Welcome To The Beehive by Robert J Safuto

Welcome to the Beehive
A Beginner’s Guide to Conquering the World of Business

By
Robert J. Safuto
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Introduction: Welcome to the Beehive ......................................................... 1
Lesson One: Protect Yourself ................................................................... 12
Lesson Two: Be Tough ............................................................................. 47
Lesson Three: Make Mistakes Then Learn From Them ............................ 68
Lesson Four: Sell, Sell, Sell ...................................................................... 83
Lesson Five: You Gotta Have Heart........................................................ 101
Lesson Six: Leverage the Power of a Team............................................ 120
Lesson Seven: Constantly Evaluate........................................................ 137
Lesson Eight: Never Stop Learning......................................................... 153
Lesson Nine: The Power of Anticipation ................................................. 175
Lesson Ten: Believe In Yourself ............................................................. 199
Afterword: The Beginning ....................................................................... 226
Reading List ............................................................................................ 228
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Introduction: Welcome to the Beehive
I originally wanted this book to be a straight memoir. One day,
I just decided to start writing about my life, one story at a
time.
In the process of writing, something unusual happened. I
began to see a common thread weaving through each part of my
life. That common thread happened to be related to all the
careers I’ve had. I realized that I have done a lot and had a
much more diverse work experience than anyone else that I know.
At the time I discovered this information I wasn’t sure that it
would make an interesting book, but it was sure interesting to
me.
As I continued to write I came to another strong realization.
I realized that along the way in my experiences of working life
I had learned valuable lessons.
I learned lessons that propelled me forward and built on top
of each other like the LEGO blocks I played with when I was a
kid. Every time I thought I had learned all there was to know in
business I then began to learn a new lesson. I would walk
through one door and shortly thereafter another door would
appear in front of me. As I moved forward, I learned.
I thought back to the beginning of my work life and realized
that the vast majority of the things I learned were purely by

Copyright 2004, Robert J. Safuto. All rights reserved. 1
chance. Throughout my teenage years and early twenties I’d
picked up a lot of information, but I was not able to link all
the information together well enough to use it to my benefit. I
progressed in my business knowledge slowly but surely. Over the
years, that slow processing of information has lead to many
larger breakthroughs. As a result of these breakthroughs I’ve
been able to increase my earning power and improve my lifestyle.
I’ve also been able to put myself in a position to make more of
the decisions to guide my life. By my own definition, I’ve been
successful.
I ended up asking myself why all of this information might be
so important to others. My personal breakthroughs aren’t
necessarily relevant to complete strangers. But it wasn’t the
breakthroughs themselves that I was drawn to. I was drawn to the
factors surrounding those breakthroughs. I was drawn to the core
lessons learned while working for each breakthrough. I wrote out
the major lessons that I’d learned and I settled on ten of them
as being the most important. These ten common-sense lessons were
the bedrock of my personal business successes. I did a lot of
investigating and pondering the meaning of these lessons. I
discovered that these lessons are everywhere in the world of
business.
So why are these lessons that I’ve learned so important to
you? These lessons are important to you simply because they can

help you improve your skills in business so that you may find
your own success. There’s proof of this not only in my life but
in examples set by many other individuals.
Consider the fact that most of us will spend at least a third
of our lives working. Shouldn’t you try to make the most of that
time? Don’t you deserve to harness all the tools available to
assist you in finding your success? Invest some time in this
book and you’ll have one more important tool to help guide you
to your success.
These lessons that I speak of weren’t always as clear to me
as they are now. To illustrate my point, I’ll take you back to a
definitive time in my life when I had yet to realize the power
of these common-sense lessons.
GRADUATION DAY
I remember the day I graduated from college. I felt like a large
weight had been lifted off my shoulders as the “burden” of
school had been put behind me. In my mind, full-time work was
going to be a breeze compared to sitting in classrooms for 15
hours a week in addition to a part-time job. After all, I’d been
working since I was twelve years old in some really tough jobs
that many people would never want to do, so I figured that

things could only get easier. My education had prepared me to
take on the world, or so I thought.
After graduation I immediately began working full time for a
shipping company that I’d been working for over the past two
years on a part-time basis. I felt fortunate not to have had to
deal with a ridiculous process of interviewing with companies to
beg for a job.
In 1991 there weren’t too many opportunities available for
someone graduating from a non-prestigious school with a general
business degree. Within a few weeks of graduation I was in the
work force full time and I was working longer and longer hours.
Gone were the days when I could leave work after just five
hours. Gone were the days when things that didn’t get done on my
shift were done by people from the next one. I was no longer a
part-time worker and full-time student. I was a full-time
employee, work was the first priority and my bosses made sure I
knew it.
Things were moving fast, faster than I ever thought they
would so soon after college. I figured that I’d have a few
months to get used to my new responsibilities, with my bosses
giving me some breathing room. I was wrong.
In retrospect, it seems that it would have been worthwhile to
pause and take a couple of months off to travel, clear my head
and prepare for life in the working world. Unfortunately, the

economic realities of the time made starting work immediately a
forgone conclusion.
At my new full-time job things seemed to move even faster as
I began to realize that the subjects I had been learning a few
months before only covered a small fraction of the knowledge
required to successfully make my way in this new world. In
short, I felt like an alien dropped onto a planet of worker
bees. I didn’t know the lay of the land and I didn’t speak the
language. I wasn’t sure what my goals should be or how I should
try to get ahead. In reality, I was beginning a second and much
more important education.
Does the situation sound familiar to you? Have you ever felt
like there was something more you needed to know to not only
survive, but to thrive in the world of business?
ENTERING THE BEEHIVE
Millions of people enter the world of business on a daily basis.
There are children getting their first jobs, high school
students earning a few extra dollars for spending money and
college students trying to earn their way through school. Then
there are the college graduates.
Every few months a new university graduating class makes the
same transition from the campus to the cutthroat world of

business armed with barely enough tools to survive the first few
months in the new world. If these folks are lucky, they’ve
already learned a good deal from previous jobs and have a good
frame of reference to start with. The frame of reference changes
completely, though, once you’re expected to make your way in the
business world and start a career.
Sure, there are plenty of valuable lessons learned and topics
covered in universities around the world, but the toughest
lessons we all learn involve dealing with what actually happens
when there’s real money on the line in a business and the bills
to pay are your own. It’s a tough, new world you’re in and
attending school is only a small part of your preparation.
In your life there will be many phases of learning and the
school phase is just one of them. Moving from the school phase
to the worker bee phase is a true lesson in reality. The halls
of knowledge tend to be an idealistic environment inside a
vacuum where studies are not putrefied by greed or anger. You
may read stories of corporate mismanagement and perform case
studies on unsavory business dealings, but that can’t approach
the reality of being involved in such a deal. Yes, it’s a jungle
out there.
The lessons that we have to learn are vital to our survival
on our own and they apply to everyone who works for a living.
Whether you are an entrepreneur, manager, artist, software

developer, candlestick maker or everything in between you will
need to learn and apply these valuable lessons.
The folks who have a focus on non-business type programs may
even be at a deeper disadvantage than those who studied
business. Most liberal arts or technical curriculums barely
touch on topics that our young people will NEED to know in order
to survive in the business world. After all, even the greatest
painter, actress or computer programmer needs to know how to be
a business person in order to survive and thrive in this world.
Some people aren’t fortunate enough to be able to afford a
college education and for those people things can be much
tougher. Forced into the working world at a young age and a low
level of experience, these people may end up spending all their
time just trying to learn the rules to survive, while thriving
may always be out of their grasp. But some high school graduates
have been able to make it in business, succeed financially and
fare much better than those with college degrees. There are
certain skills to be learned and they’re not always learned in
the classroom. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve graduated from a
top university or just have a high school diploma. All of us
need to master certain abilities in the working world, the
beehive, in order to secure our future.
Here’s my main point: There are lessons to be learned outside
the classroom that can ONLY be truly learned outside the

classroom. These lessons deal with topics that are very blunt,
stripping the sheen off of the subjects presented so eloquently
in school. I plan to pull back the curtain on the show and have
you take a closer look inside your life as a worker bee. It
doesn’t matter whether you’re still in school, have been out of
school for a day or 20 years. Wherever you’re at in your
business life, you need to learn (or re-learn) these lessons.
WHY WE WORK
Before we go any further, I want you to answer this question:
Why do I work?
Be honest now. In fact, right after you answer that, then
answer another question: If I had $2 million in the bank, would
I still do the same thing for work that I’m doing right now?
If you’re a really lucky person, you answered yes to the
second question and didn’t give the answer that probably 90
percent of people would give to the first question, which is
MONEY. Let’s face it, most of us work so we can have enough
money not just to live but also to grow and thrive.
And if we had $2 million in the bank we’d probably do
something that we really loved to do like paint, write, make
music or volunteer for a good cause. These are facts. This is
life. You can’t stop the world.

I couldn’t stop the world either and as quick as I realized
that fact I began to find ways to speed myself up a bit while
cultivating skills that would make the world around me seem a
whole lot slower.
A couple of years ago I heard a veteran NFL quarterback
describing the difference between being a rookie and a veteran.
As a rookie, he was dogged by the fact that he had only three
seconds to get rid of the ball before being crushed by
defenders. As a veteran, he relished the fact that he had three
seconds to get rid of the ball. The difference was a mindset
cultivated through experiences that lead to great skill.
In year one, those three seconds would fly by and the defense
would be on him in a flash. By year ten those three seconds held
enough time to drop back, scan the field and throw a pass. Those
are lessons he could never learn in school. He had to learn them
on the field of play.
Just like the rookie quarterback becoming a veteran, a rookie
in life needs to become a veteran to learn to speed up a bit and
develop a mindset that slows everything down so that you’re not
just keeping up, but gaining ground. Ninety-nine percent of us
will never get paid millions of dollars a year to throw a
football, which is why getting these lessons in our brain is so
important.
That job, that business, that opportunity, that dream …

All those things are our Super Bowl. They are our draft day,
our big movie career or our winning lottery ticket. In short,
they are the doorway to our dream of doing what we love and
controlling our own destinies.
Are you in? Can you see what I’m getting at? It’s important,
really important, that you get these lessons into your brain and
start taking them to heart. The sooner you take these lessons to
heart, the sooner you can start gaining ground and living your
dreams.
In the 20 years since I first had that paper route I’ve
managed to learn these vital lessons. I’ve been able to speed
myself up while slowing things down around me. It’s been a
journey of learning and discovery with some highs and a lot of
lows. The journey began long before college graduation; it just
took me a while to realize it. From paper delivery boy to
factory worker to soldier to restaurateur and energy-market
specialist, with a healthy number of careers in between, I’ve
been building a solid foundation for achievement and success in
business. I’ve learned to control my business destiny and it has
unlocked a host of opportunities in my life, allowing me to feel
more confident than I’ve ever been.

