Getting Started on the Road to SuccessCVRz Started on the Road t… · MARK VICTOR HANSEN is the co-creator of the Chicken ... consulting projects for 80 percent of the Fortune 500

The Transition From Wanting to Succeed to Actually Getting it Done!

GETTING STARTED ON THE

ROAD TOSUCCESS

© 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger, All rights reserved. 1

Ideas That Can Change Your Life™ in Success

Getting Started on the Road to

Success The Transition From Wanting to Succeed to

Actually Getting it Done!

James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger

“Getting Started on the Road to Success” will show

you where to begin, and you can begin right now!

___________________________________________



Getting Started on the Road to Success

The Authors

JAMES SKINNER is the founder of two global financial

groups that manage billions of dollars of assets. He is

also recognized as one of the world’s foremost business

thinkers and appears regularly on Japanese television.

MARK VICTOR HANSEN is the co-creator of the Chicken

Soup for the Soul empire and is the best-selling nonfiction

author of all time. His goal is to make the planet work

for all humanity!

ROICE KRUEGER co-founded Franklin Covey, the

world’s largest training company, and has supervised

consulting projects for 80 percent of the Fortune 500.

NOTE: Ideas That Can Change Your Life™ is a

collaboration of three of the world’s most amazing

authors, speakers, and thinkers. The first person “I” may

refer to any of the authors.




How Do I Get Started?

Before you get started moving forward to the next level,

there’s one thing you need to know:

You Were Born to Succeed

The first point that we would like to make clear is that

you were born to succeed. You were born for greatness!

It’s too bad today’s education system actually gets in

the way of teaching this to students. Teachers and

professors talk about very successful, admirable, and

diverse leaders—Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Lee Kuan

Yew, Konosuke Matsushita, and many others in history.

But many teachers imply, “These are the great people,

and we are the normal people.”

I have to say I consider this approach a form of

spiritual abuse; it says that you are not born for

greatness, which is not true.

What I like to teach people is this: “Here is Gandhi,

here is Churchill, and here are you; and you are like

them.” You are all born for greatness.




Do something for me now: Touch your temple

lightly to wake up your subconscious, and say to

yourself, “I was born for greatness. I am like them.”

A few years ago, I took my family to England, and

we visited Stratford-upon-Avon. The man who lived

there is someone you have all seen in statues. As a

matter of fact, when a comedian like Jay Leno asks,

“Who wrote the Bible?” you get a lot of people who say,

“Everyone knows that—Shakespeare!” Not true, not

true! But it just goes to show that some people actually

think he did.

As my family and I went through Shakespeare’s

house, I had the distinction of wearing what is called a

blue badge, meaning that I knew a lot about Shakespeare

and I knew enough to ask heavy questions. Most people

assume that Shakespeare knew everything and wrote

perfectly from the beginning. This is simply not the

case.




The dialog he wrote was tested on a daily basis by

different actors. While he was busy writing, the thing

that allowed him time to be creative was his promoter,

who filled the seats every day and even brought out the

queen when she came to the theater. Shakespeare grew

in stature; he grew in ability. But all his creations were

compiled after he was dead.

I’ve read all of Shakespeare and have gone to all the

Shakespearean plays, and it never dawned on me that he

had an evolutionary curve, because we see him in his

role as the creator of a completed body of work.

When I was a student in India, I lived in Gandhi’s

houses and emulated his growth process until I started

to understand it. That is what we are saying: Every one

of you has a mission. I tried to be Buckminster Fuller,

who had one of the greatest minds of all times and was

my teacher. Bucky invented geodesic domes, spherical

buildings made of triangles. He came up with 2,000

major inventions like the cars that run on alcohol,

ethanol, and methanol and seat 11 people facing each

other; he wrote 40 major books. I was wowed; he




expanded my soul. But I went bankrupt, which was both

my best and my worst experience.

Some of you are hanging on to my words by your

fingernails; and some of you who are reading now are

thinking, “I don’t know if I am good enough; I don’t

know if I can make it.” We are saying, “You are good

enough, and you can make it.”

