Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (4 page)

In every biography, I recognized how each person had to become a master of their mentality in order to get out of the quicksand of their life. Key to that control was their ability to think and react as an individual, and not as a group, society, or trend dictated.

Using the same self-control, I have changed my mentality from one of poverty to that of a multimillionaire, and my lifestyle with it. I changed thoughts of expecting to fail to ones of anticipating success. I overcame issues of self-esteem to attract my soul mate. When I was twenty-nine, I also chose to ignore doctors who told me to “get my affairs in order,” which was their politically correct way of telling me I was about to die. Two days after surgery, I checked myself out of the hospital, and drove 200 miles to start a new job. The abdominal stitches had me bent double like an impression of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but as I stumbled around the new office, I claimed it was a soccer injury. That was more than twenty years ago. To escape the feeling of being in quicksand, controlling one’s mentality is the first essential step.

I began this part of the book with a quotation from Albert Einstein, one of my heroes. What fascinated me most about Einstein’s life were not his many scientific achievements, but his contributions to society. During the last twenty-two years of his life, while J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI conducted a top-secret campaign against him, he was actively and passionately involved in numerous struggles for social justice, especially antiracism or what he called “America’s Worst Disease.” At the time, Einstein’s outspoken support for those attacked by fascism abroad and McCarthyism at home often made front-page news, and he was vilified at every opportunity by a negative public relations campaign orchestrated from Washington.

All this was on top of being condemned by his scientific peers as a lunatic, before technology caught up and his theories were validated. Like Madame C.J. Walker, Samuel Colt, and Audrey, Albert Einstein was a
master of mentality
, and I offer this definition and equation in his honor:

Mentality is defined as a habitual mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and react to situations. The mentality equation has three elements:

    
   
The situation
(what we see, hear, smell, taste, sense, and what the media or people in our lives can make us feel about any of that),

    
   
The thought
(triggered by how we are made to feel), and

    
   
The reaction
(how we choose to discharge the emotional thought).

The quality of our thoughts is important, and books on positive thinking tend to stop there. It is, however, the next step that determines a path of success or frustration: how we react to what we think. Under normal circumstances, we don’t exert any control over what we see and hear from the people around us or through the media. Our thoughts tend to be triggered by an automatic emotional response to what we see and hear. Then we react, and for most people it is habitual.

If you have not managed to control any of the sensory input or the thoughts that they trigger, then you let your reaction be influenced by the situation. You have placed responsibility for your life in the minds, opinions, and influence of the outside stimuli. They tell you that you have six months to live, and you die. They tell you the economy is in free fall and you decide it is the wrong time to start the business of your dreams. They tell you you’ll soon qualify for assisted living, so you determine that you are too old to go back to college.

To get out of the quicksand, you have to filter what you allow into your mind so that your decisions belong to you as an individual, and not to the fashion or trend of any group. You must choose your own thoughts and the reactions you have to them. You must become an individual again, something most people have not experienced since birth.

The moment we are born is the most pure in our entire lives. We have seen and heard nothing. Therefore, we have nothing to contemplate or to react to. We are born an individual, and with unlimited potential. One second later, a well-meaning giant with a hand the size of a spade smacks us on the bottom. It is commonly taught that we don’t feel pain in the first two weeks of life, but still it startles us. Because of the rude awakening, and the fact that we realize in the same moment that we are away from the warmth and security of the womb, we react. To our parents, our cry is the greatest sound in the universe (until that first sleepless night at home!).

Most parents do not know the secrets of success, so our newborn state of mentality is unguarded. Like a paper towel soaking up water, we absorb everything we sense in our environment. On the one hand, we learn quickly. On the other, we cannot filter anything. We take in the feelings and moods, the opinions and reactions, of those around us. Our state of mind fills up quickly, and most psychologists agree that our mentalities change very little after the age of five. We quickly cease to be individual as we conform to the family around us.

As we age, we usually develop the same habits, and react the same way to outside stimuli, as those we are associated with, such as our parents, school friends, coworkers, or sports and television idols. We mimic their behavior and take on the same values as the groups to which we now belong. We are attracted and repulsed by similar things. The result is that we continually seek experiences that reinforce our learned group behavior and beliefs.