I want to share what I’ve learned with you. My sincere belief
is that these common-sense lessons will help you down the road
to business success in your life, whatever that may mean to you.
The adventure begins …

Lesson One: Protect Yourself
“One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to

frighten wolves."
- NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
A few years ago a young woman walked into my restaurant to apply
for a job as a waitress. She couldn’t have been older than 19 or
20 and she had a fresh face, a nice smile and really short hair.
I commented that the short haircut looked really good on her.
She turned her head, touched her hair and replied in a very shy
manner, “Well, it used to be longer but I just had it cut.”
“Why’d you do that?” I replied.
Just as shy, she replied, “Well I was getting paid for it.” I
told her that it sounded like easy money to get paid for having
a haircut, but she didn’t look happy and after a short pause she
offered, “But the guy didn’t pay me. I was supposed to get
$200.”
By the look on her face and the sound of her voice I could
tell that she needed the money badly. I could also tell that she
was ashamed of being taken by a guy she had just met who seemed
very nice and charming.
The young woman, who I’ll call Kelli, was a student at a
fashion school in Manhattan and very new to the city. She was

looking for ways to keep her head above water while pursuing her
dream of being a fashion designer. I gave her the job, but she
had already learned lesson one the hard way.
Lesson one is this: Protect yourself in all of your business
dealings.
You need to protect yourself because people will lie to you
and cheat you out of your dreams if given the chance. Sounds
harsh, I know, but please read on.
Honest people get beaten all the time in business deals and
you don’t want it to happen to you. It may have happened to you
before and it might happen again.
In your working life you’ll deal with businesses both big and
small. You’ll deal with individuals as well. You’ll deal with
people as an employer and employee. You’ll deal with people as a
service provider or service receiver. In every one of these
situations there is the potential for you to be taken advantage
of. Not everyone makes the choice to treat others so badly, but
the ones who do can make your life miserable and put a serious
dent in your plans for the future.
BUILDING TRUST
In order to properly protect yourself, you need to know
something about building trust. Knowing when and how much to

trust someone else is a cornerstone skill for operating in the
world of business. You build trust with people like you build a
life savings.
Building trust takes time, effort and patience, but it’s
certainly worth it. It’s worth it because trusting someone too
much without having built trust can lead to great
disappointment. Kelli trusted her business counterpart too much
when she got her hair cut. Kelli didn’t think she needed to
protect herself, as do so many people who get shafted every day.
As a young man, some friends and I went to Times Square in
Manhattan to get fake identification so we could pass for 18
years old. We met a guy there who gladly would set us up if we
gave him $20 each. We were eager and easily sold. He asked for
the money and promised to return shortly with the
identification. He left and never returned. We didn’t even think
to protect ourselves and we got taken.
Similar circumstances occur every hour of the day with grown
(and supposedly experienced) adults being taken advantage of by
employers, business partners and acquaintances. The common
element in many of these situations is the fact that people
haven’t taken the time to build trust. In a world of light-speed
Internet, we’ve all become used to things happening so quickly.
This type of environment favors those who would hoodwink you out
of your hard-earned money.

The folks who started the online auction Website eBay knew
the importance of trust when they created the blueprint for
their highly successful venture.
When doing business on eBay, users are encouraged to leave
feedback to indicate whether or not their interaction with a
buyer or seller was a positive one. By allowing users to leave
feedback for the people they do business with, the folks at eBay
created a trust “quotient” which allows potential buyers and
sellers to evaluate their counterparties and determine whether
or not they should trust them. That level of trust translates
into a willingness (or not) to do business with other users of
the site. Before making a buying decision an eBay user can
review another person’s feedback rating. Being able to view
other people’s feedback allows business transactions to take
place much quicker than in the conventional world where we must
build trust over time.
In everyday life you won’t have the luxury of quickly
reviewing feedback when you’re making business decisions. So you
might be asking the question: How do I build trust with someone?
Good thinking! Building trust in the world of business takes
time and it involves more than a handshake and some friendly
conversation. Here’s an important point.
In business you trust a person’s actions over their words
until you’ve developed a level of comfort in dealing with them.

So if you’re a new employee at a company or are newly doing
business with someone you’ll want to rely on the results of
people’s promises until you feel comfortable that they are the
type of people who deliver on their promises.
It’s hard to know exactly when you can say that you “trust”
someone. There isn’t a point or a moment where trust exists.
It’s something that moves forward little by little over the
course of a relationship. And since there’s no clear answer as
to when you should fully trust someone, you should continue to
protect yourself while dealing in a business environment. My
golden rule on this subject is simple. Until you really feel
like you know someone, you should always err on the side of
safety and gain all necessary assurances before moving forward
in a business deal.
For many people, the first true “trust event” that occurs
after college involves accepting a job with an employer. Once
you accept that first job you’re likely to be extremely relieved
to know that you’ve got a job, but you might not have considered
all the details involved in accepting that job offer. Since my
first job after college involved me continuing with a company
where I was already working as a part-time employee, I thought
about few details when accepting my full-time position.
As a result, I had no idea what I was in for and probably
ended up a little bit poorer because of it. I never asked

questions about my work hours or career progression. I didn’t
ask what other people would expect me to do. Hence, almost
everything that happened to me was a surprise. Surprising
situations at work never feel good.
Being careful and building trust become extremely important
once you make the jump from student to worker bee. And whether
you plan on working for someone else or plan on being an
entrepreneur, trust will always be an issue of supreme
importance. The level of trust that you allow in your business
dealings affects how you are compensated. It also affects your
ability to be successful by potentially putting a dent in the
faith you have in yourself when things go wrong. Read on to
learn more about how to protect yourself while building trust.
ASK QUESTIONS
Asking questions is a very powerful way to protect yourself in a
business situation. More often than not you can detect warning
signs when you ask a few questions that your counterpart can’t
(or won’t) answer.
When Kelli made the deal to get her hair cut, she didn’t
think she needed to ask questions. She simply trusted that her
new friend would deliver as advertised. Unfortunately, things
just don’t work that way in the world of dollars and sense.

Kelli was a rookie in the game of life and as such a rookie in
the game of making deals. Kelli didn’t have the time to build
trust since her rent was due soon and she needed to act quickly.
She wasn’t alone because all of us end up in desperate
situations at one time or another.
Have you ever been in a job interview and had the interviewer
ask you if you had any questions? Did you ever clam up and
forget what you wanted to ask? In every interview for a job that
I’ve ever been on I’ve been asked, “Do you have any questions?”
Every time in my first few interviews I would freeze up because
I didn’t know what questions to ask. Sometimes I was afraid that
my questions might upset my potential employer. The next thing
you know, complete strangers are offering you a job and you’re
accepting because you need a job and don’t want to pass an offer
up.
Imagine making a decision that will have a great impact on
the majority of your waking life and not asking a few questions.
It sounds crazy to think about it, but people do it every day.
If you’re not the type to question others, change your ways now!
Pointed questions should not upset potential employers or
business partners. Good questions show your peers in business
that you’re a sharp person who cares about the details.
Kelli should have asked some important questions prior to
getting her hair cut off. One question that comes to mind is

this: “How and when will I get paid?” In fact, the question of
payment is probably the most important one in any business
situation, next to how the product or service that will be
delivered. Kelli never did ask that question, although she did
ask how much she would be paid. It was a good start but not
enough to convince her adversary that this girl couldn’t be
taken for a ride.
If you’re catching on (and I know that you are) you’re
probably getting ready to ask, “What questions should I be
asking in business situations?” I’ll give you some more detail
on that in just a little bit.
Kelli’s first questions should have involved how and when she
would get paid. Hindsight tells us that she should have demanded
payment up front. After all, when the guy wouldn’t pay it wasn’t
like she could put the hair back onto her head! So if a
situation has permanent implications then you should get paid
SOMETHING up front. Smart business people take a deposit when
they know they will have to commit time and resources to prepare
for a job.
We’re just using common sense here. If you have no previous
relationship with a person or a company, then you want to be
thorough in your inquiries so that you can protect yourself and
keep the hair on your head!

In school, most of the time we’re taught that every question
has one right answer. But in business you really want to focus
on hearing the answers that you know are wrong. There may be one
wrong answer to a particular question, with 20 right answers.
For example, you may ask a prospective employer how many weeks
of vacation you’ll be entitled to. You might be hoping to hear
something more than two weeks and anything more than two weeks
would be correct. But if you hear them say two weeks or below,
then you know they’ve got it wrong.
So you may be asking: “How do I know the right answer?”
Great, you’re catching on!
Knowing which answer is right will depend on your level of
experience. If you’ve achieved the right level then you’ll know
the answer to the question. If you’re not there yet the answers
to certain questions may lead to more questions. Time and
experience will ultimately guide you to the knowledge that you
need to have to decipher what answers are desirable and what
answers are just plain wrong.
Kelli’s level of experience jumped considerably after only a
few weeks in the city. She’d been hoodwinked more than once so
she was cautious about everything. Yes, she asked how and when
she would get paid for working in my restaurant BEFORE accepting
the job. She had learned the hard way before and lost a few

dollars and a lot of hair because of it. Hopefully, as a result
of reading this book, you’ll end up better off then she did.
I’ve given you some general guidelines about asking questions
but that’s hardly enough information to make you an expert in
dealing with business situations. I’ve put together a list of
important questions that you NEED to get answered before getting
into a business situation.
If you’re entering into a business arrangement with another
individual or corporation, you might want to ask:
What product or service is getting delivered?
Who is delivering the product or service?
What are the payment terms?
What should be accomplished in the final outcome?
When should the final outcome be complete?
What happens if the product or service is delivered late,
incomplete or not at all?
What happens if the receiving party fails to pay on time?
Does the counterpart have references of people with whom
they’ve done business before?
If you’re interviewing with a prospective employer, you may
ask:
Exactly what duties will I be performing on a daily basis?

Will I have a job title and how does that compare with
other titles in the company?
Who will be my direct supervisor?
Will I be responsible for other personnel?
How often do you appraise employees’ performance?
What are the health and retirement benefits?
These are just a few questions that you should be asking when
entering into a business agreement. If you don’t have answers to
these questions, then you aren’t ready to go forward. If the
folks you’re dealing with refuse to answer or dodge your
questions, then walk away and deal with someone else. Better to
deal with someone who’s eager and accommodating than deal with a
person that treats you like a jerk. As you move through the
process of your business deal, other questions may come up and
you should continue to get those questions answered. Even the
questions that may seem dumb to you are worth asking. The key is
that you must feel comfortable that all your questions are
answered and issues are resolved prior to moving forward in a
business situation.
Now I want you to start the first of many exercises to come
in this book. Don’t worry, none of them are hard and all of them
will increase your knowledge about how to succeed as a worker
bee.

I want you to write down a short overview of a business
situation that you’ve been in recently or are likely to be in
soon. After writing that short overview I want you to think of
and write down questions that were relevant to that situation.
If the situation happened already, don’t worry about the
questions that you didn’t ask. I want you to write down all the
questions you can think of, including ones that you didn’t ask.
This exercise will help you to think about the questions you
should be asking and break down some barriers in your mind about
questioning others.
ENGAGE COUNSEL
We’ve already established that our friend Kelli didn’t ask the
right questions and therefore failed to take the first step to
protect herself. Being so new to the city and business
situations, she couldn’t have been expected to know what was
happening when she got duped by her would-be hair thief. After
all, even if she had asked the right questions her lack of
experience might have led her astray anyway. It would’ve been
really helpful if she’d had someone to talk to about the whole
situation prior to the shearing that she ended up getting.
The next step to protecting yourself is to Engage Counsel or,
in other words, find someone who can give you solid advice.

