286 - A Lesson From 2001

0:00It's important what you can learn from lessons, successes, and failures. And so I want to talk about a lesson I learned back in 2001, 23 years ago. God, 2001 doesn't sound old until I think of it that way. And then also before that, a lesson I learned probably back in 1994 about failure, attention to detail, first impression. So let me do that. So this past week in the VIP Mastermind, a member said, Bruce, I understand you met Rush Limbaugh. And I said, no, I didn't meet him. Why do you ask? He said, oh, I saw something about you and Rush Limbaugh. And it triggered back from 2001 that, yes, when I was in a little tiny office working hard on keeping my mind positive because things weren't going as well as I wanted them to, I had a radio in the background.

0:57I was listening to the talk radio, and on that came Rush Limbaugh. I didn't do that for very long, but I did do that for a period of time. So he was talking about success, and that was something I was interested in, obviously. So I listened to it. I ended up sending him an email at 12.56 p.m., and surprisingly, he read that on air at 1.15. And it tells me that there weren't too many emails coming in, I would imagine. So that being the case, he went through and talked about success, but he also talked about how important failure was to that process. So I want to end up including that clip. I had it recorded.

1:42Audio is not the best, but you can hear it. And let's go through and let you listen to that. Feedback I got, because I did this also on YouTube, was really helpful in terms of, yes, look at what you can learn, and look at the people who have been successful, and look at how many of them were failures along the way. So it's important. So I hope you listen to that. I'll do it after this podcast piece that I'm talking at now. I'll put it in. But the second piece was back in the 90s. I was building my first board. I reached out to Tom Moynihan, who was the founder of Domino's Pizza. I had read Selling DeVito, so I know how to get to the gatekeeper, how to write a letter, how to make sure I followed up, how I kept it crisp, all that good stuff.

2:35If you haven't read Selling DeVito, V-I-T-O, I'd encourage you to do it. So I knew who his assistant was. I had a letter typed up, good stationery. had myself and two other people proofread it. There is software. There was software back then, but not like there is today. But that's not an excuse for what happened. So I ended up sending that letter off FedEx. I followed up with his gatekeeper and said, you know, I know that more than one piece of mail has been lost in a mail room. Just wanted to be sure. Let's call her Jane. Jane, you got it? She said, yes, I did. Did you have an opportunity to show it to Mr.

3:17Moynihan? Yes, I did, and he read it. Oh, good. When could I schedule a call with him? Next. It was the answer, basically. So she said, never. He doesn't want to talk to you. And what he said was in your second-to-last paragraph, you have what's called a widow's an orphan, which is you end the sentence and start. You don't end the sentence, but you end that line, and you start the next line with the same word. so you might have a the the or something like that it's easy for your mind to miss that when you read it but nonetheless it was a mistake it was a mistake I made I should not have made it he didn't miss it that tells you something too and so what he said was this is the honeymoon period if his attention to detail is so poor that in his first letter to me this is what he does I don't want any part of him.

4:15That was a hard lesson to learn. It also tells you something about big hitters. They usually don't beat around the bush. They usually are yes, no, as opposed to, well, I'll think about it maybe, you know, I'll move on to see what happens next. No, he had his criteria. I flunked his criteria, and that was that. So let's go to present day, and I got an email from someone who was commenting on the last piece I did about failure, which was the real truth about failure. And what he said was, and I'm not going to read it because it's just so full of errors. He basically said that to use Edison as an example of success is wrong because Tesla said it could have been done much more quickly and that it took too long.

5:06Well, maybe it did take too long. But rather than look at someone like Edison and say that what they accomplished took too long, let's go to the results and look at what he created. Now, the email this person sent me had no less than six or seven typos in it. So I commented back to him that I would focus on the results of Edison, but also look at how many typos you had. And then he sends me another email, which again had typos in it. Typing on a phone is not that eventful, but everyone knows I meant M-E-N-T and what I said and meant M-E-N-T. Good to hear from you, Bruce, as always. Okay. That's funny, the last sentence.

6:04So even when I point out that he's had spelling errors, he continues to make spelling errors. And my response to him was that you miss the and don't understand the importance of a first impression. so when I read things like that it takes me back to that hard hard lesson I learned from Tom Moynihan that if he makes mistakes like this at the very beginning it never gets any better so people do pay attention not all and in today's world where you do type on a phone or you do text messages or you use text speak remember when you're corresponding correct those things remember Remember your first impression.

6:51It's important. So I hope those two lessons are helpful to you. I'm going to cut in the Rush Limbaugh. And again, some people might not have liked his politics. That's fine. But again, rather than focus on that, focus on the message that he gives with respect to success and failure. And you can learn a lot from it. And maybe it's what you need to hear right now if things aren't going as well as what you want them to. So, okay. If you are looking for how to get started, go over to BruceWhipple.com. End up just going through the free material there. There's also a free course, which you can get.

