Ernest Talks

13/12/2023

Just wrote this for you but also me and also the world:

Align With The Divine!

It’s within and without.

You can test your alignment through movement - seeking out activities that move you - and that re-move the parts of you that don’t need to be you anymore.

I received an early spiritual vision in 1996. I was 15. I saw Wisdom as a force that could only come into being through Action.

It came to me like I was eavesdropping on King Solomon only to recognize my own voice was the one speaking. In this vision, it turns out that what I was looking for is what was looking.

I only understand it now, after decades of LIFE happening - and how simple it is.

There is a dues payment for this - every failure, every point of loss, confusion, conflict.

Some avoidable and some unavoidable. All got you to now/here. You went no/where.

Words have layers. The “language of the birds” is nonlinear - the layers reveal and conceal at once.

At One Meant - atonement. Alignment. A Line Meant - what did it mean? What is a “Mean”?

Words are nice but Wisdom implies and demands action. Which actions are right for applying wisdom in daily life?

The answer isn’t out there.
The answer is in here.
This requires ME to tune up.

If you’re like me, you’re only interested in what can be owned - not rented, borrowed, or stolen.

Purchased. With actions that back up the words.

This is Alignment {A Line (Mean)t} - the Golden Mean in motion. David in the sTone.

The sculptor simply re-moves everything that isn’t David.

Start chiseling - There’s treasure underneath your trash.

10/12/2023

09/12/2023

⏳Eulogy For The Living⏳

Hard to believe he passed a year ago.

I wrote this for my stepdad, Bob Sherman, and delivered it at his celebration of life service. I hope it inspires you - if you’re reading it, you’re still alive: you still have time.

Use it! Get it to whoever needs this message. It’s time to make your mark.

❤️
Ernest Chapman

—

At some point in the last week of Bob’s life, we asked him what he wanted - if he wanted a funeral, a memorial service, and he answered in classic Bob fashion with 3 Magic Words: “I Don’t Care!”

He DID care about a lot of details - about being cremated with a cheese danish in his wedding clothes, about having his ashes spread in the Holy City of Varanasi in a very specific place. But he told me quite literally that he didn’t care if we did a memorial service like this or not. He said “I won’t be there - what do I care what you do?”

It actually really surprised me.

So according to Bob, he’s not here - and this gathering is not for him. But we all showed up anyway.

According to Bob, these flowers are not for him. But we put them here anyway.

According to Bob, these nice outfits and outward displays of reverence and respect are not for him. But we’re doing it anyway.

Now you could argue with me and say no, that’s wrong, he’s here and we can feel him, and he’s listening, and this IS for him.

I guess that means you’re arguing with Bob at his own funeral! He’d probably think that was pretty funny.

Ok so what if Bob was RIGHT? If he was right, who is this for?

Why are we doing this? Why are we here today, really?

I think the answer is that this is for us. This is for you. This is for me. Here’s why.

Bob was practically obsessed with the idea of permission. For good reason, he thought that people deserved the respect and freedom to be allowed to direct their own lives. In my experience of him, he never wanted to impose on anyone or control anyone. He wanted to give and receive peace, kindness, compassion, and understanding.

He overcame incredible odds to not only become a functional, compassionate, spiritual man, a father, grandfather, and a therapist - he found a divine mission on this Earth.

He changed people’s lives permanently for the better, with the work that he did. He was a master of perspective. His photography captured souls, and his practice as a therapist healed hearts.

He had the skeleton key to the inner worlds of a lot of people.

They gave him permission to come in and rearrange the furniture - an interior decorator of souls. And he was really good at it too.
Permission really mattered to him. So when he said “I Don’t Care!” I took it as a form of permission to make this day about how I feel.

But I don’t want to focus on how I feel about the past. I want to focus about how I feel about the present and the future.
Bob inspired me at times, pi**ed me off at times, let me down, lifted me back up, helped me out and left a mark on my life. He wasn’t always available. But when he was, he was fully present. And he had an agenda.

