Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (14 page)

This is the conclusion of Step One. This step needs to be the first to be mastered because, to escape the quicksand, you need to start thinking and reacting according to your own instincts. It
is the way to rediscover the pioneering spirit with which you were born. Intentionally or otherwise, the media and people in your environment wire your neurons in a like-minded manner, unless you consciously start to change that process. The changes are simple, but not easy, because you must consistently control your mentality.

With the gentle encouragement of my publisher, I have revealed intimate details about my life that many of my friends and family will read for the first time. I am an intensely private person and this was an uncomfortable process, but necessary. So many self-help books are written by people who don’t practice what they teach, and the writers have often not encountered success before their book starts selling well. That lack of credibility has always bothered me. Authenticity is essential if this book is to be of real value to you, and that necessitates it being so personal. Parts of my life story are the best testimony to the power of these principles.

If you start to make small changes in your thoughts and reactions, you will get out of your version of quicksand. I did, and I am no different than anyone else.

Step Two shows you what to do once you are out of the quicksand. In all those autobiographies I have read, what separates the successful from the crowd is a winning idea. Step Two shows you how to rewire your neurons to put yourself in a position to have those moments of insight.

W
HEN EINSTEIN WAS WORKING
on his theories, the scientific community believed in the relativity principle, which had been formulated centuries earlier by Galileo. This principle was incomplete and Einstein was obsessed with its flaws—so much so that he tortured his mind with it for a full
ten
years.

It became his life. He spoke of nothing else, discussed it endlessly with other scientists, and challenged friends with the riddle of what happens to space and time at the speed of
light. It was the last thing he contemplated before sleep and the first thing he thought of when he awoke. The answer eluded him and he got stuck in the quicksand with his scientific buddies.

Einstein rarely slept more than a few hours. To compensate, he started taking what he called “meditative naps” during the day. After one of these naps, he is said to have jumped out of his chair with an idea that changed the course of civilization.

In 1905, he published his conclusion in a three-page paper titled “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?” The paper had neither footnotes nor a single reference to support it. The scientific community vilified him for twenty years until technology became available to validate his moment of insight.

Every week, I meet people who tell me that they want a better life, but they just don’t have any good ideas about how to change things. As hard as they try, they can’t find a solution. Step Two of the three simple steps has many benefits for your life. Most, however, are beyond the scope of this book and are well documented elsewhere. We are interested in one aspect of this step, which is all about positioning yourself to create and respond to good ideas.

In my experience of teaching the three simple steps, most people readily accept the common sense of controlling mentality in Step One. Those who take it to heart experience dramatic improvements in their lives. Those who take it lightly still enjoy many benefits. Step Three, which is about how to execute great ideas to create anything you want, gets people excited. Most people, however, skip Step Two, or if they attempt Step Two, they do so for a while and then forget about it. That’s because we are brought up in
a society where focusing outward is acceptable but looking inward is associated with being esoteric.

When Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Inc., passed away in 2011, in the majority of obituaries that made front-page news, the journalists waxed lyrical about his brilliant mind, his micromanagement style of leadership, and the impact his inventions had on the modern world. The fact he left college to travel around India, where he found and converted to Buddhism, and then spent the rest of his days as a practicing Buddhist, meditating every day, was almost always a throwaway line. It was as if they were saying he was 95 percent normal, and it is okay to allow him 5 percent weird. After all, it did not harm the impact he made or the success he had.

Instead, they should be connecting the dots between his passions for meditation and being with nature, both of which are scientifically proven to improve brain function, and the runaway success of his business and life.

In Step One, we discussed how positive vs. negative thoughts impact the neural networks, and then how exposure to prolonged stress could destroy neurons. In Step Two, we will discuss the rewiring of neural networks into a configuration that enhances our ability to create winning ideas and moments of insight.

To overcome the natural tendency for people to ignore the inner journey as something for weirdos or new-agers, I will provide solid evidence from cutting-edge neuroscience. Today, people seem to need proof to get over the fence and give it a go. For me, I always felt if it worked for Carnegie, Emerson, and Einstein, who am I to say it is not for me? At one time, I was desperate for good ideas to get me out of the quicksand. I found Step Two had a profound
impact in all aspects of my life, and it is no coincidence that my wonderful adventure started the same time that I was introduced to it.

