"Yanik Silver's In Search of Entrepreneur Heroes Interview”

Ralph Zuranski: Hi, this is Ralph Zuranski, and I’m on the phone with Yanik Silver. Yanik is just thirty-one years old. He is recognized as the leading expert on creating automatic moneymaking websites. He’s only been online full-time since February of 2000. His friends were rolling on the floor laughing when he told them he was going to put up a website.

Ralph Zuranski: They had every right to be amused, since Yanik had absolutely no web skill design experience, zero HTML coding knowledge, in fact, he didn’t have much knowledge about computers. But that didn’t stop him from going ahead with a simple key page website, and the flood of orders hasn’t stopped since.

Ralph Zuranski: Yanik is highly sought after speaker, and attendees regularly pay close to $5,000 a person to hear his secrets. He’s the author and co-author of many different books, and has published several best-selling online marketing books and tools, including Public Domain Riches, Instant Sales Letters, Instant Internet Profits, Web Copy Secrets, Mind Motivators, Instant Marketing Toolbox, and Instant Stampede Success.

Ralph Zuranski: He has a lot more products that are really great, and you can see them on his heroes’ page. He also, when he’s not working on moneymaking projects, enjoys playing beach volleyball, ice hockey, skiing, and traveling with his wife Missy. Yanik, how are you doing today?

Yanik Silver: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on Ralph.

Ralph Zuranski: I really appreciate your taking your valuable time to answer these questions. I know I really enjoyed hearing your presentation at Bob Silber’s seminar down in Florida a couple years ago.

Yanik Silver: Yeah, that was quite a fun time. One of the things that I really loved about that was that was the first time I ever really went deep-sea fishing. I was one of the few people on my boat that wasn’t puking their guts out.

Ralph Zuranski: Really? So were John and Armand and Alex throwing up?

Yanik Silver: Armand wasn’t on my boat, but John Reese was, and Stephen Pierce was throwing up, and his wife Alicia.

Yanik Silver: It was only Rich Schefren and I who were having a good go at it.

Ralph Zuranski: Oh boy! That was a beautiful time. Did you guys catch anything?

Yanik Silver: I caught something, yeah. I'm not a real fisherman. It wasn’t a tuna. It was some kind of mackerel.

Ralph Zuranski: Uh-huh.

Yanik Silver: Spanish mackerel maybe, I don’t know. I probably have it wrong, but it was something good and we had it for lunch.

Ralph Zuranski: Oh, that’s great. Oh, it was beautiful down there. It was a quite a unique gathering of individuals.

Yanik Silver: Yeah.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, let me go ahead and ask you a couple questions.

Yanik Silver: Okay.

Ralph Zuranski: I’m really interested to hear what you have to say. Do you have a dream or vision that sets the course of your life?

Yanik Silver: You know I don’t have a real solid one or something that I would say that runs kind of like the Meta profile on everything that I do. But I have a couple things. I have my values that I look at each and every morning. And that really runs the course of my business life and my personal life.

Yanik Silver: One of the things in there that I've found especially rewarding has been a statement that says, “I get rich by enriching others ten times to a hundred times what they pay me in return.” Kind of like the Zig Ziglar philosophy of “You can get anything you want by helping enough people get what they want.”

Yanik Silver: That is one of the things that has really driven a lot of my success, online and offline, is making sure that I'm always, hopefully, over-delivering in value because one of my favorite mentors is Earl Nightingale and he always talks about how the marketplace cannot possibly underpay you if you're delivering great value and over-delivering.

Yanik Silver: The other thing that I have a vision for really is helping young people becoming more entrepreneurial. I think our society has really just taken a couple steps backwards from when everybody used to be an entrepreneur, when a couple hundred years ago, maybe even as short ago as maybe a hundred years ago. Now, it’s just more of this employee mentality that’s taught in schools, and I can't stand it.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah, boy that really destroys the creativity and seems that the school system is just designed to set kids up to be employees.

Yanik Silver: Yeah, absolutely, and something that if I can have my way, is I will always have a soft spot for younger people. And I'm not that old myself. But for instance, one student of mine, he emailed me up and typically I don’t go out to lunch or do coffee with anyone because normally I'm too busy, but I had a real soft spot for this guy.

