375. In Remembrance: Radical Generosity with John Ruhlin

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John Ruhlin: 

If you want somebody that's actively loyal for you, you have to show them that you're different than everybody else. You have to inspire them to act on your behalf. And that doesn't happen on accident. It happens because of you loving them on them so much so that they can't help but want to reciprocate.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. 

Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping. 

Hey. Dr. Richard here. This week's episode is a rebroadcast of an interview I did with John Ruhlin, who simply was one of the coolest people I've ever known. John passed away recently, unexpectedly. He was a really young guy, and he has four children. His daughters, Reagan, Blakely, Sailor, and Layton, as well as his wife, Lindsay, obviously, are in a complete state of shock. 

This episode originally aired the day that John and I spoke together on a stage at an event in Chicago and really enjoyed getting to know him, truly cared about helping people and making the world better than it was the day before. So listen to this episode and if you are able to, we've linked the GoFundMe to support his family in the show notes. So if you are able to help, incredibly grateful. And I know our thoughts and prayers are all with John's family. Thank you.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And I am so excited about today's guest. John Ruhlin is the world's leading authority in maximizing customer loyalty through radical generosity. He is the founder and author of Giftology and has been featured in Fox News, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc. and the New York Times. 

While becoming the number one performer out of 1.5 million sales reps for one of the world's most recognizable brands, John developed a system of using generosity to gain access to elite clients and generate thousands of referrals. He and his firm now help automate this process for individuals and organizations like UBS, Raymond James, DR Horton, Keller Williams, the Chicago Cubs and Caesar's Palace. John and the Giftology team can help any individual turn their clients into their own personal sales force to drive exponential growth. John, welcome to the show. 

John Ruhlin: 

Richard, thanks for having me, man. This is going to be a blast. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

No, this is going to be fantastic. And there's so many places we could go. I'm so excited to talk about the things that you're doing. But I like to go back with my guests and find out kind of their origin story, what makes them tick and how they became the superhero they are today. So take us through what were the influences that led you to come up with what you're doing now over time.

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. Well, I think like a lot of people, desperation is the mother of all invention. I grew up a poor farm boy, milking goats in Ohio. So we share the Midwestern roots in common and I wanted to get out of the dodge. And I thought I'd go make mom proud, be a doctor, a chiropractor. And my life really changed because of interning with cut for the knife company, which they've worked with a million of college kids. 

And my whole life took a big pivot. I death -- I went into cut, go out of desperation. I was like, I want to pay for med school. I didn't really consider myself a salesperson. I'm actually naturally an introvert which a lot of people are shocked when they see me on big stages, but I play an extrovert on TV, but I'm not that -- normally I'm more of a one-on-one kind of person. And my girlfriend's dad, who I was -- I pitched him the idea of giving away cut, go pocketknives to all of his clients because he was this radically generous person, he'd find deals on like noodles and buy like a semi loaded noodles and everybody at church the next Sunday would end up with like 20 cases. And so I thought he would give away a pocketknife to all of his guys that were into the hunting, fishing outdoors. 

And he changed my life forever. He said, John, I don't want to order pocketknives. Could I order a hundred paring knives? And I was desperate. I was like, I'll sell you as many paring knives as you want, Paul. But why? Like why would you give a kitchen’s tool to a CEO of a million dollar or 10 million or a hundred-million-dollar company? That's weird. And he said, John, he leaned back. He's about 60 at the time. He leaned back in his chair, and he said, John, I figured out something 35 years ago. The reason I have more referrals and access and deal flow and retention, is I found out if you take care of the family in business, everything else seems to take care of itself.

So for me, it was like this, like mind blowing, like, holy crap. Like Paul understands relationships and I started -- the more I started to present this idea to companies, I realized nobody was teaching people how to use gratitude and gifting and generosity as a competitive advantage. And so I started to use gifts like Cutco to get access to $200 million companies. 

