Follow the Data Episode 9: Be Thankful – How Positive Thinking Can Help You Grow Your Amazon Business
Taking a break to be thankful can feel like a waste of time. But studies show that positive thinking is a key component to individual success. Join Viral Launch CEO and co-host Cameron Yoder for a discussion on how positive thinking can help you cultivate a success mindset to grow your Amazon business.
Follow the Data Show Notes
- Reason #1 to be thankful: Prime Day 2017 was huge with more than 60% growth over the previous year. Can you image what 2018 is going to be like? Check out our summary of Prime Day Stats to get a better idea of just how huge this day was.
- Reason #2 to be thankful: Prime membership is becoming more and more popular with estimates that over 60% of American households have a subscription
- Reason #3 to be thankful: Amazon is still growing. With stocks soaring, there’s a chance that Amazon will become a trillion dollar company sooner than originally predicted.
- Listen to Barbara Fredrickson explain her broaden and build theory and the research behind the powerful impact of positive emotions.
- Check out this article from Entrepreneur about how a positive attitude can influence your success.
- Want to be on the show? We’re working on an episode that features our listeners! Reach out to our content team with stories or questions about your Amazon business.
Podcast Transcript
CASEY GAUSS:
Did you know that positive thinking can broaden your mindset and increase your ability to generate ideas?
CAMERON YODER:
Taking a break to be thankful can feel like a waste of time. But practicing positive thinking might be the most powerful tool at your disposal as an Amazon seller. I’m Cameron Yoder.
CASEY GAUSS:
And I’m Casey Gauss, your host for Follow the Data: Your Journey to Amazon FBA Success. In this show we leverage the data we’ve accumulated at Viral Launch from over 25,000 product launches and our experience working with 6500 brands to help you understand the big picture when it comes to Amazon and, more importantly, the best practices for success as an Amazon seller.
CAMERON YODER:
This Thanksgiving we’re bringing you a special edition episode about the role that positive thinking and thankfulness can play in your Amazon business. Whether you’re just beginning your Amazon journey or already have a serious operation on your hands, there’s a lot to be thankful for this holiday season.
CASEY GAUSS:
We’re talking about what it means to be thankful, the science behind positive thinking and how staying positive and being thankful for what you have can help your Amazon business.
CAMERON YODER:
Casey, I’m actually really excited about this episode just because it’s so unique. It’s so different. We’re talking about how positivity relates to success as an Amazon seller, and not just as an Amazon seller, but success as a person in general, right?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, and for those of you who don’t know Cam, he’s probably one of the most positive people.
CAMERON YODER:
Life is good, man. Life is good. So we’re talking about what it means to be thankful, and a definition – and this isn’t like the, the definition of what it means to be thankful because I think there are many definitions. But what does it mean to be thankful? Thankful, being thankful is the ability to recognize the full worth of something and be grateful for it. So, Casey, what are you thankful for?
CASEY GAUSS:
Dude, I’d like to think of myself as a person with a lot of gratitude, so you know, I just have an insane amount to be thankful for. Everything from my family, you know, having an amazing wife, having, you know, kind of the company of your dreams at the age of 24. Like I don’t think that ever in life I cannot be thankful for everything that has happened to date. And so, you know, I just think that we have an amazing team. Everybody is just working on all cylinders so well. Yeah, you know, I am thankful for Amazon. I am thankful for the current state of the economy to allow us to be where we’re at. I mean, I could just go on and on. But yeah, I guess that pretty much summarizes it. What about you, Cam? What are you thankful for?
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah. No, I mean like you said before, I’m generally just a more positive person. I didn’t used to be that way, but I don’t know, I guess I quickly came to realize that life is too short to really get hung up on the differences or hung up on just stuff in general, and so I’m super thankful just for – I’m 22, and the opportunity just to be here and doing this literally right now is, it’s just awesome. And just meeting people, I’ve been able to go to a lot of conferences over the past couple months to meet a lot of Amazon sellers and just people in general. That’s been an amazing experience. I’m just thankful for, I don’t know, this opportunity and every single opportunity that comes every single day.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah. So, what do Amazon sellers have to be thankful for this year? You know, I think there are so many things, obviously.
CAMERON YODER:
It’s a lot. It’s a lot.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, kind of like the top list that we want to talk about, Prime Day 2017 was absolutely insane, the biggest sales day in Amazon history in one day.
CAMERON YODER:
That’s huge.
CASEY GAUSS:
Brand Registry, 2.0, helping sellers to protect, you know, their listings, as well as just getting a leg up on those that are not in brand registry with enhanced brand content, early reviewer program, headline search ads, you know, and I think it’s just going to continue to compound. But thank you, Amazon, for giving us these new features, and we’d love to see more.
CAMERON YODER:
Another stat, there were – or 62% of American households have a Prime subscription. And this is from 2017. That’s – that’s a lot of households. That’s more than half.
CASEY GAUSS:
Oh yeah, and you know, it’s just so awesome because that means that’s that many more people that are going to come and buy your Amazon products. And that’s that much larger of a market that you can sell to.
