Do You Have a Plan? Why Your Story Moves People More Than Your How-To
Someone corners you at an event and asks how to set up a blog, or how to run a Facebook ad, or which autoresponder to use. It feels like a real question, and you answer it as best you can, and they nod and thank you and then never actually do the thing you just explained. A month later they’re asking a different version of the same question, still stuck exactly where they were, and you start to wonder if you’re just bad at explaining things.
You’re not. In this lesson from the Classic Masters Course, Lisa Grossman, a network marketing veteran with decades in the industry, makes the case that almost nobody in that position actually needs a better explanation. They need a reason. And she’s uniquely positioned to make that argument, because her own comeback started with essentially zero credibility and a personal history most people would assume disqualified her from ever leading anyone again.
It’s worth sitting with why this matters more than it first sounds like it should. Most training in this industry assumes the gap between where someone is and where they want to be is a skills gap, so the natural response is to hand over more skills, more scripts, more steps. Lisa’s entire career argues the opposite. The skills were never the scarce resource. Belief was. And belief doesn’t transfer through a tutorial, it transfers through a story specific enough that somebody else can see themselves inside it.
Why does everyone ask “how” when the real gap is “why”?
Lisa points out something almost nobody stops to consider: the information required to succeed at almost anything has been freely available for generations. She frames it with a detail from her own high school years, back when the internet didn’t exist yet and a public library was the only source of information most people had.
“It was in a public library no more than six blocks from your house, no matter where you lived, and less than 3% of the people in the country had a library card. The problem is not that nobody can find out how to. The problem is nobody’s given them a reason to want to.”
That statistic should reframe how you think about every person who’s ever asked you a “how” question and then failed to act on the answer. They didn’t lack the how. They lacked a reason compelling enough to make the how matter. Your job, in Lisa’s framing, was never to become a better technical teacher. It was to become someone whose story made the “why” undeniable, so the “how” finally had somewhere to land.
What does real leadership actually sound like, compared to a tutorial?
Lisa illustrates the difference with a short parable about a person stuck in a hole, and it’s worth reading slowly because it reframes what people are actually looking for when they ask you for help.
“You’re walking down the street, somebody falls in a hole. You see somebody down a hole, and they’re screaming, and they say, help me, help me, help me. And you’re like, well, you know, I’ll look for a rope. You throw down a rope, and there’s no rope, but they can’t reach it. And then next, finally, you jump in the hole with them, and they say, what’d you jump down here for? You know, now we’re both stuck down here, and you say, no, we’re not, because I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.” That’s the whole difference between a tutorial and a leader. A tutorial explains the rope. A leader has already been in the hole, climbed out, and is willing to say so out loud.
How did a convicted felon rebuild a bigger business than she’d ever built before?
Lisa’s own credibility, on paper, should have destroyed her career instead of relaunching it. She got into network marketing in 1988, built her way to the top of a company, and years later found herself indicted alongside a family business, a situation she describes protecting her own mother from by making a deal with the federal government. She spent a year in a federal prison camp starting in 1997.
She’s blunt about the first three months there: she wallowed, feeling sorry for herself, until she noticed the camp split cleanly into two kinds of people, the ones making the most of a bad situation and the ones being miserable about it, and realized she’d landed in the second group without meaning to. That recognition alone didn’t fix anything. What changed things was a specific person: a fellow inmate serving a far longer sentence than Lisa’s, who had every reason to be more miserable than anyone in the camp and instead carried herself with a genuinely remarkable attitude.
Lisa started walking the track alongside her, and asked her directly how she managed it. The answer was blunt and practical rather than inspirational in the greeting-card sense: the time was going to pass regardless of what either of them did with it, so the only real choice left was whether they spent it being someone they respected or someone they didn’t. That single reframe is what got Lisa walking, then running distances she’d never attempted before, then deliberately picking up new skills, on purpose, for the first time in months, instead of waiting for her sentence to simply end.
Why did the “junior partner” reframe change everything on her way out?