And by the time I was a senior in college, I was Cutco’s number one distributor in the history of the company out of 70 years because it wasn't about the knife. Although to this day people are like, what's the hot new gift? I'm like the stupid knives. They're like, come on, you still sell knives? And I'm like we sell millions of dollars in knives, and it's because it's not about the knife. It's what that knife represented. It's all the little things around it. 

And so we now have kind of a done for you agency where people, entrepreneurs all the way up to Fortune 500 companies hire us to do all their gifting for them. But the system that we use like we teach people because they could go do it on their own if they really wanted to.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So you're a senior in college and you have figured out what your mentor Paul had, he was your girlfriend's father, but he gave you this mentor and kind of advice that blew your mind and changed your world. And then you basically started packaging this, but it's interesting because I've seen a lot of things out there previously talking about nurture marketing and things like that. Talk to us about how gifting and gratitude marketing is different and what was revolutionary about it when it first came out? 

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. Well, I mean, to this day, I think we're the only agency that does it because there's companies -- there's a million companies you can buy swag from and we're anti swag. Promo people will say, oh, I want to buy a token from you. I'm going to send this token. I'm like, would you call that relationship a client, that employee, that referral partner, a token relationship? They're like no. And I'm like, why would you send them some trinket or token then? 

So a lot of what we teach is kind of the antithesis of what's out there. Nurture marketing a lot of times people, they'll put things with infusion software. They're sending emails out every two weeks. Like that's great but in 2019, when everything is digital, we crave human to human experiences. We crave to be treated like an individual. We crave realness. That's why even to this day in 2019, there's plenty of content online. Yet how many conferences keep popping up where you go live and in person and masterminds?

So as a human being, we crave to be known, we crave to be acknowledged, we crave to be appreciated. I don't care if you're Richard Branson or whether you're an assistant, like we all crave this. And so really at a core level what we're doing is we're helping people scale their relationships through acknowledgement, through appreciation, through personalization. And so if you want to order a thousand jackets and hand them out to everybody, that's not what we do. But if you have a thousand clients or a hundred employees that you're like, man, these are the most valued relationships, how can I make them feel known and appreciated? That's the sort of thing that we're doing. 

And so it's not automated, although there are elements that are automated. It's taking the time and putting your money where everybody says relationships are their most valuable asset. Show me your pocketbook and what you invest your money in and show me your calendar. That basically determines what you prioritize. And a lot of people give lip service to their relationships, but nobody's really showing people, hey, I see you. You matter. I care about you. I care about your family. I care about your team. And when you do that and do it consistently, like you cut through the noise like immediately because there's so many talkers out there, so many people talking about it, but there's very few people that are doing it consistently.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So for somebody listening to this and they're a small business and they've just, or they've just begun their entrepreneurial journey, what are some of the top tips or advice that you would give to somebody in terms of using gifting to foster relationships? 

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. Well, I would say that everybody wants to say that they're like an expert or a thought leader or their best in class or the world class and what they don't realize is in the idea of marketing themselves, they, like they go slam their logo on Yeti cups and polo shirts and jackets and they pass it out to everybody. Our recommendation is to take the most amount that you can reinvest anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of your net profit back into your relationships and people are like, oh, that's too much money. 

And I'm like, well, casinos reinvest 20 percent of revenue back into their high rollers. Casinos don't do anything unless it makes financial sense. The reason they're investing 20 percent of revenue -- so even if you're a small company, we have companies that all the time that are doing a half a million or a million dollars in revenue, and maybe they only have five grand for the year to invest. Most people would take that five grand and invest it into 5,000 people. And so what did they end up sending out? They send out calendars or paper, chip clips or whatever. 

