still, it's got to be a paper book for him. So as he goes through and I do this myself, as he goes through, he'll mark something, he'll read a sentence or a paragraph and he'll bracket it on the page. In that moment, he'll decide what does that really, what's the subject matter of that? Is that attitude, is that leadership, is that perseverance? He'll decide in that moment what that is and he'll write that word in the margin. Then he'll go to the cover of the book and he'll write page 12, perseverance. So the whole time he's reading, he's marking stuff. When he gets done with it, he hands it to his assistant, she types all those up and they get filed by subject. He has done that since he was 18 years old and anytime, he's working on something, he goes, oh, I need a quote on perseverance. He's got 10 of them because over the years he has [TYLER] Collected them. [GUEST 1] So he is never looking to figure out where something is that he captured. He always, like I say, he is very disciplined, he always has it in a file. So he, he has done his for years on index card. On Dropbox, I've got a folder called quotes and I've got all these different subjects and as I find quotes, I dump them into those individual files. Now I don't have as many as John has, but I tell you what, I've got hundreds and hundreds of quotes in writing, because I'm constantly capturing stuff on that. [TYLER] Yes. To me, it's a, as you mentioned earlier, never being a reader, I couldn't stand to read it. It was too boring. It was more of like, if I was really interested in something, man, I read it. But as I think now, it's pretty normal for me to go to two or three books a week. Either that's listening on audible, it's actually having, the physical copy in my hands and a lot of that is focusing on something I'm interested in and it's, how is that relevant? It's funny to me, you bring up 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing earlier because that's something that, a subject that I didn't necessarily think that much about. I've talked to Jeff Henderson, a previous guest, and talk about this leadership and marketing. It's like, great leadership is great marketing and great marketing is great leadership. So I think it's funny you bring that up and again, that spurred this interest is I want to know more there, how to connect the dots. To me as I think about this idea of reading and capturing those quotes and getting that information is if I'm bringing that in, if I want to be able to go back to it's because I'm willing to learn with the desire to share with others, to be able to either act it out, live it out, give it to others and be that conduit of, be that river per se. To me that, as I look back now, that's, what's driven a lot of my desire to read. [GUEST 1] Yes. It's funny for me when I was, so as a kid, I didn't read at all. I didn't start reading until I was a junior or senior in high school. I started reading fantasy literature, so fantasy and science fiction. That's what got me to begin as a reader. I went off to college thinking I was going to major in engineering but trigonometry and I didn't get along very well pretty quickly. I took a literature class and just fell in love with it. My parents expected, I've got three siblings and I'm the youngest, my parents expected us all to get a degree. I thought, I think I can stand this for four years because I didn't like school either. All those years I read assigned textbooks and other subjects, but all the books that I read were were fiction and that's all I did. When I started working for John that's when I started reading non-fiction or actually the year before. I was at a thing with Dan Ryland, where he had us read a leadership book a month. After that, I decided I think I probably should try to read a non-fiction book a month. For 20, 25, 30 years, I did that. A few years ago, I started getting the bug to do some more creative writing and I thought I think I might want to write middle, what do they call it, middle grade books or young adult fiction or something like that. So I started, I thought I'm going to read some of that. I read like 35 books that year, which just shows you my pace of reading nonfiction versus fiction. I did it as a discipline reading nonfiction and like you, if I'm really interested in something, I'll read it. Other than that, it's really more of a matter of discipline than desire, honestly. I still would rather, if I'm going to just read for fun, I would still rather read fiction. [TYLER] Now there's one author and I like all of his series of books. He's on the usual path as a lot of authors, one book a year, his book comes out in July close to my birthday and so I'm like, I'm going to read that one book. It's going to take me probably six to eight hours. I'm going to get through the whole thing and one day I'm done with it. That's the fiction book I read for the year. It's Brad Thor. I love his, that espionage type world. That's the only fiction I read. Other than that, it's like I said, this idea of marketing and leadership and just a lot of that stuff that I enthralled by being around people and seeing the impact. I want to end --- go ahead. [GUEST 1] I was going to say it's really interesting, when John is always reading with two minds, one is what do I need to capture to put into my speaking and writing and what do I need to teach others very similarly to you? He very much goes into it with a mindset of what can I convey to somebody else? He takes great joy if he can teach it to somebody else in 24 hours. I mean, he is fast. My mindset has been informed by John, but it's a little bit different. I'm trying to build who I am and most of the time I'm teaching out of that situationally rather than proactively, more reactively rather than proactively. So I admire people like you who are doing it with intentionality in a proactive way to teach it. For me, it's like, I started a YouTube channel a year ago and I'm teaching basic cooking because in my first career I was a chef. There's a generation of younger people out there who don't know how to cook. I thought, let me teach some basic, so I've been doing that, but for me, it's like, I should teach this technique. Oh, I should teach. them how to do this. None of it is pre-programmed. I'm just working it out of the experience of my life from the last 40 years and then teaching, I don't even write it out to teach it because it's so ingrained in me. I'm just like, okay, let me just get out there from who I am. [TYLER] Next Food Network talent, Charlie Wetzel. Here we go. [GUEST 1] Yes. Well, I don't know what they're going to want me on Food Network. YouTube works for us. [TYLER] Yes, exactly. So as we're getting to the end of our