Читать книгу No B.S. Business Success In The New Economy - Dan S Kennedy - Страница 15

Some people think and talk in terms of “trying” a business or “trying” out the entrepreneurial experience. Before achieving major success in business myself, I went through considerable agony, corporate and personal bankruptcy, stress, embarrassment, humiliation, and near-starvation. If I’d been just “trying,” just taking a test-drive, I’d have quit. And make no mistake about it; my experience is the norm among ultimately successful entrepreneurs.

Rich DeVos plunked down millions to buy the NBA franchise, the Orlando Magic, apparently to indulge himself. Many years, for as long as I can recall, Rich, and his lifelong partner Jay VanAndel, appeared on the annual Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest men in America. Certainly many have envied DeVos’ ability to buy a professional basketball team! What guy wouldn’t love to own his own pro sports team?

But I wonder how many envied Rich and Jay when they were barely surviving in business, bottling a liquid cleanser in a decrepit gas station, delivering drums of the gunk cross-country to their few distributors in their own pickup truck, being laughed at by friends and family, in the earliest days of creating Amway. I wonder how many times they thought about quitting, but didn’t.

I am not in their league although I’ve always found them inspiring. But I do own 20 to 25 racehorses at any given time—that eat while I sleep. I drive some of them myself, professionally, in over 100 harness races a year. I travel by private jet 90% of the time. I most recently indulged myself by buying a couple classic cars. My wife and I have two homes. We take a number of vacations each year. Consider all this a metaphor for whatever life you or others might envy. Many envy mine. Such envy, so-called class envy, is often exploited by politicians and has been most ruthlessly and shamefully exploited by President Obama. But it’s not a matter of “class” at all. There’s no such thing as a “rich class.” There are people like me who decided to get rich and made decisions others are not willing to make in order to do so, and make decisions others are not willing to make everyday to stay wealthy. Many people do not envy my work schedule at all when they discover how much I work, how disciplined my approach to my work is, and how hard I drive myself, day in, day out. Many people do not envy the massive amount of ongoing gathering, processing, studying, organizing of information that I do. In fact, forget envy; they outright state they wouldn’t consider working as I do. Even fewer would go through everything I’ve gone through so far to create and sustain this life.

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.