Right before her release, a prison chaplain gave her a talk that Lisa says permanently rewired how she saw her own responsibility, delivered in blunt business language because Lisa understood business.
but you are the junior partner she said unlike all businesses when the partners get their roles and responsibilities mixed up business goes to hell in a handbasket she said so here’s your job as the junior partner you’re gonna leave you and every day you’re gonna get you’re gonna shower you’re gonna shine up you’re gonna suit up you’re gonna show up with a smile on your face and a belief that if you do that your senior partner is gonna take care of everything else you do your job he’ll do his
Notice what that reframe actually does. It doesn’t promise an easy outcome. It assigns a specific, limited job: show up, do the work in front of you, and trust that the rest isn’t entirely yours to control. Lisa took that job seriously enough to rebuild a business bigger than anything she’d led before, within three years of walking out of that prison camp, not because the shame of her past disappeared, but because she stopped waiting for permission to start acting like the job was hers to do.
Why does vulnerability build a bigger team than credibility ever could?
Here’s the piece that ties everything back to your own story, whatever it is. Lisa never hid her record. She told new contacts exactly where she’d been, on purpose, before they could find out some other way and wonder what else she was hiding. Her reasoning: if you let people see that you’re not perfect, they feel comfortable enough to be imperfect around you too, and that’s precisely the comfort someone needs before they’ll admit they’re struggling and let you actually help them.
She built an international team of hundreds of thousands of people this way, many of whom didn’t share a language with her, using nothing more sophisticated than physical warmth and total honesty about who she was and where she’d been. Nobody was won over by a polished resume. They were won over by someone willing to stand in front of them and say, plainly, here’s exactly what happened to me, and here’s what’s possible on the other side of it.
That’s a genuinely uncomfortable instruction for most people to follow, because it asks you to lead with the part of your story you’d normally edit out of a first conversation. It’s tempting to introduce yourself with your best month, your nicest photo, your proudest result, and save the harder chapters for later, if you ever mention them at all. Lisa’s experience argues that backwards. The harder chapter is usually the reason a stranger decides to trust you in the first place, because it’s proof you’re describing a real climb and not a highlight reel.
That’s the real instruction underneath this entire lesson. Your story doesn’t need to be dramatic to work. It doesn’t need a federal prison camp in it, or a family indicted, or a decade in an industry before the breakthrough finally came. Whatever it is, it needs to be true, specific, and told without flinching from the parts that don’t flatter you. A bad month you actually survived, a mistake that actually cost you something, a stretch of time you actually doubted yourself, all of it is more useful to the person listening than a version of you that’s never struggled at anything.
Do you actually have a plan for using your own story this way, or are you still hoping a better explanation of the “how” will be the thing that finally moves someone who’s stuck? Most people never build that plan on purpose. They wait for a big enough result to feel like their story is finally worth telling, not realizing that the story was already worth telling the moment it became true, long before the result arrived to prove it. If you don’t have that plan yet, this is exactly the moment to build one.
This lesson runs deeper into how Lisa built and led teams across language and culture using nothing but story and belief, along with more of her own history in her words. It’s part of the Classic Masters Course. If you’re new to it, get the entire course, this lesson included, for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
And like two months ago we met at Eric Worre's thing, two weeks before Atlanta. What was Atlanta? Who counts? It was August 8th or 10th, no, this is August 8th, no, June 8th through 10th. Yeah, okay, so we met the weekend after Memorial Day, yeah, it was like two weeks before. So we met like two weeks, that is what we met, yeah, three months. And I think it was like, yours, thank you, like me, because you know I met Dagan, I could, I don't need one, yeah, I guess, earlier thing, yeah, so it is superior, I can walk around, you can have it if you want. So, you know, I met Lisa and we just get along. I think because I was, I was the weird guy in the meeting. Yes, it was the first time in my life I was ever identified as badass, and I found out later it was a compliment. You know, long story short, you know, we start talking and chit-chatting, and you know, what's the largest team you've ever built? Like, you know, a million plus people? Well, yeah, okay, like a million people, you know, which to me is like, it's a lot, you know. And so, you know, I was like, really, you know, and then I start talking to her and she's kind of weird too, you know, it's kind of a common thing, you find people who've done weird things and make a lot of money, they have all these strange ideas, and she knows more about things that not really, you know, a lot of stuff nobody knows in network marketing, like how products are developed, and I'm sure that way you are weird too. Yeah, it's interesting, a lot of interesting stories she has, though. But she introduced us to Glenis and Laurel, who planned both of our events, and had that not happened, probably Atlanta would have been a slight disaster. How many people were in Atlanta? Yeah, you know, that was done in two weeks, isn't that amazing? These guys were amazing, yeah. We would have showed up with the microphone, and it may have worked, it would have worked, it probably would have worked. Yeah, we would have yelled really loud to have everybody hear us. Anyway, so she's got a lot of valuable insight on, just done a lot of different things. I've been friends with Eric Worre for years, and you know, he's also a very amazing guy, and he says, you know, you're one of the most knowledgeable people in the whole network marketing industry, what do you call, you the queen of calls, me the TMZ of network marketing. She also thinks that's a compliment, all these things people tell me are compliments, I'm not so sure, but for my ego I choose to believe. Okay, can I erase this a little bit, just some of it? Yeah, you can erase whatever you want. Well, I don't want to erase any of it. No takers, I just need a little bit of space. That's okay, we can take it.