7:35Just enter your email and you'll be on the mailing list as well, which gives you three actionable items each week. But remember the successes and failures that you can learn from, you can change from, so you don't repeat the same error again. And remember first impressions. So with that, let me put in this piece from that radio broadcast back in 2001. Along these lines, this email comes from Bruce Whipple. Mr. Limbaugh, if you've read Napoleon Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich, you already know who he was But if not, and of course I do, but some of you may not Andrew Carnegie asked Napoleon Hill if he would interview approximately 500 people The early 1900s, the most successful people And distill those interviews into a philosophy of success He spoke with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Luther Burbank, and many more His formula for success was clear and didn't contain any magic shortcuts, the results of his interviews.

8:43The formula started with a burning desire, which was so intense that it would carry you through the many adversities along the way. He also said that action behind that burning desire was essential. Just wishing alone didn't get anything done. sitting around hoping for it, sitting around wishing for it, meant nothing. That action accompanying the desire was the key. Now, one of Napoleon Hill's most profound observations in his book, Law of Success,

9:21was this. I'm convinced that failure is nature's plan through which she hurdle-jumps men of destiny and prepares them to do their work. Failure is nature's great crucible in which she burns the dross from the human heart and so purifies the metal of the man that it can stand the test of hard usage. We would cease to fear or to run away from trying experiences if we observed from the biographies of men of destiny that nearly every one of them was sorely tried and run through the mill of merciless experience before he arrived. That's a flowery way of saying that most of the, if not all, of the tremendously successful people in this country have also been spectacular failures, from which they were toughened, from which they learned, and by which they were further prepared.

10:31and Mr. Whipple says this leads me to wonder if the hand of fate does not test the metal of which we are made in various and sundry ways before placing great responsibilities upon our shoulders so I think that the lesson here and remember now it is a I wouldn't call it a approach of passion of mine the things that, and I don't know that it would be if I hadn't had the chance to meet some of these people. I'd probably be laboring under whatever misconceptions everybody has. But having met people who I consider to be among, if not the best at what they do, it can't help but notice certain common characteristics about them.

11:23And as Napoleon Hill here discovered, burning desire or passion. That's clearly number one. No question about it. But the thing that I had not associated with it, too, that Napoleon Hill does is failure. And how that toughens you, prepares you even more. And how, in some cases, there's no tolerance for it on the part of those observing the person in question. But it's almost always present in the life of somebody who's ultimately and eminently successful. And the reason why this is important to me is because I've always believed that the average person is capable of far more than he or she thinks he or she is capable of.

12:24Now, you know there's something else in common about successful people. They've all been told that what they want to do won't work. There is negativity around everybody at all times. And for some strange human characteristic-oriented reason, people are prone to believe negativity. It takes work to be positive. It takes a supreme effort to be positive. You look at Norman Vincent Peale and all these other people who have written books on the power of positive thinking, they themselves get quite wealthy because it's not a natural state. It's something that you have to talk yourself into. You have to psych yourself up for.

13:07The natural tendency is doom and gloom. The natural tendency is pessimism. Amongst, not all people, but among many. And you have to fight that. And the idea that being upbeat and positive about things is just part and parcel of achievement as well. And I've seen, I've mentioned this before, how many of you think back now to who was your best teacher, high school, college, or whatever? and at the time you liked that teacher you may have hated them in fact at the time or you might have thought they're the best teacher because you enjoyed them the most you laughed or had the most fun but but now as you look back on it the best teachers are the ones that got more out of you than you thought you had the best teachers or the most inspirational people in your life they may that have been teachers, whoever they were, could have been your mom and dad or close friend, but whoever, it was a person or people that led you to realize you were better than you thought you were.

14:19You had more ability than you thought you had. Once you learn that, this is what I hate about affirmative action. It's what I hate about multiculturalism. It's what I hate about liberalism and the politics of group. Once you learn that you are better than you think you are, no matter how good you think But then it's Katie Bar the door. Once you get that kind of confidence, and since I think a nation is nothing more than the result of the sum total of its people, not its government. I mean, America's great because of its people using God-given freedom to seek that which is the best in them, to seek that which is the most pleasing, Whatever it is, the quest to be as good as you can be, the best you can be in this rich atmosphere of freedom, there's just no holding us back as a nation.

15:19But the more people who are held back because they don't think that they have what it takes, because that's what they've been told, either by their parents or by their friends or by teachers or by their government or whatever, that's what troubles me. that I've just, from my own personal experiences, and not my own, my personal experiences of meeting and seeing and watching and observing other people, I know that the vast majority of people in this country are capable of so much more than even they think. In many ways, I'm not talking, maybe you're not going to be any better at doing math problems than you are now, but there's something, something that you are foreign to excel at.

16:07There's something that you are bound to be as good as anybody else. Well, better than you think you can be, which is, as I say, in and of itself is the single greatest motivator there is. But therein lies a rub. You've got to find what it is that you like. You've got to find your passion. I was lucky. Found mine when I was eight or nine. Some people, 25 or 30, still haven't. Once you find it, though, that moment when you learn that you're even better than you think you are, is the day your ship comes in and you're not at the airport. You're at the dock. You're ready to meet it. And so studying successful people and admitting the truth about them is not only therapeutic, but is beneficial to everybody, the nation as well, as a whole.