Yanik Silver: Actually, it’s two of them, now that I come to think of it. They're both college-aged, and they both had their own little online businesses where they were selling information products based on what I had taught them.

Yanik Silver: One of them was making about $3,000 a month from his college dorm. I was really impressed and he had driven up about five hours just to see me, so I took the time out and had coffee with him and really helped him out.

Ralph Zuranski: You know that’s amazing. It seems that that’s one of the themes that went through all the Heroes interviews is that the entrepreneurs, the people that start businesses, that have the courage to do so, are the real heroes to those that I'm interviewing.

Yanik Silver: Yeah, I can see that.

Ralph Zuranski: You know how important is it to take a positive view of step-backs and misfortunes and mistakes because that seems that’s inherent in being an entrepreneur?

Yanik Silver: Well, you're always going to have set-backs, misfortunes, and mistakes. The real interesting thing is to always think about two things. One, I think about, “How can I turn this problem into an opportunity?” I don’t know where the quote came from and I'm probably going to screw it up, but “Within every problem lays some kind of opportunity.”

Yanik Silver: If I can figure out the opportunity in there, the faster I can get out the other end of where the problem is. If you look back on your life, in most cases, now obviously there are some things like an illness that is very close to deathbed. When you find out about that, it’s not really a good thing.

Yanik Silver: But most set-backs or misfortunes or things that are mistakes are, if you look at them in the long run, they are pretty positive. There's an interesting story, and I can't remember the gentleman’s name, but he was a big, either stockbroker or bond broker or some kind of money mover.

Yanik Silver: He got caught doing something illegal. He went to jail. So he was sitting in jail. He got convicted, I think, maybe a month or two months before 9/11. Maybe you know this story, Ralph. He’s sitting in his jail cell, and 9/11 comes, and obviously the airplanes go smack into the Trade Center, the World Trade Center Buildings.

Yanik Silver: They came in right where his offices would have been. Everybody in his office perishes and dies who was there. He would’ve been there. So something that looked pretty horrible - he’s going to jail for these investment-related crimes that he’s committed - all of a sudden, didn’t look so bad.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah.

Yanik Silver: And there are lots of things where perhaps you're fired from a job and that gives you the freedom to finally start your own thing. There's lots of thing where when you look back at it, it could be a set-back or misfortune and it really is a turning point for you if you just go back and think about it.

Yanik Silver: For me in my own case, I can't really think of anything too tragic but the only thing that comes to my mind right now is growing up as a kid, I worked for the family business, my father’s business, selling medical equipment. And, every summer, I wanted to live at the beach.

Yanik Silver: He wouldn’t let me live at the beach. He made me work at the company selling. I was either telemarketing, or out cold-calling on doctors or designing their marketing pieces and so on, but just working there. To me, I thought that that was a horrible, horrible misfortune to befall a young high-school kid, instead of living at the beach and having a lot of fun, I had to work.

Yanik Silver: But looking back now, it gave me a tremendous head start over anybody else because at the age of fourteen I was telemarketing. At the age of sixteen, I was out doing sales face to face, so it gave me a big head start over almost anybody else.

Ralph Zuranski: That’s amazing. Well, I guess it’s important to be an optimist. What do you think about optimism?

Yanik Silver: I really would consider myself an optimist, and not kind of a Pollyanna-rose-colored optimist, where everything is great, no matter what’s happening. I’m almost like a pragmatic optimist in a way. So maybe you’ve got you're backup plan. Something that I love, and I’ll go back to Earl Nightingale is, he talks about cheerful expectancy.

Yanik Silver: To me, that is kind of what optimism is because you have to have something to the foundation of your optimism. It’s like walking into a test when you're a kid, and being really optimistic that you're going to do well.

Yanik Silver: But guess what? If you didn’t study or you have no clue about what the test is on, or the subject, or the things that are going on there, it’s pretty hard to be optimistic that you're going to get a good grade.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah.

Yanik Silver: There's no reason for you to be optimistic. But if you have a reason to be optimistic, let’s say, you’ve studied, and you know your stuff, then you should definitely be optimistic. That’s the way that I think about it, like I talked about cheerful expectancy.

Yanik Silver: When I first got online, there were a lot of people already in there, and it gets more crowded each and every year, and more competition and so on. But when I got online, I had a very positive, cheerful expectancy that I was going to succeed because I could see some of the models that were successful.

