Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (20 page)

I picked up some mementoes and pushed them into my coat pockets. One of Harry’s ashtrays, Audrey’s favorite snow globe that I gave her as a Christmas gift when I was eight. As I stepped outside, however, I placed them all back inside the door. For me, it was time for closure.

When I returned to the United States, I finally felt ready to start my own company. I recall the morning of my fortieth birthday. Something odd happens to every man on that day. The night before, the last of my thirty-ninth year, I had retired to bed as a young, fit, trim man. The next day, I woke up looking as if I was six months pregnant. How does that happen? Sometime in the night, a fat fairy casts a spell and there it is . . . middle-age girth. Its effect is to make us stop feeling invincible and start to think about our financial future.

Money had never been a goal of mine. Travel was my main aim, and the high salary and benefits I earned along the way was something of a bonus. Now I realized that I needed to apply the three simple steps to my financial independence.

The media and people in my environment were keen to accuse me of insanity for wanting to start a business during a recession. I made plenty of use of my mentality shield, and filtered out the television news. Still, I could not clarify in my mind what sort of business I wanted it to be.

I was thinking too hard, whereas stillness is the opposite of that effort and exactly what is needed to solve puzzles. It was my wife who told me to stop trying to work it out. “Keep taking quiet time,” she reminded me, “and the answer will find you.”

The more we struggle, the more we get stuck. This is true in any aspect of the application of these steps. We sometimes get caught up in trying to solve puzzles, when what we should do is plug into the matrix and relax. We don’t need to know how something is going to work out. We simply need to send out the desire, and let life fill in the details.

My wife and I were leasing a home in Florida at the time and house-hunting during our weekends. The three simple steps apply to all aspects of our lives, and finding our dream home was something we had our hearts and minds set on.

One Saturday, we spent a few hours driving aimlessly around some neighborhoods. Tired, we decided to call it a day and head home. Admiring the setting sun, I missed my exit on the road, did a U-turn, and got completely lost. We found ourselves in a neighborhood that was not on our target list because we had assumed it to be out of our price range. Slowing down to admire some of the lovely homes, a front door opened, and the owner walked across her front yard to push a “For Sale by Owner” sign into the lawn at exactly the time I drove by the house.

An hour later, we had agreed on a price. It was a picture-perfect home and almost exactly what I had in my imagination. The couple who owned the house worked from home. The husband had lost his job, and they had decided that morning to sell up and move back to be nearer to their parents in North Carolina. The woman had just returned from a store with the newly purchased “For Sale” sign. The sale went through quickly, and the sellers were so kind they even threw a neighborhood welcome party for us before we had closed.

The house backed onto open water where dolphins played at sunset. For taking quiet time, I kayaked ten minutes across the shallow bay to a sandbar surrounded by mangroves. A nature preserve one mile away was a great place to charge up my connection to the matrix. It was there I made another commitment to change, this time to start my own company.

With my current company, I worked from home but commuted to the head office in Minnesota every couple of weeks. Bob, the CEO of the company, was trying hard to get me to relocate to Minneapolis. I liked the city and the people, but it was where we had spent our first winter in America. Neither of us had enough body hair to cope with it. So, this regular airline commute was a compromise.

Part of my role was to build sales and marketing teams to launch new pharmaceutical brands. I had to assess market potential.
That can be tricky when a drug is the first in its class, and no one really knows how doctors will respond. I had a positive track record of forecasting sales for four previous launches.

For the fifth launch, the company was excited. My experience warned me that most of the employees working on a project tend to buy into their own story. Everyone is so keen for the success upon which their jobs depend that some partial blindness to facts can creep into the culture. We had a classic situation brewing in Minnesota, with everyone believing the fifth launch would be the blockbuster to make everyone happy.

In a routine press release to shareholders, Bob had announced the market forecast for the new drug was a half billion dollars in its first year. On a difficult commute, I had to come up with a way of letting him know my estimate for the first year was for only $5 million in annual sales. There was nothing wrong with the drug, but I knew physicians would likely only use it in very severe cases of the disease it was designed to treat and that sales would take many years to approach the levels Bob expected.

When everyone else had left for home, I sat him down with a coffee and presented my numbers. He paled. I argued that the gap between our estimates was enormous, and even if I were slightly wrong, shareholders would be crushed. It was time for damage control and a concerted public relations effort to lower the street’s expectations.

Bob believed his own numbers were the more accurate. He asked for evidence of my assumptions, and I had to admit that I was going more on instinct than facts. His information came from a paid consultant, but the consultant had just fed back to him what he thought the CEO wanted to hear. Bob added that if I could not achieve half a billion, then he could always find someone else who would.

I called my wife from my hotel later that evening. I was halfway through explaining how I felt about it all, when she cut me
off in mid-rant. “You didn’t take quiet time this morning, did you?” she accused. I explained how I had to get an early flight. “You should have gotten up earlier. That’s what you tell everyone else to do.” She added that when I take quiet time, I am always calm in a crisis and confident that whatever is happening is part of the way of the winding staircase. She was right, and I admitted it. From time to time, we all slip back into the old habits. This is why I say these three steps are simple but never easy.