CAMERON YODER:
Right, that Prime badge, that FBA man, that’s huge. It’s huge. Amazon is also, it’s growing at an astounding rate. So a couple weeks ago Amazon’s stock surged about 13% because their growth is outpacing predictions.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, it’s just crazy. And you know, for the longest time everyone was saying, you know, maybe 2020, 2021, Amazon will be, will represent 50% of e-commerce sales. But it’s looking like that – they could cross that milestone, you know, next year, which again, just means more opportunity to sell more products and just grow your wealth, grow your business, leverage that growth to then go build a business off Amazon. I mean there’s so many opportunities here, and I think that we all kind of just need to be thankful for the work that Amazon is putting in because that helps make our businesses so much more valuable.
CAMERON YODER:
Right, right. Then there’s also, oh man, huge, huge piece of news that everyone was talking about, speculating, still speculating about, but Amazon’s expansion into the acquisition of Whole Foods and the potential or possibility of one day – of people getting their products into a brick-and-mortar store as a result of this is insane.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, and so even if we are not able to get, you know, third-party products into Whole Foods, I mean it just means more Amazon customers, I’m assuming more Prime subscriptions that are using Amazon in –
CAMERON YODER:
More growth, more growth.
CASEY GAUSS:
– yeah, in additional ways. And so it’s just incredible. There’s so many positive things going on in Amazon and, you know, we’re all benefiting from it.
CAMERON YODER:
It’s really easy to get bogged down by the specifics of everything you do as an Amazon seller. And really all this news for Amazon really, I don’t know, it just helps keep a vibe of positivity going up, and it shows that this past year in 2017 Amazon has come a long way even though they were huge before that. But it also just shows that they’re on a pretty good path moving forward into 2018.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah.
CAMERON YODER:
So okay, now we talked about what Amazon sellers have to look at as just positivity for Amazon in 2017, but we’re going to break down now kind of the science behind the effect of positive thinking and really just kind of thankfulness in general. So I was going to break it down a little bit to give you some insight into what positivity means for you as an Amazon seller. Barbara Fredrickson has a theory called the broaden and build theory. Now the theory is this. The theory is that negative emotions can cause you to narrow your mindset and your scope of attention in a fight, flight or freeze response to feelings of anger or anxiety. So just to kind of go over that again, basically negative emotions cause your mindset to narrow. And kind of the antithesis of this is that a positive mindset really opens up your mind to newer possibilities.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, so if you remember back to us talking about kind of, you know, this ever elusive silver bullet or sellers getting focused in on, you know, what are these hacks, and I think that maybe this pertains to this specifically, right, so like –
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah.
CASEY GAUSS:
– you know, when I’m in fight or flight I’m just looking for that one little piece of saving grace that is going to take my business, you know, to the moon and back. And you know, what we’d like to think is, or according to the data, and we’ll get into it a bit more, you know, if you’re focused on positivity you’ll be able to take that step back, think of the bigger picture and really kind of disseminate what does it take to build a successful business. And that is not these little hacks. Again, it’s doing everything really well. So kind of just a cool way to tie in some of this awesome data around, you know, positive thinking and success and relate that back to Amazon.
CAMERON YODER:
Exactly. Like the negative mindset is going to create more opportunity for sellers to kind of try and reach and grab at things that aren’t necessarily going to help just because seemingly it’s the best thing that’s in front of them, again, that fight or flight method. So basically negativity really causes people to react, or can cause people to react in a manner that they don’t really think about what they’re doing before they do it. But going back to positivity, so positivity or thankfulness can cause you, the theory states, to broaden your perspective and increase your attention so that you see a wider range of perceived possibilities. So this more open mindset really enables positive thinkers to discover creative solutions, build new skills and ultimately be more successful than negative thinkers just because they’re broadening their mindset. So instead of being so – so I would describe the silver bullet mentality as more of, at least, a narrow-minded approach to business.
CASEY GAUSS:
For sure. And you know, a lot of people say that, you know, what’s the most valuable asset to your business? And a lot of the time it’s you, and people forget that, you know? And so yeah, I just think that this is very applicable.
CAMERON YODER:
Being narrow-minded is relatable to the silver bullet mentality, while positivity is related to learning more or widening your gaze and just learning and building new skills. To add onto this further, there was a study done that was conducted basically to support this theory. In this study each student watched a film that evoked a series of emotions. So there were five films that were showed. Each student watched a single film. The emotions that each film was supposed to – were supposed to convey were amusement, contentment as positive traits, neutrality as kind of the middle line, and then anger or anxiety as the negative traits. So each student watched these films. And then after the film the students were asked to fill out a questionnaire that asked them to list all of the things they wanted to do in that moment. So they watched these emotional, these films that evoked emotion, right, and then they were asked to write down what they wanted to do in that moment.
Now there were 20 blank lines for these participants to fill in. So interestingly enough, the students who watched the films that elicited amusement and contentment, so the more positive traits, came up with more action items on their questionnaire. So more things that they wanted to do in that moment, more. And the other characteristics, the ones that watched the more negative films that evoked a negative emotion did not come up with as many items as the people that had watch the positive films.