As a businessman, the thing I hear most often is comments such as “I wish I could start my own thing, but I don’t have any good ideas.” Just last night, a friend who strikes me as having the common sense, drive, and customer focus to be successful with his own “thing” was lamenting how much he detested his job. I asked him why he doesn’t start his own company. He said he would love to, but he doesn’t have any brilliant ideas about what sort of company to start.

The truth is that you don’t have to come up with an idea. They are already there. Brilliant ideas, or moments of insight, are literally bursting to get through our closed-off minds. Unfortunately, the way we have learned to behave has wired our neurons in such a way that we often are oblivious to them. In the stories of successful men and women, and later through trial and error in my own life, I discovered a simple step that is designed purely to rewire neurons such that they can be receptive to those ideas again. The step is effortless. Whether you are five years old or eighty-five, you can introduce Step Two into your life right now and enjoy success, because a single moment of insight is worth a lifetime of experience.

S
HORTLY AFTER AUDREY’S FUNERAL
in 1982, Harry was evicted from the farmhouse when it was revealed he had not paid the £15-a-month rent for several years. The owners had resisted taking action while Audrey was ill. It was the third time in his adult life that Harry had suffered the humiliation of eviction from his home.

A trail of debts unraveled. Money had been stolen, vehicles rented and abandoned, and goods purchased on sale or return terms that were never returned. The children took responsibility for the mess, in and out of courts, over two difficult years.

Eventually, Harry’s whereabouts were tracked to a damp, windowless studio that was built into a wall of a railway bridge. A naked bulb hung from frayed wires that were illegally connected to an electric conduit under the bridge. The floor was bare concrete, and the only furniture was an unmade folding bed against one wall. When I walked into the room, Harry was heating a can of soup over a Bunsen burner, his ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked up. “Hello, son,” he muttered, as if he had been expecting me at that very moment.

The look of shame in his eyes hit me with the power of a sledgehammer. I had seen that look once before. As a child, I
watched when Harry’s father was forced by debt to close his small cake shop and move into a two-room home provided by welfare. I recalled the same expression of embarrassment. It was as if they had lived the same lives, and when I thought about it, their patterns of behavior were frighteningly similar.

In 1914, the British government launched a massive campaign to manipulate the mentalities of young men to make them join the army. “Your Country Needs You” was the slogan pasted to every wall. Lord Kitchener led a cleverly controlled exercise in guilt throwing. “Surely you will fight for your country. Come along boys before it is too late” sang the catchphrase from megaphones at every town hall. From platforms and stages, pretty girls offered any young man who agreed to sign up a kiss and a King’s sovereign.

A million young men with unguarded mentalities reacted habitually. Among them, George Frederick, my grandfather, stepped up onto that stage and got his first kiss. The minimum age for joining the army was nineteen, but there was no age verification system. When he headed for the trenches, George was a gangly sixteen-year-old choirboy, barely strong enough to aim a rifle.

In 1916, at the battle of the Somme, George was one of the few survivors of his regiment when he received a second kiss in the form of a sniper’s bullet to the head. He survived but was blinded. Behind the lines, he was retrained to be a cook working from a Braille recipe book. Six months later, he recovered his eyesight and was immediately moved back to the front line.

In 1917, at the third battle of Ypres, the Germans launched artillery shells containing mustard gas. They exploded short of the British trenches, releasing a gray-green fog that crept slowly toward George’s position. George had not been issued a gas mask. He knew running was futile, as the second wave of artillery was always aimed to detonate on those in retreat. George made a choice to die with his boots on, a decision that saved his life.

Mustard gas was not an effective killer. It was designed to creep into the soil, making trenches uninhabitable for weeks. Exposed skin blistered. It could cause blindness, vomiting, and internal bleeding.

Unfortunately, the soldiers didn’t realize that the gas was denser nearer to the ground. Those who lay down never got up again. Standing at his post, George suffered bronchial injury, but he lived. At nineteen, he returned home as a weakened man with a permanent cough.