I recommend taking that same $5,000 and take your top 20 relationships and invest $250 into them so that each of those people, when they get that, whatever it is, it could be a knife, could be a custom weather bag, it could be whatever. But when they get it, they're like, oh my gosh, this person went all in on me versus going mediocre on many. And that's where, like, when we talk to people, it's like, don't send them 12 gifts, send them like -- if you look in 2019, most people like what's the most popular show on Netflix right now, that Marie Kondi or whatever his name is, like the idea of decluttering your house, most people don't need more stuff. They have crap coming out of their ears. There's a book essentialism. They're like, I have a box by my door at the house, like every week we're going to Goodwill because we have so much stuff, like we're blessed. And a lot of people in America are blessed. 

So if you're trying to take care of your mentor, your best client, they don't need more things, but everybody has room for an artifact. You give something to somebody that's best in class, that's world class, something that we do for all of our gifts, it has to be personalized with their name. If you're going to just ship something from Amazon that's generic, guess what the likelihood of them actually keeping it is? It's next to nothing if it's a high-level person because you're not going to buy them something that they can go buy on their own. 

So you have to think creatively about how you personalize it, how you tie in their spouse. Eighty percent of the gifting I do include somebody's wife, husband, their kids, their pets, their inner circle, because those people are usually neglected in a business relationship. And I want to honor those people. And so a lot of what we do isn't about spending the most money. It's about taking whatever the budget is, whether that's $500, $5,000, $50,000, doesn't matter, and going all in on a few people so that those people become raving fans of you. 

Everybody thinks they have loyalty because they have clients that stick around. That's not loyalty. Loyalty is when that person is actively advocating for you, where they're a salesperson for you. And so for us, like people are like, John, do you have a hundred sales reps? How many sales reps do you have? And I'm like, I don't have any. How are you doing your business? I'm like, I've turned my thousand clients. I've loved on them so much that they become salespeople for me, and that's the secret sauce. People think when you give gifts to reward a client, no, I want to keep them and grow them, yes, but I want all my clients become salespeople for me. That doesn't happen on accident. 

If you want somebody that's actively loyal for you, you have to show them that you're different than everybody else. You have to inspire them to act on your behalf, and that doesn't happen on accident. It happens because of you loving them on them so much so that they can't help but want to reciprocate. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

And what's interesting, I heard you say something, and I can see how fired up you are talking about this. But you're talking about gifts for people's spouses and you're talking about digging into the relationships that I don't think most salespeople go there. Most salespeople aren't asking when's your wife's birthday, how many kids do you have, things like that, other than just for small talk? But it sounds like there is an intentionality in doing that to really create that raving fan that you described. 

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. Well, think about it. I mean think about you or I, we're talking about our buddy how before, like we get treated really well. Like when I travel, I get to fly first class or private. I get to stay at nice hotels. Last week, I was speaking for this billion-dollar group in Texas and they put me up at the Four Seasons. It's like, I get treated like a king. Guess who gets treated not like a king when I'm traveling? My wife, I have three daughters. They get the worst end of being in business. 

And so when somebody can acknowledge and make me the hero to my wife and to my kids and to my assistant and my team, they end up getting me as well. But they acknowledge the fact that I'm a human being and they acknowledge the fact that the people around me sometimes don't get treated the same way that I do. 

And so a lot of what we're doing is just like, people are like, oh, what's the hot new gift in construction? And I'm like, it's the same gift that we give in technology. It's the same gift I give in pro sports. I can send the knives to every single person on the planet because guess what? Last time I checked, everybody eats, they entertain, they're a foodie, they cook, they have families, they host, they have bar mitzvahs, they have Christmas. Like we treat people like human beings, like, because that's -- but so many people want to talk about golf, or you want to talk about business stuff, or they want to talk about industry stuff, I go at it from a completely different angle. 

And so when our clients give gifts to their relationships, people -- like I had somebody come up to me the other day and say, John, this is the nicest gift. And this is somebody who is the assistant to a pretty high-level executive in their India appreciation business. And I sent them a couple knives. And this gal left me a voicemail message. You would have thought I sent her a brand-new car. She was in tears. She's like it was so thoughtful and you had my name on it and there was no logo on it and the handwritten note. Like she went on -- I wish I could play the voicemail for you. 

