Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (5 page)

After I started my first company, there was not enough money in the business to justify drawing a wage. I subsidized myself by doing a couple of consulting projects on the side. For one, George Rathmann was the company chairman, and in 2002 I was invited to meet him for an interview. In 1999, here’s how
Forbes
magazine described George Rathmann:

Over dinner, he grilled me more than I had expected. I wanted to impress him but seemed to be failing. Then his wife arrived as we were selecting desserts. With a twinkle in her eye, she asked, “Has he been giving you a tough time? He said he was going to be hard on you to see what you are made of! I felt sorry for you, so thought I’d rescue you before you get indigestion.”

With his cover blown, the interrogation became a general discussion on the secrets to business success. When I was getting into detail about plans for my company’s future, he held up his hand to stop me. “You don’t know what business you are in until you get into the business!” he said. “Don’t get bogged down in the detail. Just get started. The rest works itself out.” It is one of the best pieces of business advice I have ever received.

In the same spirit I offer it to you here. I may provide a lot of detail in the three simple steps. Take George Rathmann’s advice, and once you get the concept, just apply it without worrying too much about the details of how or why it works.

The second piece of good news is that only small changes to mentality are required to make giant improvements in your quality of life. The metaphor I use to understand this is to think about a pool table that is neatly set up for a new game. The solid and striped balls rest in formation at the far end of the table, and have little to no purpose when they are resting. Your intention, however, is to turn the rack of inert balls into something different. The cue is your mentality, and the white ball’s movement is the reaction to your thoughts.

The very slightest change in angle between the tip of the cue (mentality) and the surface of the white ball has a vastly different impact on the outcome. Make the wrong angle, as I sometimes do when starting a game, and the white ball flies off the table,
while the rack of balls remains untouched. I am left feeling frustrated. If, however, I change the angle of the cue only slightly, the white ball smashes the rack of colored balls all over the table. It is a dramatic difference in outcome from a very small change in the angle of mentality, and the success of it feels fulfilling.

So too it is with changing your quality of life with these principles. Change a little and you can change a lot. In learning to control your mentality, you do not have to wear a purple kaftan and drink herbal tea all day. You simply have to make small, often subtle alterations to the way you think and react.

When you are sitting in front of your bank’s lending officer, who is challenging your lack of business experience for the venture you want to start with borrowed money, how you react to the criticism or challenge determines whether you get the loan or not. It sounds obvious, but I have steered clear of investing in dozens of bright ideas simply because the person who was presenting to me reacted defensively or negatively to something I asked. Investors more often invest in the jockey (entrepreneur) than the horse (idea). There is no shortage of horses, but winning jockeys are hard to find.

Like it or not, there is a thing that can be called The Millionaire Mentality. There is a frame of mind which puts an individual a long way ahead on the road to success.

J. PAUL GETTY

When asked her opinion on a particular conflict, Mother Theresa said, “I am not
against
war. I am
for
peace.” In that marvelous
statement is the distillation of a dozen subjects from quantum physics to theology, and it is the essence of this first step. If you read the rest of this first step, and grasp nothing more than the meaning of this sentence, you would have enough knowledge to make a big difference in your life.

Yes, it starts to sound like feel-good ideology, but some of the world’s most hardened industrialists promoted this mental imperative long before any self-help guru caught on to it. Andrew Carnegie was forced by poverty to seek employment as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, earning $1.20 a week. He rose to be the world’s wealthiest man with a personal fortune equivalent to $7 billion in today’s value. He exhorted man (it was a macho world back in the 1850s) “to aspire to individualism, to ignore all that was missing in his environment, and to seek only improvement in
what he wants
.”

We must change our thoughts from being
against
things we don’t want to being
for
things we do want. It is that simple, just like I promised it would be. That is the subtle change in angle of the cue to the ball, and the outcome will astound you. It is, however, far from easy because it is a lifelong lifestyle change. To introduce that small change in our lives with consistency so that it becomes habitual, we first need to understand some of the key properties of thoughts and words. Understanding these properties will allow you to be more mindful and skillful in handling your mentality in critical situations.

Many teachers of success theory base their philosophies on the premise that everything in life begins with a thought. They miss a key part of the creative process.
Nothing
is what comes first. Everything starts from nothing, including a thought. This may
sound odd coming from the mind of a hard-nosed businessman. It is, however, a self-evident and scientific fact. Every successful business comes from nothing. Every creative idea springs from nowhere. Before somebody had the idea, it did not exist.