So, warning everybody, my name is Lisa Grossman. When I live at home, I hail from Dallas, Texas, but I'm hardly ever there. And Curtis Broome and I are partners. He's very modest, he didn't tell you, he was a professional speaker, he just doesn't like to claim that anymore, because since he came to network marketing he actually gets up and speaks from the heart and tells the truth instead of going around the country and getting paid to sell a bunch of stuff he doesn't care about. So now he's got a career he's really proud of instead of one he just made a lot of money at, but he also makes a lot of money at this one, and he's been doing this a long time now. Wasn't he really good? Yeah, but usually he gets up and he talks about all the technical, how-to, very corporate, authoritative stuff, and I talk about belief and mindset stuff. So I'm sitting up here with a topic that I'm not really good at, so I'm going to ignore it and go back to the stuff I like to talk about. Pretend that's okay.
How many people know my story? I'm gonna tell you my story because it's kind of indicative of the industry that we're in, and most people know because it's been online a lot, but I don't exist a lot in this world. I got introduced to the wacky, wonderful world of network marketing in 1988 by a family relative. I was very resistant. I got dragged to a meeting with all of the excitement that one would get about this industry in 1988. My only reference for network marketing, prior to going to a meeting, was when I was going to college my father told me I couldn't go to college in Southern California, because everything strange came from Southern California. Southern California is where Est came from. Southern California is where the Hare Krishnas came to the United States. Southern California is where Scientology came from. And Southern California is where Herbalife came from.
And they were all the same. So I get dragged off to this network marketing meeting where they sold plastic water filters. There were 400 people in the room. And I was sitting there with this kind of body language, looking around the room going, okay, if I see anybody that I know, if they see me, I saw them, I won't talk.
They won't talk. And maybe I can get out of here without anybody ever knowing I came. And it was a motley group of characters. But at the end, all these people stood in a line and they walked across the stage and they held these checks. And as I'm listening, they're making a lot of money and they're talking about, I'm traveling and having all this fun, and I'm thinking about what I'm doing.
And I go to the pay phone and I call my husband and he says, well, how bad is it? And I said, you know, these people are really, really odd, but I'll tell you, honey, they're dumber than us, they're uglier than us, they're making more money than us.
I think we should try it. So I got involved and I had a lot of fun with network marketing as a hobby. I got to the top of that company. I was paper empire and went back to my own business and things changed. But several years later.
And I helped some companies, did my own business. But in 1995, my primary business, as luck would have it, family owned business, I found myself indicted by the federal government, and I battled them for a number of years. And around 1996, late '96, I made a deal with the federal government to protect my family, because actually they were after my mother. They offered me to testify against her.
I don't know if you know much about being raised in a Jewish household, but you might as well blow your brains out with a gun before you go testify against your mother. So that was not an option. They indicted my husband. He was basically married to the wrong girl.
That was his crime. Couldn't let that happen. So in the end, I cut a deal in the best interest of my family. And I spent a year as a guest of the federal government, from May of 1997 to May of 1998. And when I came home, my options were limited, and I had made a lot of friends in network marketing.
I understood the business of network marketing. I can build a good network marketing business, but I understood the business of network marketing better than most, I think. So I made some phone calls.
