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  • Show Introduction

    Show Introduction

    Spicy jalapeno bacon ipsum dolor amet kevin jowl alcatra tongue burgdoggen, cupim pork chop prosciutto pancetta ball tip bacon leberkas fatback. Kielbasa drumstick shank strip steak cow chislic bacon short ribs pig swine pastrami salami ribeye ham hock doner. Andouille rump biltong brisket, prosciutto leberkas ground round fatback pig shankle t-bone alcatra salami filet mignon chicken. Andouille t-bone leberkas drumstick, porchetta kielbasa tail.

    Tongue chicken drumstick landjaeger. Cupim spare ribs ribeye, chicken salami pastrami burgdoggen t-bone chuck flank. Drumstick shank pork belly ground round shankle ribeye. Beef brisket meatball, andouille biltong shank picanha porchetta buffalo spare ribs pork chop. Boudin leberkas spare ribs chislic doner. Ground round chuck prosciutto pork belly swine jowl shankle sirloin boudin kielbasa alcatra tail. Corned beef burgdoggen boudin turducken jowl.

    Corned beef short loin landjaeger porchetta biltong cupim. Filet mignon jerky strip steak jowl, ground round prosciutto sirloin boudin picanha ball tip corned beef rump biltong swine sausage. Swine tri-tip cow tenderloin, boudin strip steak tongue ground round. Chicken short ribs meatloaf buffalo. Prosciutto alcatra shankle pancetta turkey.

    Salami rump shoulder, beef spare ribs chislic strip steak venison. Ground round short loin hamburger doner boudin. Shankle landjaeger beef pancetta, t-bone pork belly kielbasa short ribs frankfurter pastrami drumstick. Tail kielbasa spare ribs doner ham tri-tip boudin jowl.

    T-bone beef ribs biltong, beef tri-tip swine pastrami prosciutto meatloaf capicola. Ball tip burgdoggen andouille meatloaf ribeye turkey corned beef alcatra kielbasa shankle. Turducken landjaeger ribeye swine ground round capicola hamburger, t-bone sausage pancetta doner porchetta. Pastrami tail kielbasa, ham strip steak bresaola salami pork loin pork belly pork swine buffalo landjaeger ham hock jowl. Tri-tip turducken chuck filet mignon jowl tail jerky pork chop capicola shank pancetta. Chuck drumstick ground round salami, chislic meatball pork loin bresaola short ribs. Tri-tip short loin spare ribs pig, salami pork chop rump.

  • Booth Jonathan

    Booth Jonathan

    Vegas wasn’t ALL fun.

    Some of it was work, too.

    Which was fun.

    The group in the photo was a fun gang.

    I read their minds, predicted their future, helped stretch their imagination of what’s possible, and they are never going to forget the name “Thrive Agency!”

    The woman in the center had so much fun that she left and came back with her four other colleagues and made them watch.

    Now THAT is a high compliment in my book.

    You have to have a damn fine pitch if your audience grabs their friends to have you sell to them too.

    That’s why my trade show work is so much fun for me. I love getting the ratio of comedy, mind reading, and client messaging juuuuuuust right.

    Guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks!

    Might post a video of the 12 minute set in a couple days, but for now I’ll let you go.

    Best thoughts,
    ~Jonathan

    PS: If you work somewhere that exhibits at trade shows, let me know. I can really help them out. Get me in touch with the person who organizes the whole thing, and I can take it from there!

  • Life Mastery Business Insights From An Unlikely Source: Early 1900 Psychics

    Life Mastery Business Insights From An Unlikely Source: Early 1900 Psychics

    I recorded this video while sitting on the floor in the Amsterdam airport. It was the middle of the day but my body & mind thought it was 3am.

    Combine that with random people walking by and giving me thumbs up (which you’ll notice when I look up and nod) and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how strange it was to make this video.

    But the info is still solid.

    What [ethical secrets] can we learn from psychics who made a ton of money in the great depression?

    Let me tell you!

  • Coincidence Beyond Explanation

    Coincidence Beyond Explanation

    “It’s hard to believe in coincidence, but it’s even harder to believe in anything else.”

    ― John Green

    For most of my life I’ve been a card carrying Atheist, and along with being a member of the “skeptics” club I also get bonus access to a “doubtful of meaningful coincidences” attitude to ensure that all the fun and mystery is drained from life.

    Over the years, however, I’ve generally gotten much more open to the idea of ‘real magic’ in life.

    And last week, in particular, I was presented with an experience that’s tough to explain away as “random probabilities.”

