By the thinkBIG Team
It’s amazing what a strong belief in something can do for you. When I was in high school my cousin, a psychiatrist, was hired by the San Diego Chargers football team.
His job was to determine what personal traits a football player needed to be a great football player—a star player—one that stood out from all his contemporaries.
His work lead him to two different types of individuals. The first type was a devotedly religious individual—somebody with very strong religious beliefs.
The second type was the football player who had a huge ego—one who genuinely thought he was a superstar already.
From this research I learned a valuable lesson. Each of these superstar examples believed in something so strongly, it caused them to excel beyond anybody else. One believed in a higher power and the other believed in themselves. The key was a strong belief.
As I was growing up and started building the foundation for what was going to be my path through life, I remembered this research. And I developed the belief that I too was going to be a great success. And each year that passed that belief grew stronger despite setbacks and failure.
Was it hard lifting myself up after a major failure? It wasn’t easy but I knew and had the belief that I was destined for success and these failures were simply tests—tests to determine if I had belief in myself and my eventual success. And this inner belief coupled with a drive to eventually be the successful super star I wanted to be—all played a role in my eventual success and growth.
I am now considered by many as a success. I can pick and choose what I want to do and when I want to do it. And as I look back at my life, I realize that there were a series of principles that I followed that helped make this successful journey of mine the success that it became in addition to the belief in me.
The first and most important lesson I learned was simply, “Everything that happens is for the best.” Very often something fails and doesn’t work the way I had envisioned it and it turns out later that it was for the best.
Often when I was heading in a direction and nothing worked when I discovered something that put me in a totally different direction—one that I would have never envisioned—and it turned out to be a huge success.
Which brings me to my next principle: “Don’t be attached to any outcome.” This makes sense. If everything happens for the best, then why be attached to any outcome? I never fret over something that doesn’t turn out the way I had expected.
A good example of this was how I discovered BluBlocker sunglasses—a product I have sold for the past 22 years and was one of the most successful mail order products of its time. I was driving down Interstate 405 in Los Angeles with a salesman who was taking me to a company that wanted to sell me their product.
It was a bright sunny day. I was squinting. My fiend noticed this and handed me a pair of sunglasses. I immediately stopped squinting and commented on how unusual the sunglasses were. “They were made for NASA,” my friend commented.
“Where can I get them,” I asked my friend thinking the sunglasses might make a great mail order item. He told me that the company that made them was going out of business and besides the sunglasses were too expensive and he told me that people buy sunglasses at a drugstore and nobody sells them through the mail.
I flew back to Chicago, our corporate headquarters, only to discover that a catalog we were publishing for United Airlines was missing a product. One of the companies we were going to feature had gone bankrupt and we had this blank page we had to fill.
Talk about bad timing. I needed to come up with something in a few days to meet the deadline for United and I had no time to spare. I immediately contacted my friend and asked him to overnight me a sample of those sunglasses. “I’ll figure out a way to make them so everybody can afford them,” I told him.
The sunglasses were sent to me and I knocked out a full-page ad in a few days and we made our deadline.
It would stand to figure that the bankrupt company was a blessing in disguise. It forced me to aggressively go after a product that I may have never discovered had it not been for what might have appeared to be a bad situation. 22 years later and 20 million pair of sunglasses was my reward.
I really believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Stronger to be able to manifest the things in your life that you want and stronger to be able to handle similar situations when they come up.
Anybody can be successful if you learn the rules and follow them one by one. But to be super successful, you want to learn the rules and break them one by one. That is another observation I have made through my many years in business.
I also have many spiritual principles that I follow. One states, “Whatever you focus on, expands.” If you focus on your business, it will expand. If you focus on your health, it will get better. But be careful about focusing on money. Money is a symbol of work and effort. So focusing on money will expand the work and effort and not more money. Instead, focus on helping others. The money will come automatically.
Finally, we’re all given the opportunity to be successful. The difference between those who make it and those who don’t can be broken down into two groups—those who somewhere along their path give up and those who don’t. Not giving up is truly the key to making it big.