And I'm like she's into the appreciation business for like decades. How is a couple knives the nicest thing that she's received as a gift? And it's because most people in business, they focus on the business, they don't focus on humanity. When you focus on humanity, A, it's fun. B, it never gets old. Like treating human beings like human beings, like you don't get burnt out. Like I get to play Santa Claus year-round. It's fun. And it's fun for our clients too, because they see people light up like a Christmas tree when they receive something like that. 

So yeah, I get pretty -- I'm pretty passionate and fired up about things because it just, I see so many people wasting thousands and millions of billions of dollars sending out crap that ends up in landfills or ends up at goodwill and that pisses me off. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I hear that. And I want to shift a little bit and I'm sure we've talked on some of the high points of this, but I want to spend some time talking about your book, Giftology: The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals and Strengthen Retention. So I presume we've talked on a lot of the premises of this book, but I know that you've got some science in there. And while a lot of it may seem self-evident, talk us through some of the science, the research on what has been shown to be true regarding the philosophy that you bring. 

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is based in science. It's actually based in wisdom literature. Like if, whether you're a person of faith or not, a lot of the principles that we base the book on are from like the Old Testament. People really like that dusty old book. The Bible has like wisdom and truth. And I'm like Proverbs says a gift ushers you before Kings. I can assure you that the reason I'm a farm boy and I can get access to guys like Gary Vaynerchuk or how Elrod or like some of these heavyweights that are CEOs of billion-dollar companies is because I've loved on people in such a way. 

And so the personalization is a big deal. People like we all know that like the best sounding thing on the planet is what? Somebody's name. When you engrave their name and their spouse's name and their family name into something, it makes it from being stuff to being something personal to them. The timing of the gift, people are like, when I asked people when they send gifts, they're like, oh, we always send gifts after a deal's done, after referrals close, and we send gifts at Christmas. And I'm like, guess the three times I don't send gifts? After a deal's done, after referrals given, at Christmas. Like we call it no ABC gifting. 

When you give a gift after a deal's done or after referrals close, everybody says they're in the relationship building business, nobody would say I'm in the transactional business. Yet, when you give a gift after a referral’s given or at Christmas or some obligatory time, you've turned that relationship into a tit for tat type relationship, a transactional business. So when do I send gifts? Like I build up from a thousand dollars a month when I was in college for gifts. My budget last year was $400,000 for gifts. I don't send one gift when it's expected. All of the gifts I send out are what I call just because times, or when somebody gives me their time. 

When you give a gift out of the blue in the middle of April, like Gary Vaynerchuk's talked about it, like, do you get any brownie points when you give your wife flowers on Valentine's Day? No, it's expected. It keeps you at like ground zero. But you start showing up with flowers every couple of months as it just because like on July 22nd, which happens to be my wife's birthday, but if it wasn't your wife's birthday, July 22nd would be pretty meaningful to show up just because like your wife probably is like, did you do something wrong? Like why did you do this? 

But when you love on your relationships, not out of obligation, not at expected times, the timing of the gift is just as important as what you're sending. You can send a sucky gift but if you started sending it at times that are not expected, if people are like, wow, this is the only cool thing that showed up that wasn't a bill or some swag. And when that sort of thing happens, the timing makes somebody feel special and VIP. 

So the other thing that we talk a lot about, like Robert Chowdhury, he's done a ton of research. People are like, why do you -- like why would you redirect all of your marketing budget towards gifting? Like, that seems stupid. And I'm like, well, statistically it shows when you give a gift to somebody, not a trinket, not strings attached, when you give a true gift to somebody, like when you give a gift -- like here's a good example. 