    The basics

    My Mom hasn’t traveled much in the past 20 years.

    I mostly go home to North Carolina to see her, but for the first time in almost a decade she wanted to come visit me in Chicago to attend the opening of my show (and best date night in Chicago) “Game of Imagination” on my birthday in January of this year, 2020.

    Here she is on that night:

    She flew out of Asheville, North Carolina to get to Chicago. One of her friends drove her to the airport, dropped her off, and decided to visit a second hand shop while she was in Asheville.

    What she found

    While she poked around the DVD stacks she finds this:

    It’s one of 20 promotional DVDs I made back in 2009 after I did a two week tour through South Korea to entertain American troops.

    I hand-made every single one of these DVDs.

    I used my DVD drive of my laptop to burn it, stuck the disk label on by hand, printed the DVD case insert at Staples, cut them out with scissors, and stuffed the case with a couple postcards with links to my site.

    I only handed them out at one conference for college entertainers, and I didn’t think to keep a copy for myself.

    Eleven years later it pops up in a thrift store on the day that my Mom’s friend drops her off at the airport to visit me.

    The Long Con

    My hat is off to my mom’s friend because she kept this a secret for months. She held it as a birthday present for my Mom, which absolutely blew my mom’s mind.

    She opens the wrapping and sees “Jonny Zavant” and vaguely recognizes it as my stage name, but it didn’t click what, exactly, it was.

    That’s when her friend explains where she found it, and on what day, so Mom calls me up right away.

    That’s when it blows my mind because I hadn’t seen or thought about that thing since I gave the last one away. It was never intended to be a mass market thing, and I expected them to be lost to the sands of time.

    Instead it finds its way slowly home to my family.

    Explanation

    Best I can figure is I handed one to a student from a college in/around Asheville. It probably sat around the student activities office for years until someone decided to get rid of “all this junk” and took it to that thrift shop where it sat for who knows how long before my Mom’s friend found it.

    That’s still pretty amazing, though.

    “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

    -Einstein
  • Fire Triangle of Online Sales

    Fire Triangle of Online Sales

    I love fire more than you do.

    When I was 14 I almost got arrested for juggling fire. Well, not for juggling, per se, but for drawing a crowd big enough to block the sidewalk & forcing folks into the street who wanted to get by.

    Fire & street performing taught me a lot of what I use every day in my business, nearly 20 years later.

    It’s all about triangles

    Triangles are everywhere, and for good reason. They’re simple, strong, and infinitely variable.

    Once you see it, you’ll notice them everywhere.

    3 legged stools are stable on any surface. Triangle chokes in martial arts are nearly infinite in number.

    Ever heard of the fire triangle?

    Fire needs oxygen, fuel, and heat to exist. Remove any one from the equation, and it goes out.

    Turns out there’s a “fire triangle” of doing business online. These are the 3 essential elements to successfully doing business on the internet. Get any single one wrong, and you’re not going to be toasting any success marshmallows.

    </mangled metaphor>

    Website

    You have to have a place where you can build your presence. Some people use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I prefer having my own website.

    Hey, look! You’re on one right now!

    If you’re building on someone else’s platform, they can change the rules overnight, and you’ve lost all your hard work. (Ask me about my friend who lost his 40,000 YouTube followers due to their mixup, never to get them back.)

    A website is always available. Multiple people from different places on Earth can visit the same website at the same time. That’s like being in 2 places at once.

    You can’t do that.

    Your website is your best tool for telling people who you are & what you’re about. When we do that in the real world we call that having a conversation & that builds trust.

    Your website is your virtual handshake and trust builder with potential customers & clients.

    Social Media Marketing

    You have to tell people you exist.

    I get it. You want people to find your organically. You want to feel like people are connecting with you based on the value of your work.

    You want people to like your page because you’re just that wonderful and they should just know.
    You feel like if you tell people about your work, you’re being sleazy.

    Well, consider this.

    What if you created the cure for cancer in a lab in Antarctica? What if you didn’t tell anyone you created the cure for cancer? What if you thought,

    “I’ve worked hard creating this cure. People should know how amazing it is. I shouldn’t have to explain it to them. I want them to come to me here in the frozen-ass wasteland where I live.”

    For shame! How dare you hide the cure from the world like that! You have a moral obligation to tell as many people in as many different ways you’ve done this amazing thing.

    Telling people you’ve cured cancer is marketing. Helping people understand how valuable the cure is, is sales.

    Now, if your cure is just water, and you’re telling people it’s the cure for cancer, then you’re lying & that’s sleazy.

