My friend Jim Rohn, one of this lifetime’s greatest success teachers, says that if you follow any highly successful businessperson around for a week—if you can keep up—you’d see the mystery of his success solved. You’d say, “Well, it’s no wonder he’s so successful. Look at ALL the things he does.” In my experience, most people given such opportunity, also wind up saying, “Well, I would never do ALL that.” Not couldn’t. Wouldn’t. And most would definitely quit the first time they ran up against a really ugly and miserable set of circumstances, like the recent recession. And that is why only about 5% of the entire U.S. population earns over $250,000.00 a year. Not for lack of opportunity. Simply because they decide not to. Any other explanation is nonsense. And any attempt to re-distribute wealth by government hand to those whose decisions are incompatible with wealth and do not cause wealth is doomed to failure, as history has repeatedly demonstrated.
Yes, I Have Definite Political Opinions
I don’t think you can separate personal and political philosophy. I find almost all highly successful businesspeople who’ve created their own success stories from scratch share a very clear political viewpoint. I write about mine in a column published weekly at www.BusinessAndMedia.org and in a special content section at the DanKennedy.com site: DanKennedyPolitics.
It’s worth very seriously questioning whether or not your own decisions are compatible with success and are the kinds of decisions that cause success, and whether or not you are willing to make and live by these essential decisions.
Keeping Faith with Your Commitments
To succeed as an entrepreneur requires decision and determination—total, unwavering commitment. To keep faith with this commitment, you have to develop and embrace attitudes, habits, and behaviors that are markedly different from those of most of the people you’ve known. You have to cut down on time spent with people who are not supportive of your entrepreneurial ambitions. Time spent hanging around fearful people, doubtful people, skeptical people, people not themselves committed to successful achievement, can impair your ability to succeed.
You mean I have to change my friends?
Probably. And the books you read. And the television programs you watch. And a whole lot more. We cannot help being and becoming a product of the ideas we associate with most, of the books and magazines we read, the tapes we listen to, the TV we watch, and the people we spend time with.
As thick-skinned as I believe I am and as much of an independent thinker as I pride myself in being, I admit that my performance and determination vary in relationship to what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, and who I’m hanging around with. Earl Nightingale brilliantly summarized all this: “We become what we think about most.” If you are going to become an exceptionally successful entrepreneur, that is what you must think about most.
Another way to look at this is in terms of passion. The most successful entrepreneurs I know are passionately involved with entrepreneurship in general and their businesses in particular. They’re in love being with entrepreneurs, excited about their products or services, “on fire” with enthusiasm, and that gives them superhuman powers.
This is one very good argument for belonging to entrepreneur groups, coaching programs, and peer advisory groups, so you have regular contact and share ideas and information with like-minded entrepreneurs who validate, support, and encourage you. You can greatly accelerate your entrepreneurial success and decrease your aloneness, and isolation-related stress by associating with other progressive entrepreneurs. In such an environment, you are continually challenged by the others’ achievements and progress. The other members as well as a top-notch business coach running the group can call you on your B.S. You can derive personal motivation from recognition unavailable anywhere else—after all, who but kindred spirit entrepreneurs can understand and appreciate your making the difficult decision to axe a non-productive employee or your success with a new ad campaign? Being part of the right group of progressive, creative, and tough-minded entrepreneurs can make a huge difference.
You cannot immunize yourself against the influences of the ideas in the people you associate with. There is no vaccination to protect you from limiting, unproductive, antibusiness, or antisuccess thinking. For this reason, you must immerse yourself in associations that are in harmony with your goals and aspirations.
This doesn’t mean that you must socialize only with other entrepreneurs. I have friends who are college professors, corporate executives, actors, athletes, office workers, and so on, but I choose them carefully. They do not have negative attitudes about business people; they do have interesting ambitions within their careers or tied to others’ outside interests that can be stimulating. But, frankly, there are very few of these in my life. I call them “civilians,” and I imagine that I think of them much like a career military officer thinks of civilians. They cannot possibly understand me or what I do. Because my primary interests in life are business, success philosophy, and politics and theirs are pastimes that distract from such thinking, we have little as common ground. An enjoyable evening now and then, a trek to the theater together, a Super Bowl party, fine. Regular association, mindnumbing and tedious at best, harmful at worst.
GKIC Membership
GOOD NEWS! There are Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle™ Chapters meeting regularly in over 150 areas throughout the United States and Canada, facilitating exactly this kind of support for more than 10,000 entrepreneurs every month. You can find a Directory at DanKennedy.com, or if you take advantage of my Free Gift Offer on pages 272–273, and there is a Chapter in your area, you’ll automatically receive an invitation to a meeting.
Unfortunately, you are going to discover that the majority of nonentrepreneur civilians have a number of set-in-cement biases against and frustrations with you, the entrepreneur. Here are some of the big ones you’ll run up against.
ACCUSATION: You’re a Workaholic
Most entrepreneurs I know experience great conflicts between their commitment to business and other aspects of their lives: marriage, family, civic activities, and so on. Having two failed marriages in my background, I’m hypersensitive to this conflict, and I’m always working on ways to handle it more effectively. The fact—and it is fact—that the line between “work” and “play” is thoroughly blurred for the true entrepreneur, and the corollary fact that the entrepreneur’s business life is often, frankly, bluntly, more important to him than his personal and social life is a huge source of befuddlement, annoyance, and tension for those around him. If you read a lot of biographies of great entrepreneurs, you’ll find this a common thread. Read the Buffet bio The Snowball just as example. The vast majority of people casually familiar with Warren Buffet view him as a kindly, wise owl, an elder statesman, a pater familias for investors. But being married to him or a child raised in his household would, if this book is to be believed, give you a very different sense of the man.
It’s convenient and easy for others to label the determined, passionate entrepreneur as a workaholic—a diseased, neurotic addict guilty of neglecting non-work responsibilities, of not loving his or her spouse or family, of being a self-absorbed ass. It’s convenient and easy, but overly simplistic, and certainly not very helpful.
In reality, the constantly working entrepreneur may be saner and happier than the critics. Most people detest their jobs, yet they continue going to them day after day, month after month, year after year. They spend the lion’s share of their lives doing things they find boring and unfulfilling, but