time here together, there's one thing that I want to know from your perspective. As you said, you're a different perspective. You're the guy writing the books, you're working with John, you're working with the whole team to collect all of this information and then be able to spin it into the world, to where it's in this neat little package, in this little book to where people can refer to it. Give me your perspective of the impact of the 32, 33 million books that have been sold in the last 25 years or so. I'd love to hear that. [GUEST 1] Gosh, that's hard to quantify and it's hard to get my brain around, you talk about copies of books and that's a fun thing to throw out there, because it's a big number, but so many people have been changed by the things that John has done. Really, when John started writing about leadership, there really weren't a lot of people writing about leadership. There were management books out there and for the most part management really deals with systems whereas leadership deals with people and John was, I guess he was pretty revolutionary in that space. There's a lot of talk about leadership. When John first started, he used to say I've got three degrees and I've never been taught, I never had a leadership class in any university that I went to, which was true for him. Leadership classes are commonplace now. Back 30 years ago they were not, John has definitely made an impact on that space. So I wouldn't, I don't know the world well enough to say that he single handedly championed the movement, but I think, I feel confident that he was definitely a big part of that movement. When somebody becomes a better leader and has good values, then life gets better for everybody they touch. So that's a huge thing. Then you look at the big picture, but going all the way back down to the simple, when I was a member of John's church before I worked for him, I read the winning attitude and I was not a person who had a particularly good attitude. I had a little bit of a victim mindset. I felt like the world did to me what it wanted and I was not proactive. They talked about locus of control. I had already been working on that a little bit, but when I read the winning attitude, it really cemented in my mind that my attitude about life, my attitude towards other people was a hundred percent my responsibility. That message changed my life. Well, has that happened for every single one of the 34 million people? Probably not, but it's certainly happened for a lot of them and we don't know, and if they're like me, they may have passed along the book to somebody else, so maybe two people were changed by that physical copy of the book. As a person of faith, I don't think I will really have any idea of what the impact of John's books are until I get to have them, because there're just too many people and too many places and too many things that that may have happened or happened that none of us, but the person that happened who will ever know about. I'm grateful that I get to work with somebody who cares about people and is trying to make a difference and that I get to be a part of that with him and have for almost 30 years. It's been a great, great journey. [TYLER] Oh, it's awesome. Love it. There's one last thing I'm going to share and it just happens to be the copy of the 21 Irrefutable Laws that I have. I've listened on Audible, I've gone through the workbook and I didn't look at this page until today. This is what it says at the top, and I must have bought this used, to Howard Schultz. Thank you for taking time from your family to be a part of our special occasion. I hope you will find this book as valuable as I have in building a legacy of leadership. As the mood says, learn from every man with appreciation David Hyman. I thought that was pretty interesting that I have that book, but to two gentlemen there that obviously received this book, appreciated it. Thank you for making it such a powerful book 25 years ago and again now. Thank you so much for your time, Charlie. I treasure it immensely. [GUEST 1] That's cool. Thank you so much, Tyler, for having me. It's been a great conversation and I just wish all your listeners and watchers out there to have a great time learning and leading. [TYLER] I believe one of the great pieces that I picked up from Charlie during this episode is the process that he shared of John's note taking. John's told me that before, but it's really understanding how can you implement yourself and what does that mean for you as a leader, if you're collecting information, if you're reading books? But if you're not making notes to share and teach that with people, if you're not making notes like John does, he makes those notes to be able to present it in a speaking engagement, or he's going to write it in a book that as Charlie mentioned to me, we're we all have the opportunity to be a teacher. John's a teacher, Charlie's a teacher. They just teach in a different format. You're a leader, you're a teacher, we're all teachers. So we're collecting the information that we consume daily, even if it's online or how we filing that away. That way we can share it with someone else. As Charlie said, one of the great attributes John has, and I've seen him do this, if he learned something yesterday, he's going to be telling people about it today. He doesn't need to be a master at it. He doesn't need to master the subject. I've learned that in my experiences and I think that's a great Testament to leadership in action. You don't have to master it. You just have to realize, oh, that's really good. I need to change that my life. I need to apply that to what I'm doing. I need to teach others. To me, that's what separates leaders. I'm not a leadership expert. I'm just a student and I'm willing to learn. I'm willing to grow and I hope that you're gathering a little bit learning with me as I get to share these words with you, because it's about willing to go through the process, it's becoming and developing that mastery in leadership that you really grow and implement a lot of the laws as part of the 21 laws of irrefutable leadership. I hope you join in with us this month, read 21 Laws with us. Love for you to be a part of the Impact Driven Leader community. Thank you for being here today. Again, if this is the first time ever listening, I'd love for you to subscribe. If you got value out of today's episode, my conversation with Charlie, I'd love for you to share it with others. As always, I'd love for a rating and review. Let me know how we're doing. Check out everything that is Impact Driven Leader at my website, tylerdickerhoof.com. Check out all the show notes and thankful for you being here. Until next time, have a good one.