We all need someone to talk to. When we’re kids we talk to
our parents and maybe our older siblings for advice. Later in
life we may ask teachers or guidance counselors for advice. But
once we step off the slow-moving machine of higher education and
step onto the fast-moving alien planet of worker bees, we end up
short on advisers and long on adversaries. If you’re lucky
enough to stay close to your family and friend support network
then you have something great to fall back on. But if you’re one
of the many who takes the leap and heads to far-away places,
knowing who to talk to won’t be that easy. And besides, when
you’re fresh out of school the last thing you think you need to
do is ask someone for help. You just learned all you’ll need to
know, right?
Wrong! You need a counselor. You need someone with a little
bit of experience who has no agenda and can provide you with
bits of sage advice to keep you on track and away from the bad
guys who cut all your hair and stiff you on your end of the
deal. Say these words to yourself right now: “I don’t know as
much as I think I know about insert a subject here.” Saying
something like that is humbling and most of the time we avoid
thinking it, but the truth is that no matter who you are you can
always learn something from someone else.
The first step to engaging counsel is to find the right
person (or people) for the job. In order to find the right

person you first need to open up to the idea that a counselor is
necessary. If you’re reading this book, I’d say it’s a safe bet
to say that you’ve already come to that conclusion.
You’ll need to have some criteria for a counselor in order to
begin your search. Any person providing you with counsel should
be someone you respect and trust. It should be someone who is
available when you’ll need them. And above all it should be
someone who has more experience than you in the areas where
you’ll be seeking advice.
Whether you’re just out of college or have 15 years in the
business world, you’ll need to be able to evaluate your
potential counselors prior to giving them the job. After all, if
you’ve just graduated college you might not get too much
valuable advice about work from your roommate who got out of
college with you. Evaluating the person’s level of experience is
important, as this person will provide input that guides your
life. Being successful at this step requires a skill that can’t
be taught in any school. That skill is being a good judge of
people.
You may ask, “How do I know if I’m a good judge of people?”
That’s a good question and there’s no simple answer that works
for everyone. My simple guidelines for judging people are these:
Engage people who are honest with you and others
Engage people who encourage your endeavors

Engage people who really understand you
If all the above are true, then engage people who are eager
and willing to help
Do you know any lawyers? For all the lawyer jokes that you
hear I’ve found my lawyer friends to be some of the most
intelligent and thorough people when it comes to assessing a
situation. Have you met any people recently who you like and are
a bit more experienced than you? There may be someone at your
job who you admire that could help you. Seek out this person who
will be your confidant and guide and they will probably end up
finding you. People who are experienced absolutely love it when
others come to them for advice. It makes them feel like they’re
respected and their efforts are worthwhile.
Do you have anyone in mind? Keep thinking. Take a couple of
days to assess the world around you and identify someone. Once
you’ve settled on someone, then you’ll need to approach that
person and ask them if they’re interested in helping you out.
OK, you might want to ask, what do I do if the person I choose
says no? No problem, move on and try to find someone else who’s
interested in helping you. You can’t be discouraged by a few
no’s because there will be a lot of them in your quest for
success. After all, you want to be dealing with someone who’s
enthusiastic about giving you advice. Anyone who says no to your
request for counsel is not a good fit anyway.

Consider this your next exercise. Develop some basic criteria
and seek out a counselor for business situations in your life.
Once you’ve found your counselor and started this relationship,
you’ll be in a much better position to succeed in your
endeavors. Of course, having a counselor won’t be worth anything
unless you actually spend the time to get some counsel every
once in a while or as often as you need it. To not do so would
be like jumping out of an airplane with a parachute but not
using it!
Finding and utilizing a counselor is but one of the steps to
protecting yourself. There are still a few things that you’ll
need to do. Each new thing that you do is as important as the
previous thing, so read on.
KNOW WHAT YOU WANT
When I was starting out as a paper delivery boy at age twelve,
business agreements were simple. I delivered the papers and all
that I wanted out of the deal was some spending money.
As I got older, things got more complicated. My job wasn’t
just about spending money anymore. Working was more about
security than ever. When making my first decisions after college
I had absolutely no idea what I really wanted out of my new
career. I treated my job as though I was a paper boy who needed

some spending money. Not knowing what I really wanted ensured
that my job wouldn’t really benefit me in a meaningful way.
Sure, I’d get paid some money for working but I wouldn’t be able
to create a solid future until I could envision that future. As
I stated in the introduction, we work for money or benefits so
that we can gain, be secure and shape our future. In order to
get those benefits you have to know what you want to get out of
your business arrangements.
In some situations, knowing what you want is second nature to
you. When you walk into a restaurant you may want a good meal at
a reasonable price. When you go to a movie, you pay to see
entertainment that you enjoy. But what about those times when
you’re looking for a job? Are you just looking for a job that
pays well or are you also interested in a special kind of
professional development? Do you want to lead a team, have an
office or get three weeks vacation? Do you want to try your hand
at running your own business? What about health care and other
benefits besides salary?
You could have many more questions about these things or
anything else. The key here is to understand that without
knowing what you really want to achieve in a given situation,
you’re lost even with all of your questions answered. In the
previous section I mentioned the importance of asking questions.
Knowing what you want helps you to ask the right questions.

Maybe you’re a business owner or you aspire to own your own
business. Knowing what you want out of a business situation is
much more important when the business is your own. This is
because there’s usually a much higher financial risk involved
when you’re running your own business.
It may sound surprising to hear that many entrepreneurs fail
to know exactly what they want to get out of their business
arrangements. Some people are great at coming up with ideas and
getting those ideas off the ground in the form of businesses,
but that’s where the motivation and initiative stops.
When I was in the restaurant business I partnered with a
person exactly like this. As a result, I joined a business that
was merely surviving on inertia with no direction and no real
future. You could see in the bottom line that the business
wasn’t making a profit. In fact, the business was losing money
every month. I joined the business because I saw a diamond in
the rough and wanted to inject the business with my direction. I
knew what I wanted to get out of the business and those ideas
affected how I ran operations. This attitude resulted in
improved financial health for the business (and me) in just a
few months.
The key point here is that business owners who know what they
want in all situations are much more likely to be successful
than those who have a vague idea of their goals.

I do understand that at times it can be extremely difficult
to pull it all together to know exactly what you want. You may
have just graduated school with a boatload of student loans and
high expectations from others. You may be in the middle of a
career and finding yourself unexpectedly unemployed. You could
be a single mom (or dad) trying to provide for your family while
still having a home life. You may be running a business that’s
struggling and be too involved in keeping things going on a day-
to-day basis.
Many high-pressure situations like these make it tough to put
it all into perspective. People who are successful in business
find a way to get that perspective. Like the veteran quarterback
who can avoid a sack and make the most of his short time, you
need to handle the pressure and find a way to make the world
around you slow down just a little bit. Is that very hard to do?
Yes. But with practice it is doable. People just like us are
doing it every day of the week.
I want you to work on a little exercise to bring it all into
focus. Grab a sheet of paper and think of all the business
situations that you are in now or may be involved with in the
near future. Write down a short description for each of those
situations. Leave space under each situation for some details.
Under each of the business situations I want you to write what
you hope to get out of the situation. Once you’ve decided what

you hope to get out of the situation, expand on it by writing
down how you plan to ensure that you get what you want out of a
situation. Here’s a simple example of how this should work:
Situation - Calling on a client for a potential sale.
Expectation – I want the client to either continue the sales
process by requesting more detailed information or agreeing on
the spot to purchase my product.
Action Plan – I will prepare before the meeting by ensuring
that I understand the client’s situation and needs. I will
prepare and present material that addresses those needs. I will
show up on time for the meeting, and be very positive and very
responsive to the client’s questions. I will ask for the sale
or, at the very least, make my best attempt to move the sales
process forward.
You see, it’s a very simple thing to do. It just requires a
bit of thinking and some common sense. The key to knowing my
action plan was knowing what I wanted to get out of the
situation. Try this for as many scenarios as you can think of.
And remember, this isn’t school, so there are no mistakes on
this. Everything you write down has value.
GET IT IN WRITING

OK, so you’ve built a little bit of business savvy by completing
the previous exercises. You’ve got a good basis to move forward,
and move forward we must. These skills will inevitably lead you
to a point where you’ll be ready to enter into some kind of
business agreement. Agreements are just words and by themselves
they don’t really hold any weight when engaging in a business
deal.
Any agreement between yourself and your counterparty needs to
be legally verifiable in case something does not go as expected.
And as much as we’d like to think that people are all honest and
everything will happen as planned, it’s just not the case.
That’s why you’ll find that the best way to protect yourself in
a business situation is: Get your agreements in writing!
Now this may be a step that seems to be common sense but so
many people skip it because they think that it’s easier to take
someone’s word for something instead of putting it on paper.
This thought process is one hundred percent wrong.
Remember, we’re talking about ways to protect yourself here.
So imagine you’re engaging in a business agreement to provide a
service for someone and everything goes smooth on your end. You
get paid on time, you’re happy and they’re happy, end of story.
Now imagine the same scenario but your client now refuses to
pay. They may start making up reasons why you shouldn’t be paid
or that you should be paid less than what you agreed upon. You

would probably protest that you delivered the agreed-upon
service completely and on schedule. The problem is that without
the terms in writing you have no way of proving that fact and
your claims against your client will be severely limited.
I never took a class in college that specifically dealt with
contracts because I was a business major. They do exist, but the
problem is that you probably only think about them if you’re
interested in law. Well if you’re in college I’d strongly
suggest choosing contract law as an elective no matter what your
major is. In fact, I think that a class on contracts should be
mandatory since we’ll all be in many situations where some sort
of contract is (or should be) involved.
I remember working as a tile and marble installer on a very
large job in a building for a very famous developer in New York
City. The job involved very expensive marble being installed in
a building that had a prime location, so it was bound to be very
lucrative. When the job was complete the developer tried every
trick in the book to defer and/or reduce the payments to my
company.
This developer made up stories of defects and late work to
try to reduce our payment by tens of thousands of dollars.
Here’s the best part, the job had already been verified onsite
and the terms, which were met completely, were in writing! The
developer simply didn’t care and wanted to throw out the

original terms AFTER the job was done. A dispute was brewing,
but could you imagine my company’s situation if we didn’t have a
written contract?
Luckily, my boss had gotten a deposit to cover all the
materials involved in the job prior to starting, so he wasn’t at
a total loss while he attempted to get paid for the work.
Eventually, my company got paid every penny of the original
price but we wouldn’t have had a chance of that without the
written agreement. Later, we realized that this particular
developer made his money by squeezing small contractors after a
job was complete, and I’m sure that many of them got squeezed
pretty hard.
In partnering with my wife in her photo business, we deal
with situations that require agreements all the time. I
introduced her to the concept of getting things in writing for
all of her business dealings. When people agree to have my wife
provide wedding photography services, the cost can run into the
thousands of dollars and the photography contract protects each
side from the other doing something that can hurt the other.
For example, there is a clause that requires the client to
pay a one-third deposit so that my wife can set aside the time
and not book any other jobs. There’s also a clause that requires
the client to provide a week’s notice for cancellation or
forfeit their deposit.