He wanted to help me become the best version of myself. Even if I didn’t see it yet - but only with my permission.

We had a nickname for Bob with Trey and Sebastian - we called him “Grumpy”. He came off a bit gruff, maybe it’s because he’s from New Jersey and us Southern folk didn’t get the cultural difference. Also sometimes he was just kind of grumpy. Usually because he cared, a lot. When Dunkin Donuts first opened up in Nashville, the Grumpy factor decreased by about 11%.

Bob asked great questions too. And he helped me ask great questions. And he helped me teach Trey and Sebastian to ask great questions.

Right now I’m asking myself a few big ones that I’d like to share for my kids and for everyone. It’s really simple stuff.

⏳In the time that I have left, how will I help those around me become better versions of themselves?
⏳In the time that I have left, what will I do to elevate and lift up my family and my community?
⏳In the time that I have left, who will I start showing up for?
⏳In the time that I have left, who will I finally allow myself to become?
⏳In the time that I have left, what actually matters?

Bob might not be here in the literal sense of the word, but I think he is here in a different way.

A wise man named Albert Pike once said “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”

To me this means that Bob actually is here.

And this moment can be a type of initiation. Right now. A new beginning.

Because if you really love Bob, you’ll want to receive his gifts as he intended to give them - and Bob was a healer. So we all have an opportunity to receive healing. Right now.

Bob is here in all of our hearts. His words and actions are rippling through us all, out into the world. Right now.

Together, we are the mark that he leaves on the world. Right in this room. This moment is a gift.

And for this gift, I have my own Three Magic Words to say:

“Thank You Bob”

05/12/2023

04/12/2023

Do you remember your future? SUNDAY PLANNING - WOW… 🚨

…this is critical. I almost forgot how much it matters. And as one of my clients said last week, absolutely blowing my mind on a call to talk about synthesizing a brand messaging strategy for a billion dollar company with a bunch of wildly different businesses inside it - an overwhelming task at times -

“I AM THE SOURCE OF TIME”.

⏳How is anyone the “Source of Time”? ⌛️

There’s a spiritual answer and a technical answer. Let’s do the technical answer first:

⚙️When you’re planning your time on a Monday morning, you’re already IN the week. Imagine an airplane pilot making a flight plan AS THE PLANE IS TAKING OFF - not a good idea, right?

But if you try to plan the next week on a Friday, you’re probably “over it” and ready to just unplug. Not as sharp.

The fact is, your unconscious needs a little rest to do all the hard work FOR you - trust me, it’s smarter than you.

My first two careers before I jumped into branding were music and music teaching so I know this is right: Sunday planning is like making a setlist before the gig - so that when you walk out on stage, you already know what songs you’re going to play in what order. You already have it rehearsed - and when you go to sleep, it’s all percolating in the subconscious.

You wake up the next day READY - and run the setlist.

So I just did a test - to see if not doing Sunday planning for a few weeks would had an effect - and the results are in, it took almost a week for my rhythm to recover after Thanksgiving.

It was actually a slow slide down into not getting up early enough, going to sleep later, and suddenly realizing I was feeling “off” in a subtle way -

wait -

😱 I hadn’t worked out in a week!
🦧 I wasn’t meditating!
🗓️ I was getting busy all of a sudden!
⏰ The time margin was gone!
👺 That’s not normal!

🦃 It wasn’t about Turkey or tryptophan.
✈️ It wasn’t about travel.
⛰️ It wasn’t about motivation either. I love what I get to do for a living.

It was actually more about WHEN I did the planning. I was planning day of, in the mornings. OOPS.

🌊Now for the spiritual part:

The more I’ve optimized the mental-physical-emotional-spiritual spaceship called “Ernest”, the more leveraged my outcomes become - bad or good.

My inner state / vibe works in a subtle, but highly out of proportion, kind of way. “Out of proportion” in the sense that minor shifts in approach here have MAJOR effects.

