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When you depend on others, you collect and store up excuses for failure like Harry does. Harry doesn’t like his too-small, indisrepair house. He doesn’t like his five-year-old, mechanically ailing car. He doesn’t like the pile of bills in the kitchen drawer. He hates his job. He doesn’t respect his boss. But wait, the one thing he does have going for him is a book of excuses. He opens it up and sighs with relief: This sorry state of affairs isn’t my fault. My mother liked my brother more and that gave me an inferiority complex. We grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. My family couldn’t afford to send me to college.... And on and on and on.

This is called burying yourself in B.S. If you really want to be a success in business, you need to be emotionally independent before you can ever become financially independent.

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must set aside your neediness for acceptance from others. Immunity to criticism is a “secret” shared by all the highly successful entrepreneurs that I know.

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to set aside your “Book of Excuses” once and for all. Making money as an entrepreneur and making excuses are mutually exclusive, wholly incompatible.

I feel fortunate to have discovered a lot about this very early in life.

If I ever got an allowance, it stopped when I was still a little kid. I don’t remember it. I do remember earning my spending money very early on. I picked strawberries and packaged tomatoes at the greenhouses behind our community, cleaned stalls at a nearby stable, and washed and waxed cars. I soon figured out that selling was easier than manual labor. So I spent my teen years selling. I sold business printing and advertising specialties, Stuart McGuire shoes, a new plasticized, reusable carbon paper, and became involved in a multi-level marketing company.

In my early experiences in direct and multi-level sales, I quickly found out that most of my distributors (even though they were 5 to 25 years older and more “mature” than I was) could not be relied on even to have the appropriate literature, samples, and other materials with them at presentations! If I wanted prospects handled properly, I had to take steps to make up for the others’ lack of organization, discipline, and reliability; I had to have extra supplies on hand. This business taught me the importance of self-reliance, and the futility of relying on others.

The sooner you arrive at accepting 100% responsibility for everything, the more successful you’ll be. Go take a look in the mirror. There’s the man or woman—the only man or woman—who can make you happy, thin, rich, famous, or whatever it is that you aspire to. Dr. Phil can’t make you thin, McDonalds doesn’t make you fat.

The power you need and can have as an entrepreneur comes from eschewing all excuses. Never blaming the economy, the government, the competition, the timing, your parents, your school, or anything or anyone else for anything. Ultimate power comes from accepting total responsibility. When you believe as I do that circumstances control other people but not me, then circumstances won’t control you either.

A very common occurrence in America in recent years has been Wal-Mart coming into a town, and lots of little mom-n-pop businesses rolling over and dying. Their owners blame Wal-Mart. There have been protest marches. Books written. Much hand wringing about behemoth Wal-Mart destroying small businesses left and right. All utter and total B.S. And here’s the proof: there are small businesses who have thrived when Wal-Mart came to their towns. Why? Because they didn’t embrace the excuse for failure. They re-engineered their businesses to do what the giant won’t, to compete in a different way.

Bill Glazer, President of Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle^™, is a case in point. In his former life, he was a retailer. When he began, in downtown Baltimore there were 14 competing menswear stores, each independently owned. As giant national chains entered the market, 13 of those stores closed. The last store standing, one of two thriving stores owned by Bill, ably withstood heavy, direct competition from the giant discounter, Mens Wearhouse. In fact, his stores enjoyed double-digit annual growth while his industry went flat, and his stores consistently generated per square foot profits 250% higher than the industry average. How could this be?

For one thing, Bill is an ingenious, aggressive marketer, who violated his industry norms, made extensive use of direct-mail, and overall developed such unique and effective marketing he was able to package it and sell it to thousands of other retailers for their use. Another, he is extremely disciplined, so he insisted on his salespeople performing; booking appointments by phone with customers rather than standing around waiting and hoping for somebody to walk in. But possibly of greater significance is his attitude about competition, his conviction that he can always reposition his own business and out-maneuver the big behemoths or anyone else. He approached his business from the standpoint of someone totally and completely in control of results—not someone with results subject to the control of others.

Entrepreneurial success requires a very, very strong sense of autonomy. My dictionary says “autonomy” means “self-governing.” Simple. Good. It says a lot.

Free Gift

Bill contributes to my No B.S. Marketing Letter and all other Glazer-Kennedy resources, and provides expert coaching to our Members on “outrageous advertising that is outrageously successful.” You can meet Bill via one of the FREE Webinars provided to new Members, as part of my FREE GIFT to readers of this book. The complete offer is on pages 272–273 or you can go directly to FreeGiftFrom.com/business.

