Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I don't want to shoot this video. I'm in full-on rebel mode. I have a rebel part of me that's just taken over my consciousness, my thoughts, and it's just saying, "I am tired of marketing." I don't want to do marketing anymore. I don't like marketing. I like sharing with people about their food. I like helping people with their food. I like teaching them about Bright Line Eating. I like explaining how food addiction is real. I like connecting with people over life, over their problems, over anything, really. I just like connecting with people. I don't like marketing. And my job this week was to talk about the leaderboard, which...
And I'm in this Mastermind. I'm in New York City. I'm not even at home, as you can tell. This is a hotel room. That's my teddy bear, Roster. He goes everywhere with me. I should take you on a field trip actually, because this is a pretty incredible view. I don't even know if you're going to be able to see this. Can you even see this? Oh, it's totally bright. Anyway, that's New York City. I'm in Brooklyn. Anyway, you can't really see it that well.
But I'm at the Hay House Authors Mastermind, so this week is all about books and how to sell books. And I've got my book here, and I put it on the back of the toilet tank. And I love this book. It feels so good in my hands. And I woke up this morning knowing I had to shoot this vlog at some point. And it's Monday. I usually shoot the vlog on Monday so my team has time to process it and stuff before Wednesday. And so it's Monday morning, October 2nd, and I open my book and it says, "Commitment over 51%." It says, "Sometimes we don't have to be fully committed to stay bright. We don't have to be fully committed to whatever it is we have to do. We just need commitment over 51%." And I was like (sigh).
And then I knew there was a reading in here, because I wrote them. There was a reading in here on your yes and your no, and I found it. It's on March 22nd. And the quote at the top of the page is by Pythagoras, who said, "The oldest, shortest words, yes and no, are those which require the most thought." And I've been thinking about my yes and my no around marketing my book, around doing all the stuff I do. I frigging hate some of the stuff I do sometimes. Sometimes I don't want to shoot videos. Maybe sometimes you wake up hating the thought of doing Bright Line Eating. You just don't want to do it. A rebel part of you is like, "I don't want to do this. I'm a big no for this."
So I tried to find the scalpel instead of throwing it all out, throw the baby out with the bathwater, find the scalpel of, well, what's my yes and what's my no? I'm obviously not a no for shooting this video because I'm shooting the frigging video, but I was a no for memorizing anything for it. I don't know if you know this, I never, ever use a teleprompter. I've literally never used one in my whole life. And I usually don't have much going into a vlog by way of what I'm going to say, sometimes some scribbled notes if there's points that I need to make, and then I have to memorize those, of course, and keep track of them in my brain as I'm talking. And this time, I have my notes right here. I'm not going to memorize them. I was a no for that. Just a big fat no for that.
But I'm a yes for this book getting into more hands. This book gave me magic this morning. This book is powerful. This book is a little dance with the universe. The fact that I woke up this morning and the reading was, "Commitment over 51%," it was like the universe saying, "Sweetheart, you don't have to be all in on this just to do the next right thing, just to take a baby step." And I'm sitting here in this Hay House Authors Mastermind thinking what I'm a big yes for, and I am a big yes for our message, the Bright Line Eating message, getting out there more into the world. I'm a big fat yes for more people learning about how bright lines for food can create sanity and thriving and health and wellbeing for so many people, for the message that not every brain reacts the same to food, that some people start eating certain foods and they cannot stop.
And that's a thing, and it is a perfectly reasonable, sane choice to stop eating those foods entirely. I want that message out into the world that abstaining from sugar isn't abstaining from a food group. Sugar's not a food group. And so I want this message to be reaching millions of people more than it's reaching, a billion or more people than it's reaching, and that's marketing. Marketing is getting your message out to more people. And I'm like, "I don't love that." So I have to find the way to say what needs to be said or figure out what I'm willing to say without selling my soul. Sometimes I just don't want to do it.
Let me see if there's anything on this list that I'm willing to say to you. All right, so here's something I'm willing to say. We are hoping that some folks will buy more than one book, but I get that the thought is, "What would I do with all these books, Susan? What if I buy all these books to come meet you in Rochester, New York, and then I've got 20, 30, 50, 100 books. What am I going to do with all these books?" I have some good thoughts about that because this book can help a lot of people. What you could do with them, and just to say, to win the contest, you can't go resell them. That's in violation of the whole point. But you can gift them and you can donate them.
So here's a thought. Bariatric surgery clinics, those doctors who perform bariatric surgery, I know some of them and they know that their surgery is not a quick fix and that most of the people will lose weight and then start to gain it back. And they are desperate to tell people, "This will not be a permanent fix. You have to change the way you eat." And they're going to try to impress upon their people, "Don't just have me operate on your digestive tract. You've got to think differently about food. You've got to address the underlying issues. You've got to eat better." And I'm guessing bariatric surgery clinics would be happy to give these books to people because they're going to need a daily dose of Bright support as they live after that surgery. And a lot of the people won't qualify for the surgery, and those are people that we want having this book. So that's a thought. You could give them to bariatric surgery clinics.