I said, you know, I can help you with your company, I can help you fix your problems. And I went and I did a lot of consulting for network marketing companies. And in early 2000, I was helping some friends with one company, and I got a call from some others, and they said, we need your help. Translation: come consult for us for free because we can't afford to pay, but I like them.
So I did that, and we got the company ready to launch, and they said, you know, nobody really wants to go talk about this product, do you think you might want to go build a team again? And I said, I could do that. So I went out and I started sharing this information, and I got, I was in the right place at the right time with a very good list of a lot of people that I've met over the years, and it took off. Nobody thought the business would take off, and the rest was golden. You know, the last decade was just a golden decade, we took that business around the world and put a million people in it and did a billion dollars in sales, and all kinds of wonderful things happened.
But the reason I told you that story, I want to go back to 1997 and tell you what changed between before I went away and after I got away, because if you hear somebody tell you that they got out of prison and then they went on, very shortly later, to make, you know, three years later, to make more money and build bigger teams in an industry than they ever built before, most people would say, how could that happen? You know, I listen to people all the time saying, how can you make this industry work, I have no credibility, what kind of credibility do you think I have? You know, I swear to God, I was the only person on my block who'd ever been to federal prison.
Well, let me tell you about that experience. Federal prison camp is an interesting thing, it's white-collar. There are no, before you feel too sorry for me, there are no bars on the doors, it is a camp, it is white collar, they are banking on the fact that they are going to get you there. The humiliation is mentally what you do to yourself, and I made myself crazy when I cut that deal with the government to protect my family. I didn't know anything about federal prison camps, so I let my mind figure it out, and of course I've seen enough prison movies that I drove myself crazy for two years I did my time before I went away. When I got there I was miserable, and if I go into anything I go big, and I took feeling sorry for myself to an art form, and for three months I wallowed in self-pity.
And when I got there, prison camps, great equalizer, everybody gets the same clothes, everybody gets to say, a job, nobody cares where you came from, nobody cares anything about you very much, like home-based business, right? Doesn't matter what job, you know, we don't care if you went to college, we don't care if you're a truck driver. And the people are sort of in two very distinctive categories: there were people that were out doing things, making a difference, great attitudes, walking the track, pleasure to be around, and there were people that were miserable and they were feeling sorry for themselves, and they were ordering people around and they were awful. And I realized, three months in, that I was like the second group, and that pissed me off, I didn't see myself that way. So one day I got up and I went out and started walking the track. It was such a foreign experience, exercise was not something I ever really identified with. And there was a girl, her name was Kim Dukeson, and she just had an amazing attitude, and I started walking around the track with her, and Kim was phenomenal.
Here I was, my little 12-month deal, there are three months gone already. She had seven years. Seven years for being in love with the wrong guy. She fell in love with a guy, she didn't do anything, you know, he got busted, she could have testified against him, she didn't even know he was doing anything wrong, and instead she married him, so she wouldn't, couldn't be made to testify against her spouse, and ended up doing seven years. And I said, Kim, explain it to me, how is it you have such a phenomenal attitude? And she said, well, how much time you got left? I said nine months. She said, nine months is gonna get here no matter what you do. Nine months from now, on the calendar, you're gonna have a choice: when it's here, you're gonna look back and you're gonna say, I spent nine months being a sorry son of a bitch, or I spent nine months doing all that I could do. What you do with the time is up to you, you can do the time or you can let the time do you.