These clauses prevent clients from double-booking
photographers while they wait until the last minute to make a
final decision. To protect the client, the agreement states
exactly what photo services will be delivered on the day of the
wedding. So by looking at the agreement you can see all the
details about the services to be performed.
The terms for the deposit are an important part of any
written agreement. If your business arrangement requires you to
set aside time in the future and/or commit other resources
before the job is done, then get a deposit for your services. A
deposit that is refundable under certain conditions is critical
to ensuring that the other party is serious about a business
deal.
From time to time, my wife will do photo shoots at cost in
order to test new equipment or lighting techniques. These shoots
are set up without deposits and nearly half the time the people
fail to show up for the appointments.
Conversely, when she collects a deposit for her services the
people show up one hundred percent of the time. When people are
paying a deposit it shows you that they are serious about
enlisting your services.
When you accept a professional job these days many employers
will require you the sign an employment contract prior to hiring
you. You should read these contracts and know what they say

prior to accepting a job. You have the right to make this
evaluation and I would avoid any employer who tries to get you
to sign something without evaluation. You also have the right to
add anything to the contract that has been promised but is not
contained in the paper that you will sign. Oftentimes we’re
tricked into feeling that it’s “take it or leave it” in this
type of situation and that’s just not the case. Some employers
may give you that attitude and those are the employers that
you’ll want to run from.
I know that you’re getting smarter as we go and probably
asking the question: How do I know what terms should be in my
agreement?
First of all, if you’re thinking about how your written
agreements should be worded and structured, then give yourself s
gold star because you’re grasping a very important concept that
will serve you well in business. Second, you should take some
time to try to assess your contractual needs.
If you’re someone who provides a product or performs a well-
defined service, you can probably write out a contract that will
cover most situations and leave space for the name of the person
whom you’re doing business with. If you provide a service that
varies greatly from client to client, then you may want to
include a few basic terms and fill out the rest as you take on
work.

Here’s another situation where your counselor will come in
handy. Your counselor can guide you on setting up some template
agreements. Another thing that the counselor should do is
recommend that you have a lawyer review your template agreements
to insure that they are legally binding. After all, spending the
time to get things in writing is worth nothing unless you can
enforce the agreement.
Sometimes people will try to beat an agreement that’s been
signed. Remember my example about the building developer. A
strong, legally binding agreement prevented my company from
being fleeced out of money and prevented us from being put in a
very dire financial situation. Taking the time to review your
agreements with a lawyer costs money but it will save you big-
time in the end.
For your next exercise I want you to get into the mindset
that you have the right (and the obligation to yourself) to put
your agreements in writing. I want you to think of a situation
where you should’ve had a written agreement but didn’t. It may
have involved a job that you accepted or a business deal that
you engaged in. You could also think of a situation where you
had a written agreement but it didn’t include all conditions
that you would have liked. Either way, use that situation to
think of all the conditions that should have been in the
agreement and write them out. Once you’ve done that, consider

how your situation could have been improved by having some of
these conditions in writing.
ENFORCING AGREEMENTS
Thus far, I’ve given guidance on ways to protect yourself while
you build trust in a business environment. All of this is great
in theory but must be practiced in order to provide the true
benefits that you desire. All of these measures lead up to your
written agreement. The written agreement is not the end of the
line here, though.
What if you make an agreement with someone and the other
party fails to meet the terms of the agreement? This is where
you need to take strong action. The next lesson is a very
important one: Be prepared to enforce your agreement.
If the other party in an agreement meets the terms of the
agreement and you do the same (which you should always do) then
both of you should be satisfied. If your counterparty fails to
meet the terms of the agreement, then you have to act;
otherwise, all your previous work and preparation are put in
jeopardy.
This is one of the most difficult areas for people to take
action on. The reason people fail to enforce agreements is that
it requires that you engage in some sort of confrontation.

Have you ever seen a class on confrontation in a college
curriculum? You probably haven’t unless you took some law
classes. Lawyers are trained in the art of confrontation,
whereas everyone else is left to figure out how to do it (or
hire a lawyer!) And while the thought of a confrontation may
seem unpleasant, it really doesn’t have to be. You also need to
remember that if you’re on this step then there is probably
either some money or a service that you are owed and there’s no
way you can make it in the business world if you’re getting
robbed of money or services.
From our youngest years on we are generally taught to be very
nice and avoid confrontations with other people. This thought is
so pervasive throughout society that we’re left feeling like
confrontations are a bad thing and should be avoided all the
time. I remember one time sitting on an airplane watching two
men argue over which seat number was the window or the aisle. A
man had gotten on the plane first and taken the aisle seat. A
few moments later another man got on the plane and said to the
first man that he had a ticket for seat 7B, which was definitely
the aisle seat.
The first man looked him directly in the eye and insisted
that 7B was the window seat. The man with the ticket for the
aisle seat protested once and the man actually in the aisle seat
rebuked him again. Without further protest the main with the

ticket for 7B took seat 7A without another word spoken about it.
In this situation the man who took the window seat was obviously
looking to avoid a confrontation while the first man was really
looking for one. And while this certainly wasn’t a critical
situation it illustrates how some folks will try to impose their
will on others even in the most unassuming situations.
The key here is not to let others impose their will on you
without you having some say in the matter. Your say will involve
the action that you take to enforce your business agreement.
You may be thinking that enforcing agreements only applies in
situations where a person owns a company or is an employer of
others. This is not the case. As an employee, you should be
prepared to require your employer to follow his written
agreements with you. These days, even smaller companies have
employees sign some kind of standard agreement. If you sign the
agreement and the employer violates the terms, then you are well
within your rights to take action. After all, you are not an
indentured servant and you should never act as if you are one.
Stand up for yourself and you’ll get what you want, rather than
getting what others think you should have.
At this point you’re probably looking for guidelines on what
your possible courses of action are in enforcing your agreement.
The action that you should take will depend on the situation.

In my wife’s photo business, she takes a one-third deposit
for all work performed and if the client fails to show up on the
day of the shoot, then the agreement states that she can keep
that deposit.
Now, she’d rather complete her services and get paid the full
amount rather than have a client who doesn’t show, but the
financial penalty for last-minute cancellations protects her
from wasting her time. And besides, the other person fully
agreed to forfeit the money if they failed to show up for their
appointment.
I learned this lesson the hard way. In my years running a
personal training business I had gotten burned a few times in
the beginning by clients who made appointments, then failed to
show up.
After this occurred a couple of times I began enforcing a
twenty-four hour notice rule on cancellations, with the penalty
being the price of the session if the client failed to show up.
As a young paperboy, I had a few deliveries that failed to
pay me after the first week. My paper manager advised me to keep
delivering and that they would probably come around with a
payment. Well after I had to pay back the cost of those papers
for the second week in a row, I decided to take action. I
stopped delivering the paper to the homes that hadn’t paid.

In both cases I took action to enforce agreements and as a
result I was able to quickly reverse the situation. My unpaid
newspaper deliveries tracked me down and paid their outstanding
balance so they could get their papers delivered again. As a
personal trainer, I had forgotten the lessons I learned as a
paperboy, but once I had to pay all the bills on my own I made
sure to remember to take action so that I’d have enough money to
pay the bills. My personal training clients had almost one
hundred percent attendance after I instituted my twenty-four
hour cancellation policy.
Now, if you are really averse to confronting others you
always have the option of accepting the short end of an
agreement. Of course, that would mean that you’d be moving in
the opposite direction of your goal to become a stronger
business person and achieve your dreams. You will also be a bit
lighter in the wallet, as you’ll be getting paid less and/or
paying more than once for services that are owed to you. All it
takes is a few of these situations and whatever business that
you’re in will not be a business too much longer.
I’m going to assume that you have grasped the importance of
enforcing agreements and that you are ready to take action. It’s
important that you understand what actions you will take prior
to having to take them.

You should be asking yourself the following question prior to
making a deal with anyone: How will I react if the other party
fails to meet the terms of the deal?
Your action depends on the situation. In some instances
direct legal action may be necessary. In other instances you may
just need to communicate directly with the other party in order
to resolve the issue.
Sometimes people just forget to do something and need to be
reminded. One great example of using communication to resolve a
disagreement comes from my experiences buying and selling on the
auction site eBay. As a rule, I always provide feedback for
people who sell to me and require feedback from others who buy
from me. Since I always provide good service, the higher number
of quality feedback that I have, the easier it will be for me to
buy or sell in the future.
Whenever I sell something on eBay I will always request that
the winning bidder leave feedback after the transaction is
completed, while explaining that I will leave feedback for them
once they’ve posted mine. Even with this policy stated, some
people will still not leave feedback. In my earlier dealings on
eBay I always wanted feedback but never did anything about it,
so my feedback rating stayed pretty low even though I’d sold
quite a few items. I got tired of that situation, so I made sure
to create the written policy and follow up all sales with an e-

mail a few days later specifically to request feedback if it had
not been left.
Since I’ve started doing this all of the people buying from
me have left feedback. These people probably would not have left
feedback otherwise, but all they needed was a reminder.
That’s a simple example of how direct communication can
resolve something lacking with an agreement. Other situations
that involve dealing with larger businesses will be more
complex.
If you’re an employee of a business, you may have few choices
in forcing a business to meet its obligation to you. The one
option you do have in that situation is to find another job.
Sometimes telling your employer that you’re ready to go
elsewhere will get him to honor his agreements with you.
You’ll definitely want to get your counselor involved in
deciding actions related to enforcing agreements. You should be
able to run through your business situations with your counselor
and come up with necessary action plans. Some of these plans may
involve direct communication, some may involve legal action, and
some may involve a little bit of both.
The key here is that you need to know what action you will
take if a deal goes wrong. Don’t obsess on the potential failure
of a deal, but know that you’re protecting yourself by taking
action. Following this advice will greatly increase your chances

for success by saving you the financial loss and emotional
strain of broken agreements.
This is the perfect time for another one of those ever-
important exercises. As I stated earlier, your willingness to
enforce your agreements stems from your feelings about
confrontation. Because of that fact, this exercise focuses on
confrontation. You’ll write down a series of questions,
contemplate them and then write down the answers. Here you go:
How do I feel about confrontations in general?
When was the last time I felt like I confronted someone?
How did I feel about that confrontation?
Does a confrontation mean violent action or are there other
types of confrontation?
How important is it to me that I stand up for myself?
Have I ever suffered financial consequences from failing to
confront someone?
What are the details of a situation where I should have
stood up for myself but didn’t?
Why is it important to stand up for myself in business
situations?
Seeking counsel, getting your questions answered, agreeing in
writing and then enforcing agreements are the cornerstones of a
successful life in the new and alien world of business. But

while these actions form the cornerstones, there is a lot more
to a successful life in the beehive, which is why you must read
on.