Yanik Silver: I also saw some of the key course skills that were required, and I already had them, because I had studied like Earl Nightingale. I’ll go back to him again and you can tell he’s been a pretty big influence, where Earl Nightingale talks about, if you want to become an expert, read for one hour a day for three years.

Yanik Silver: If you want to become a world expert, read for one hour a day for five years. So I thought, “Well, what would happen if you read for two hours a day on a subject, or three hours a day?” So I had the foundation. I had the direct marketing principles down and so that gave me that cheerful expectancy that I can walk in and really do well.

Ralph Zuranski: So you're dad, making you work during the summertime, gave you a huge foundation. Did you sort of look at him as an ogre at the time that he made you do that and changed your opinion of him later on.

Yanik Silver: Yeah, absolutely. I wasn’t too happy with that. At one point, I even remember quitting and trying to work at TCBY, the little local yogurt store. And I hated it because I had the evening shift after high school, where I’d have to just take apart the yogurt machines and clean them. It was ridiculous for maybe eight dollars an hour, or seven dollars an hour. I thought, “Oh, I'm going back.”

Yanik Silver: So, yeah, I definitely was not thinking that it was in my best interest to be doing all the stuff that I was doing. But right now I definitely think of my father as one of my heroes.

Yanik Silver: And he’s got a really interesting story. It’s something that I really enjoy because I think that this applies a lot to entrepreneurs as well. My family is from Russia. We came over from Moscow in ’76 and I was two and a half at the time.

Yanik Silver: They came over, you know, not really knowing the language, not having any kind of advantage that people who’ve grown up here have. He came with $256 in his pocket for me, my mom, himself, and my mom’s mother.

Yanik Silver: He went to work at a hospital here. He got a regular job, and on the side, he was moonlighting, repairing doctors’ medical equipment for doctors in the hospital. Pretty soon, the hospital found out about it. This was in 1978.

Yanik Silver: They said, “Well, you’ve got two choices, Joseph. You can either keep working here and give up what you're doing with the other doctors on the side, or you can be fired. ” And he said, “Well, okay, I’ll start my own thing.”

Yanik Silver: He’s gone on to build this multimillion dollar business. Just this immigrant-type philosophy is something that I've always been interested in, and entrepreneurs really have the same thing, because it’s starting from nothing and building something. A lot of people who have many advantages and benefits that immigrants don’t have, somehow fail to take advantage of all this.

Yanik Silver: Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger - perfect example. He came here from Austria. Who would’ve thought that this guy with a very funny accent could become this mega superstar actor and also an Olympian bodybuilder? He proved everyone wrong. There are so many stories like that.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, how much courage do you think it takes to pursue new ideas?

Yanik Silver: I think it depends on the idea. It depends. If it’s a pretty radical, new idea, I think that then it takes a lot of courage because there are a lot of naysayers. You know what, even if it’s a mildly new idea, it still takes courage, because a lot of times, your friends, your family, they're not going to get it.

Yanik Silver: It’s kind of like this crab mentality. I'm from Maryland, and Maryland is, I don’t know if it’s official, I think it is the official state slogan, “Maryland is for crabs.” So, I've never been crab fishing, or crabbing, or whatever it’s called.

Yanik Silver: But I know for a fact that if you have a bucket with one crab in there, he’s going to escape and get out of there. But as soon as you get two crabs in there, you're safe. You don’t need to have a lid on the bucket any more, because as soon as one crab tries to make his way out, the other crab’s going to reach up, grab him, and pull him back down.

Ralph Zuranski: Really?

Yanik Silver: Oh yeah, and it’s the same way with people, it seems like. If you're not with positive people who are happy and excited about where they're going in life, they want to bring you back down to where they are.

Yanik Silver: They have something in Australia that my Australian friends told me about this saying, and I can't remember exactly what it is. It’s something about the tallest poppy, that they want to cut down the tallest poppy. And so just like the crab analogy, that if there's a big poppy plant that’s risen above the others, that’s the one they want to cut down.

Yanik Silver: The courage is you got to be courageous enough to follow your own ideas; follow your own ambitions; follow your dreams and goals, really. And as you start moving up and having these things become a reality, you're going to start hanging out with a whole different group of people. Typically, for them, it’s natural that if you have an idea and you want to make it into reality, it’s natural for them to have that happen.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah.

