So today, I want to talk about tiny little things, just very, very small things, small little spurts of action that you can grab onto and totally change your life. I'm going to give you some examples, so stick with us. And welcome to this episode of The Daily Grateful. I'm Michael Kroos, and have you ever, like, just picked up on one tiny little thing?
Maybe you went to a talk, and it was a long talk, and you're taking all these notes and everything, and you're listening, and it's just kind of going through you, and then one little thing just kind of pops up. Let's talk about that a little bit. You know who Mel Robbins is? Maybe you do.
She wrote a book called The Five-Second Rule. It became famous. There's two million copies of this book has been sold. It's Amazon's sixth most-read book of the year, and she had a national television show for a couple of seasons.
This woman is a dynamo. Was she always a dynamo? Kind of, sort of, but, you know, not a very popular dynamo for a long time. I mean, she was out there, you know, preaching the preaching and doing all of that, but one day, she was giving a talk, and she was getting through it, and their audience was out there listening and everything, and at the very end of the talk, she was done, and she goes, oh, one more thing, one more thing, and what was that one more thing?
She said, well, here's what you do. So if you come up with an idea, any kind of idea, say you're laying on the couch, you're laying in the bed, you're taking a walk, you come up with a weird idea in your head, in five seconds, you must, you absolutely must take action and walk towards whatever that is, and immediately start doing something within five seconds, and if you do that, whatever you came up with has an excellent chance of coming to fruition, and you are going to be successful. And that was the end of the talk, and off she went, and everybody's sitting out in the audience, and they're saying, yeah, yeah, and at the end, you know, people are talking, what did you get out of that? Well, you know, because Mel's got a ton of stuff to talk to you about, and that five-second rule, and it's not the five-second rule, by the way, you know, where you drop the french fry on the floor, and you've got five seconds to pick it up, and you need it, no, this is five seconds to immediately do something physically to take action on an idea that you've come up with in your head, in other words, get off your butt, and go do something immediately, within five seconds, get up and start doing something to make this thing work, whatever it is, and that's what everybody was talking about, and of course, Mel Robbins was out in the hallway, greeting people, and talking to people, by the way, if you ever go to these conventions, and these big events, all the good stuff happens in the hall, just know that, you know, go listen to the speakers, but the good stuff happens in the hall, and everybody came up to her and said, what about this five-second rule, we want to know more, and you know, she did this as a last-minute thing, she kind of threw it in, because she hadn't, you know, I think she had like a 30-minute talk, and she was at 28 minutes, and what kind of else can I throw in here, so that's the way I interpreted it, and it totally changed her life, it totally changed the lives of literally now millions of people who have read that book, or heard her podcast, or heard anything about that, and it's a tiny little thing that she came up with, was the five-second rule.
Similar thing happened when I went to a talk by a guy by the name of Daniel Hall. Daniel Hall is the host of the Real Fast Results podcast. He wrote a book, by the way, called Real Fast Writing. Daniel's into Real Fast stuff, he just really is into Real Fast stuff, and I've always done FanFest, and he came to my town, a friend of mine, had him come to a meeting, and he put on a talk, and he's just going about the talk, and in the middle of the talk, he brings up this one teeny tiny little thing that I picked up on, and I looked around, nobody else seemed to be picking up on it, and there was a lady next to me, I had no idea who she was, I said, did you pick up on that?
She goes, no, what did he say? And I told her, and he said, yeah, that's kind of good. Daniel Hall finished his talk, and he's coming down, I said, Daniel Hall? He said, yeah, I said, I'm Michael Kroos, can I talk to you?
He said, yeah, let me grab my wife. Grab his wife, brought her over, sat down, wonderful people, just the nicest people in the world. I said, great talk, right in the middle, you did this one little thing about what you do to take what you do and multiply it in several different directions. Would you mind expanding on that for me?
And I have my yellow pad, man, I'm taking notes, and the lady next to me is taking notes. And he said, well, what I do is when I have a guest on the podcast, I record the podcast, and when I record the podcast, I go to a website, and I have, for a dollar a minute, now they're $1.25 a minute, it's called Rev.com, by the way, if you want to know, Rev.com. They're extremely accurate, extremely, extremely, extremely accurate. He said, I send it over to Rev.com, this podcast for about an average of 20, 25 minutes long, so he's spending 25 bucks to get this thing, a transcript made, and he gets it as a Word document within about an hour, hour and a half after he submits it.