You need to remember that when you start on the

road to success, you are not where you are going to be

when you finish. It can be a short road, a long road, a

very long road; it doesn’t matter. If you start walking,

eventually you are going to get to where you want to end

up.

What is My Mission?

Deciding that is the next step we have to take. You may

be born to succeed, but succeed at what? What is your

mission?

Every major philosopher in the area of success says

that you have to have a mission and a purpose.




Napoleon Hill called it a major, definite purpose, a phrase I

really like, because it has to be something major. If you

succeed at something but it is only minor, then maybe

all you can say is, “Well, I did manage to get the

shopping list done.” But that might not be the thing that

excites you.

You need to start thinking about why you are here.

What is your purpose, your mission in life? I would like

to challenge everyone who is hearing, seeing, or reading

this: Make your mission and purpose so clear that you

can get it down to one sentence. One sentence.

For example, the purpose of my life is to teach

the world a better way to live. It is that clear. What I

am doing today, right here and now, is living my

purpose.

My mission in this context is to help people achieve

what is truly important to them.

I want to speak and talk to people all over the world

and help them succeed. On the Chicken Soup level, we




want to write and change people one story at a time. As

good as your story is, it can be even better. As healthy as

you are, you can be even healthier. And in the money

books, our purpose was to create one million

millionaires who gave $1 million back to their church,

charity, or the equivalent by 2014. Our students are up

to $2 billion.

If you are not a millionaire, how many of you would

like to be a millionaire? Once you are a millionaire, how

many of you would like to be a multimillionaire? How

many of you would like to be a philanthropist, a lover of

humanity, and would like to contribute back and solve

some problem that is just waiting for you to tap into

your encoded DNA to solve? That is a very big mission.

Our mission now is to sell a billion books and

change the destination of humanity to a place of total

success. We don’t want to tell people what to do but to

show them some ways and opportunities to make it

happen.




Finding your mission may be a challenge because you

may not be able to see the whole picture, and the way

there may not be clear from where you sit right now.

You may be able to have a sense of which direction to

go, however.

Imagine for a moment that you are out on the

ocean, and you look around and see 360 degrees of

nothing but water around you. You think, “Where do I

go from here?” Have you ever felt as though you were

completely lost out in the ocean and didn’t know where

to go from there? Explore that as your purpose and

choose one direction for now; imagine as you are

heading that way that you see land. Well, if you see land,

maybe you should go ashore. Now you are on the

beach, and it is all sand; and you think, “My whole life is

sand.” But as you start to look around, you see some

woods beyond the sand. Now it is time to wander into

the woods, and you may get lost again. I know that as I

have tried to develop my mission over the years, I have

come to places where I think, “What is this all about?”

and I feel lost. Keep walking. When you come out of

the other side of the woods, you will see a mountain.




Maybe it is time to climb the mountain, because as we

push ourselves, as we do things that are increasingly

more difficult, we get more clarity and more strength.

When you end up on top of the mountain and you look

on the other side, you see a whole new continent.

Let me summarize to help you remember. Creating a

mission or a purpose is an act of discovery as much as it is an act

of creation. The key is to start exploring now and discover

what your mission is.

As we move forward, we have found that all success

has to start with decisions. You have to make decisions,

you have to make up your mind, and you have to decide

as you move forward that things are going to be

different from how they have been—whatever that

means to you.

You may decide that your health needs to be

different from how it has always been.

You may decide that your relationships need to be

different from how they have always been.




You may decide that your financial condition

definitely needs to be different, immediately, from how

it has always been.

So, the next step builds on you knowing you were

born to succeed. You have a sense of your purpose

about why you are going to be doing all of this; now you

need to make a decision that it is absolutely going to be

accomplished.

One of the three ways to do this is to sit knee to

knee with a receptive person who is not a relative.

Quietly ask them 50 times in a row, “What do you

want?” and just listen and smile to what they say; you

don’t have to agree or anything. And then have them do

the same thing for you. It’s amazing to see where

responding to “What do you want?” will take you. What

do you want, what do you want, what do you want?