Yanik Silver: That’s one of the things that I absolutely love. I love ideas, but I love even more ideas that I implement and turn into cash, because that’s the way I know that it’s had a profound effect on people.

Ralph Zuranski: Do you feel that it’s an uncomfortable experience to pursue your dreams?

Yanik Silver: No, I don’t think so.

Ralph Zuranski: Let me clarify that as far as just the amount of conflict that you have in your circles of your peer group and your family that it is going to be uncomfortable because you're going to make a change. That scares everybody, and so they resist change in most cases. They basically make life uncomfortable for you because you want to do a different thing.

Yanik Silver: Yeah, well, in that case, that is true. Of course, it’s going to depend on your family and your friends, but in most cases, it’s the same thing. They know you as one way and if you start exhibiting different characteristics, they get uncomfortable.

Yanik Silver: People want you to remain consistent. You decide, “Well, I’m not going to do it this way.” One of my best friends, attorney, CPA, he works now for a government agency, before he was working in private practice and he still doesn’t get what I do.

Yanik Silver: He doesn’t understand. He just knows that I drive around in a really nice car and take vacations whenever I want. He calls me up and kind of laughs and he’s like, “Do you ever work?”

Yanik Silver: I’m like, “Yeah, I do work.”

Yanik Silver: But you definitely are going to experience some discomfort and that’s just kind of par for the course. Like I said, then you're going to start getting around other people who share these same kinds of attitudes and beliefs. There are other people that are just like you.

Yanik Silver: Some of the best advice, I can't believe how often I've gone back to Earl Nightingale, but Earl Nightingale talks about, I don’t remember which program it is, but you should get everything that he put out, either Lead the Field, or The Strangest Secret, and he has some other, not as widely known, stuff.

Yanik Silver: He talks about, “If you want to be successful, just look at what the average herd does.” I don’t know if he called them this, but I call them this - it’s the mediocre majority. If you look at what most average people are doing, just do the exact opposite, because most people aren’t successful.

Yanik Silver: It’s typically only about the top five percent of people. I'm not trying to say this in an elitist type way. It just seems that most people would rather be yakking on the phone, or plopping themselves down in front of the T.V. instead of doing something constructive.

Yanik Silver: If you do the exact opposite, so let’s say the average person comes home and watches four hours of T.V. at night. Okay, well, I'm going to be successful. I don’t have a successful role model, even though there are tons of books and biographies and different things that you could study if you wanted to.

Yanik Silver: But let’s just say you don’t have a personal role model in your own life. Just think about what these people are doing and do the exact opposite. So for four hours a night, I would, instead of watching T.V., I’d actually read something productive.

Yanik Silver: This is not to say that I'm a big nerd and read for four hours every single night. For the people that know me, I'm a pretty social person and I actually love to have a good time. But when you could put the work in once, and that’s a great thing with the Internet business too, is you could put the work in once and profit from it over and over again.

Yanik Silver: But you’ve got to pay the price initially.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah, but did you believe your dreams would eventually become reality?

Yanik Silver: Yeah, like we talked about the cheerful expectancy I had. I had every notion that I would be successful online when I applied what I saw working. I don’t know if I would have imagined what I’ve got right now and where it’s leading up to. That’s one of the things that really stops a lot of the students and clients that I work with is that they don’t see every little step along the way.

Yanik Silver: My favorite analogy to this is, let’s say you’re walking in a really thick pea soup-type fog. You can only see a hundred yards ahead of you. Well, you know, let’s say your end goal is a mile down the road. You’re not going to be able to see it. So that stops people from going any further, because they can’t see where the end goal is.

Yanik Silver: But if you go this first hundred yards as far as you can see, you’re going to be able to see the next hundred yards, and then you’ll be able to see the next hundred yards. And that’s what I’ve always believed in.

Ralph Zuranski: Well a lot of people are paralyzed by doubts and fears. How are you able to overcome your doubts and fears?

Yanik Silver: Well, it would be a lie if I told you I don’t have doubts and fears anymore. I think anyone who tells you that is lying. There’s a great book title, and I can’t remember the name of author, but it’s called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

Yanik Silver: I really like that because it makes a lot of sense. You’re going to be fearful. Maybe it’s something new, or maybe it’s someone you have to call for business and this person seems completely unreachable, but you feel the fear, dial the number and just do it anyway.