You could go to a Brightest gathering, I don't know if you know there's these Brightest groups. So if you look in Facebook for your area, your locale, wherever it is that you live, and then put the word Brightest after it, you might find that San Francisco Bay Area's Brightest, Pacific Northwest's Brightest, Utah's brightest, Minnesota's Brightest, whatever, some of these places are holding fairly sizable gatherings, and they have speakers and they get together. And Utah's Brightest is huge. Minnesota's Brightest is huge.
And you could commit to going to one of those events and bring your boxes of books, and then give everybody one or two. And then the message could be, "Bring this to your local library and give it there." It's a beautiful book. Someone sees this book in a library and they flip through it and they're like, "This is precious, and I don't want to eat the standard American diet. I want to eat differently with my food." And they read some of the little nuggets in here, then someone goes home with this book for a week or two from their library, and now suddenly they want to look into Bright Line Eating. You could commit to giving them to every local library within driving distance. Look up all of the Little Free Libraries in your area and give it there.
What were some of the other ideas? Oh, just the best one is save a bunch of them to give to people that you end up meeting through your life who have a struggle with their food, who don't want to eat the standard American diet and just have a book, then you can inscribe it and give it to them. So yeah, that's something you could do. Did I just lose my place? Oh, I just found it again. Is there anything else here I'm willing to say to you?
Oh yeah, so the leaderboard does come out today. That's cool. So we had some people buy batches of books and they're on a leaderboard right now, and if you're one of them, thank you. And I've called some of them because we're collecting phone numbers of them and just I want to get to know them and thank them. I'm not calling all of them. I'm on a trip right now and so forth, but I called this woman, Sue Smith, in England. She was at the top of the leaderboard at first. It was seven books that she'd bought. Now, the leaderboard's gone way up to 20 some odd books. But Sue Smith lives in England, and I was so glad that I talked with her. I had to speak with her again this morning to get permission. This morning, I was like, "I don't want to shoot this vlog, but maybe I'll talk about Sue Smith. I don't know what I'm going to talk about."
So I reached out to Sue Smith again and she answered, thank you God, and she gave me so much love and support. And she just basically said, she gave me a pep talk, is what she gave me. Sue Smith, thank you. She's like, "Susan, you're probably tender because of what happened last week and the week before and the blow-back you got." And I am tender. I don't know if you know this about me, I have an extremely tender heart. I am confident, but I am extremely tenderhearted. I get gutted by stuff really easily. And she's like, "You're probably tender from that." And she just gave me this sweet pep talk.
Sue Smith lives in England and she's lost 110 pounds with Bright Line Eating, and she's been keeping it off now. She started almost seven years ago, 110 pounds. She says, "I have a whole new life now." And she takes the Bright Line Eating wisdom to heart, that to keep it, you got to stay in gratitude and service. And that's what she does. And every morning, she and some other folks in Europe host a little accountability call for people in Europe. So it's at their timezone in the morning. And they're now reading this book together because when you order just one copy and you go to, what is it? Onthisbrightdaybook.com. Just one copy allows you to download the pages of the book for all of September and October. So they all have the readings of the book in their hot little hands right now, and they're reading it together in the morning and then discussing it.
She told me, "It's just sparking such beautiful discussion every morning." So the leaderboard is out. We're updating it periodically, not every day right now, but the dates that we update it are on the bottom of the leaderboard, so if you want to know when it gets updated, you can see that information. You get on the leaderboard by buying some books and going to onthisbrightdaybook.com and entering your information there. That's how we know you bought the books, because otherwise, we won't know. Any ties, the person who submitted that form first, tie goes to that person. The winner is the person who submitted it first.
Let's see. Anything else I'm willing to tell you? Oh, the contest ends Saturday, October 28th. That's the last day of the contest, all of it, the leaderboard, all of that. Oh, the leaderboard is at brightleaderboard.com. At the bottom of that page, that leaderboard page, you'll see some cool foods and different things. You might say, "Well, what's all that?" It's random social posts, but they're cool. We have this software that's taking anytime you post something on Instagram, you, anytime you post something on Instagram and use the hashtag #onthisbrightday in your Instagram post, our website sucks your post picture right up into our website. So you could post a picture of yourself with whatever, saying, "Hi," and you would get onto our leaderboard page. So that's cool. Look at the bottom of the leaderboard page. It's just a bunch of random people and their Instagram posts. They just use the hashtag #onthisbrightday.