    But, there’s nothing inherently wrong with telling people what you offer is valuable, and the best place to do that nowadays is online.

    Email

    Think about someone asking you to marry them on the first date.

    Sure, there might be a situation where you’d say yes (Maybe it’s me: devastatingly handsome, charming, and successful. I get it, but my heart belongs to someone else.), but the chances are you wouldn’t have enough context to make a decision. You barely know the person.

    If you ask too early it’s gonna be awkward. Too many people ask for the sale right away and they wonder why they get turned down.

    Think of email as a way to court your customer. Help them understand how wonderful you are. You show them you can be a good conversationalist. They have a good time whenever you show up, and eventually they look forward to hearing from you.

    That’s what email can do for your business.

    Put It All Together

    If you apply these three things in juuuuust the right way, you’ll have a successful business that you can run from anywhere in the world.

    Don’t know what your fuel is? Tried it before but it didn’t work? Let’s chat about it. This is what I do for a living! I help people turn their experience into a successful business by helping them create their own holy trinity.

    If you’ve read this far, let’s talk about how we can make this happen for you. Join my secret email society with the form below.

    (You can marry me!)

  • Words Are Magic

    Words Are Magic

    Just now I was looking out the window letting my mind wander as I do quite often, and a weird thought popped into my head.

    Put the right words in the right order and you can get someone to give you money, fall in love, or even start a war.

    That’s magic.
    Persuasive writing is one of the most powerful skills you could ever hope to work on. And why writing instead of speaking? When you speak, you might in front of a room full of 2,000 people but you’re only going to connect with them in that moment. If you write the same words, you now can reach anyone from then until the end of time.
    There are authors who died centuries ago, but whose thoughts remain just as relevant today as when they were first written. (I’m looking at you Marcus Aurelius. . .)
    If you want to get better at writing words that create action (specifically someone taking dollars out of their wallet and handing them to you), then check out the Boron Letters. It’s a series of lessons framed as letters from a father writing to his son from prison.
    The website is atrocious, but don’t let that keep you from digging in. There’s gold in there.
    Go find it!

  • Never Blame the Audience

    Never Blame the Audience

    Everybody’s had a bad day at work. Usually that doesn’t involve a room of 2,000 people watching you have a bad day.

    As an entertainer it’s easy to tell yourself that it was the crowd’s fault. They were too drunk. They were too busy texting.

    They were too this.

    Too that.

    Whose fault is it?

    Yours.

    One of the most valuable pieces of advice I got from a fellow performer is

    “never blame the audience.”

    ~my mentor dude

    Anyone can do the easy shows. It takes a true professional to pull through a rough environment with a successful show.

    How do you get to that level?

    Never blame the audience.

    Blaming the audience allows you to ignore what you did (or didn’t do) that you could have to have a successful performance. If you have an off night, ask yourself what you could have done to avoid whatever problem derailed you.

    Did you focus on the one person texting and forget about the 1,999 who were having a good time? Did you give the mic to someone who was completely wasted?

    You’re responsible.

    As the performer, your job is to take control of the experience for the audience so they feel comfortable putting their attention in your hands. They have to feel secure in your leadership before they can relax enough to enjoy whatever you’re about to lead them through.

    Your Company

    I can’t tell you how many CEOs, owners, and upper management folks blame poor results on consumers, crappy sales people.

    Everyone but themselves and their poor leadership.

    Have an amazing product that you know will change lives, but nobody’s buying? It’s your fault.
    It’s your job to find where the breakdown in communication is, and fix it.

    It all boils down to communication.

    Your focus is not on finding the solution. You’re busy blaming every one else which allows you to continue ignoring how your website is difficult to navigate. Your sales process feels like a scam. Your employees are checked out because you’ve shown them you don’t value them.

    Whatever the issue, it’s your responsibility to find a solution, get the results you want, and move on.

    How do you fix it?

    Take an honest look at how you run your business, and that’s difficult to do. Sometimes you’re too close to a problem to find the solution.

    (Or you don’t know you’re looking at the problem when you’re staring it in the face.)

    That’s why it’s important to get an outsider’s perspective. (Good) performers have directors. They have a whole creative team to provide feedback.

    They probably have a mentor or coach, too.

    Who is in your mastermind? Brain trust? Advisory board?

    Find a team of high quality people who can help you take responsibility for how you’ve been doing things, and help you find better ways of doing them in the future.

    It’s the only way things will get better is if you know better.

    Then do better.

    Remember. Never blame the audience.

    It’s on you.