Yanik Silver: Something that has helped and I don’t do this enough as I should, is some mental rehearsing; vividly imagining what you want the ideal outcome to be. If you do that, you will find that that does help you a bit.

Ralph Zuranski: Who helped give you the willpower to change things in your life for the better?

Yanik Silver: For me, it’s been listening to a lot of mentors, typically via tape or video program or written material; from trying to study the people that have been really successful and just seeing what they’ve done.

Yanik Silver: On the more personal level, it’s been my family. My dad, like I mentioned, is an entrepreneur. He came over here as an immigrant and started with nothing, and built up something.

Yanik Silver: My mother, who just passed away a couple of weeks ago actually, she wasn’t an entrepreneur, but she was incredibly encouraging. It doesn’t matter what kind of silly, dumb idea I had, it didn’t matter to her. As long as I wanted to do it, she was behind me all the way.

Yanik Silver: She had a long fifteen year battle with cancer. A lot of people, if they have cancer, that’s the end of their lives for them, but that’s not the way that she was. She had cancer, but the cancer didn’t really have her, if that makes sense. She would live life to the fullest. In between chemo treatments, she’d be out there dancing until midnight or 1:00 a.m. having a good time.

Yanik Silver: So just seeing the strength that she had, with what she was able to overcome, in a way, with what she had been dealt with, made me realize that all the stuff I had been trying to do was a lot easier.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah, I can imagine so. Do you think that perseverance is really important?

Yanik Silver: I do think perseverance is important. There are two parts to that for me anyway. I think there is a certain amount of perseverance that is good and then at some point it just becomes banging your head against the wall and you’ll be much better off going in some other direction.

Yanik Silver: So let’s say you’ve been trying to make a go at your business and you keep trying a bunch of different ways. You keep trying a bunch of different ways and nothing is working. At that point it is time to say, “Okay, well, next. And let’s move on.”

Yanik Silver: For perseverance to be a positive aspect, from my point of view, you’ve got to be trying something different. You can’t just be – let me do this exact same thing over and over again, because I know perseverance is a good quality. So if you keep doing the exact same thing over and over again, you are going to get the exact same result over and over again.

Yanik Silver: So to me, perseverance is positive if you are trying new ways to try and get the end goal that you are shooting for.

Yanik Silver: Now, if you’re not getting your end goal, there are a lot of ways to skin the cat. Let’s say you want to be a millionaire. That’s your goal. There are a whole lot of ways to become a millionaire. It could be through real estate. It could be through stocks. It could be selling your own products like I do. It could be any number of ways. There are tons and tons of different ways.

Yanik Silver: So like I said, if you are banging your head against a wall, there is a point where you’ve got to say this is not the right course for me.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, in business, there are a lot of people that you come across that upset you, offend you, and oppose you. How important is it to forgive those people?

Yanik Silver: To me, I’m never one to hold a grudge. I typically think that, not even just in business, but in your personal life, I think it takes a lot more energy to hold a grudge, and to be really pissed off and mad at somebody than it does to just let it go and forget it. Just say I’m not going to do business with this person anymore.

Yanik Silver: Okay, they’ve proven that they’re not worthy of my trust. Get over it. But a lot of people love to hold on to the negative feelings. To tell you the truth, the negative feelings affect you. It’s not affecting them. They don’t care if you’ve got negative feelings towards them. It’s not bothering them typically. But it bothers you.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah, it seems that people who hold on to those feelings are hoping that they can affect you because of the way they are feeling about you.

Yanik Silver: I think it is pretty immature.

Ralph Zuranski: I agree. Would you experience service to others as a source of joy?

Yanik Silver: I do. That’s one of the things that keeps me going in this business. I probably have enough now that I really don’t need to work too much harder. But I really enjoy meeting with a couple of the college kids that were my students and having them tell me about my influence on their lives.

Yanik Silver: At the seminar I went to last weekend, I was actually attending, and I ran into one of my students. He told me about how he had no money in his pocket. He bought one of my courses which he really couldn’t afford. It turned the lights on for him. He created his own information product.

Yanik Silver: I have to give him credit, because it’s not just me. He went out and took action. But he made over one and half million dollars in 24 hours, selling his product. And it came from a starting point. And he was almost getting very emotional about how much it affected his life and how it helped him out.