He then takes that, and he goes on to Fiverr, where he has somebody, Fiverr, by the way, is a gig place where you can have people design stuff for you, used to be for five bucks, and now it's more, but he had his real fast results, book cover, all designed, all right, and he would then stick a picture of the guest in the middle of it, and then put their name on the bottom of it as a co-author of this little book, and it was always a Kindle book, and then he'd have himself as the co-author. So, you know, that's how that worked, and he published it as a Kindle book. Pretty smart, but in the middle of the Kindle book, he had all these little things that you could click on for more information, which took you to a landing page, which took you to something that you would buy something that the guest was selling, essentially. So he did that, and he did a few other things, and boy, that was such a good idea, such a good idea, and I thought about it for a little while, and oh, and by the way, he also would put it on his real fast results blog that he had.
So it was a blog, it was a Kindle book, it was a podcast, and it was all right there. You know, so all these places you could go, and you could get this information that was available everywhere. So he just took all of his stuff, he took one idea, and turned it into four ideas. Well, on the radio show, I used to have a friend named Truman Burst, he's a master herbalist, and he called me up, like, right after, the next day, he called me up, and he says, I'd like to come on your radio show.
I said, I'm not really doing that kind of a radio show anymore, but I said, I've got another idea. Why don't we record a podcast? And he said, about what? I said, what product are you pushing now?
What creation have you made? And he had made a men's pill for sexual prowess. And I'm not going to say what I called it, but he said, and I'd like to come on and do that. I said, okay, why don't you do that?
And he said, okay, so I am on, and he's on for 21 minutes, talking about circulation and all this, and all these different herbs help it, and he's got a wonderful product that will do it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I took that, and I sent it right off to Rev.com, and they sent me right back a transcript of it. I took that, and I made a Kindle, I went to Fiverr, had this real dicey cover made, you know, and I made it into a Kindle book, and I had that Kindle book published the next day, and the Kindle book sold for 99 cents. By the way, out of that 99 cents, I got a royalty.
And I want you to know right up front that I literally made dozens of dollars off of that book. Dozens. Maybe. Maybe a dozen.
I don't know. But anyway, in that book, it had, you know, links that you could push. Now, so we had that out there. We had, you know, we had the podcast, and then we had the Kindle book, and then I created a blog for it, and we had the blog for it, and then Truman does this thing every week with a religious group, where they are all on a live telephone call, and there are sometimes 30,000 people on this call.
And he took that, the audio of that little thing, and he played it on his thing, and he played it there, like, every week. He would play it there. And I'm going to tell you something. This stuff was flying off the shelves.
I, of course, was making dozens of dollars. It might be off the book. But he was making bank on this. He was just selling these things.
I never saw the things. I never tried the things. But anyway, he was my friend. I did that for him.
So we did all this from one tiny, tiny little thing. And there's another example of that. There is a product out there called Flea Stoppers. If you go on the internet, and you type in Flea Stoppers, it's a carpet powder.
My buddy, Bob Jones, who lives in North Carolina, he doesn't own the company anymore, but he used to own the company, went to a talk, and he found out that tiny amounts of any type of borate, be it sodium, or borate, tetrahydrate, sodium, or orthoboric acid, worked into a carpet, would kill the larvous stage of fleas. And if you put this stuff in your carpeting, it would literally last forever, but he guaranteed it for a year, and he created this product called Flea Stoppers, and was selling it everywhere from an entomological talk that he went to, where they talked about that for about 10 seconds. And afterwards, he went up and talked to the entomologist about it and said, tell me more about this. And they said, yeah, it just takes a little tiny bits of it.
And then he found out how to get an EPA registration and all of this good type of stuff. And the next thing you know, Flea Stoppers is still on the market. It was selling millions of dollars worth of products at one time. But then Bayer came out with this stuff that he put on the back of your pets, put him basically out of business.
He essentially gave this business to the woman who was helping him run it. And it does a little bit of business, but not much. And it's only for wall-to-wall carpeting, and who has wall-to-wall carpeting anymore? Not very many people.
It doesn't work on tile. It doesn't work on hardwood. But a little tiny idea, you know, just part of a little tiny talk, went out there, and it just multiplied for him. And it's just, one of the things I've always said is you take one tiny little bit of action, and you can take that and expand on it, and it can make your life better.
That one tiny little thing of action could be something you heard at church that your pastor said that would be beneficial to your family. That one tiny little thing that you have may have been in a book that you're reading, and you picked up this one tiny little thing, and it changed the relationship between you and your turtle dung, your honey pumpkin lover pool, your heart's delight. I mean, all of these things all start from a tiny, tiny little thing. I'm grateful for that.
Hey, we'll see y'all tomorrow. We'll see you next time. Thank you.