Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
Okay. We’re back again with Leah. Thank you so much. Leah, off camera, you said this thing, what changes you? And then you stopped. You didn’t say anything else. I’m like, okay, what do you mean, what changes me? You said, no, no, push the record button. I got that. So I’m sitting back. This is on you, my friend.

Leah Bumphrey:
One of my favorite quotes is, “Nothing changes you in life except for the people you meet and the books you read.” And I think that is a profound truth.

Matthew Burns:
Have you got who said that?

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, it’s been attributed and misattributed to so many different people.

Matthew Burns:
I will find that. I’ll put it like three or four misattributed ones in the comments.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yeah, but there’s a bunch of them. All you’ve got to remember is that Leah Bumphrey said it.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, there we go. Done. Leah Bumphrey.

Leah Bumphrey:
There’s a last name that’s going to go into history, right? But that’s what changes you is what you read. Because when you really read something, and I’m not talking about something that has to be heavy and deep, even the short story, you’re meeting people when you’re reading something.

Matthew Burns:
Yes.

Leah Bumphrey:
In real life, the people that you end up knowing, the people that are even casual acquaintances of yours, they’re disruptors. They disrupt what is comfortable for us. And when you allow yourself to be disrupted, my goodness, there’s no end to what’s possible. And we can agree, we can disagree, we can discount. But when people stop, and sometimes I haven’t read a book since grade 10, when I was forced to. How tragic is that? And we all get lost in reading this, okay? We’re scrolling, and we’re reading. And yes, that means you’re literate, but I’m talking actual reading. And that’s why when we talk about meeting people, Matthew, can you imagine 10 years ago, you and I did not know each other. 10 years ago, we did not know each other

Matthew Burns:
We did not know each other. Absolutely.

Leah Bumphrey:
But what did we do the first couple of times we met? You kind of read each other’s character. You read each other’s character, and you go, “Well, this he’s right. This he’s not. This is interesting. This is stupidity. This is weird to me. I want to know more.” And that’s what it does. It inspires you to know more, to become more. And bringing this around to business, man, if you have ever walked into an old-style general store in a small town, like Jack Teske’s Trader, which is the one that I grew up with, and you walk in there, and there is stuff in there from 50 years ago. It’s never moved. He has no idea what to charge you for because he doesn’t remember what he paid for it.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. The dust has dust on those ones. Yeah.

Leah Bumphrey:
Okay. Well, that’s our character and our personality and our business. If we’re not open to change, and I’m not talking about technology change, I’m not talking about getting a new cash register or how you’re doing your inventory. How do you react to people? How do you make people want to connect with you?

Matthew Burns:
Well, I want to take one step back as well. Okay. So you said I was going to really like this one, and I actually, it hits me a lot harder than I thought I was going to be because I wanted you to think about… We’ve learnt this over time, being Wizard of Ads Partners, studying at the Wizard Academy. The reaction our brain has to a really well-written character is the same as talking to somebody in real life. So when we read a book, and we get mesmerized by that book, if we watch a really well-done movie and we get into the character of the movie, our brain lights up and gets scared with them when they’re scared. Our brain lights up all of the emotions and happy feelings. That’s why we cry when something terribly sad happens, or crazy, amazing. Oh my God, I’m so proud of them.

And we then know these characters as if they’re real people. We think about people like Sherlock Holmes, probably one of the most iconic characters of all time. Everybody knows them today. And I mean, we’re talking any character from the Bible. These are people that … And I say a character from the Bible. I don’t know where you are religiously, but we didn’t meet them, but we believe-

Leah Bumphrey:
It’s a pretty well made book. I think you’re safe bringing it up.

Matthew Burns:
But we know how we would align or misalign with those characters. And so it’s such a powerful thing that you say that people or stories change us. That’s what changes us, it’s people in the story because we get connected, we get mushed up in their stuff. They get mushed up in our stuff, and it sits in our imagination center, which is what? A hundred thousand times, when neurons in our imagination center are combined with the rest of the brain. So we have so much capacity for mashing all the different parts of our life together, and it informs us, and we’re constantly being bombarded with new things. And I love that thought process. I’m a little science geeky on that stuff, but less emotional.

Leah Bumphrey:
My little nerd.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, yeah. But no, but I think you’re absolutely right. But it’s why really powerful marketing works. When it’s well written, and we come from a story, and we are able to give really good characters, that’s why we build character diamonds. We’ve got to do one of these on character diamonds. Building proper character diamonds so that we can… Oh, I’m sorry. And I took over, but- No, no. Yes, yes, yes, yes. This is beautiful.