Yanik Silver: I felt very grateful for it, but I told him that I can’t take the credit for it. He’d done so much by himself. But if I gave him a nudge in the right direction, then I feel very grateful.

Yanik Silver: I just had this big seminar a couple of weeks ago called my Underground Online Seminar. We had a real private dinner with just a couple of my friends. It was very spontaneous where a couple of them got up and gave me toasts. I had no idea that they were going to do this. And even at the higher level, it is really rewarding to hear from people who I had no idea I had affected them this much.

Yanik Silver: It is rewarding to hear even just an email from a customer who tells you that they didn’t think they could do this. Then all of a sudden, they’ve quit their job, and they’re making a hundred thousand dollars a year on the Internet, or whatever the case is. That’s definitely some of the most satisfying, rewarding accolades that I can get.

Ralph Zuranski: How important is it to maintain a sense of humor in the face of serious problems?

Yanik Silver: I think it is pretty important. I think your sense of humor is important for every aspect. As soon as you start taking yourself too seriously, then there’s a pretty steep decline. Especially, like you said, if you are facing a serious problem, laughter has been proven to be a way to de-stress yourself and sometimes even cure yourself of some major illnesses.

Yanik Silver: There’s a famous anecdotal evidenced by Norman Cousins. I don’t remember what he had, but… Ralph: He had cancer.

Yanik Silver: Okay. He was in his hospital room and he sent for all the funny videos he could possibly get and he just watched them nonstop. And he cured himself. So I definitely think there is a very therapeutic value in laughter and trying to find something amusing in your situation.

Ralph Zuranski: Other than your mom and dad, who are the heroes in your life?

Yanik Silver: Well, definitely my mom and dad. The other heroes in my life have been some of the mentors who I’ve learned a tremendous amount from. They’ve kind of shown me the way, really. I’ve been talking about Earl Nightingale a bunch of times, so he’s definitely up there on the list.

Yanik Silver: Dan Kennedy, who’s a direct marketing giant, and who I’m fortunate enough to know. It’s interesting how things come full circle. I remember reading all his newsletters and just being blown away and very excited to meet him; I would love to have the opportunity to even work with him. And now I’m running Dan Kennedy’s affiliate program. I even have a page in his monthly newsletter.

Yanik Silver: So it’s exciting when someone you look up to as a hero, and has influenced your life so much, and when you’re able to now stand on a relatively equal footing.

Yanik Silver: Some of the other heroes are pretty much the unsung heroes, like entrepreneurs. I think any entrepreneur is a hero to me. Anyone who has the gumption to start their own business and to really decide to go out there and make a go out of it, even if they fail at their business, is a hero to me.

Yanik Silver: They are providing something of value back to society, or else they’re going to be out of business pretty soon. They’re providing jobs. Our whole economy, or a lot of it, is based on small entrepreneurs. So to me, those people are really deserving of the title of hero.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, as an entrepreneur, most people, right out of the gate, aren’t successful. A lot of people fail. You’ve heard the statistics of small businesses on how fast they fail. How important do you think it is to be willing to fail at what you do in order to learn how to be successful?

Yanik Silver: I think that you should be willing to fail. You shouldn’t expect to fail. Like we talked about a cheerful expectancy and having a reason for this cheerful expectancy, so do your homework before you go into any venture.

Yanik Silver: It’s not enough to say, “I want to open a restaurant.” But if you want to open up a restaurant, let’s say, I want to do that. I have not a clue about the restaurant business. I’ve never worked in the restaurant business. I’ve maybe talked to someone who owns a restaurant maybe once in my life. I’ve eaten at a bunch of restaurants. That doesn’t mean that I have the skills necessary to run a successful restaurant business.

Yanik Silver: Now if you go out and you interview ten top restaurateurs from all over the country,  if you sat them down for a day and took copious notes and did a bunch of research. Then you go out and fail, then that’s different than just saying, “Okay, I want to start a restaurant,” and going out and failing.

Yanik Silver: Though there is something to be said for failing forward as much as possible. I’m a direct response marketer and I like the way direct response marketers look at things. We look at things as tests. We can go out in the market place. We can go out with a new promotion and it could bomb. You know what, it’s not a failure. It’s just an unsuccessful test.