Lesson Two: Be Tough
“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight
- it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
- DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Back in the 1960s the Cuban Missile Crisis had many Americans
fearing a nuclear war.
In October 1962, American intelligence sources detected
Russian missile sites being constructed on the island of Cuba,
just 90 miles from the United States. The presence of such
missiles constituted a dire threat to the security of the United
States.
In the days that followed, the United States and Russia were
locked in an intense game of chicken. President John F. Kennedy
ordered a naval “quarantine,” whereby the U.S. Navy blocked
Russian ships attempting to bring additional missiles and
construction materials to Cuban ports. Tension rose on both
sides of the conflict and many Americans feared that the country
would go to war.
After several days, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev
rethought his position, turned his ships back for Russia and
agreed to tear down the missile sites in Cuba.
During that time President Kennedy had to make hard decisions
that affected the future of the United States. As a leader,

President Kennedy needed to take action to show that the U.S.
would not tolerate such a threat to its national security.
Instead of giving in when America faced an imminent threat,
President Kennedy took action and stood tough.
Now there’s no way of knowing how things would’ve gone
without the so-called “quarantine,” but in this case the end
certainly justified the means.
It’s a rare situation in business where the outcome of a
situation can be life and death (unless you’re dealing with the
Sopranos!) But where our livelihoods are involved, standing your
ground is very important. President Kennedy’s actions were those
of a leader protecting the interests of the U.S. population. As
a business person, you must be ready to take tough stands in
order to protect yourself and your partners. If you learned
Lesson One then you know how important it is to protect your
interests. That’s why the second lesson you need to learn is
this: In business you have to be tough.
Many years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I witnessed a few
tough stands while working on construction sites in New York
City. As a worker on a variety of jobs large and small I
witnessed businessmen in the construction industry fighting for
their business.
On one particular job a roofing contractor strongly objected
to some waterproofing work that my crew was doing in a shower

room of a building. As we worked on the job, a guy busted into
the room demanding that we stop because, as he said, “That’s
roofers’ work!”
We were shut down for several hours as the head of the
roofers union engaged in heated negotiations with our boss.
After a while they came out of closed doors and we were allowed
to continue with our work.
That situation left a lasting impression on me. I remember
how passionate the roofers were about the fact that we might be
doing work that could mean a paycheck for one of their fellow
workers. And I remember how adamant we were about this work that
was putting food on our tables as well.
Both camps took a stand, with the roofers refusing to let us
work and us refusing to leave the room so the roofers couldn’t
take over. To both sides the business was worth it and we both
had our legitimate reasons for standing pat. In the end the
bosses worked it out, but not before they had a chance to air
their grievances and come to a suitable compromise.
These days you rarely read or hear about a management
philosophy that advocates being tough in a business environment.
The “Zen” approach of going with the flow and avoiding conflict
seems to be very popular in print. Don’t fool yourself into
thinking that the hallways of the shiny office buildings can’t

be as tough as that shower room in what was to be the New York
Foundling Hospital.
Whether you’re involved in a small business or a salaried
worker in a large corporation, you must defend your standing in
order to persevere and get ahead. After all, our quality of life
depends on our business skills and unless you’ve got a great
curveball or are lucky enough to be a movie star then you’re
probably working for a living, which means all of this stuff is
extremely important to your financial well-being.
Right about now you’re probably thinking: What exactly does
this guy mean when he says, be tough?
PRINCIPLES
Know your beliefs and principles and stick by them. Not having
defined principles is like a boat not having a rudder. The costs
of not having (or not following) your principles can be great.
Take the following example, for instance.
One of your life principles might be to be honest in all
situations. Now let’s say that you’re working in the marketing
department of a large corporation. Your boss has a meeting with
you and asks you to “pretty-up” the results of a marketing
survey of your company’s latest project because someone higher
up on the food chain needs the product to appear successful.

Your boss makes it clear to you that jobs are on the line
(including your job) if the numbers don’t come out right.
BOOM! You’ve now got a personal dilemma, or maybe not. You’re
being asked to compromise your beliefs and fudge the numbers or,
in less diplomatic terms, you’re being asked to lie.
Depending on your previous experience you may not be able to
imagine such a scenario occurring in a reputable organization.
All you have to do is look at the business news on a regular
basis to see that this type of thing does happen, and quite
often. Major corporate flameouts like Enron, Tyco and WorldCom
have shown us that some folks in the corporate world work very
hard to deceive their co-workers and the public in order to
advance their financial position in society.
Back to your dilemma. When asked to do this particular deed,
you can hear it in your boss’ voice and see it on her face that
refusing to fudge the numbers a bit would greatly upset her or,
in less diplomatic terms, she’ll can you like tuna if you don’t
help out.
You’ve reached an important moment of decision in your career
and in your life. On one hand, you can help advance your career
in the short term, while on the other hand you might be taking
an action that may hurt others and you might have to pay dearly
for later.

The real decision, of course, has nothing to do with your
career and everything about whether or not you’re willing to
stand by your principles.
The obvious decision here is to stick by your principles and
refuse to change the numbers, or so it seems. You see,
somewhere along the way you can lose sight of what’s real and
situations like this can become like a gray area where small
compromises are rationalized by saying things like, “It’s only a
small change, so how could it hurt?”, or “We’ll balance things
out correctly next quarter.”
NO!
Don’t listen to those voices, whether they’re coming from
your boss or inside your own head. Once you start breaking your
principles then you’re more likely to do it again and again.
Each little compromise can propel you down a quite slippery
slope.
Think about those executives who made what they thought were
small fibs and were so happy when they got the bonus and
promotion. Now think about how they felt when their names showed
up on TV connected to a corporate scandal. Financial penalties
and plea bargains inevitably follow and all of a sudden those
little fibs turned quite devastating.
You’ve got to be tough and weather the storm in the present.
Refuse to fudge the numbers and your boss will put all kinds of

pressure on you like threatening to fire you, withholding a
bonus or passing you over for promotion. So be it. Sometimes
being tough means weathering the storm in the present so that
the future will hold brighter days. Never mortgage your future
for a little satisfaction in the present.
Get the picture? Stand by your principles!
COMPROMISE
At times, being tough can be a paradox because while you need to
be tough in business you also need to know when to compromise.
Knowing when and how much to compromise is an art in itself.
Once again, we find ourselves in an area where your counselor
can help you. Since your counselor is more experienced than you
are, he or she can help you find the right level of comfort with
compromise in a given situation.
My general guideline is that you should consider compromise
in all areas except ones where your principles are compromised.
You will find out that compromising your principles opens you up
to a world where you never know where you stand. On the other
hand, there are areas where you might want to give in a bit in
order to get things done.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis example that I began this lesson
with and the subsequent example of the construction site, both

sides ended up compromising just a little bit in order to bring
the situation to a satisfying conclusion.
In each case, the satisfying conclusion was dictated by the
situation. In the Cuban Missile Crisis it was very satisfying to
have avoided all-out war while gaining the removal of the
missiles from Cuba.
In the construction example, both sides were able to continue
working on their respective jobs after only a short delay. After
all, no one gains if both sides blow up at each other and
progress gets stopped all together. You may have to compromise
with your business adversaries at some level. The compromises
involved in the earlier examples were relatively
straightforward.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis example, President Kennedy agreed
to forego any further military action and lifted the
“quarantine” in exchange for Russia removing their missiles from
Cuba. In that case the U.S. held fast on the basic principle
that we will protect our mainland in the event of a threat. But
there was a compromise in that we decided not to use force, but
strong persuasion. The result was successful for us but the U.S.
would have been well within its rights to defend itself more
forcefully.
In the construction example, our immediate livelihood was
threatened and we couldn’t ignore that, but at the same time our

boss was willing to be reasonable as long as the terms were
discussed beforehand. In the end we were allowed to continue
working on the shower room while the roofers were given a chance
at some other work that we were scheduled for later on in the
job.
In both cases, both sides adjusted their desires in the short
term in order to come to the compromise. You can’t always
convince the other side of a situation that a compromise is
necessary, but you can keep an open mind to the possibility of
meeting in the middle.
The actual situations that you deal with will be different
from my examples no matter what business you’re in. To make the
decision whether to compromise or not a little simpler, just ask
yourself this question: Does the following action violate one of
my guiding principles? If the answer is yes, then you’ll want to
stand your ground. If the answer is no, then a compromise is
probably in order.
As a tank platoon leader I dealt with situations that
tested my toughness and willingness to compromise on a regular
basis. Many times soldiers would challenge my authority to see
how far they could push the envelope and get aw ay with stuff.
Most of the time, I stood my ground and refused to give an inch
but there were a few situations where compromise was necessary.

I can remember one incident in particular where I got word of
a soldier who had stolen a part from one of our tanks on the
morning of a big inspection, causing my company to be missing a
crucial part while securing it for his company’s benefit. I was
furious and ready to turn the guilty party in to the Military
Police.
To me, theft within the U.S. Army was inexcusable and should
be punished harshly. I was ready to take action when a senior
Sergeant in our tank company pulled me aside and suggested that
we could use the information as a bargaining chip, thereby
gaining favors from the offending company and allowing internal
discipline to take place by the other Company Commander.
I was ready to bring down the whole house and report the
theft to the Military Police but luckily I stopped for a second.
The favors that we were being offered would more than make up
for the lost tank part and the soldier agreed to apologize to
the tank crew from whom he’d stolen the part from. So instead of
ruining the career of a young private who didn’t know better and
causing huge scandal, we came to a compromise that involved
acknowledgement of wrong doing and compensation for the wrongful
actions. (And unknowingly, I practiced the tenet of engaging
counsel that I mentioned in Lesson One.)
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are two people who know that being
tough and sticking to your guns can pay off big time. They sold

their script “Good Will Hunting” for $600,000 to a major film
company.
At the time, they were just struggling actors trying to get a
break in the film business. The film company wanted to make the
movie with two other actors in the starring roles. Ben and Matt
had the right of first refusal on the roles and they would not
let the movie go forward without being cast in the roles that
they wrote for themselves.
After all, their long-term goal wasn’t about being
screenwriters, but film actors, and the script was simply a
vehicle to help them get film roles. In addition to that, the
film company insisted that the movie be shot in Canada where
production costs would be much cheaper.
Once again, Ben and Matt stood tough and insisted that the
movie be shot in the Boston area, where the script was
originally set. While they insisted on some things, they were
willing to be flexible and compromise on adjusting some areas of
the story.
As a result of Ben and Matt’s tough attitude on their deal-
breakers, the script went unproduced for a year and a half until
Miramax agreed to purchase the script rights from the first film
company. The rest is history. Miramax agreed to make the film
with Ben and Matt in the starring roles and use genuine Boston-
area locations.

“Good Will Hunting” went on to gross $138 million and win Ben
and Matt Academy Awards for Best Screenwriting. Even more
important for Ben and Matt, though, was the fact that they were
then seen as movie stars. In the six years since “Good Will
Hunting” they’ve both starred in multiple big-name projects and
earned sizable sums of money. Ben and Matt stood by their
principles while compromising a bit and probably even exceeded
their original dreams of Hollywood success.
These are great examples, but how you learn how to be tough
while compromising is entirely up to you. Your best chance is
not to be afraid of putting yourself in a situation where
conflict may occur.
Frankly, every agreement that you enter into has the
potential to end up in a conflict, just like all of your other
relationships. When the time comes, you just need to think about
how important a particular situation is to your business and
life, then act accordingly.
Right now what I need you to do is stop for a second, put
down this book and take a few moments to do some soul searching.
In the previous paragraphs I mentioned principles. The Merriam
Webster dictionary provides the following definition of the word
principle;
a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption b
(1) : a rule or code of conduct (2) : habitual devotion to right

principles <a man of principle> c : the laws or facts of nature
underlying the working of an artificial device.
So in this case we’re talking about your personal rules or
code of conduct. Do you know what your guiding principles are?
Don’t be ashamed if you don’t. I can’t ever remember anyone
sitting me down to really think about principles but you find
that taking this step is as important as anything you can do
when entering the workforce.
Take some time with this, do some soul searching and even ask
your counselor if you have to. It’s that important. Return to
the book when you’ve got a list of at least five guiding
principles. The list will get larger as time goes on but for now
you should have a baseline to start from that puts the earlier
part of this lesson in focus.
Here’s an example of the start of my list of principles:
1. Honesty – conduct myself in a manner that is truthful
in all my business dealings.
2. Fairness – evaluate both sides of a situation before
making a final decision.
3. Responsibility – take ownership of any mistakes or
missteps and admit when I’m wrong.
Your list may have three principles or ten to start with. The
length does not matter as much as the intent and feeling behind
the principles on the list. You don’t have to complete the list

now, but I do expect you to add to the list as your most
important principles become apparent.
Hopefully, it didn’t take you too long to come up with some
guiding principles because I don’t want you to lose the flow of
the book. There are many important lessons ahead.
Armed with the will to be tough when necessary and your
guiding principles, you’re ready to move on to the next facet of
this lesson. Because even as you’ve vowed to be tough, stand by
your principles and compromise, you still need to …
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
A major part of being tough involves handling those nasty
situations that come up out of the blue and throw our best-laid
plans into confusion.
As young children most of us get into routines that are very
comfortable and as a result we learn to loathe the unexpected.
Higher education isn’t always the best place for us to learn to
deal with change either.
Classes are scheduled for certain times of day and as the
student you show up to get your lesson. In the crazy world of
business, the lessons and challenges come at you without any
predetermined schedule and this can often be a harrowing
experience.

