When he was 25, Jim Rohn had pennies in his pocket, no money in
the bank and creditors calling. He was straight off an Idaho farm,
clerking in a store, and didn't have much planned for the
future. Then Rohn met Earl Shoaff—an entrepreneur who had
made a fortune in vitamins—and Shoaff told him his future
would look exactly like his recent past . . . unless he made some
big changes.
Like what? For starters, Shoaff told him he had to face the fact
that it wasn't the government or taxes or competition that was
keeping him down. What was? Rohn's own thinking about success:
"My philosophy was all wrong," says Rohn. "I was
preventing myself from succeeding."
So Rohn set about discarding his old thinking and adopting new
disciplines for sharpening his skills and goals. "Do
that," said Shoaff, "and you'll make
millions."
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Guess what? Shoaff was right. By age 31, Rohn had left clerking
to become a top-flight salesman for Shoaff—and he had earned
his first million. Rohn was on his way.
That was more than three decades ago, and today, Rohn is a
staple on the motivational speaking circuit. But in an era where
positive-thinking proponents are a dime a dozen, Rohn swims against
the current by teaching the tough-love formula he learned from
Shoaff. "It worked for me," he says, "and that
formula for success works today just as it did yesterday."
Here, Rohn—creator of the videotape How to Have Your
Best Year Ever—offers no easy answers, no quick rides to
prosperity. But give him a close read, and you just may learn the
secrets to the successes you dream of at night.
Entrepreneur: You say we have the ability to design our
future. What about outside forces we can't control-such as
competition, government regulations and so forth?
Jim Rohn: We tend to blame whatever happens to us on
those external things, but we need to take personal responsibility.
I used to say, "I sure hope things will change." Then I
learned from my mentor, Earl Shoaff, that the only way things would
change for me is when I changed.
We cannot change the circumstances, but we can change what we
do. Either you design your future or somebody else will design it
for you-and guess what they may have done for you? Not much. The
ability to design our future is in our hands, if we wish it to
be.
Entrepreneur: What's the key factor in determining
our future?
Rohn: It's your philosophy, the sum total of what you
know—that's your guidance system. Unless we are exposed
to ideas that let us expand and refine our guidance system, we will
get stuck with the system that was handed to us. If we learn from
our experiences, other people's experiences, books and
seminars, we can expand our guidance system. That helps us discard
errors we had been making in the past and take on new disciplines
for the future.
When I met my mentor at age 25, I had been working six years,
but I was broke. Within the next six years, I was rich. What made
the difference? Simply this: Correcting my old errors and setting
up new disciplines. Mr. Shoaff told me to read, and I did—not
trash but books full of information that I needed to know about
sales, management, financial planning and more. He told me to take
classes, and I did. And that's how I changed my philosophy.
But how can you think about changing unless someone presents you
with alternative thinking? You won't change where you are
overnight, but overnight you can change the direction in which you
are going.
Entrepreneur: You have said that we can change our lives
in a day, and in fact, you provide the prescription for doing so.
What's the starting point?
Rohn: Disgust. Disgust is a negative emotion, but it can
have a powerful impact on that day you become disgusted with being
on your knees looking for pennies. It's the day when something
clicks for you—and it can click for any of us.
One day years ago, a Girl Scout came to my door and asked if I
would buy some cookies. I didn't have the money, so I lied to
her and said, "I already bought lots of boxes." After she
walked away, I said to myself, "I don't want to live like
this. How low can I get—lying to a Girl Scout?" That was
a turning point for me.
Entrepreneur: Nowadays many of us have that kind of
experience, and afterward we decide to "affirm" ourselves
into prosperity by saying things like "I am living a wealthy,
successful life." Does that work?
Rohn: Affirmations without disciplines are the beginning
of delusion. I believe in affirmations if they are true. If you are
broke, the best thing to affirm is "I am broke." Put that
up on the refrigerator and see it every day until it becomes
powerful enough to prompt you into a life change.
Until you see the truth about your condition, positive thinking
won't work. Listening to thousands of pre-conscious,
subconscious, high-tech affirmations will not help. All you have to
say is "I am not where I want to be in life, and something is
wrong. What? Something is wrong with my philosophy." Once you
understand that, your life can totally change.
Entrepreneur: To start a life change, don't we first
need to absorb a healthy dose of motivation?
Rohn: For 25 years, I have debated with motivational
speakers who say we should start [changing a person's life] by
building motivation. But I say if you are on the wrong track and
you get motivated, you'll just get to disaster quicker.
The first step is for you to be unhappy about where you are and
to accept the blame. This is a traumatic decision to come to, but
once you recognize you need to do the new disciplines to make
changes in your life, you can get motivated. But just walking
around telling yourself "I'm terrific, and I'm getting
better"—that's not going to help.
Entrepreneur: What do you mean by "do the new
disciplines"?
Rohn: Doing a discipline is trying things that lead to
progress, to productivity. For example, a discipline might be
taking a class one night a week to develop a new skill. Or reading
a book a week, listening to tapes, making cold calls, creating a
financial plan. All these are disciplines.
Discipline means we don't let go of the things we know we
should be doing—we do them! Disciplines are the miracle
workers. Knowledge not invested in disciplines is wasted.
Entrepreneur: Where do we learn our disciplines?