And that resonated with me, so I changed my attitude. I started teaching personal development. I decided I was going to run five miles, and I made my own plan and I made my own decision, but the five miles was really kind of insane because I had never walked a block, again, you know, without being forced, and that was an interesting experience for me because I remember, you know, you could decide to run five miles and say, oh, I'm gonna do that, you make it about halfway around the track once when you've never run and you hit the ground. I remember the first time I walked the whole way and ran a short part, and the first time I actually ran a mile, and then two miles, I never made it to five, I got to about three and a half miles. I remember I, you know, learned to speak Spanish sort of, and I took horticulture, and I learned to cut hair, and I learned how to play volleyball, and everything that I could learn, I learned how to do. And it was all going swimmingly well until about three weeks before I was going to go home, because right before you're gonna go home, they send you to what I now affectionately refer to as meeting with the do-gooders. They were these lovely people that come in from the outside to help you think about going home and reintegrating into society, and I'm sure they meant well, but you go to this meeting, and I'm in a great mood, things are going great, I'm having a grand old time, and you sit down with about 12 other people that are also going to go home soon. They say, you know, we just want to talk to you before you leave, so you're all prepared for what you might face when you get out. Okay, so we just want to ask you some questions. Okay, have you thought about the fact that when you go home your family may never speak to you again? Oh no, I've never thought about that, that's not gonna happen. Have you thought about the fact that nobody may ever hire you again? No, I haven't thought about that. Have you thought about the fact that your spouse may disown you, your children may not talk to you? No, I've never thought about that. Have you thought about the fact that you may be living on a box under a bridge with no friends? I've never really thought about that. And this goes on for about two hours. The power of association, who you hang out with. By the time I leave this meeting I am a terrible basket case. It was a Saturday, I was up all night, oh my God, I'm gonna be living under a box and my husband's gonna divorce me, my kids are never gonna speak to me, I'm never gonna get a job, and oh my God my life is over.
But we had a great chaplain there, so the next morning I'm up all night, like, I'm gonna go talk to Sister, I'm gonna go talk to Sister, and she was a tough love drill sergeant, tell the truth kind of, like you guys badass, our Army sergeant lady. So I get up the minute they finish the morning, I trench out of the chapel, I'm sitting on a bench waiting for her to show up for morning services, and she's like, comes up, Grossman, what's the matter with you? She's like, oh my lord, I come inside, I have three services today. She says, you know, I make a habit to never solve anybody's problems, I never fix people's lives for them, I never tell them what to do because they never listen to me. She goes, but I have no time for you today, so I'm gonna make a good deal, I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna fix your life, I'm gonna tell you everything you need to do, and then you're gonna go away, never bother me again, okay? So I come in and she says, all right, here's the deal, Grossman, I'm gonna put this in business terms, you like business, you understand business, she said, your life, you have been living your life like it is a sole proprietorship, and it's not, it's a partnership. She said, this is really gonna piss you off, but you are the junior partner. She said, unlike all businesses, when the partners get their roles and responsibilities mixed up, business goes to hell in a handbasket. So here's your job as the junior partner: you're gonna leave, and every day you're gonna get up, you're gonna shower, you're gonna shine up, you're gonna suit up, you're gonna show up with a smile on your face and a belief that if you do that, your senior partner is gonna take care of everything else. You do your job, he'll do his. Your children aren't gonna disown you, your husband's not gonna divorce you, you're gonna impact more lives, make more money, do more than you have ever done in your entire life.
And the more human that you make yourself, the more you'll come off a pedestal and let them see that you're a person who's had problems just like them. The more that they understand that you are somebody who understands where they are because you've been there too, and the fact that you are not there anymore, the more they want to hear from you. So people last night at the bar, you know, I listened to everybody, and what I've learned in network marketing is people come to events and they always want to know how to do this, and how do you do this. I get it, because this is such a paradigm shift to me. I'm up to these guys, well, how do you set up a blog?
Duh, there's probably 900 people, I probably could stop by a preschool and find some kid that I can hire to teach me how to set up a blog, the way it's getting younger. What people really need to know is not how to, but why to. Here's most people that you'll meet, if you want to really help them.
You're walking down the street, somebody falls in a hole. You see somebody down a hole, and they're screaming, and they say, help me, help me, help me. And you're like, well, you know, I'll look for a rope. You throw down a rope, and there's no rope, but they can't reach it. And then, finally, you jump in the hole with them, and they say, what'd you jump down here for?
You know, now we're both stuck down here, and you say, no, we're not, because I've been down here before, and I know the way out. That's what people are looking for when you meet them. I've been where you are, and I know the way out of here. Come with me, and I will show you.
Or, I don't know what I'm doing, because I just found this yesterday, but I know the guy who knows the way out, and there they are. Come with me, and I will show you. Watch this video, because we don't have to know, they do. What we have to do is go tell people there's a way, that they don't like where they are, to be somewhere else, because that's our job.
Our job isn't the how-to. A person who knows how will always end up working for a person who knows why. Every single time. When I started in network marketing, there was no internet. When I was in high school, I learned something.