In my first full-time job as a loading dock manager, I was
initially surprised and really frustrated when conveyer belts
broke down and trucks came in late, causing confusion and
increasing my work hours. I hadn’t yet opened up to the idea
that inconvenient and sometimes devastating events will occur. I
needed to keep my cool to get through them instead of being
angry and frustrated. My initial reactions to unexpected events
involved a good amount of yelling and cursing before I pulled
myself together and addressed the issue at hand. I’m not sure
how much time I wasted being frustrated, but it was too much.
The thing that you have to learn is that the unexpected will
occur and that you need to let it bounce right off you while you
keep moving forward. Being upset does nothing to change the new
circumstance.
On Aug. 14, 2003, a huge blackout occurred that left millions
in the Northeastern United States without power.
Within minutes millions of people in the city of New York
took positive action to deal with this unexpected event.
Commuters began walking home over bridges and stores began
having sales of perishable items so they wouldn’t lose
everything to spoilage.
New York is a tough city and one of the reasons it’s so tough
is that New Yorkers deal with unexpected events as much as
anyone. I’m sure there were also plenty of people who were very

frustrated and angry that they couldn’t get home or couldn’t
conduct business as normal, but that’s negative energy and it’s
counterproductive.
Unexpected events don’t always occur on such a grand scale.
The event may be something that takes place at your company.
Your company reports better-than-expected earnings and then also
announces a round of layoffs and reorganization. And guess who’s
part of the group being fired? That’s right, it’s you.
Or how about this. Your job is moved from the United States
to somewhere overseas and they’d like you to train your
replacement. It sounds crazy but this stuff happens to people
and seemingly calm lives can be turned upside down overnight.
You have to be ready to deal with the unexpected!
Life in the military is all about change. As a soldier, you
can be deployed all over the world if the need arises. My time
in the Army taught me all I need to know about dealing with
change. Accept it, evaluate the situation and move on.
I’d like you spend time thinking about some unexpected things
that could occur and imagine how you’d deal with them. You could
lose your job, or a family member could become ill or maybe
something great could happen like you’re offered a promotion or
you find out a new baby is on the way. There are many types of
unexpected changes and you need to be ready to deal with them in

a way that’s constructive and keeps you on track. This approach
will help you to continue on to realizing your dreams.
Grab a piece of paper and write out a few examples of
possible events. Then think about and write down how you’d deal
with those events. The exercise isn’t designed to have you
predict the future but to merely get you into the mode of
thinking about dealing with change.
Some of the events could be perceived as positive, while
others you may perceive as negative. I’m sure you’ll be
surprised at the answers that you come up with and the feelings
that are associated with those answers. Put this book down until
you’re finished with the exercise and then come back and read
on.
BE DECISIVE
What will you have for dinner tonight? When will you leave for
work tomorrow morning? How will you make a living after you get
out of school? These are basic questions that everyone has to
ask at some point in their life.
We’ll all deal with these questions and many others. We deal
with these questions by making decisions. Some decisions are
routine and made in seconds, and there are some that are tough
and require lots of thought.

Being able to make the tough decisions determines your level
of toughness and furthermore will affect your level of success
in the business world. There’s an old saying that goes like
this: “He who hesitates is lost.” You don’t want to be lost.
The more ambitious you are, the more tough decisions you’ll
have to make. After I got out of the military I had some very
tough decisions to make. While working at a large technology
consulting firm I felt underappreciated, underpaid and
dissatisfied with the work that I was doing.
I had some serious decisions to make about my future. At that
point there were simply two choices. One choice was to do
nothing and continue with the status quo. Another choice was to
make a change and do something else. I had already learned the
price of waiting around and not making a decision, so I knew
what to do. I chose a different path and did so quickly. I
didn’t want to regret every day that I went to work.
There are so many other situations that will require
important decisions in your business life. Should you take a
certain job? Should you ask for a raise? Should you buy from a
certain vendor? There are tons of questions and just as many
decisions. You need to master making these decisions in order to
have a chance at finding your success.
Many times people get paralyzed or ignore times of decision
because of fear. People fear that the decisions they make will

be bad ones. These feelings are normal but you have to
understand something. A decision is very rarely bad on its own.
The actions that you take after making a decision will
ultimately determine whether your outcomes are positive or
negative. I’ll give you a strong personal example from my life.
At the point where I decided to leave my civilian life in
California and join the Army, many people thought it was a bad
decision. I was derailing a great adventure and a nice career
that I was building in the fitness industry. It could have been
a bad decision but I made sure to get as much out of my
experience in the Army as possible.
I traded one set of possibilities for another. A few years
later, after I had achieved my goals, I decided to go back to
civilian life. Again, people reminded me of my accomplishments
in the military and some thought it was a bad decision for me to
leave. I was decisive again and reentered civilian life. I lost
nothing in the process, as I was determined to use all that I
had learned in the military. This landed me in the technology
consulting job that I mentioned earlier.
I used the same process in that decision that I did with all
the rest. And while I was moving from decision to decision and
sharpening my skills, other people I knew were staying in their
same old situations and complaining about the ruts they were in.

This process worked for me because I put in the effort and
made my decisions turn out positive. You’ll need to do the same
in order to be successful. Look around in your own life and
examine the business people whom you admire. Chances are these
people are not afraid to make tough decisions. That willingness
to make the tough decisions is undoubtedly a major reason for
their success.
What are the tough decisions that you have to deal with in
your life? Are you good at making decisions or do you have
problems making decisions? If you think you’re doing well, then
could you do better?
Do a quick exercise to find out about your decision-making
skills. Write down the last three important business decisions
that you made. When I say important, I mean to exclude those
decisions that you have to make every day.
To me, an important decision would be something that could
change the course of your career. Think of the situations that
you’ve been in. Even if you were in a situation where you
decided to stay with the status quo, it still qualifies as a
decision.
So write down three decisions and explain the situation.
Answer yourself the following questions for each situation:
Why did I make the decision that I made?

Did I take too much (or not enough) time in making the
decision?
Did my actions after the decision make the outcome
positive for me?
Do the preceding exercise in earnest and you’ll find out more
about how your appetite for decision-making is affecting your
career.
I hope I’ve given you an idea about what it means to be tough
and why it’s so important to have a certain amount of toughness
in your career and personal lives. The only thing to do now is
go out and practice what you’ve learned. It won’t be easy but if
you give it a chance you’ll find the right mix of toughness and
compromise to make things work for you. Sure, you’ll make some
mistakes, but then that leads us to the next tenet of my
philosophy.

Lesson Three: Make Mistakes Then Learn From Them
“Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing

flawlessly.”
- ROBERT SCHULLER
When I first graduated from college I was terrified that I would
make a mistake. It really didn’t matter what the mistake was
since it could be related to any choice that I made at that
point in my young life. Sixteen years of graded education had
taught me that a higher grade was better and that perfection
was, well, perfect.
I began to feel like aiming for an A and getting a C would
never be acceptable. Hence, I decided not to take too many
chances and grabbed for the easy and safe B. After all, why
stretch myself and take a risk at the age of 21?
I also wanted to please my parents, who had a vested interest
in seeing me go on to a “normal” career that provided me
security. This way I could go on to owning my own home and
starting a family just like they had done. And so, for a short
while I adopted my parents’ version of the American dream.
Does this sound like a familiar story to you? The story
doesn’t necessarily get any better if you stay in school to
pursue an advanced degree, either. The high cost of advanced

education can force a person into a very “safe” existence in
order to preserve income to cover student loans and other
educational expenses.
After all, people don’t feel good about taking risks when
they’re $40,000 in debt and just starting out in the working
world. Even if they are loaded down with debt, there are some
folks who still have the will to make risky moves and take the
chances that lead to being a successful business person and
achieving their dreams. Those folks are among the few but
courageous.
It’s more likely that you are like I was right after college.
I was having second thoughts about pointing my career in a less-
certain direction.
It took me less than a year after I graduated from college to
realize that the “safe” route wasn’t the one for me. I was
working as an operations manager for a shipping company with
long overnight hours and low pay as my reward.
Day by day I felt my life slipping by and I couldn’t see a
very exciting future for myself. I was a bit depressed at my
prospects and as a result I was drinking too much and gaining
weight. It wasn’t a very productive time for me.
This daily malaise finally reached its peak in the Christmas
season of 1991. Something, and I’m still not sure what,
compelled me to make a change in my career. Maybe I just got

sick of coming home tired and not feeling excited about
anything. Maybe I was watching a movie and saw something that
made me realize my life wasn’t headed where I wanted it to go.
That doesn’t matter, because all that’s important is that I
was compelled to make a move. I began researching possible
careers with no idea where I would end up. I wanted a positive
change in my life. I had gotten excited about physical fitness
in recent months so I began a deeper investigation of the
possibilities in the fitness industry.
Soon after I decided that I would start educating myself with
a goal of becoming a personal fitness trainer.
Let’s stop right here and ask a question. Have you ever been
compelled to make a change in your life? Have you ever felt like
it was time to make some new moves and open up new
possibilities? I would bet that the answer to both those
questions is yes. Reading this book may be one of the moves that
you’re making. Here’s another important question: Do we always
act when we feel strongly about making a change? The answer most
of the time would be no. The reason people hesitate is because
change equals risk and if you take a risk you just might make
mistakes and be considered a failure. And no one wants to be
considered a failure.

MISTAKES ARE AN ESSENTIAL PART OF LIFE
What is failure? I once heard that the only people who fail are
the ones who fail to try something they are compelled to do.
This thought is counter to the popular thinking that it’s better
to avoid failure (or mistakes) than to welcome the chance to try
something new.
At the time I began making major changes in my life, many
people considered my thoughts to be grounded in insanity. I came
from a place where a steady job and certain income were highly
valued things. There were no big dreamers, artists or super-
achievers in my family, or my world growing up, for that matter.
There were simply people who were doing their duty and
raising their families. All of this was good and noble and
there’s certainly no shame in that approach, but my gut was
screaming for something different. I was compelled to act so I
embraced the following philosophy: The only mistake in life is
not following your heart.
Have you ever had the same feeling? Have you ever had the
feeling that you NEEDED to be doing something else or that you
needed to go in a different direction? I believe that these are
feelings that many people have but few express outwardly for
fear of being rebuked or ridiculed. There’s just too much
negativity happening for people to take that chance.