I was booked into a chain-brand hotel in the city. No matter what part of the world you happen to be in, every room in this hotel chain looks the same. I usually stay in boutique hotels that at least have gardens or views so I can keep plugged into the matrix, but this trip had been arranged by someone else at short notice.

A few miles away was a Wellness Center, situated on the edge of the scenic Minnetonka wetlands. Primarily a spa in a serene setting, it offers nutritional and lifestyle guidance for people who want to lose weight and live healthier. The therapists take care of their clients without judgment and also work on the spiritual and energy disturbances they believe underlie a tendency toward obesity. It attracts people from all over the country and has uniquely styled bedrooms for those who choose to stay on site. Years before, I had learned that when all the rooms are not taken, they can be reserved by non-members, just like a hotel room. I had stayed there several times and found it a place to plug powerfully into the matrix. I used to take some good-natured ribbing from my peers about it.

I called and found a room was available. When I arrived, the place was just about shut down for the night. Other than the security guard, I appeared to have the building to myself.

The bedrooms are on the second story. At the end of the corridor is a staircase that winds up a tower to a meditation room. The spa believes meditation can help obese people in many
healthful ways. The circular room has floor-to-ceiling windows, affording views over marshland. Before turning in for the night, I sat up there for a couple of hours. I reiterated my desire to start my own company and took quiet time a little late in the day.

I rose early and repeated my trip to the tower room. The spiraling climb reminded me that all good things in my life go the way of the winding staircase. Then I grabbed a healthy breakfast before heading back to the office.

The atmosphere in the office was tense. Word was out that Bob was mad with me. There is no such thing as winning an argument, especially with your boss. The Spanish have a lovely saying for this: “When someone argues with a fool, it is hard to tell the difference.” Most people stayed clear of me, as if I had become contagious. I rechecked my market assumption. If anything, I felt I was being overly optimistic and even $5 million in annual sales would take a lot of effort. I looked for support from other executives but soon realized I was alone on this.

I went back to see Bob in his office. Neither of us held onto anger, and even in the heat of our battle, there was still a mutual respect present between us. I told him I accepted that he was in a difficult position. If he could not accept my forecast, I would step aside so he could find a replacement quickly. I offered to help that person with a transitional period because I still wanted the company to succeed. I was for their success, even if I could not be part of it. He accepted my resignation. We negotiated a fair settlement and an amicable parting.
*

I felt the greatest peace, and the decision felt right intuitively. I got to the airport well ahead of my flight time. The Minneapolis
airport is a fine one if you have time on your hands. I had an unhealthy lunch to counterbalance the spa breakfast, then killed some time with window-shopping.

I was at the foot of an escalator, just about to head up to the VIP lounge, when the idea for the perfect business hit me. It just popped into my head. It was not a single thread or a vague notion. The whole concept flashed into my mind. It seemed so obvious that I wanted to hit myself for not coming up with it sooner. I remember laughing out loud and receiving puzzled looks from strangers standing around me. These moments of insight happen all the time when you practice the three steps in this book and are a thrilling experience every time.

Immediately to my right was a small bookstore. Something drew me to it. In the business section was a single copy of a book, so small that I was surprised it had not fallen behind a shelf. It was about why many small businesses fail within a year. I bought the only copy and devoured it on the flight home.

I was fired up when I landed. I had sketched out a business plan on the back of a napkin. The business model had never been attempted before in my industry. I needed to raise investment, but had no connections in that world. I also needed to convince my ex-CEO, the one I just fell out with, to let me purchase one of the company’s assets.

I never ask how something can be achieved. I set the target and let life fill in the details. On the drive home from the airport, I tried to work out how to explain all of this to my wife. I planned a dinner and rehearsed what I would say. We would need to sell our dream home, which we had only been living in for a short while. As I entered the house, she took one look at me and said, “You’re starting your own business!” She is always a step ahead of me. A little abashed, I mumbled about maybe having to sell the house. “Okay,” she said. “Now, what do you fancy for dinner?”

Through dinner, we talked about the idea, the structure, and what I wanted to achieve for patients. We both got fired up, and it was well into the early hours before we retired to bed.

This concludes Step Two. When I have taught these principles to individuals and groups, I usually find that they readily adopt Step One and Three. In those steps, it is very easy to connect the dots between something good showing up in their lives, and a change they made in their mentality or goal setting. It is harder to trace the link between taking quiet time and reconnecting with nature, and the great idea that just popped into your head while you were changing the oil in the car. It takes time to rewire those neurons, and it takes time for your mentality to be sufficiently under control for the ideas to surface with the energy required to get a reaction from you. Stick with Step Two, and you’ll never regret it.

I can only encourage you to make this Step Two a consistent part of a new routine. Not even my closest family and friends knew I did this, but it has catapulted my adventure forward. Other people who have done this consistently tell me it has changed their lives just as dramatically and permanently for the better.

I do understand the challenges of trying to form new habits, especially when I am encouraging individualism. There is no peer group pressure to make you stick to it. Please do use
www.threesimplesteps.com
as a helping hand. Consider it the peer support group for those times when you need a little encouragement. We all need it from time to time.