After the war, he worked on the railways as a ticket collector, but his disabilities caused by the gassing meant he could only work part-time. His lungs were damaged, and he coughed up phlegm constantly, a habit that caused him issues at home and work, although it did nothing to slow down his cigarette smoking. After the war, he was a restless spirit, and bounced from one job to another, trying his hand at insurance sales and shopkeeping.

In 1928, he married Emily. The following year, they had their only child, Harry, and moved into a terraced house that backed onto a railway line. While Emily sold insurance to keep a roof over their heads, George opened a fruit and vegetable shop that never made any profit. When World War II arrived in 1939, rationing closed the shop.

During World War II, George volunteered as an Air Raid Warden. After the war ended for the British, in 1945, he moved to the Welsh countryside, and opened a candy shop in a small market town. When it closed, he tried a cake shop nearby, while living in a damp cottage with outside plumbing. Eventually, he retired to state-provided housing a few miles walk from our derelict farmhouse. George spent his days indoors, smoking cigarettes and reading library books, until his weakened heart caught up with him in 1971.

Harry grew up hearing first-hand accounts of war, and then experiencing the drama of World War II as a teenager. For a
while, he was sent away from the city to live with strangers in the countryside where it was safer. He left as a boy and returned to his parents when he was nearly an adult. When he was eighteen, in 1947, he joined the Royal Air Force and served abroad for two years. When he returned, he landed a secure job working as a bank teller. There, he met and fell in love with Audrey.

As restless as his father, Harry left the bank to start a business of his own as a market-stall holder, first selling fruit and vegetables. When that failed, he turned his hand to making and selling furniture wholesale. He moved his family to a flat above a shop next to a busy railway line and signal control box. Escaping creditors, he moved his family once more to an isolated village in the Welsh countryside.

He initially found work as a van driver, delivering packaged meat products to shops around the region. When that ended, he sold insurance and then soft drinks from the back of a car. Throughout the 1970s, Harry started and failed at several businesses, varying from opening a tire depot to distributing wine. They rarely lasted more than a few months. His most ironic venture was a financial services company in which he advised people on their investments, mortgages, and savings, none of which he had ever experienced.

He lost his small investments and the life savings of those gullible enough to join his schemes. Eventually, he gave up trying to do anything at all and spent his days indoors while smoking cigarettes and reading library books, just like George.

The pattern in behavior and experiences between George and Harry bothered me. Finding him in that state of shame under the railway bridge made me consider my own behavior. We were alike in many ways, especially in our love of reading, and had I not also recently left a secure, promising position for an uncertain future? I knew then that I needed to be sure to avoid the ancestral repetition.

Shortly after finding Harry in that nearly homeless state under the railway bridge, I came across Napoleon Hill’s famous book,
Think and Grow Rich
. This book has sold millions of copies since its publication in 1937, and many people credit it for helping them get out of their personal quicksand. I had, however, already read the detailed biographies of many of the tycoons he interviewed and drawn my own, and quite different, conclusions about what it took to succeed.

Reviewers and “how to get wealthy” bloggers describe Napoleon Hill in saintly terms:
born into poverty . . . began his writing career at age thirteen to make money . . . dedicated more than twenty-five years of his life to define the reasons by which so many people fail to achieve true financial success and happiness in their lives
. At the risk of being accused of heresy by the self-help success movement, that is not an accurate portrayal of a man who was more like George and Harry than any of the tycoons he interviewed.

Hill’s grandfather was a printer, and his father became a self-taught dentist, having made an improvised and illegal set of false teeth for Hill’s stepmother. His stepmother bought him a typewriter when he was thirteen, in exchange for him giving up his six-shooter and the wild life that went with it. With that typewriter, he became a reporter for the local mountain news.

There was no evidence of poverty or oppression in his childhood. He got a job with a prominent lawyer who also owned a coal mine. When the mine manager got drunk and accidentally shot a bellhop, Hill arranged to have the death covered up as an accident, using his own money to bribe the coroner. His reward was to be made manager of the mine at the age of only nineteen.

He played around with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but he let that go in favor of a partnership in a lumberyard in 1905. In 1908, Hill was wiped out when the lumberyard went belly-up. So he took himself off to New York to rebuild his life and to be in
close proximity to the giants of American business and industry. Among them was seventy-four-year-old Andrew Carnegie.