Including “time compression.”

Let me tell you about a wonderful dream I had 20 years ago that taught me how to play fast music phrasing. It’s the same idea.

I was walking through a forest, and I looked down and saw the floor of the forest was made of an interlaced grid of snakes, like graph paper.

They held the world together. The speed of their movement was a type of clock.

A friend from high school, William, was sitting on a tree stump like the ghost of the flute player in Zelda 3 (sorry, Super Nintendo ju**ie here)… and he was SHREDDING on guitar.

He looked up and I asked him “how are you playing that so fast?” And he said “It’s simple - just slow time down.”

And the snakes all started moving in slow motion - but William and I kept having a normal conversation.

I realized that from the point of view of the world, we had actually sped up. So the secret was to become the Source of Time - and then just operate at what still feels like a normal speed while the world slowed down around you.

How is this possible?

Well that’s beyond my pay grade. Ask Deepak Chopra…

And whether you realize it or not, You are the Source of Time.

Have a fantastic week! And remember that it already happened and it kicked ass💥💯🚀

❤️
Ernest

02/12/2023

The history of the future is the collective projection of the present state of our creative consciousness.

What are you focusing your creative consciousness on?

02/12/2023

When you’re facing a difficult problem, ask yourself:

“Do the laws of physics make it impossible to solve this problem?"

If the answer is no, there's only one thing in between you and the solution:

Knowledge 😎

30/11/2023

Your State
Creates
Your Fate

30/11/2023

What’s not going to change no matter what happens in your business over the next 10 years?

28/11/2023

🤴Caveat: if you want to just outsource everything like a business monarch with attendants who bathe you, feed you milk and honey, dress you in fine silk garments and feed you grapes while strumming a Greek lyre, go for it - we can do that too but you’ll need a bigger treasury💰

Everybody else:

Let’s do a quick exercise. Write a one liner for each question. Only one idea and only one sentence. Mine below - what’s yours?

1. Who is an ideal client or customer for you? ONE person.
3. What urgent and specific problem are you solving for them? ONE problem.
5. What is the sales pitch for the solution? ONE result.
7. Why will they pay you instead of someone else? ONE differentiator.

My answers:

1. Client: You’re an entrepreneur who survived the startup phase and you’re finally ready to grow your business with real marketing.
2. Problem: You’ve outgrown the baby brand you started with and need some serious Brand Therapy - and you’re not looking to spend $25k - $50k on an agency.
3. Nail Your Branding in 8-12 weeks - with a complete brand strategy that corrects your alignment, claims your positioning, clarifies your messaging, crafts your identity, and creates an evergreen content marketing machine.
4. Instead of “selling” you a “brand” we’re actually installing a permanent brand strategy system into your company that you get to own 100% and use repeatedly whenever you want to pivot instead of hiring more agencies.

If you can’t answer these questions right away, you might have a cool logo or a cute name but you probably don’t have a brand (yet). Good news: you can fix that in 8-12 weeks (depending on how serious you are about growth…)

28/11/2023

Define Align Design Shine Bottom Line 🚀

17/10/2023

What your customers *THINK* your company is = your

So how does your brand behave?
What kind of clothes is it wearing? (Design)
Who is it talking to? (Target Market)
What is your brand actually saying? (Messaging, Content)
Does it drive a car? (Website, Socials)
Do you have gas in the car? (Advertising, Staff)
Where is it going? (Sales)

Entrepreneurs love jumping in their cars and driving all over the place.

Companies that hit the gas without total clarity on WHO they are, WHERE they’re going, and WHAT their message is usually CRASH the car sooner or later...

10/10/2023

How you talk about what you do is more important than what you do.

Why?

Because people can only remember a small amount of information.

Aim for 5 words or less! Example: "I Grow Businesses With Marketing"

See how simple that is?