We are encouraged to be team players in a culture of democracy in which the decision or victory goes to the person with the
most votes or highest score. In business, we find ourselves in an endless round of meetings in which consensus is the goal, and the lone dissenter is looked upon as a troublemaker. Our culture today shows little tolerance for the genius or the singular voice or anyone who might react unconventionally. Before long, most people will lose all sense of self.

The American dream, however, was not built by a think tank. The country grew on the backs of pioneers. Individuals, armed with little more than an idea and an unshakeable will to survive, achieved unprecedented success in a fresh, new country.

You might be reading this book on a device invented by Apple Inc., a company that is valued at more than $500 billion today, as I type these words on another of their life-changing inventions. Apple’s success is attributed to the pioneering spirit of Steven Paul Jobs.

Steve was put up for adoption just after he was born. His adoptive parents named him and brought him up in California. When he was eleven, Steve simply refused to go back to school because he was bored, and his parents moved him to a different school that offered electronics classes. He never conformed to what the world expected of him. He developed a reputation as a loner and had what his teachers called “an odd way of looking at things.” He had issues with some teachers, who could not accept that he did not want to fit in with the class mentality that challenged nothing being taught to them. Like Einstein’s teachers thought of him, Jobs’s high-school teachers considered him disruptive.

In a 2007 interview with
PC World
, his partner Steve Wozniak revealed that they first met during Wozniak’s college years, while Jobs was in high school. “We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world, we were both smart enough to think things up for ourselves and not have followed the common disregard of the day, like counterculture.
Steve was more a part of the counterculture thinking and I was really disclosed to it.”

This individualism pattern followed Jobs into the workplace, where his manager at his first company, Atari, considered him “a nightmare to work with.” When Jobs and Wozniak developed their idea of a personal computer, both Hewlett-Packard and Atari rejected their idea as ridiculous.

Had Steve Jobs accepted the common opinion that surrounded him, who knows what would have become of him? History shows that he had an unshakeable belief in his own mind.

This individual went on to change the lives of a billion people. Had he conformed to group mentality or peer pressure as a child, we might never have heard of him, and you would not be reading this on your mobile electronic device.

More than once in my life, I have also been called “a nightmare to work with.” I have been told by dozens of people that I had my head in the clouds. Employers have reprimanded me for not toeing the company line. My peer group has ridiculed my lack of experience and unique business models. Yet here I am, a serial entrepreneur, writing this book. I do not dare put
myself in the same pioneering bracket as a Madame Walker or a Steve Jobs, but it has been a blast of a trip just the same.

One of the secrets has been to control my mentality. It might all sound as if we either have to become a genius or a spiritual master. We do not. Reclaiming mentality is simple and anyone can do it, starting right now.

Most people ignore a book’s introduction. We pick it off the shelf, form an opinion of the title, read the back cover, and scan a few sentences of chapter one. The process of deciding whether or not to read it takes about eleven seconds. With that in mind, I kept my introduction short. If you skipped it, let me reiterate two key points.

The number three has been significant throughout human history. It is the tripartite nature of the world as heaven, earth, and waters or the three phases of the moon. It is human as body, soul, and spirit. Whether it’s the Holy Trinity or the Yin-Yang-Tao, any person can understand and apply a concept through an appreciation of three simple steps.

Think of a television. It is a complex thing, but if we understand the three simple steps of the on/off switch, channel button, and volume control, we can all have an enjoyable viewing experience. We don’t have to become expert in the science of fluorescence.

So it is with understanding the concept of success. Everything in life can be understood enough to be useful to us when it is broken down into a few key principles. We need neither the
detail nor the expert knowledge to get the benefits from a subject. When it comes to success, I believe you need to understand only three things.

The smell of a freshly baked loaf of bread excites me. (Well, different things excite us as we age!) Learning a lot about individual ingredients is useful to a professional chef, but I just like to eat fresh bread. I don’t need to understand the chemistry that takes place in the oven in order to satisfy my hunger. So too you don’t need to grasp anything deeper than the need to control the inputs into your state of mind in order to pull yourself out of the quicksand.