Negativity be damned; I felt something and needed to act on
it. Once I decided that I wanted to be a fitness trainer, I
began planning some new moves, researching possibilities in the
fitness industry and teaching myself the principles of good
health and fitness.
I made some changes. By taking chances and making the jump
to a completely new industry I opened myself up to a world of
new mistakes. I knew nothing about the world of fitness. I had
no formal training in exercise science or physiology. This was a
very scary time, but it was also the most exciting time of my
life. I stopped listening to the naysayers and started taking
action.
Slowly I began to realize that I could make mistakes, learn
from them and in turn increase my chances of success. And guess
what, I was happier. You’ll be happier too when you forget the
negative and take your best shot at whatever it is you want to
do. Gone were the nightmarish memories of the college “Career
Fairs” where professors encouraged students to interview for
jobs with major corporations.
People want and deserve more than jobs. People want an
exciting life that fulfills their dreams, and college was the
last place to cultivate thoughts about dreams.
I began learning the valuable lesson that it’s OK to make
mistakes as long as you learn from them and don’t keep repeating

them. In fact, I’d say that making mistakes is an essential part
of maturing and finding out who you are in this life. I know
there are a million indications that point toward avoiding
mistakes but those indications are dead wrong!
I had plenty of chances to make mistakes during my first few
months as a personal trainer. This new world exposed me to new
people with different ideas and backgrounds than mine. Many
times I would say the wrong thing or lose training clients due
to my lack of ability in the area of sales.
Each time I made a mistake I would put the memory of what
happened into my mental toolbox and be vigilant about referring
to that memory when a similar situation would come up again. I
found that unlike the exams that we all took in high school and
college that there are re-tests with many chances to earn an A.
Higher education simply fools us into thinking that you have one
shot at every moment.
MISTAKES LEAD TO SUCCESS
So where did I get the guts to start taking all these chances,
you ask?
The U.S. space program during the 1960s provided me with some
valuable examples of how taking risks and learning from mistakes
could pay off. The engineers and scientists working on the space

program endured very long hours for years and years while trying
to perfect the first rocket that would go into space.
All that I remembered from school were the stories about the
successes of putting men into space and then on the moon. School
failed to teach me all the small and major failures that
occurred in the process of getting to those milestones. After
each crash and explosion the scientists would go back to the
drawing board and try again, processing what they’d learned from
their past failures until they finally created a new paradigm in
the field of space exploration. In short, their mistakes led
them to success.
After learning some more about the space program I took a
look at my own life and realized that I was avoiding challenges
in the mistaken belief that success involved avoiding mistakes
at all costs. The U.S. space program example teaches us that if
we strive to avoid mistakes then we can’t discover new things.
Without mistakes we can’t learn. I decided to look at things in
a new light and celebrate my mistakes as steps toward my future
goals.
Do you avoid challenging situations just to make sure that
you never take a misstep? If you do, then you must realize that
instead of trying to reach your goals in business you’re really
just expending a lot of effort trying to be perfect. You end up
just spinning your wheels.

That’s not what we want at all. We want to move forward and
find our success. Remember this important point. Trying to be
perfect will not move you onward and upward in the beehive.
MEASURE YOUR SWING
As I slowly absorbed these facts about the space program I had
less and less fear about putting myself in challenging
situations. I also learned that the whole process wasn’t just
about making mistakes and learning from them. Another valuable
lesson from the space program was this: You need to calculate
your risks when going into a venture. I call this measuring your
swing.
After all, the space program scientists didn’t put a human
into the first rockets that they were testing until they were
certain that an unmanned rocket could be launched into space and
recovered successfully.
The first astronauts went through thousands of hours of
rigorous and realistic training prior to being selected for the
manned space flight. So yes, there were great risks but at the
same time the scientists were smart enough to try to identify
the risks and deal with possible consequences before taking the
next step. Sounds a bit scary, but the important part is that in
spite of the risks they kept taking those steps forward.

Making a big life change probably won’t require the same
preparation as the astronauts required. A person committed to
their dreams will understand that the willingness to risk
mistakes and learn from them along with the ability to measure
their swing can take them to very high places and give them an
edge that can’t be found at any school. Taking risks can
certainly lead to possibilities never thought of at the local
career fair.
I don’t expect you to be an expert at evaluating risks and
dealing with mistakes. I’ll go through a simple example from my
life and then give you the opportunity to work on a few examples
of your own so you can ease into the whole thought process.
Back when I was 18 I decided that I really wanted to learn
to play the guitar. I always loved listening to music and was
fascinated by people who had the ability to make great sounds
from their guitars. Thinking like the 18-year-old that I was, I
focused on the risk that the whole venture would be a failure.
You’re probably wondering what risks are possibly taken by
trying to learn the guitar.
First of all, a capital investment was required. I would need
to purchase a guitar in order to play and that would cost a
couple of hundred dollars. How could I afford to buy a new
guitar? How would I know which guitar was right for me?

Then I would have to invest in lessons with a teacher,
because I had no idea where to start or what to do. How would I
find a teacher and once found how would I know the right one to
choose?
Next I would have to make time dedicated to learning and
practicing the instrument. What if I didn’t have enough time to
get good at it? What if, no matter how hard I tried, I never
played well? My family and friends might be really disappointed
in me.
That seems like a lot of brainpower going into what should be
a small decision. Frankly, it is a lot of brain power. The
thought process is focused on the obstacles to learning to play
the guitar and many people do not get past that stage when
making decisions.
After all, there are multiple opportunities to make mistakes
and face potential ridicule for failing. The key here is that
it’s okay to make such evaluations as long as we take it a step
further and deal with these risks.
How could I afford a new guitar? I investigated guitar prices
and determined the minimum amount I would need to purchase a
guitar. I was working and saved some money every week for a
couple of months to afford a low-cost starter guitar.

How would I know which guitar was right for me? I went to a
couple of different guitar shops, talked with sales people and
tried some different guitars in my price range.
How would I find a teacher and once found how would I know
the right one to choose? I looked in local music newspapers and
inquired at guitar shops about teachers. I met with a couple of
different teachers and tried out a couple of lessons with each
to see if I was enjoying it.
What if I didn’t have enough time to get good at it? I made
time. I gave myself 30 minutes per day dedicated to practicing
the guitar.
What if, no matter how hard I tried, I never played well? I
gained comfort from the thought that everyone had to start from
scratch and if they could do it, then so could I.
Isn’t it amazing how many different lines of thought can go
into one seemingly simple decision? While these thoughts may
seem limiting at first they are only one step in the process of
taking risks to better yourself. These risks lead to mistakes,
but as I correct each mistake I get closer to success. If you
break each risk down into individual parts and address them as
such, you’ll see that they are easily dealt with.
What I’d like you to do now is spend a little bit of time
evaluating at least two situations where you feel mistakes can
be made. Break down each situation into smaller parts using my

earlier example as a guide. Each of those smaller parts will be
an issue or potential area for mistakes. Decide how you’ll
address each issue. Be creative; you may come up with multiple
possibilities for each point of risk. The goal here is to
practice your ability to evaluate situations and give you
confidence in doing so.
And by the way, I’ve been playing guitar for sixteen years
now. I still have the first guitar I ever bought and play it
almost every day. I’d say that the investment and risk
definitely paid off.
BIG RISKS LEAD TO BIG REWARDS
If we look at the world of business we can find many individuals
who’ve taken big chances in order to reach their goals and be
successful. Michael Dell started his computer company out of a
dorm room on the University of Texas campus.
As a fresh-faced student, Michael left school to focus on a
company that would eventually become the No. 1 direct computer
sales firm in the world. If that’s not a risk, I don’t know what
is.
Most parents would be mortified at the prospect of their
child quitting school to start a company at such a young age.
Ten years ago I didn’t know one person who had ever heard of
Dell Computer and now just about every adult person recognizes

the name. Michael Dell understood the importance of vigorously
going after his dream, learning from his mistakes as he went.
After all, his goal in life wasn’t to merely have a college
degree, but to create a life that would fulfill his dreams.
Michael Dell took a big risk by quitting school in favor of a
small computer business. He worked hard to make his risk pay off
with huge rewards. Today, he’s the chairman of the most
successful computer company in the world.
There are plenty of other business examples of risk-takers
who’ve made mistakes in recent years. Earlier in the book I
mentioned eBay and its innovative system for building trust.
The innovative services introduced by eBay are only one
reason why it has been a very successful company in the Internet
sector. While many of the company’s contemporaries have been
acquired or run out of money, eBay has continued to grow more
profitable with each passing year, growing from profits of $7
million in 1998 to $250 million in 2002. This facilitator of
free trade on the Internet didn’t become one of a handful of
Internet blue chips by playing it safe, either.
Over the past five years eBay has been constantly moving into
new business areas and developing new offerings for its growing
customer base. Some of those moves, like moving into the
Japanese marketplace and the development of a customer payment
system, failed miserably and lost the company money.

Other moves, like the purchase of PayPal, yielded high
dividends. So in order to find out what would work, eBay CEO Meg
Whitman and her staff had to activate some ideas that seemed to
have promise but failed. The key here was that the eBay team was
able to recognize their failures, adjust their plans and try
other things that eventually worked. Today, many people consider
eBay the most successful Internet company yet. I tend to agree.
Learn from their approach and you will be rewarded.
You may not be a CEO or even aspire to be a future CEO, but
taking those chances, making mistakes and adjusting is so
critical to finding even the least of your dreams.
What’s more important, though, is that you’ve grasped all the
philosophies that I’ve put forth up to this point in the book.
You’ll need to truly believe in what’s been presented in the
first few chapters in order to move on and get the full benefit
of what we’re trying to do here. So far we’ve talked about
concepts that you need to believe in, but as we move forward
we’ll explore the actions that you’ll need to take in order to
conquer your dreams.

CHECKPOINT
You’ve done well to come this far and I want to make sure the
message sticks. Take some time to reacquaint yourself with the
first three lessons of this book. Go through all the exercises
and re-examine your commitment to moving forward.
Once you’ve reviewed the first three lessons, come back and
start with the next lesson, where you’ll learn that people who
are succeeding in the professional world worry less about risks
and think more about how to sell their ideas.

Lesson Four: Sell, Sell, Sell
“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help
enough other people get what they want.”
- ZIG ZIGLAR
Back when I was in my early teens my friends and I used to ride
the New York subway to Times Square in Manhattan. Once there, we
immersed ourselves in this totally crazy world of bright lights,
street hustlers, pinball parlors and adult-themed entertainment.
Mostly we’d just walk around like little tourists in a
crazed, adult version of Disneyland. We’d talk about getting
fake identification which hopefully would convince people that
we were eighteen years old. We’d eat pizza and just watch the
street. One Times Square staple from back then that has since
disappeared are the three-card monte dealers.
Three-card monte is a game where a person flips three cards
(two black and one red) around and when they’re done flipping a
player tries to select the red card. Back then this game was THE
street game in Times Square and it was also a big hustle.
Unsuspecting tourists or kids from Long Island would plunk
down forty dollars and try to pick the red card, with a hundred
dollar payout if they were successful. Of course, most of the

time the tourists would lose and they’d have to fork over forty
dollars to the dealer.
The only winners weren’t really winners at all since they
were working with the dealers to give the impression that the
game could easily be won. Now this game was completely illegal,
but the zeal with which the operators plied their trade was
admirable. There they were taking this game that appeared to be
a total con and convincing people that they should actually
plunk forty bucks down on a street corner, with no guarantee of
a payout even if a real player won.
The three-card monte operators knew something that all
successful business people know. You’ve got to sell whatever it
is that your business or dream is.
The three-card monte operators could have stood there on the
street corner with cards waiting to be shuffled, but instead
they put on a show which gathered crowds and then those crowds
got sold on the idea of trying to make a buck by picking a card.
Since three-card monte is not a legitimate business, I certainly
wouldn’t recommend that kind of selling to anyone. Still, the
concept is the same when you’re promoting your business or
ideas.
IT’S ALL ABOUT SELLING