The story goes that Andrew Carnegie told him to interview the wealthiest men in America and write the secrets of their success in a book, which would be “one of the most enlightening documents ever written.” Carnegie did not offer to finance the project as some reviewers suggest, but he did apparently provide him with letters of introduction to fellow tycoons.

To put bread on the table, he taught advertising at the La Salle Extension University in Chicago. He then left to cofound the Betsy Ross Candy Company. He fell out with his partners, who had him tried for fraud. The judge vindicated Hill.

Over the next decade, Hill won and lost businesses, business partners (who sometimes ended up in jail), and his family’s love. Controversies of some sort always seemed to accompany the loss of one of Hill’s businesses. One of the governing rules he discovered was that whatever you set your heart on, you must be prepared to pay a price for, a rule contrary to my own experiences.

Despite his lack of success, Hill started a success magazine called
Hill’s Golden Rule
, but eventually it also failed. He founded another periodical that featured ads for Hill-conceived organizations like the Peptomists and the Co-Operative Club. Failed again.

In 1928, Andrew Pelton, the book distributor and former advertiser in Hill’s old magazine, rescued him from poverty and obscurity. Hill borrowed money, rented a hotel suite, and bought expensive cigars, which he handed out liberally amongst hotel staff. In addition to that, he tipped the bellboys heavily and dressed to kill. Every worker in the hotel viewed him as the big man. Pelton attended the meeting in the hotel. Hill was well aware Pelton would pick up on the reverence the staff showed him. It worked. Hill pitched his idea to Pelton and showed him a couple of pages of the impending book, and a deal was done
right there and then. An advance on royalties was handed over on the spot.

Hill produced an eight-volume
Law of Success
, which set down his fifteen principles. The fact he had not actually discovered how to succeed in anything at this point eluded the readers, and soon he was raking in royalties of $2,500 a month. His success was writing a book about how to succeed. It was an illusion, and in my opinion, it was snake oil.

Flush with success as a writer, he purchased a 600-acre Xanadu in the Catskills, where he planned to establish “the world’s first university-sized Success School.” Royalties dried up, takers for his syndicated success column dwindled. Hill was evicted, and the owner foreclosed on Xanadu.

In 1936, Napoleon Hill, barely scraping by at fifty-three years old, married a young and beautiful woman after she attended one of his lectures. She pestered him into writing
The Thirteen Steps to Riches
. Pelton agreed to publish it, but he wanted a catchy title, suggesting
Use Your Noodle to Win More Boodle
. They settled on
Think and Grow Rich
.

The wife went on to write a book called
How to Attract Men and Money
. Ironically, the book was released the year of their divorce, and she ended up with everything, including Hill’s house and fancy cars.

W. Clement Stone, a self-made billionaire, and an avid fan of Hill’s, one day purchased the rights to the book and presented them as a gift to the writer. As a result, Hill died a millionaire, but he had made and lost many fortunes during his lifetime, trying to find the laws of success for the ordinary man to obey and thus grow rich. His simple formula was the cultivation of faith, belief, persistence, patience, purpose, and desire, but it failed to work for Hill.

Napoleon Hill’s life did not seem to me to be that different from either George’s or Harry’s. The three lives showed patterns
of behavior that led to failure. In 1983, that was not what I wanted for my life. I wanted to be like a top chef rather than the food critic. I wanted to be like the tycoons who actually made a success of their lives, not the guy who watched from a distance full of admiration.

Many people claim that Hill’s book has been of great help to them in their endeavors to succeed. I preferred, however, to take the advice of men and women who had actually succeeded at something.

I dove back into the biographies of self-made men and women. People like Henry Ford and Cornelius Vanderbilt had systems for idea generation. Vanderbilt’s father was a ferryman, and Cornelius started out repeating the family pattern. He spoke of wanting to break away, and making a different mark in life. Mary Ellen Pleasant, who as a slave was sold three times to different owners, deliberately set about creating ideas that could help her break away from that life of slavery followed by servitude. She amassed a fortune equivalent to $600 million at today’s value.