Guitar gurus say, "Tone is in your fingers," meaning that I can buy all the special equipment and the guitar that Eddie van Halen used, but I'm still gonna sound like me.
On the flip side, Eddie van Halen can go to a garage sale and buy a guitar and he's still going to play like Eddie Van Halen, because the tone is in your fingers.
In the book, Rework, Jason Fried writes, "You don't need special equipment to be good and you definitely don't need special equipment in order to get started."
You want the results, but you don't know how to get started; maybe you've started but don't know why it's not coming together for you.
It's because you haven't developed the tone.
Tone is everything! Think about your relationships. If you don't approach it with a certain kind of tone, it's going to blow up in your face and you're going to make the situation worse. You could have had a message that really made sense in your mind, but if it's delivered with the wrong tone, it blows up things, things get even worse.
Same thing in your career. I remember when I first started in sales, I let me emotions take over and blew a deal. My sales manager taught me a valuable lesson. He said, "Marsh it's not what you say, it's how you say it. You could deliver that same message with a different tone and they would still be sitting here buying from you, right now.
Years ago, some guys from work and I decided we were going to start playing golf. So I ran out and bought the best of everything. I bought the leather bag; expensive golf shoes, pro balls, Calloway clubs, 3-wood, driver, and putter.
I looked like a million dollars, but my game was worth pennies. Instead of spending time at the pro shop, I should have spent time on the driving range with a set of used clubs working on my tone, working on my swing, working on the mechanics, and my mental game.
I can dress like tiger woods. I can't play like tiger woods, but on the flip side of that tiger woods can dress like me, but he's still gonna play like tiger woods because he's spent decades developing his tone.
See you want things to blow up for you, but first things have to blow up on you, using what you already have and putting in the reps, developing that tone until you one day blow up.
People use lack as a crutch.
What do you have right now that you can get started? Open up any biography, and you'll find that every one of them used what they had. Opportunities didn't come to them from all that they had; they came from what they did with the little that they had.
Case in point. When Daymond John was starting FUBU, he didn't have the money to buy big billboards in New York. Instead of letting the lack of money kill his dreams, he took stock in what he already had. In exchange for cleaning and repainting the metal did is he looked around and said, well, what is around me? that c found these mom and pop shops that were all around him, they had these metal doors that slide shut and he went to them. He said, look, I'll clean up your metal doors. I'll repaint them for you and everything.
Have them looking really nice if you'll put authorized FUBU dealer. On the outside of those doors. So when you leave at night and you pull those down, people can see that. he said, I, I didn't learn any of that in a business book. I didn't pick that up on a blog or anything. I used common sense and the common sense.
Let me break that down. The common sense means that you keep coming back to a familiar situation. It's common. You keep coming back to it, but you use your senses in looking for that tone. I don't have the money for a billboard, what is all around me that I can use right now?
That cost absolutely nothing.
And he used thesenses and familiar surroundings that he kept coming back to and started putting that tone together. A tone where today
he's made millions.
Tone is in your fingers.
When I started the sales life in 2017, mean I could have gone from episode 20 to episode 600 on paper. I could have published number 20 and then the next episode came out. I could have said, Hey, welcome to episode six hundred but you would have known immediately that that was all bullshit because the tone you will be like, there's no way this guy has done 600 episodes.
It doesn't sound good. The equipment is bad. The way he delivers a message is not good at all. It's that tone. But on the flip side of that, I guarantee you, I could go back to episode 20 and deliver that today four years later, differently, more concise, more on point, more relevant, where you could walk away from it and apply it to your life.
Because I've spent hundreds of hours working and shaping and developing my tone. It's not something I can buy online. It's not something I can just on paper. It's something that you have to do. And if you want to go to the next level, you got to work on your tone along the way.
Chris Lockheed put it best he said there is no cover band in the rock and roll hall of fame. Now I guarantee you, every one of those bands started off as someone else, but as they jelled, as they continued to play, as they develop their tone,
they learn their own unique path. And develop their own unique style in voice,
Everyone starts at zero, but not everyone stays at zero. And I want you to begin to.
Developing your tone. Let's crack open that TSL toolkit. Let me give you a few things, man, that you can apply right now.
Number one, use what you have. It's common sense, right? But you've got to commonly come back at it consistently to hone those senses. Start with what you have work toward what you need, get to what you want.
For over 600 episodes. I worked on developing my tone and I'm happy to say that. Now I've gotten to a point
where to develop my tone even better I've hired a coach that will take the tone that I have right now and improve on that. But see, I could have put off. For years saying, well, I need money for a coach. Everybody's got a coach.
I didn't have the money for that. I didn't have a microphone. I didn't have a computer, had a cell phone. I had a free app. I had five minutes and I started right I worked on developing the tone.
That's a long process. It doesn't just take time. It takes time to develop the tone.
Number two, you gotta start it suck. You have to suck in order to succeed. Everybody starts it. Suck. As you suck, be grateful that no one is tuning in.
You got a few people that are tuning in simply because they love you simply because they want to support you. A lot of them, are going to fade away and you're going to get into this no man's land where it seems like no one is listening. No one is commenting. No one has given you any sort of feedback. Be grateful at that. It's a wonderful thing, because this gives you time to develop the tone where you don't have such heavy criticism coming at you that would make you want to quit.
Imagine if you had the skills that you have right now, but you had the notoriety of Beyonce or Taylor swift, the media would crush you because you suck. So be grateful in these dark time hours. This is where you can hustle, this is where you can get really good in the gaps where you're off the radar.
No one is even paying you any mind.
Get good during these times and third point, bring it home.
Today is a link in your chain. That's it. Don't worry about the whole fence coming together for you. It's just a link. Just focus on this one link and how many links can you hook together? You have to gamify everything.
Just work on this one link today. And how many links can you put together? And when you miss a day, when life gets in the way, remember what I always tell you, never miss twice. Things are gonna happen. You're gonna miss one day. It's not gonna, be good one day, whatever never missed twice.
Today is just a link day, work on that link. But the other link together. And you're going to have a chain of success.