They did a study if when you put a chocolate or a piece of or a mint in a bill, like a waiter does at a restaurant, guess how much the tips went up? Eighteen percent. By giving a half a cent mint, the person's tip went up 18 percent. Like the ROI on that's like 20x. I mean, it's like crazy. When we're wired, whether you're a person of faith or not, as a human being, you're wired, your DNA is -- when somebody loves on you, no strings attached, most people want to do what? They want to reciprocate. And when you can start to create a habit where people know you as a giver, they want to lift you up. Most people are takers, and they have like a bullseye on their back. People don't want them to succeed. They love to see them fail. When you're a giver and you're known as a giver, people love lifting you up and seeing you succeed. 

And so what we're talking about here isn't like woo woo, and fluff and like warm fuzzies. Like, oh, I checked the box. I sent Christmas gifts. I feel good about myself. Like we've seen people get 100x return on their investment. It's like an ATM machine. You put in a dollar. You get $100 back. Now, the $100 might take five years to come out and you might not know how it's going to come back to you. But when you can start to have the mindset and put the system into place, it's not based in fairy tale land. Like this is what we've been eating our own dog food for 18 years and the reason that we're able to do what we do is because we've been making these deposits into people in the ripple effect and the doors that it opens for us and for our clients. It's staggering.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

And you mentioned that this is a system and might not get it back all at once, but it is something that will pay itself forward over time. Talk to us about the metrics involved from a tracking standpoint. And then earlier on, you mentioned that there is some automation and there's some things people can do to automate the process. So I want to talk about those two things. 

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. So the system is taking -- you need to determine who your most important relationships are. Most people have no like I thought the loyalty action plan. Like nobody has like a loyalty. Most people want to like -- they do a little Facebook ads and then they do a little sponsorship, a little trade show. They don't really have a plan of how they're going to appreciate and acknowledge their most important relationships. And their gifting plan tends to be like, oh, it's December. You had a good year. We should probably say thank you. And they run out to Harry and David, and they slam some stuff, some logos on their stuff, and they send it out to their staff. 

Determining who your most valuable relationships are and narrowing it down to the top 10 or the top 20 percent of your relationships is a part of the system. Most people, they treat all of their clients the same way, or maybe they do a random one-off gift here or there. They don't have any continuity to it. So if you can determine who you're going to go after, what the value of those relationships are currently and the secret sauce is what's the lifetime value of those relationships if they grow? And what if they start to duplicate themselves? What if every three years you get a referral from your best client? What does that start to look like snowball wise? When you start to get one client that duplicates into two, people's businesses start to flourish. 

And so, like, most people only want to measure things. Like, right now, it's like, what can you do for me in the next five minutes? And it's really sexy right now to talk about like Gary V and all these guys talk about playing the long game, but how many people really are building their relationships for a 20 year long -- to the 20 year long haul for the 50 year long haul? 

One of the reasons that I was able to commit for the long haul with the system was I looked at my mentor, Paul, my girlfriend's dad, who is the attorney. He was 60 at the time. And I looked at his life and I'm like, I want his life when I'm 60. I want those kinds of relationships. I want those kinds of referrals. I want that kind of pace of life. Like he always had time for people. He was never rushed or in a hurry. And yet he was like, everything he touched turned the goal. 

And so I think part of the understanding is, is that most people measure things, what happened this week, what happened this month, and they're not building their network and they're not building their relationships for a 20 year, a 50 year run. And so most of the time when they're putting in that dollar, they're ruining the gift because they're expecting a referral to pop out five minutes later. 

And that's not how human beings work. When you give a gift with strings attached, you ruin the gift because the other person doesn't feel like it's a gift. They feel manipulated. Nobody wants to be manipulated, but we all love to reciprocate. And sometimes the timing is you gave a gift to somebody and they're going through a divorce, where their business isn't doing well, where their kid’s sick, or who knows what's going on in their life. But if you can make deposits into your top 10 to 20 percent of your relationships, who knows what company they're going to be at five years from now. 