Quickly, spontaneously, answer with whatever comes

into your mind. Do you want a car, a house, a better

family, more money? But, you get to be more specific

about it. A penny is more money than no pennies, but it




isn’t adequate. Do you want $10,000, $100,000, or $1

million? What do you want?

Ask and answer the question all 50 times. See where

it leads you.

The second level is asking, “What would excite

you?” What I loved about Bucky Fuller was that as he

asked me this, I said that I wanted to talk to people who

care about things that matter and that would make a life-

changing difference.

The third level, when you are sitting knee to knee

with somebody, is asking, “What is God’s destiny for

you?”

“What is God’s destiny for you, James?”

“God’s destiny is for me to change the planet.”





“God’s destiny for me is for me to sell a billion

books.”


“God’s destiny for me is for everyone on the planet

to read the ideas that He has downloaded through me

for them.”

These are good answers.

As you ask or answer the question 50 times, it is

fascinating to see that everyone hits the level that we are

going to be talking about now: You want to serve others. At

first you want to take care of yourself and your loved

ones, but pretty soon you see how much you want to

serve.

Many times as I counsel and coach people, when I

ask them to make a decision, they are afraid to make a

decision because they are afraid it will take them to

failure.




It is far better to make decisions that will get you

embarking on that ocean of life and to make a few

mistakes along the way (and temporarily feel like a

failure from time to time) than it is to not make a

decision. You aren’t a failure, no matter what you think.

You just discovered the direction in which you know

you shouldn’t go.

If you run up on a reef, you just might find yourself

on a sandy paradise in the Maldives. So, don’t be afraid

to decide. Decide and move; the results will teach you if

you made the right decision. If it wasn’t, then correct it

and move in the other direction.

Make a Decision

Some of the decisions that you make will have huge

impact on your life.

One of these is your standards. You need to raise

the bar on yourself. You need to decide that this is not

the direction that you want to go and decide what you

want instead.




There are two sides to the equation. You have to

make a decision about what it is that you want, but you

also have to make decisions about what it is that you

don’t want.

Raise the Bar

What is no longer acceptable for you in your life? What

will you no longer put up with? What have you had

enough of? What are you fed up with?

I know that the biggest changes in my life happened

when I was living in a tiny apartment stuck between a

Pachinko parlor (Japanese pinball, the noisiest game

ever invented), and a freight train that ran 24/7, 365

days a year. The building would shake every time the

freight train went by. I had been living there for eight

years. I was completely broke, and I was stuck in this

place because I didn’t know how to get out. One day I

made the decision that I had had it up to here. I was fed

up. I would no longer put up with being in this little tiny

place stuck between the freight train and the Pachinko

parlor. I would no longer put up with having no money,

and I would no longer put up with not being healthy. I




would no longer accept the fact that I didn’t have great

relationships with other people. I would no longer

accept the fact that my business was no longer

successful.

It is incredible how you can use what almost appears

as negative energy to change whatever is making you

angry.

My life changed almost overnight. I ended up living

in a 39th-story apartment with a 270-degree view of

downtown Tokyo. Then I decided that’s not what I

wanted. I decided I would no longer live in a house that

didn’t have a pool. I was looking around Tokyo trying to

find houses that had pools; there weren’t any, so I

moved to Singapore.

How many of you create “not-to-do” lists? Try this:

Get up in the morning and say I am not going to do this! To

do the things you want to do, you have to stop doing

some things so that you can achieve what is truly

important to you. This is important!




All great coaching has only four questions:

What do you want more of?

What do you want less of?

What do you want to start doing?

What do you want to stop doing?

Just to summarize, when you are trying to get started

on the road to success, you want to have a to-do list,

meaning a “what I want to achieve” list: This is where I

want to be. Then you want to have a “to-don’t list” of

things and actions that you want to eliminate from your

life.