And then – after the films – they were shown a visual picture, a visual representation of shapes, okay, so just picture a bunch– you’re handed a piece of paper and on it are a bunch of shapes. And you get to look at it for a little bit, for a small period of time. That paper was taken away, and they were given basically another paper, and they were asked to identify the shapes that were similar to the ones they had seen before. So in this specific study the people, the students that had watched the negative emotional films remembered the smallest visual components of the shapes that made up the image that they had seen at first, and the positive thinkers remembered the overarching theme, or the overall form of the configurations but not necessarily the smaller shapes. The conclusion was at the end that thinking positively tends to help you keep a global or big-picture perspective.
CASEY GAUSS:
So next thing I kind of want to relate it to you, your Amazon business and how positive thinking can help you to be more successful. So I think the biggest one is just that, you know, Amazon is so dynamic, and things are changing so frequently, and the people that have success are the people that are really willing to be, you know, adaptable and to kind of fit whatever needs to happen. You know they’re not focused on the past. And so, you know, employing positive thinking allows you to be very nimble and say okay, here’s this new challenge. Now let’s take what we’ve done in the past, our knowledge and our expertise in the team that we have, if you have a team, and let’s apply that to this new landscape moving forward versus, you know, negative thinking would be so focused on, you know, this sucks, it’s not going to be as easy to have success. You know, I wish things were the old way versus, again, the positive thinking is you’re rolling with the punches. And that’s exactly what you have to be doing in order to, you know, be successful on Amazon because that is inevitable. Things are going to change. So yeah.
CAMERON YODER:
You’re also – so you’re also developing – as an Amazon seller you’re developing a lot of new skills as time goes on. And I want to read this quote from the study before, just because it’s, I don’t know, I think it speaks to Amazon sellers in general. And the quote is, “Researchers have often noticed a compounding effect or an upward spiral that occurs with happy people. They’re happy, so they develop new skills. Those skills lead to new success, which results in more happiness, and the process repeats itself.” So it’s compounding happiness on skill basically, like you are, by having an air or a mindset of positivity you are increasing her ability to develop these new skills by being an Amazon seller, which being an Amazon seller you’ve already developed so many skills, like team leadership even is just one skill that has resulted for a lot of people from Amazon, or different selling methods, or business in general. And there are so many more skills to develop by selling on Amazon. Maintaining that positive mindset is going to help you develop those skills further.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, and you know obviously as a fellow business owner there’s a million things that are going wrong. There’s always going to be fires, not just related to Amazon making changes, someone that you hire doesn’t work out, or you know, oh, your manufacturer is giving you issues, or you know, there’s a million things that can go wrong. And dwelling on those things or, you know, turning very negative or even turning that negativity against yourself, I know that’s very easy to do, you know, that’s just not going to help you to have success. And so always be positive about the future. At least what helps me is I’m always so excited about what is going to come or, you know, the bigger picture of Viral Launch and what we’re trying to achieve. And that really helps you to, you know, go through the kind of valleys or those tough times.
CAMERON YODER:
I definitely want to encourage you to focus on big pictures. So a big picture mentality, for example, would be hey, it’s going to be okay. We have tomorrow to wake up to. If something goes wrong, that’s okay. You have tomorrow. You have next week. You have next month. This Amazon game is a marathon. And it’s not a sprint. So you have all of this time in front of you to allow you to not have to get stressed out and sucked into unproductive pursuits that are just going to cause more stress. So stay committed to the big picture, whether that’s hitting the million-dollar mark or making your first sale. Basically, basically there are a lot of different things that you can focus on, but one thing that you have control of is your mindset. And if you choose to focus on your shortcomings and entertain ideas of failure, then that might be what you live up to. But if you entertain ideas of positivity, you reap what you sow.
CASEY GAUSS:
That’s all we have for this week. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll be off next week over the holidays, and we encourage you to take a break yourself. Spend some time with the people you love, be thankful for what you have and what you’ve been able to accomplish so far. Also it’s just nice to, you know, take a step back, breathe, read a little bit, challenge yourself and just think of the bigger picture because that is ultimately the roadmap that you need to set to help you achieve success.
CAMERON YODER:
Yo, eat some delicious food. If you’re listening to us and you’re international I say go buy a turkey, you know, get in on this Thanksgiving thing. Go buy turkey, you know, make some good mashed potatoes. It’s going to be a good time. You never know. That moment of contentment could really make the difference in success or failure of your business.
CASEY GAUSS:
Thanks again for tuning in. Don’t forget to leave a review. Please, we all know how difficult it is to get reviews on Amazon.
CAMERON YODER:
It’s so hard.
CASEY GAUSS:
The same is true for podcasts. Guys, we need you. I’m just messing, but it would be awesome. We also kind of, you know, just love to hear what people have to say. So if you want to be featured on the show leave us a voicemail at 317-721-6590. We’d love to hear from you.
CAMERON YODER:
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.