I learned that all the knowledge you could ever want in the whole world was available to you for free. It was in a public library no more than six blocks from your house, no matter where you lived, and less than 3% of the people in the country had a library card. The problem is not that nobody can find out how to. The problem is nobody's given them a reason to want to. Your job is to give people a reason to want to, or to help them find within themselves a belief that they can, that they are worthy, that there is a better way, that you believe in them when they can't believe in themselves.
And I don't care if you're never talking to them, because if you put up a video, you are talking to them. I have understood that people never underestimated my language. I have today 300,000 people in my group, and most of them speak Thai and Chinese. You want to know how I built an international group, seriously, around the world?
I'm going to show you, and nobody ever believes this is the secret. You people feel good right now? You really feel good? You believe you can feel better? I'm going to show you how I built my business around the world.
Everybody stand up. There is no person in the world, no matter how good they feel, no day that does not get better, if you don't give and get five hugs. So on the count of three, turn to somebody next to you, and give them a hug, and do it five times. One, two, three.
That's it. People up on stage, when I would do the exercise, I would hug them and they would stand there like this, especially the Japanese. And eventually, I'd feel them melt. And I would tell them, okay, I'm not a shaky-handed kind of person, I always want to shake my hand.
And I'd grab them and I'd hug them. I'd say, you can go back home, after they took all the pictures, and you can tell them, five years from now when everybody in Asia is hugging everybody else, you met the crazy American girl that started it all. And that is how I built my business, by not being afraid to let people know that I was the convicted felon who realized that life will give you a second chance, and there was an industry that didn't care where you came from, they only cared what you were willing to do tomorrow. If you will let people see that you're not perfect, they will feel comfortable enough to be imperfect around you and try.
And they will feel like they know you. I love people. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid to cry on stage. I'm not afraid to tell my story.
I'm not afraid if people don't like me. I'm not afraid of people telling me that it doesn't work, because guess what? It does. So people can tell me a lot of things. They can tell me they don't like it.
They can tell me they're afraid. They can tell me a lot of it doesn't work. This week, there was a company that nobody in this room really believed in that went down, that a lot of people are worried about what it's going to do to people. They're worried about what it's going to do to the industry, about what Arthur Andersen did when it went out of business. Isn't that too bad?
Some things don't work, and some people are gullible, but the fact that people are gullible and they cling to things just goes to prove that people are so eager to believe in anything but themselves, so eager to believe the answer is in anything other than themselves, that you have a job. We all have a job. We have a choice. The choice is to sit at home and say, oh, that's, it is what it is, which are the most destructive, dangerous words I have ever heard in my entire life. It is what it is, so why do anything?
Or, it is what we can all make it. And if you choose the latter, go out, tell people they can change their lives, and if they start arguing with you, say, okay, stay tuned, watch me, and then go make it happen. The best argument against people is not to argue with them, but to prove them wrong, and go back three months later and say, okay, this is where I'm at, you want to talk now.
Thank you very much. Have a great afternoon. Hold on, hold on. Huh? Appreciate it.
Did you two have a great talk, guys? Give her a hand. Give her a hand. I didn't say anything. Huh?
I didn't say anything. I know. You just, you just told something. Well, you know, sometimes, guys, and you guys are a little bit different because you know. I mean, we've all heard people telling stories, right?
And it's like this, and they're like, just stop telling stories and get to the point. It is the point. Oh. Do you want to know? It is the point.
A big story is the point. You want to build a huge business? Ask questions, tell stories. Ask questions, tell stories. That's it.
That's it. This is what we all do. You know, me on the internet, off the internet, it's all the same. Build my whole business 20 years. Are you happy?
Do you have a plan? Would you like to see one? Are you happy? No? Do you have a plan to get it?
No? You don't? No. Okay. I'm going to leave.
Do you have a plan to get happy? No? You want to see one? Well, it's interesting. Give her a hand.
Hey, you rock. I appreciate you. Now, you don't have to go to federal prison before you're successful. I would recommend, use our story.
No, I would recommend you don't listen to the messages the universe is sending you, because if you don't, the universe will keep turning up the volume. You don't have to go to federal prison. The song was playing for a lot of years of my life before it got that loud.
You can listen soon. That's awesome. So if you don't have your success story yet, then it's time to create one, right?
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