Now... tell me what you do in 5 words or less 👇

03/10/2023

🦄 Finding A Unicorn Company Name

A great name:
✅ Is a word or phrase that happens in your customer's head when they want to find the product or service you offer
✅ Those words are the name of your company, as well as the product and the category that you're in
✅ It's the name of the website (hopefully .com) and you own the trademark on it

If you have all of those things in full alignment, you are
KLEENEX
and you have a perfect name.

Everybody else, all the rest of us, keep trying to find that 🦄

02/10/2023

“If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you'd have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That's because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.”

-Seth Godin

01/10/2023

This works for internal too…

29/09/2023

A great way to understand your market is to get on the phone, ask them great questions, and listen deeply to their answers.

Start with a clear understanding of the following 6 things - in their words, not yours:

1. Identity. Who is your ideal customer or client and even more importantly, who do *they* think they are?

2. Belief. What do they believe, hold dear, *know* in their hearts to be true? What is their "reality"?

3. Desire. What do they want more than anything else?

4. Problem. What's in the way of them getting what they want?

5. Solution. What would eliminate this problem?

6. Action. What are they doing to try to get what they want?

Get this directly from them first, and it becomes way easier to build the rest of the profile.

28/09/2023

“What’s the ROI on Branding?”

I get asked that all the time.

It’s the VALUE created by 10 other ROI’s which you can TRADE for dollars:

Return on 🧠 Ideas
Return on 🏆Integrity
Return on 😎 Identity
Return on 💡Inspiration
Return on 🪞Introspection
Return on 🦄 Imagination
Return on 🔬Intelligence
Return on 🤖Innovation
Return on ❤️Intention
Return on 💥 Impact

And yes

Return on 💰Investment 💰

Tight branding is more than a pretty picture or magical feeling - it can reduces customer acquisition costs and increase marketing results through the value of radical clarity.

Pointed internally this is “permission” – to be who you really are or for your company or culture to be who your purpose says you are. 

Pointed externally this is “promise” - a promise that you will fulfill the desires of your target market. 

When you’ve got it all aligned, it’s a lot easier to stand up and shout your truth from the rooftops because you know it’s true and they know it’s true and there’s nothing in the way anymore!

26/09/2023

Did you know it's way more expensive to fix problems after launch? That's why business strategy, product / service design, and matter so much - because when you get things right in the design phase, the cost of marketing and sales goes down - and the cost of fixing mistakes goes down.

26/09/2023

Thinking Big With Small Business

🤯🤯🤯 This might seem weird, but you can totally own and operate a small business without being small minded…

… here’s 5 things that make a world of difference. I’ve observed this over the years working with a variety of clients from mom and pop startups up to multibillion dollar companies:

👉Fun fact👈
..they all have the same problems.

💄1. Start with Brand

You wouldn’t show up for a blind date in a bathrobe.

Is your brand sloppy, unintentionally confusing, poorly executed, or just plain bad?

You might as well be showing up to work hungover, cigarette in hand, pants falling off revealing that tramp stamp of bugs bunny you got back in the 90’s (oops), because you left your belt out in a field somewhere with your wallet (which is probably empty, let’s be honest here)

A great brand is an “internal megaphone”, tying together everyone’s mindset, mission, and shared mythology.

Then it points OUTWARD and becomes your marketing materials.

And you know you’re on a blind date with your customers and clients every second of every day, 7 days a week, because you have a website, right?

👑 2. Run for an office that doesn’t exist

It’s boring as hell when everyone tries to be like everyone else.

Wanna know how to win an election? Run for an office that doesn’t exist!”

If you lived on a two-dimensional plane and there was literally no 3rd dimension, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s no way around simple obstacles like a line or a box.

But the minute you discover the 3rd dimension, it’s obvious: you can jump over the obstacle.

Running for an office that doesn’t exist is like discovering a 3rd dimension where everyone else’s thinking is totally flat.

You find ways around problems everyone else thinks are just “the way things have always been”.

There is no “way things have always been”. There’s just what you’re willing to accept, or not.

Don’t accept the limitations of conventional thinking.