Look at really, really successful people. There is a lot

of stuff that they don’t do anymore. For example: How

many of you still open your own mail? It is a shocking

question for most people. You mean there are people

who don’t? I would offer to say to you that the

President of the United States does not open his own

mail. That Lee Kuan Yew does not bother to go down

to the mailbox every day and does not open his own

mail. Bill Gates does not. I have read that Bill Gates




does not open his own e-mail until a team of 30 has

screened it.

What do you not want to be doing? Do you still

want to be cleaning your own house? I love Singapore

because one in every seven families has a full-time maid

and has a line on their “to don’t” list that says, “I do not

want to be spending time cleaning my house because I

want to be spending time doing my business.” It creates

wonderful job opportunities if you are a decent human

being and treat your maid nicely and on a day like this

give her the day off as I do. You create a job

opportunity for someone. Some people think it is

demeaning to give other people work. It’s not true. How

many of you are grateful that there is something that

your boss doesn’t like to do so he gives you a job?

Do you still want to drive your own car? Do you

want to be piloting your own airplane? I like the fact

that there is somebody who sits up front and pilots it for

me, so I can sleep on the way.




Make Another Decision

You want to decide Do you want to be doing this and this and

this and this? If you have a company, what are the jobs

that you as the CEO should be doing and what things

should you not be involved in?

I have an assistant at work, obviously, because I run

20 companies in over 35 countries, so there is a lot to

get done, right?

My assistant brings things to me, and for 95 percent

of everything that gets put in front of my face I have a

one-word answer: “Next.” Next is a polite way of saying

no. What “next” means is I am not going to look at it, I don’t

want to look at it, I will never look at it, please take it away from

me; and if somebody else wants to do it, that is fine; but I am not

getting involved.

The reason is that I want to be focused on teaching

the world a better way to live. I am trying to write 100

books in 100 days, and you can’t write 100 books in 100

days if you are doing all these other things.




Saying no is not about being selfish. I want to be

very clear on this. Saying no to things is about

contributing even more. It is about being selfless. It is

about saying that I have a bigger contribution that I

want to make; so, unfortunately, I do not have the time

to attend to some other things.

This brings us to the next step of getting started on

the road to success.

I remember the day it happened to me. I met an

individual who was incredibly healthy; he was vibrant.

His skin was clear, and he had energy from morning to

night. I thought, This person has got some different DNA.

Then three days later I met another extremely healthy-

looking person. And the week after that I met two more.

I started to notice that there are all these people who are

really healthy. I went up to one of them and asked,

“How do you exercise? What do you eat?” and he told

me how he did it. I went to the next one and asked him,

and he told me the same thing. I then went to the two I

had met earlier, and I asked them. They all had exactly




the same answer. All four of these healthy, incredibly

energetic people were doing exactly the same thing!

Then it hit me. For the first time in my life, it hit me

that I don’t know everything. This was an incredible

thought for me. I had grown up thinking I was the

smartest guy in the class.

I have been looking for this person. Is there

anybody who knows everything? What does it mean if

you don’t know everything? It creates a level of humility

in you that enables you to learn.

Be Humble and Open to Change

That was the day that I learned to be humble. It changed

everything in my life, because I realized that these

people were healthy and succeeding in this dimension of

life because they knew something that I didn’t know.

Then I thought, “Hmmm, maybe there are people who

are more successful in business because they know

something that I don’t know. Maybe people who are

really successful in relationships are succeeding because

they know something that I don’t know.”




So, I went on a quest that I call modeling. I find

people who are getting phenomenal, incredible,

unbelievable results; and guess what? There are people

like that in every field of life, and I find out exactly what

they are doing.

Model

One of the first people that I went to model is a great

friend of mine, Stu Mittleman. He ran 1,000 miles in 11

days. Just to put that into perspective, that is three full

marathons a day, every day for 11 days. He made it into

the Guinness Book of World Records, and I thought,

“Hmmm, maybe he knows something I don’t know.”

When Stu turned 49 he decided it wasn’t enough, so

he ran from San Diego to New York. He ran from San

Diego to New York in 56 days, running two full

marathons a day, every day, for 56 consecutive days. A

marathon is 42.195 kilometers, 26.1 miles. He did that

for 56 consecutive days at the age of 49. I was thinking I

need to learn from this guy!




