Normally, I stay far away from all the get-rich-quick stuff. But I remember when copywriter John Reese became the first Internet marketer to (at least publicly) break the million-dollar-in-one-day barrier.

In fact, I remember thinking at the time, oh, for goodness sake, you want us to buy into your product launch so you can set a sales record? Puh-lease! I didn’t buy it. Nevertheless, I watched what was going on, and was pleased for him when he surpassed the goal.

Well, I just stumbled on a short interview of John Reese by Tony Robbins on the psychology of this order-of-magnitude breakthrough ($100,000 in a day was considered fantastic back then). Both of them compare it to Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile, and they share lessons about achieving any BIG goal that I think transcend the (to me, not very interesting) specifics of making a big pile of money.

Two things struck me particularly:
1. The opening titles say Reese was $100,000 in debt. I have to wonder how such a world-renowned copywriter (I’d heard his name for years, long before this event) got into such a hole in the first place; the video, alas, doesn’t address this.

2. Reese’s thinking was much bigger than I realized. I hadn’t known that a million in a day was about ten times as much as had been done before. It reminds me of Amory Lovins’ thinking about energy use: that it’s just as easy or perhaps even easier to save 80 percent of your energy than to save 10 percent.