Like I've had relationships where it took seven years before I landed the Cubs. The person who helped me get the Cubs deal. Wasn't even at the Cubs when I started gifting them. They were with Time Warner working with NASCAR, but I made deposits. I made deposits. When they got to the Cubs, they made referrals. Somebody else who was at the Dodgers, when I started gifting them, showed up at the Cubs. The two people who made the Cubs deal happen, weren't even at the Cubs when I started gifting them seven years prior.

So I think the big key here is, is that knowing if you love on your relationships, whether it's your marriage or whether it's with your parents or whether it's with your kids or your clients or your prospects, knowing that statistically, if you have a great business and you follow through on things, you have a great service, like you can't be a great gift giver and have a sucky product and expect gifting to save you. But if you have a good business and you build good relationships and you take the extra steps to love on them and play the long game, then the return turns into that 10x return, that 100x return. 

And I think that's where people get hung up is like, oh, I tried that gifting thing one time and I didn't produce anything. I'm like, first off, you sent a bunch of crappy swag from China with your logo on it. So you didn't even follow the Giftology system and you followed it one time in three months. That's not the Giftology system. If somebody comes to us and wants us to do all their gifting for them and they're not willing to commit to three years, I won't take them as a client because I don't want them to think that they're doing something. They follow the shiny object and the flash in the pan and then six months go by and they're like, yeah, I tried that whole loving on people thing. That thing doesn't work. 

Because I want somebody to understand that this is committing. This is not like chase this little like shiny object for six months and then move on to the next thing. This is committing. This is a way of life. This is a lifestyle. This is saying, you know what, I want to be known as a giver and I'm committing this. I'm going to build my relationships. And I know that this works if I commit to it for the long haul.  

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I love that. And everything you're saying is really resonating with me. I'm sure people listening at home or nodding along for sure. So we've got the system. We're in this for the long game. I was just curious just about that one piece that we haven't talked about is that what parts of this are automatable, because this sounds like such a human-to-human kind of experience? So what parts of this can we use technology to improve? 

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think everybody -- most people have a CRM. Most people can filter through a list and determine who those relationships are. A lot of times when somebody's sending out gifts with us or whether they're doing on their own, I call it planned randomness. So you can set up, like, I'll send the same thousand knives to a thousand different people. But based upon the fact that it's personalized with their name and that it shows up at a random time and it has a handwritten note, like, you can take the same item and send it out to 10 of your relationships, 50 of your relationships. 

If you do the Giftology system, the little details, well, I have some people on what's called a build a set. I'm building a $5,000 set of knives for them over the course of five years, a thousand dollars a person per year. I know what they're going to receive. I already have it laid out on a plan and then automatically the order's going to go in and their name's going to be engraved on it and their family name. I've already set up what the notes are going to say, and it goes out to hundreds of people. 

So I'm able to lay out the plan way in advance and build towards something. So at the end of five years, they have a $5,000 set of knives. I set that up one time in my team and the partner tech go, who we work with is able to execute all of those details because we built out the system. And so I know it's going out, but the person on the other end, the client, the prospect, the referral source has no idea what's coming when. And that's by design. 

So you can set up a plan and partner with some of these vendors to lay out what the plan is going to be, but don't cut corners. It needs to have a handwritten note. If it doesn't have a handwritten note, it feels like it's coming from Amazon. It needs to be well packaged. Like you don't get a gift with just some like random cardboard box. It needs to be personalized with their name on it. It needs to show up at a time that's not their anniversary, birthday, or Christmas. 

So all of those little pieces and parts are what allow you to automate and build what I call kind of the mass customization. The name’s personalized, the notes personalized, all of those things are personalized, but you are able to build an actual plan and a system in place to where day to day you don't have to think about it. You can go focus on FaceTime with people or being on a podcast or doing the things that only you can do. 