For example, it says you make your own rules. You feel free to ignore or violate or, at the very least, challenge and test all established norms of your industry. To ignore competitive pricing and, instead, devise a marketing system that has you selling in a competitive vacuum—which happens to be my specialty as a marketing strategist and consultant. You decide to do business on your terms, to fit your preferences, which I talk a lot about in this book’s sister-book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs. It says you organize and operate your business to meet your objectives, to suit your preferences, as discussed in great depth in No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits. Andrew Carnegie, one of America’s first from-scratch billionaires and the inspiration for the all-time bestselling book on success, Think and Grow Rich, spoke of the need for a secret sense of superiority. The sense that ordinary rules and restrictions are for ordinary people, not you. This explains why so many super-successful entrepreneurs quite literally change the entire industry or profession they are a part of.

It also means you govern your own thoughts and emotions, and do not let others dictate how you should think or what you should believe.

The truly legendary mega-entrepreneurs I admire and have studied exhaustively were or are intensely self-governing.

Walt Disney, for example, violated the established, universal, ironclad amusement park industry “rule” of multiple entrances and exits. Against all expert advice, he designed Disneyland with but one entrance and egress. Although he did not do so for purely mercenary reasons, it’s impossible to estimate the enormous volume of souvenir merchandise sales that occur precisely because everyone must “walk the plank” past the stores and merchandise carts to get out of the park. In many other ways, as Disneyland, then Disney World developed, Walt insisted on building based on his beliefs, often in direct opposition to how things had always been done before.

Walt was one of the great “Unreasonable Men”—a description that fits most terrific entrepreneurs. My friend and speaking colleague, Mike Vance, who worked closely with Walt for many years, tells the true story of Walt being told by a waitress that “something didn’t seem right” about the Bayou Restaurant—then abruptly shutting the entire thing down, shooing away all but a few of the customers, sacrificing revenue and creating havoc, then conducting an impromptu focus group to get to the bottom of what “didn’t seem right.” It turned out to be the absence of fireflies, which Walt demanded be fixed by importing fireflies. Time and time again Walt drove his bean-counter brother crazy, demanding things be done, often expensive and difficult things, to achieve the exceptional authenticity the parks are famous for.

Walt put Disneyland in a location no one thought could possibly work.

The cliché “he walks to the beat of his own drum” applied magnificently to Walt. As it does to Trump.

Donald Trump is so famous he needs only one name, Trump. Like Cher. Most established experts in commercial real estate development avoid branding their properties with their name, as the traditional industry belief has been that doing so made it difficult to attract top tenants or to later sell the property. Trump has been sharply criticized and ridiculed for slapping his own name on every building he develops. However, he says that as soon as the Trump name goes up on one, its value pops up by 10% to 15%. Trump is much maligned, criticized, made fun of, and has certainly had his downs as well as ups, but he has also made himself fabulously wealthy and into a famous and valuable brand.

“Sam Walton was less afraid of being wrong than any man I’ve ever known.”

—DAVID GLASS, RETIRED CEO, WAL-MART

GKIC Invitations

Invitations to Glazer-Kennedy events like the ones featuring George Ross from The Trump Organization and Ivanka Trump, Gene Simmons of KISS, Peter Shea of Entrepreneur Media, etc. are available to Members. The entry door is at www.FreeGiftFrom.com/business. Discussions about my books that I had with Kristi Frank from The Apprentice can be viewed on-demand at www.NoBSBooks.com.

I appeared as a speaker on a program with The Donald, and we have had his right-hand man and chief negotiator, George Ross, Ivanka Trump, and Bill Rancic and Kristi Frank, competitors from The Apprentice, as speakers at Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle^™ annual SuperConferences. I have quizzed them all for insider info and insight, with all the answers verifying my observation that Donald Trump is autonomy on steroids.

Men like these are self-governing. They break rules, re-write rules with impunity, daring and, often, even arrogance. With some it is blatantly apparent. With others, masked—such as with Buffett.

This attitude can have its costs. It is, itself, risk—risk of embarrassment and humiliation, risk of accumulated envious and resentful enemies eager to celebrate a fall. But this attitude seems at the core of every extraordinarily successful entrepreneur I know. Many could easily be clinically diagnosed as narcissists and have considerable difficulty with relationships. Most live with constant peer disapproval, criticism, and conflict. This is the price tag of so consistently getting their own way and getting things accomplished beyond the bounds—often even beyond the imaginations—of 99.9% of the population around them.