Create new categories of thought, invent the future, and if the chair doesn’t exist for you to sit in, create it.

🧪3. Focus on Inputs

Burnout is a real thing. It leads to bad decisions, and a downward spiral of diminishing returns.

Small minded small business owners often get trapped in cycles of panic because they are working 25 hours a day and not stopping to manage their PERSONAL inputs.

Entrepreneurs suffer from this too, I’ve been guilty of it. We’re driven, and we’re willing to show up early and leave late. And we slaughter ourselves to get the job done sometimes.

That only works for so long, then it backfires.

I’ve seen small business owners bring this attitude into situations where their employees are way less invested in the business (because they don’t own it), and when the employees drop the ball… who picks it up?

The overwhelmed, overworked owner.

And then what happens?

Resentment, burnout, confusion, blaming, anger. Lots of bad s**t.

Sometimes it seems like there’s no other option. There’s not enough equity to bring on partners who care enough to show up more. There’s not enough cash to raise wages. There’s not enough time for the owner to be a glorified swiss army knife.

So their health suffers. Their family suffers. Their happiness suffers. This leads to dumb actions that make things worse. It’s a vicious cycle.

Imagine if you had TOTAL CONTROL over your own PERSONAL inputs, at the beginning of the day… then imagine that YOU DO.

You have control. Just get up a few hours earlier. Try it. It works.

If you started your day stupid early doing ritual practices of exercise, meditation, study, taking a walk, breathing, having some time to think, to reflect, to get in the zone, you’d:

…show up for work energized, in control, and in a state of “flow”

…be twice as efficient, make smarter decisions, and require less “do-overs”

…become more relaxed and fun to be around and you’d do a better job of managing employees and setting expectations.

The inputs are simple:

👉 Sleep

👉 Exercise

👉 Diet

👉 Meditation

👉 Reading

👉 Music / Hypnosis

👉 Activating the Vagus Nerve

The outputs are also simple:

✅ Productivity increase

✅ Clarity of thought and action

✅ Better relationships

✅ More impact

✅ More revenue and profits

💰4. Invest in LTV

It’s a seductive trap to reach for quick money.

You figure out what works and sell something and people buy it and boom there’s your revenue! Wheee!!!!

But what’s the lifetime value (LTV) of those customers? What if you could 10X it?

The ones who win year over year and build massive wealth are playing a bigger game. And you can start now.

Winners consistently outspend their competition to acquire customers with a value ladder that bit players never would have imagined.

You don’t have to be Amazon to figure out what to take a loss on to get someone in the door who you know you can sell more things to down the line.

Every big business is a small business that got big by doing things differently than those around it, and running for an office that doesn’t exist, while investing in LTV in ways others would never think of.

If you set it up right, you can ascend your customers up to higher and higher price points, allowing you to take an initial loss on earning their business. Once you’ve gained their trust, and earned their business, they’ll pay you back 10x over time.

You might think $150 to acquire a new customer is expensive if you’re selling something that costs under $50 but things look a little different if that customer keeps coming back every month and you make $600 per year off of them. Layer on a higher ticket item that costs $250 once or twice a year and now things are starting to get real.

But do you have all that in a spreadsheet?

⏰👊5. Ruthlessly Defend Your Time!

Don’t let people steal your time. Give it to them when they deserve it, and guard it with your life, because it IS YOUR LIFE.

All you have is the time you spend taking actions and speaking words, and those actions and words echo out into the world for infinity, like ripples in an endless pond.

Letting others have control over your time comes at a price: the freedom you require to get to the next level.

Take control, or be controlled.

Put all these together and you have a recipe for RESULTS!

💄Start with Brand

👑Run for an Office that Doesn’t Exist

🧪Focus on Inputs

💰Invest in LTV

⏰👊Ruthlessly Defend Your Time!

22/09/2023

Branding pointed internal is permission. Pointed external is persuasion.
Once you have both hook it up to a megaphone and OWN your market!