That's why people outsource it to us. Not because they can't do it. It's because they don't want to figure out the system and have to automate it themselves. But anybody, and I mean anybody, whether you're a solopreneur or whether you're a billion-dollar company, like, I put the whole -- like, everything that we do is in the book. There's not like a Giftology 2 coming out next year that like I've withheld like part of the secret sauce. Like, the whole recipe is there. Just most people, they want to make the bread and they're like, yeah, I'm not going to put yeast in today. I don't think that's really important. I'm like, do you realize you're not making bread if you don't put yeast in it, that's not bread. And so like if you don't want to follow the system, that's fine but don't expect the results of making bread unless you're willing to follow the recipe 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Right on. All right. Everything you're saying is absolutely sounds like it makes perfect sense. And you definitely need your yeast for bread. That is for sure. John, I have absolutely loved this discussion. We are at time here, but as you know, I wrap up every episode by asking my guest a single question that is, what is your biggest helping, the single most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our chat today?

John Ruhlin: 

Yeah. So I have two things. One is a lot of our clients, we walk through kind of a like a strategy day with our clients. And one of the things we talk about is what are the worst gifts to avoid giving? They don't want to outsource all the gifts to us. Like what are the things that would at least put you in the top five percent of gift givers? And it's usually most people's entire playbook of what they've been giving the last 30 years, so they're horrified when we walk through this list. Like gift cards are on that list, don't give. Consumables on that list, don't give. Apple products on the list not to give.

So for your tribe, I would be a giftologist if I didn't leave you guys with a gift. If you go to thegiversedge, the givers, with an S, edge.com, they can download for free the white paper of the 10 worst gifts to avoid giving if you want referrals without asking, and that we also give an explanation why. So that's the free gift. 

The other thing I would say that my mentor Paul taught me, not because he said this, but it's how we live. And it was you'll never regret giving more than is reasonable. In most situations, people hold back 5 or 10 percent in relationships. We don't want to be taken advantage of. We're afraid of getting hurt. Paul lived his life the exact opposite. He always asked himself, what's the most I can do in this situation? And when you live life like that, you show up at like -- he would show up at the pizza shop and he'd be like, what's the most I can do here? I can pick up the tab for the entire restaurant. It's going to cost 800 bucks, but all of the -- I love -- 90 percent of these people I know, and I love, and he would just do it. That's just who he was. 

And so I picked up that mentality. And do I do it perfectly? No. Sometimes I suck. Sometimes my wife thinks I'm a jerk. Like I'm not perfect in it, but the idea of giving more than is reasonable and going all in on people, like that's where you separate yourself and give that -- everybody says go the extra mile, give 110 percent, but I don't think they actually live it, and they're willing to do that with their time and with their pocketbook. 

When you do that with whatever level you're at, people notice. It shocks and awes them. You become memorable in their mind. And so I would say that give more than is reasonable is the thing that I've tried to live my life around and build my life on. And it's paid back huge dividends and it's just fun. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Perfect. And very much resonates with the theme of the show. So I love that share. John, where can people find you? 

John Ruhlin: 

Outside of the Giver's Edge, they can go to -- they can find the book Giftology that's on like six different versions of it on Amazon. And if they want to follow us, we're at Twitter at @Ruhlin, R-U-H-L-I-N. And or if you just Google Giftology, 9 of the top 10 things that show up. I don't know if there's enough giftology.com we don't own, but everything else on the planet related to Giftology outside of that domain, we haven't figured out how to own that yet.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Okay. Well, we will have everything John Ruhlin and the link for the givers edge. com in the show notes and on The Daily Helping app available in the iTunes store and on Google Play. Well John, this was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I loved our chat. 

John Ruhlin: 

Hey, man. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Absolutely. And I also want to give gratitude to each and every one of you who chose to listen to this episode. If you like what you heard, go subscribe to us on iTunes and leave us a five-star review because this is what helps other people find the show. 

But most importantly, go out there today, do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are and post it in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping because the happiest people are those that help others.