In my own experiences, the ideas for companies and investments popped into my head quite out of nowhere. It is important to realize this fact because in most cases people are just too busy to notice. They could pop up while a mother is tearing her hair out getting the kids ready for school. The ideas never stood a chance, crushed by the anxiety of racing to meet the school bus. Perhaps they arise while watching television, but the images of a Wall Street crash will destroy them before the thinker even notices.

In my own cases of good ideas, they remained in my head, and became reality only because I had learned to have stronger control of my mentality. The world screamed through the television at me that it was a crazy time to start something new, and everyone I knew, other than my wife, didn’t think I was capable of succeeding. Without knowing the techniques to control mentality, the ideas would have been crushed in moments.

The concept of nothing is difficult for us to compute mentally. As soon as we try to conceptualize it, we give it identity and form, and it ceases to be nothing. In essence, we destroy it by thinking about it. So let’s not try too hard. The only thing to contemplate, and the only reason I make the distinction, is that because everything comes from nothing, then in nothing must be all of potential. The closer, therefore, we can get our minds to a state of nothing, the more potential for success we would have. We will come back to this in step two.

A thought is a thing that you created out of the nothing. Thoughts can be identified by modern imaging techniques as waves of electrical energy flowing in the brain. Having been created, thoughts have three fascinating properties:

        First, we must accept that all things have energy, which can be scientifically identified as a frequency of vibration at a quantum level, or a small footprint in the ether, or indeed, waves of electrical impulses.

        Over the past three decades,
string theory
has increasingly captured the imagination of physicists. Hundreds of researchers around the world now hammer away at its equations every day. They consider it the greatest step forward in science since Albert Einstein and Max Planck introduced the key ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics about a century ago. It is what Einstein described as “like reading the mind of God.”

        String theory holds that everything in the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings of energy. In this view, every particle in your body, every speck of light that lets you read these words, and every force of gravity that pushes you into your chair is just a variant of this one fundamental entity. The denser something is, the lower its vibration, and the smaller its footprint.

        On our world, humans interpret a stone as being denser than a tree, and vibrating at a slower frequency. A tree is denser than a human. After nothingness, a thought is the least dense thing in our experience. Therefore, its first intriguing property is that it has the highest energy of anything we can conceptualize. It can kill or cure, invent a nuclear weapon or a romantic moment.

        The Law of Conservation of Energy is a law of physics that states the total amount of energy in an isolated system (such as a thought) remains constant over time. It cannot be destroyed, and it does not deplete if we simply
forget we had it. Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that mass is energy, and the two are interchangeable. Energy becomes mass and vice versa. A thought has no other role than to try to become its physical equivalent (mass). Therefore, because their energy remains conserved, the reality of your life experience today is the result of the thoughts you emitted in your life up to now, regardless of whether you remember having them. You may not accept that accountability right now, but I hope by the end of this book you will both understand and accept that your current experience is the result of prior thoughts and your reaction to them.

        The third, and somewhat disturbing, property of a thought is that it has no consciousness with which to assess the merits of itself. The thought itself does not think. It does not judge itself as good or bad. It simply exists as an isolated system. Therefore, all thoughts, whether we consider them good or bad ones to have, contain equal power to become reality.

        Ah, there’s the rub. Every thought eventually becomes its own experience, energy converted into matter, without considering if that is good or bad for us. This is why control of mentality is critical to your success. Whatever you are
against
becomes your experience, and you get extra helpings of what you did not want: more dead-end job, more stupid boss, and more boredom. Whatever you are
for
, more of that comes your way. The only solution is to have more
for
thoughts than
against
thoughts, and to make those
for
thoughts bigger. That is the simple lifestyle change required to control mentality.

Lincoln scholar Douglas L. Wilson wrote: “To approach Lincoln’s presidency from the aspect of his writing is to come to grips with the degree to which his pen, to alter the proverb, became his sword, arguably his most powerful presidential weapon.” He noted that President Lincoln “responded to almost every important development during his presidency, and to many that were not so important, with some act of writing. Every word spoken, every line written was carefully mapped out.”

Theodore C. Blegen wrote, in a study of Lincoln’s writings: “He respected the power of words, and he wrote and spoke with clarity. He was able to put profound thoughts simply. He was sincere and earnest. He had both dignity and humor. He could rise to a lofty eloquence that has not been surpassed in the history of oratory. His language was pungent.”

When not in control of our mentality, our immediate reaction to a thought is usually to issue words, whether texted, written, or verbalized. We may react in other ways such as kicking a wall, crying, or laughing, but most times the habitual reaction issues in words. When we are emotional, the tongue can react like a semi-automatic weapon in the hands of a poltergeist. It is an issue for us because all words immediately trigger images.