Rohn: Most of us pick up our disciplines from the people
who surround us. I teach people to ask themselves: "Who am I
around? What are they doing to me? Is it OK?" To start the
process of change, we may need to disassociate from some of the
people we know, and we also need to expand our associations by
finding people of value and spending more time with them. You want
to be around people who have turned pennies into fortunes.
Entrepreneur: Should we avoid people who have failed?
Rohn: Not entirely. There are some people with whom you
want limited contact. In fact, I teach that for proper learning,
you should talk to the failures as well as the successes. It's
too bad failures don't give seminars. It would be great to hear
from someone who really messed up a business.
Entrepreneur: Isn't one of your key teachings that
failure befalls us not as a result of a major catastrophe but
because of a series of little neglects?
Rohn: That's all failure is. Neglect starts as an
infection; if we don't take care of it, it becomes a disease.
Here's the formula for failure: Failure is a few errors in
judgment repeated every day. Success, on the other hand, is simply
the natural consequence of consistently applying basic
fundamentals.
Entrepreneur: Let's go back to that life-changing
day. After we feel disgust, what do we need next?
Rohn: The desire to change. You have to want it bad
enough to do it. A great mystery is why some have the desire and
others don't. I've also known people in whom the desire was
suppressed for years, and one day, suddenly, it's there.
Once you have the desire, get working. That's the next
step-taking action. Since I was 25 years old, nobody has had to say
to me "When are you going to get going?" Once you have
the desire, you see rest as a necessity, not an objective. When you
see rest as an objective, you haven't learned that the great
delight in life isn't rest, it's productivity—and
productivity only happens when you have the disciplines.
Entrepreneur: On that life-changing day, what else do we
need?
Rohn: Resolve. That means saying "I will do it in
spite of (whatever) until I succeed. I will keep doing the
disciplines."
Recognize, too, that your battle often is within yourself.
It's the whispers in your mind that tell you to relax, to let
that task go without doing-just for today. Resolve is the turning
point where you just say, "I will do it."
Entrepreneur: How do we maintain resolve in the face of
obstacles?
Rohn: Paying the price is easy when the promise is clear
and powerful. True happiness is making steady progress toward
defined goals. You won't get there all at once. But if you are
making reasonable progress, that's the recipe for happiness.
And as you make progress, your resolve grows.
Entrepreneur: What's the secret to goal-setting?
Rohn: I teach a simple process: Decide what you want,
write it down, and regularly check off the steps you're taking
toward your goal. That's simple, but success is usually the
result of doing simple stuff.
Ask yourself, "What do I want? What skills do I have to
develop to get there? How will I do it? What disciplines do I need
to follow?"
Entrepreneur: You also teach that we should make it a
discipline to regularly reflect on what's happened to us.
Rohn: Reviewing your experiences makes them more valuable
for the future. I call it "running the tapes again." You
see the highs and the lows, what you've done, and what you need
to do.
At the end of every day, take a few minutes. At the end of every
week, take a few hours. At the end of every month, take half a day.
At the end of every year, take a weekend. We all need some solitude
to think about who we're seeing, what we're doing, what
went right, what went wrong. Reflection helps to lock the
experiences in your mind so you can draw on them in the future.
Entrepreneur: What do you tell entrepreneurs who say they
understand what you are talking about but they're too busy?
Rohn: You cannot be too busy to reflect. This is the time
when you will come up with new ideas and refinements of existing
ideas that will let you double or triple your productivity. If you
don't take that kind of time, it's easy to stay on the
track you're on and to miss some really big stuff.
Entrepreneur: Why do you advise entrepreneurs to work
even harder on personal development than on business?
Rohn: Income seldom exceeds personal development. There
may be a time where you have a little good fortune and your income
soars beyond your level of development, but in time it will come
back down. That's why you need the discipline to read that
book, to take that class.
An entrepreneur, in particular, needs to learn a variety of
skills. Just a tiny refinement of your thinking can multiply your
results. If you don't do it—if you don't
study—you may be missing huge chunks of money and
satisfaction.
Entrepreneur: When we're making progress on the road
to success, what pitfalls should we look out for?
Rohn: The twin killers of success are greed and
impatience. The movie "Wall Street" told us greed is
good, but it isn't. Greed means working toward something at the
expense of others. True ambition, which is good, means working
toward something by serving others. Help enough people get what
they want, and you will get whatever you want.
As for impatience, that's being unwilling to wait for the
process to unfold. If you've only been at the disciplines for a
week and you give them up because you are impatient, you've
aced yourself out of what could have been your fortune.
Picture the farmer who plants his seeds and, a few days later,
is out in the field saying "Where's my crop?" Of
course the farmer is a fool, but how many of us forget that it
takes time to build a great company? That's something every
entrepreneur needs to understand.
Entrepreneur: When you say "This stuff is
easy," do you mean it's easy to understand?
Rohn: And to do. The key is to not neglect what's
easy. Is reading a book hard? Taking a class? Ask a person why he
or she neglects the easy stuff, and you'll never hear a good
answer. If there's something we should do and we don't do
it, whose fault is that? Nobody's but our own.
Anybody, anywhere can take the steps toward success. Success
isn't magical or mysterious. It's easy if we consistently
follow the disciplines. As time unfolds, add more disciplines. As
you accomplish one goal, go for the next. Just have patience with
yourself, and in due time, you will do it.