So the leaderboard is for what? See here, I'm marketing again. Marketing, it's weird. Marketing from an inauthentic place is so smarmy. And we all feel it, when someone's trying to pitch us on something, and we just click on buy. Yuck. But when someone's passionate and they want to help, it lands totally differently. And so I'm struggling with the, how do I find that place sometimes? Sometimes it's just such a grind. What I really love is just helping people, but the universe has made it pretty darn clear to me that my path is not just helping people one-on-one, that that's not my path. And so then I'm trying to help people one-on-many. It's like this beast that's developed this whole life of its own.
Yeah, there's three... Can I even say this in a voice? There's three sections of the leaderboard. The top three people will get to come to Rochester, New York, and that'll be fun because that's one-on-one, me and three people. We're going to have a blast. I'm going to call them all in advance. We're going to craft our trip together. The top person will get all expenses paid. The next two will get invitations, if they can come and if they want to. And right now, to get into the top three doesn't cost much more in terms of buying books than a plane ticket. I have been on a Disney cruise. They're amazing and they are so expensive. If you look at a dream vacation for a family, it's so expensive.
And I guarantee you that the top three people who get to come to Rochester, New York, will not have spent anywhere near what someone spends to go on a Disney cruise, nowhere near. It is going to be the most economical if, to you, it's a dream vacation. Now, if it's not, then don't do it. But I know there are people, because they've told me that this would be a dream vacation for them. And we will do dream vacationy things. We will have a blast. So the top three people will get to come to Rochester. The top 20 people will get a signed nameplate. Sorry, five signed nameplates. So they can gift four copies to friends, the signed nameplate with a book, and then one of those nameplates will be just for them. I will inscribe it to them, and I'm going to have my team create a Google form so that people can enter a little bit about them like how they want me to address them, a little bit about them Bright journey, so I can write something personal to them.
And then what they can do is they can affix that name plate right in the front cover of the book and they will have their own Susan Peirce Thompson signed copy. So that's the top 20 people will get that. And then everyone who buys five books, and I just gave you a bunch of ideas of what to do with five books. Well, you keep one, and then four other books, put them in your local library, save a couple to give to friends who end up confiding in you that they're struggling with their food in some kind of way. Everyone who buys five books will get to join me for lunchtime lives during the week that the book is published. This is October 24th.
And I'm here at this Hay House Authors Mastermind and I've been lining up people to join me for those Lunchtime Lives. People like Ocean Robbins, you probably know who he is. He's the founder and CEO of the Food Revolution Network. You may or may not know that, probably more than anyone else in the world, he has been instrumental in getting Bright Line Eating out to the world. And we're going to share the whole story of that and just have a sweet Q and A time and share lunch with you. Also, Patty Gift, who's the head of Hay House. Hay House is the publisher of all my books, every single one of them, and Patty Gift is the Grand Poobah of Hay House, and we have a very interesting story to share. We're basically going to go back through memory lane and talk about the inception of Bright Line Eating and also about book publishing. If you have the notion that you might want to write a book, we'll take questions. It's going to be really sweet.
So Patty Gift, Lucinda Blumenfeld, who's my agent and the head of an incredible literary agency in Manhattan. And so she and I will get to tell our story of meeting and knowing each other. She's been my agent since the beginning. Nicola Kraus, who's a multiple New York Times Bestselling Author and my writing coach, will get to tell our story of how we met and so forth. And I'm missing one. Ashley Bernardi, who's my public relations person, so if you want to peek behind the scenes of how PR works and all that. So it's just going to be a whole behind the scenes story of Bright Line Eating and the history of it and this whole other side. The book Bright Line Eating was, of course, the whole point of all this. The original message was, "Write a book called Bright Line Eating."
It's so funny, I didn't want to shoot this vlog, it's now 20 minutes long. It's ridiculous. Anyway, so if you want to be invited to all of those Lunchtime Lives and to the announcement where we find out if we made the New York Times list and stuff, if you don't care about that, you don't want to do any of that, don't do it. Anyway, I will go out to dinner now with all these Hay House authors, these fancy pants people, and continue to wrestle, deeply wrestle with, how do I show up in the world doing this authentically? Can I stand it? I can stand it. Sometimes I love it.
What's meaningful? I think about that a lot. What needs to be left to the world in terms of Bright Line Eating? Am I doing it? Am I doing it right? Am I leading it well? Just it's a big responsibility. And there are a lot of people still suffering with their food. People watching this, you may be still suffering with their food. Am I serving you as well as I could be? Does doing this, is this the right thing to be doing? These vlogs, this marketing, this whatever? I don't think of my vlogs usually as marketing. They're just sharing information. But in book launch month, this was not easy to write this book and this needs to get into hands, so I really do take this as my job to get this out into the world. And if I could just see you in person and hand it to you and sign it and give it to you for free, that's how I would want to get it out into the world. But I can't do that to the probably 500 million people who need it, so what's the next best thing?
That's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