Yanik Silver: It’s all about the way that you frame things, is the way that to me makes a lot of sense. There is no good or bad value until we attach it to something, to an event, to a situation.

Yanik Silver: So if you say, “Well, okay, this restaurant went under.” You can say, “Yes, I’m a failure.” And attribute that to it and frame it that way. Or you can reframe it as something else. Here’s all the things that I’ve learned from it and it’s going to make my next entrepreneurial adventure even stronger.

Ralph Zuranski: So you think it’s important for people to learn from the mistakes that they make?

Yanik Silver: Absolutely. You’ve got to be able to learn from the mistakes that you make, but even more so. This is something that I’ve tried to do is I’ve tried to avoid making the mistakes as much as possible by learning from people that have done it ahead of me. 

Yanik Silver: There are so many books out there that you can learn tremendous amounts of information from. People who have spent twenty, thirty, forty years in their particular business or venture, or whatever, and they have all this information out there for you in a $10 book or $20 book, or in some cases it is a more expensive home study program.

Yanik Silver: Whatever the case is, it’s all worth it because it shortens your learning curve and you can find out how to avoid those mistakes without having to actually do it yourself. So that’s a smarter way of doing it to me.

Ralph Zuranski: Yanik, how does it feel to be recognized as an Internet hero?

Yanik Silver: For the people that know me, I’m a pretty modest, humble guy. Like I said, the accolades and the emails and the notes and coming up and meeting people in person who talk about me helping to change their lives is something that is very, very rewarding to me, and the same as this being recognized as an Internet hero is.

Ralph Zuranski: So by your ability to help others in the success that you’ve had in making them successful, do you think that’s why you recorded this honor?

Yanik Silver: I would have to imagine so. Hopefully that’s the case.

Yanik Silver: When I sit back and think about some of the people that I’ve helped kind of turn the lights on for, and then they’ve gone out and taught other people, or had tremendous influence in their community, or been able to support their family in new ways, it’s something that really almost boggles my mind. When you think about the kind of influence you can have, by just helping to get people to where they want to be.

Ralph Zuranski: That’s basically the primary way you’re making the world a better place, by helping people become successful?

Yanik Silver: Yeah, right now that is my primary way. In the future, I’d like to do some other things. 

Yanik Silver: Whatever venture you’re trying to get into, even if you do it badly, it is worth doing One of the things I don’t publicly talk about, there are certain charities that we donate five percent of every dollar that comes into us, in the business, too.

Yanik Silver: I’ve done other things like, I think you were there Ralph; I had my big 30th birthday bash. I invited all my customers in for a free seminar which typically would have cost about $2,000 or $3,000 and all I asked for was a $50 donation to Make A Wish. We raised $25,000 for Make A Wish Foundation.

Yanik Silver: So, things like that are some of the ways that I’m trying to make my little contribution in the world if possible.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, I really appreciate your time, Yanik. Is there any parting piece of wisdom you want to pass on to young people?

Yanik Silver: The only thing that I’ll leave you with is:  it doesn’t matter how you start, but just start badly at first.

Yanik Silver: There’s never going to be a perfect time for anything. I thought when I was starting my business that I would wait until this certain time, or I’d wait until this happened, or whatever happened. And the truth is, there’s never, ever a perfect time. So just get out there, and in the words of Nike, ‘just do it.’

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah, that seems to be the advice of most of the heroes that I’ve talked to, is just do anything. It doesn’t have to be perfect, nor will it ever be perfect.

Yanik Silver: Nor will it ever be. I still don’t think my business is perfect. There are a lot of things I could do to make it better, but it’s a lot better than when I started. And it’s probably going to be better next year, and the year afterwards, as long as you’re always on this upwards trajectory, where you are kind of improving along the way.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, I’m amazed at what you’ve accomplished at such a young age. That’s the reason for the Heroes program. It’s to get kids to realize there are people out there that are like you that have incredible information that can help them be incredibly successful before they’re twenty-one.

Yanik Silver: That would be terrific. I’d love to create some new millionaires before they’re even legally able to drink in the United States, before 21, would be really cool.

Ralph Zuranski: I’ve got the best of the best as far as the heroes in the information we put up in the In Search of Heroes web blog. So I just really thank you for your contribution and just really appreciate what you’re doing for the world.

Yanik Silver: My pleasure. Thanks, Ralph.