So, I went to him and spent an hour and a half

listening while he told me what his approach was and

how he did it.

The next morning the first time in my life, I ran 17

kilometers; and in the end of that year I ran my first

marathon.

I wanted to learn about money. I met an individual

by the name of Dee Hock. Many of you have never

heard of him. How many of you have heard of Dee? He

is not very well known. He is bigger than Bill Gates,

bigger than Warren Buffet, and bigger than Sam Walton.

He created the largest commercial venture in human

history by creating this little thing called the Visa card.

Many of you have that in your pocket.

When he was president of Visa, he told me they had

500 employees, and they were doing $1 billion a year in

business per employee. They now have 3,000

employees, and I believe their annual sales are

something like twice the national budget of Japan.




So, I thought, “This guy knows a thing about money

that I have never heard of or thought about.”

You can meet such people in any number of

incredible ways. At a break during a conference there

was an old guy standing off alone with nobody talking

to him. Nobody had ever heard of him. I was looking

across the room at this guy, who appeared kind of

lonely, and I thought, “Maybe I will go over and say

hello.” So, I went over and said, “Hello. Are you

enjoying the conference? How is your day going?” We

talked about the conference, the weather, and lunch.

After about 15 minutes he looked at his watch and said,

“I think the keynote address is about to begin,” and I

said, “I think so.” I sat down and he walked up to the

podium. That is how we met.

Be Humble

The next step is to become humble and to model or

imitate those people who are phenomenally successful in

every field and endeavor. You can do it by meeting

them, you can do it by listening to their tapes, you can




do it by reading their books, and you can do it by

reading books by people who have modeled them.

Being humble doesn’t mean to be lowlier than a

worm; it means being teachable. It also means not to be

arrogant.

As we grow, develop, and achieve more, as we get

bigger titles and bigger homes, it is so easy to start to

become arrogant. Ironically, despite all we’ve learned,

we become less and less teachable and it limits us. At a

point, we will stop rising and start going down.

Develop a Support Team

Our next step: If you want to get on the road to success,

you need to develop a support team that will get you

there.

I have never seen an individual in history who has

succeeded alone.

I still remember (because I was a very young boy)

the first time a man, Neil Armstrong, stepped onto the




moon. One man on the moon had 150,000 people

supporting him on the ground. Think about that for a

moment. We all think about Neil Armstrong and the

great success of reaching the moon, but he had a huge

support team on the ground; every manufacturer, every

designer, every worker on every part of Apollo was

standing by to fix any problem that he had.

Now, if you had 150,000 people standing by to solve

any problem that you had, do you think you could be

successful? Yes or yes or yes. There are not many

options on this one.

Example: When Stu Mittleman decided he wanted

to run two marathons a day for 56 days, he gathered a

support team. He had a massage therapist, a

chiropractor, and a nutritionist all traveling with him to

make sure that at the end of the day he could fully

recover to participate in the two marathons the next day.

He didn’t just go out and do it alone.

Back to the space program. It was called “mission

critical,” meaning it is critical because when the




spacecraft is going to the moon it is off target 99

percent of the time and has to keep re-vectoring—the

same as you or I do. That is why your mission has got to

be in writing. I recommend that you tape your mission

on a mirror.

I interviewed the 101 best-selling authors, including

Dr. Scott Peck, who had had the number-one New York

Times bestseller for 12 years and had made $40 million.

We whited out his name and wrote in Chicken Soup for the

Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hanson. We put

it on the mirror in my house and Jack’s house so we

were clear on where we were going. Now, Jack and I are

a team. Put one finger up, and then on the other hand

do the same; then put them together and say one and

one equals 11. One is breakable; it is vulnerable. Two is

invincible, and it has power. TEAM is an acronym:

Together

Everyone

Accomplishes

Miracles




Jack and I decided to bring together a team to

market Chicken Soup, and we read the two most

important books on marketing to leverage us. One was

by Dr. Jeffery Landis, How to Make a Whole Lot More

Than $1,000,000 Writing. The other was by John Kremer,

1001 Ways to Market Your Books. We read them,

highlighted them, circled them, and starred them; we

wrote ideas on little yellow sticky notes and put them all

over the walls at Jack’s office in Culver City. We kept

prioritizing them and wrote a business plan. That is

what we went to sell with.