Leah Bumphrey:
But here’s the thing, all of us have watched a movie, read a book, met someone that if you don’t like them, if you’re not connected, it’s forgettable. You don’t want to waste your time. You’re not entertained by it. But man, if an author, if a director, if an actor can make you like someone, you’re in. You are in. You know these people. Dirty little secret. I love the old series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, you do. You brought that up not too long ago.

Leah Bumphrey:
You and I both love our Star Trek.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Leah Bumphrey:
Because there are characters that we really like. Exactly. It has nothing to do with the setting. It’s that we like them. And if we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to expand on our likes, to like more people, we’ll never be changed. We are going to be the same.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. No, a lot. So you’re really talking about opening yourself up to new experiences and keeping an open mind to most things. So I also want to say that the opposite is also true, that we get just as connected to the bad guys when they’re well-written characters. So the foil is just as good as the hero. And as long as they are true to their character and they never break that, we can see them somewhere else in the world. So as long as we can connect to them somewhere else, we get really highly …

My wife will be watching a movie. She’s very empathic. Her emotions run high. So she hates it if I get into really serious and dark stuff because she can’t avoid herself by getting sucked in. And she says, “I hate that. I don’t want to watch this because that character sucks.” And I go, “Does it?”

You hate that character. You hate them. That means that you’ve been moved from normal, from middle, and now all of a sudden you hate them. What changes you? That character changed you. It changed your perception of … Maybe it was … I’m thinking Moriarty is a great foil, right? Where we knew that Sherlock Holmes, going after this dude, it’s like, ah, I’m thinking people like Darth Vader. Whether you like Star Wars or you don’t, everybody knows Darth Vader; we know the character, we understand what he means, and we know whether we stand with or against the Sith.

Leah Bumphrey:
And then I have to get back to the character diamond idea. Here he is. His north star is pure evil, but what’s the polar opposite? I’m your father. Honestly, that is brilliant. Yeah. Brilliant. How many people were changed by that? People who might’ve hated science fiction because it’s a story placed in a different setting. And again, I’m going to bring this all the way back to business. The story of the people we meet, of who we are, of what shapes us.

Matthew Burns:
Shapes our business.

Leah Bumphrey:
It shapes our possibilities. It shapes our imagination because, as you said, we are more well-suited to live in an imaginary world than we are to live here. Hello, the Matrix. Let’s have some fun with this.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely. Well, and we were just talking about recruiting in our last video. So when we talk about recruiting, bringing in a new character that doesn’t fit, then you can have them create fiction, or you can have them align and help to bolster what’s already great. And so I think it’s a brilliant idea that what changes you is what you read, because again, into the imagination center of our brain right away, or the people that we meet, because we can’t avoid them at that point where we have to be connected. And everybody’s favorite topic is themselves. So you can’t avoid running into somebody where they don’t tell you two, three, five things about themselves because they want to align with you, and they want you to know them. And this is important to me. Is it important to you? And so you can’t be changed by the information.

Leah Bumphrey:
The only variation on that quote that I’ve heard, the only addition that I go back and forth with, is that we also are changed by the music we tend to listen to. And again, think back to Wizard Academy, every class you go to, and the range of music. And there’s some really neat information out there about the megahertz of music, modern music versus classical music.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.

Leah Bumphrey:
Versus what it does, how it changes you.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely. Listen, the first time I ever heard anything was in the Magical Worlds of Communication, which was originally taught by Roy H. Williams. Now, Daniel Whittington does a great job. I’ve taken the course more than once with each of those gentlemen. And music theory is a massive part of that course. If you want to learn more about how music changes you and what you should be listening to. I mean, by the way, you’ll never listen to music the same way again. So, be forewarned.

Okay. This was really neat. I think that … Yeah, I’m doubling down, man. I think we’ve got to start talking about character diamonds in a big way, so we can … Anybody that’s watched this show, watch for Leah again, because Leah and I are going to talk about character diamonds in the future. Thank you for coming back to Crumbs for Giants.

Leah Bumphrey:
Absolutely. So much fun.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, where we talk about marketing, and we really appreciate everybody for coming back. We’ll talk next time.

Leah Bumphrey:
Thank you.

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