Even with a great agent, we heard 33 publishers in a

row tell us, “No thanks.” Then we went to a book expo,

and there were thousands of little publishers there. We

went to the small publishers one by one. We were

turned down by 144 publishers, and then one little

publisher took us.

Now, marketing is storytelling; and whoever tells the

story the most and the best wins the sale, wins the

business, wins the contract, and wins the purchase

order.




We also called Dr. Jeffrey Lant, whose book we had

used as our model, and said, We don’t understand this point

or that point. Usually you can get such phone

consultations by paying anywhere from $50 to $500. We

called John Kremer and said, We think this point is right,

but could we change it this way and would it work? and he said

yes. We kept adding to our approach, and we never

stopped. Now we are adding to it again by sharing our

knowledge with you, because we want all of you to make

as much money as you can with smart marketing.

James here. The thing I like about Mark is that he

can be like a fifth grader in elementary school.

Now imagine that you are in fifth grade and you are

looking at a test; you get to the third question and don’t

know the answer. What do you do? You say, “Oh, I

don’t know the answer; on to number four.” So, OK,

you didn’t get the answer to number three.

Now, Mark sets up these phenomenal goals—sell a

million books, plant 18 billion trees—and he has no idea




how to do it. None. He says, “I have a great goal, and I

have no idea how to do it.” Then he stands up on his

desk and waves both arms and yells, “Does anybody

know the answer to number three?” If nobody knows

the answer to number three, then he looks at the teacher

and he says, “Teacher, do you know the answer to

number three?” If the teacher doesn’t know the answer

to number three, then Mark goes running down the

hallway, “Is there anybody in the school who knows the

answer to number three?” If there isn’t, then he walks

out into the road, starts stopping cars until he finds

somebody who knows the answer to number three.

Would doing that get you started on the road to

success?

There is somebody who has your answer. You can’t

ask a question without it stimulating you to start

vectoring toward the answer. Maxwell Malts wrote the

high science here. He says your mind is psycho-

cybernetic; it is goal answering. You are always on a

mission to answer a goal.




The danger is that if you ask questions, or say even

vibratingly, “Oh, my gosh! What if I go bankrupt?” then

you are asking the wrong question.

You want to ask questions like “How can I make

more money? How can I be healthier? How can I be

happier? How can I be more fulfilled? How can I

contribute more to my family? How can I contribute

more to my church, temple, synagogue, or mosque?

How can I grow as a philanthropist? How can I do

more charity? How can I make my country work or the

world work?”

Dignity

As you start to walk to road to success, you always need

to have dignity and class.

Dignity and class are not reflections of your current

economic situation.

Think about Gandhi when he showed up in the

parliament building in London wearing only a simple




loincloth. All the heads of state wanted to meet with

him because he had dignity.

I remember the first time I visited South Africa,

many years ago. We went to Soweto. There has been a

lot of progress made since then, but at the time the area

was even more challenging and deeply impoverished.

We were able to visit some people in their home; it had

dirt floors. The homes were made of tin cans that had

been spread out and stapled together. Imagine living in

Africa and spending a summer in a home made of tin

cans. We went into the home, and the father was

scrubbing the floor. We were all a little bit surprised. We

looked down, and he looked up and saw the little bit of

surprise in our eyes and said, “Just because we are poor

doesn’t mean we have to be filthy.”

So, as you start your mission, begin from a place of

dignity that says, “Whatever I have, I take care of. I take

care of myself. I take care of the people around me.”

With that firm foundation, you are already on the road

to success.




With best wishes,

James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, Roice Krueger

___________________________________________

Documents

Getting Started on the Road to SuccessCVRz Started on the Road t… · MARK VICTOR HANSEN is the co-creator of the Chicken ... consulting projects for 80 percent of the Fortune 500