If you have a dream, idea or business on your mind then you have
to be the first and foremost salesperson in order to make it
happen. You can do everything else right but without sales
skills your efforts to forward your ideas will be severely
hampered.
Here’s a very important question: How did we get to the point
where so many business people, young and old, have forgotten the
importance of being good at selling? Remember when you were a
kid and you wanted to stay out past a certain hour and your Mom
or Dad would object? Did you ever start countering their
objections with, “But Mom, all the other kids are staying out”?
Or “Dad, please, if you let me stay out I’ll come in early
tomorrow”?
Between staying out late, going to the movies and staying up
to watch TV shows, I must have had thousands of debates with my
parents. Each one of those debates was a sales session. I was
selling my idea on leisure activities and answering their
objections one by one. Most of the time the parent wins the
debate but the times that you do win feel great.
Somewhere along the way I lost that zest for selling and so
do many other people. It’s probably because we get more
independent as we get older and have less to sell. Once we have
jobs and cars and reach college age the last thing we want to do
is have to convince people of what we should have or do. School

doesn’t help much either. Teaching young adults how to sell is
not a priority in high school. I’ve never met a person who’s
been taught anything about the importance of sales in high
school.
You may get some exposure to sales in college, but then the
focus is usually marketing, which isn’t nearly as important as
the ability to sell. Artists have it even worse because most
fine arts curriculums abandon sales altogether, leaving artists
at the mercy of large corporations to sell their work. These
corporations then give the artists pennies on the dollar.
Compounding the lack of emphasis on the importance of sales
in business (and life) is the fact that we come to view the
sales profession as a sleazy group of old men going door to door
trying to sell vacuum cleaners or useless life insurance. How
about those folks who call you up in the middle of dinner or
your favorite TV show trying to get you to buy a time share or a
satellite TV system? Those unsolicited types of sales definitely
give the profession a bad name because they are annoying people.
Coming out of college, and even after that, I thought of
sales as a dirty profession not worthy of my time. I wanted to
be an executive and be in charge of things while leaving sales
to the salespeople. Many people I’ve talked to feel the same way
about sales, but they haven’t learned the simple fact that

everyone is a salesperson to some extent and if you’re not then
you probably need to be.
It took me a little while in the business world to re-learn
the importance of selling ability. I realized that my ability to
sell would make the difference between working for someone else
and being able to work for yourself. Like many people, I came to
this conclusion the hard way.
When I started my personal training business I had never been
in a position where I really had to sell in order to make a
living. So while I was focusing on learning to be a great
trainer I wasn’t making much money because I couldn’t sell to
clients. I quickly learned that I would have to sell in order to
survive in my new profession.
Everywhere I went after working as a personal trainer I found
that sales skills were essential. In the military I had to sell
my troops on training strategies so that my tank platoon could
be successful. As a technology consultant I had to sell clients
on our services while selling my bosses on my abilities so I
could move up in the organization. As a restaurant manager I had
to sell potential patrons on the idea that they would enjoy my
restaurant. My wife is an amazing photographer, but she never
really had a steady business on her own until I talked to her
about the importance of selling. By learning to focus a certain
amount of her time on selling skills she’s been able to gain

more clients than ever. In all these situations, selling is a
common key to success.
This tenet of my philosophy even applies to folks who have
more traditional jobs working for large businesses. In the last
few years working for corporations as a consultant I’ve learned
that you need to sell in order to meet your career objectives
within a corporation. If you’ve got an idea that will benefit
the company or would like to move into a different area of the
business, then chances are you’re going to have to pitch that
idea and overcome the objections of someone higher up the chain
of management.
Without the ability to sell you’re likely to languish in
dead-end positions, with your best ideas never getting
implemented. I define dead-end positions as ones that fail to
challenge you and fail to fulfill your everyday needs as a
professional. If you’ve ever been in one of these positions then
you know what I’m talking about. It makes it hard to get up in
the morning and even harder to imagine your dreams coming true.
And this is why you have to sell!
My personal examples about selling may seem simple because
they are on a small scale. But when you start thinking about
selling in situations where hundreds of thousands of dollars are
at stake, then things really get complicated.

As a consultant to the energy industry I became involved in
situations where that kind of money was at stake. It’s good to
realize the importance of selling early, and with small amounts
of money involved, so you’ll be ready to capitalize when the
bigger challenges arise.
LEARNING TO SELL
My first step toward becoming a salesperson was recognizing that
I needed to be one. The second step was going out and getting
some knowledge. I read books and listened to tapes talking about
sales techniques and dealing with clients’ objections. I can
still hear Zig Ziglar’s voice from his sales tapes that I bought
and listened to a hundred times.
The next step was actually applying these methods and finding
out what worked. During this process I made mistakes and
adjusted. There were plenty of frustrating moments but I was
getting better by the day.
By now I trust that you’ve bought in on the concept that
you’ll need to sell to be successful. Otherwise, I haven’t been
a very good salesperson! Next, you’ll need to know how you can
begin to build your own sales skills.
Unfortunately, there are very few lessons that can accurately
depict the situation of really trying to sell to someone who

needs to be convinced that your product or idea is worthwhile.
In school, people discuss sales techniques and learn to analyze
target markets. This preparation is nothing compared to dealing
with a live person who has many objections to what you’re
offering. This is all good because there are many “real world”
opportunities to hone your sales skills.
Real world situations are the best training grounds for
salespeople. You probably have many opportunities to practice
selling but you might not know it.
As a young paper delivery boy I focused on delivering the
papers on my route without ever thinking that I should be
stopping in on folks who didn’t get the paper to try to sell
them on the idea of receiving it. In this way I could have built
up my paper route and earned more money. I just wasn’t thinking
of selling. As a military officer I learned that I had to sell
ideas to my superiors in order to get approval for my plans.
Many times I fell short of convincing my bosses but I learned
from each attempt and honed my skills.
There are other options available to help you improve your
sales skills. When my wife started advertising her actor’s
headshot business I advised her on improving her sales skills.
One powerful technique for building sales skills is to go
through mock sales scenarios. Mock sales scenarios involve role
playing to simulate a sales situation. In my wife’s case we

practiced situations where people would call her to ask about
photo services. I’ve also done similar exercises where I’ve sat
alone and talked myself through an upcoming sales discussion.
These mock sales scenarios allow you to identify weaknesses
or areas where you may stumble in presenting your ideas. They
also help you to build confidence in presenting a particular
topic. If possible, do some sales exercises alone to build your
confidence and then have other people work with you so that they
can give you their impressions of your approach and demeanor.
Between the mock scenarios and your work in real situations,
your sales skill should improve and give you a better chance at
success.
KNOW WHAT YOU’RE SELLING
Even with good sales skills there are still some very important
aspects of selling that you will need to master. All the skills
in the world won’t help you if you don’t know what you’re
selling.
Imagine if you’ve got an idea that you want to pitch to your
boss and at the last second before the pitch you were told that
instead of talking about an idea to improve revenues in your
department you would have to sell your boss on the idea of

purchasing a new type of software that you know little about.
You would probably have a very rough time making the case.
It’s important to be as knowledgeable as you can be about
your idea, product or service. People feel confident when you
speak from a position of intelligence on a particular subject
and they are more likely to see it your way.
Besides just knowing a lot about what you’re speaking on,
you’ll also need to know any issues that aren’t directly related
to what you’re proposing but might affect the folks who agree to
your idea. If you have a proposal to reduce revenue in your
department you need to know how that proposal might affect other
departments.
If you’re trying to sell a product to someone you need to
know if it will have an impact on any other products a person
may already be using. As a personal trainer I had to keep in
mind how a specific exercise plan would fit into a person’s
lifestyle or personal preferences. You see, the more you’ve done
your homework, the better equipped you will be to deal with the
questions that you’ll be asked.
Yes, people will ask questions. Some will ask very few
questions and others will ask a lot of them. Either way, you
need to be able to answer the questions right away or at least
get the answers in short order. Your ability to answer people’s

questions will be a major factor in determining whether or not
you’ll be successful at selling.
DEALING WITH OBJECTIONS
Questions can be easy to deal with compared to objections. It’s
highly likely that almost everyone you sell to will have some
objections. Objections are the reasons why a person has doubts
about buying what you’re selling. Objections don’t mean that you
can’t sell to the person; they just mean that you need to
provide more information.
The key to dealing with objections is being ready for them.
So when you’re selling anything you need to think about the
reasons why someone will reject what you’re offering. Once
you’ve done that, you need to think of rebuttals, or reasons why
their objections should not stop the sale. If you’ve followed
the last two tips by being knowledgeable and ready for
questions, then you should be able to handle this step provided
you’ve thought out potential objections along with the proper
rebuttals.
There will be situations where you may hear a rebuttal that
you hadn’t thought of before. In that case you’ll need to think

on your feet and come up with a rebuttal on the fly while
remembering that objection for any future sales discussions.
I recommend keeping a detailed log of objections that you can
refer back to before each sales call or presentation. Having
such a log allows you to be well-prepared for dealing with
objections in the sales process.
CLOSING THE SALE
The last (and most important part) of selling is closing the
sale. To close the sale you simply need to ask for the sale.
There are many different ways to close the sale. If you’re
pitching an idea, you might summarize your key points and state
the chief reasons why you think the idea will be successful. If
you’re selling a product you might say something like, “So how
many of these would you like to order today?”
Closing the sale can be tough because it involves getting a
decision from someone in the moment. At the time you attempt to
close the sale there may be additional objections and questions.
The more experience you have in selling, the better you’ll be
when it comes to closing sales.
One word to the wise is not to try to close the sale too
early in the process. Make sure you’ve provided a decent amount
of information about your product, service or idea. The danger
in trying to close too quickly is that the other person (or

people) might think you’re trying to get a quick sale without
considering their needs. Keep in mind that smart business people
will always ask questions and want solid information.
Learning to close takes time and effort. You’ll make mistakes
but you’ll learn from those mistakes. Whatever you do, don’t
forget to ask for the sale.
DELIVERING
Once you’ve closed the sale, you haven’t finished your
responsibilities. Any good business person knows that the
closing of the sale is where your greatest responsibility
begins.
Once you’ve sold you have to deliver on your promises. So if
you’ve sold your boss on a new idea, then you’ve got to work to
make that idea pan out. If you’ve sold someone on a product,
then you need to deliver a product that does just what you said
it would do. Failing to deliver will hurt you in the long run,
as you might fool someone once but they will rarely allow you to
fool them twice.
While working as a technology consultant I saw too many
situations where companies promised big things for projects
worth millions of dollars and then failed to deliver on those
promises.

As a business person you should always be aware of your
ability to deliver on a promise, and if for some reason you
can’t deliver, then you should be upfront about it. It never
feels good to admit when you’re wrong but it’s better to swallow
your pride than to cover it up.
With this approach people will respect you and just may give
you a second chance if you mess things up.
I’d like you to do a practice exercise that you should repeat
every so often to keep your sales skills sharp. Write down three
sales situations that you either have found yourself in or are
likely to find yourself in. The situation can involve a product
or service you want to sell. The situation can also involve an
idea that you want to sell. Write down a few things about the
situation first by answering the following questions: What is it
that I’m trying to sell? Who am I trying to sell to? What will
the people I’m selling to get out of my product, service or
idea? What are some objections that people might have to my
proposal?
Once you’ve answered those questions for each of the
situations, imagine yourself trying to sell to someone who knows
nothing about what you’re selling. Tell the whole story and try
to imagine what questions you’ll answer, how you’ll answer
objections and how you’ll try to close the sale. This type of

creative visualization will boost your confidence for selling in
real situations.
PERSISTENCE
Even with the preparations that you’ll make for selling, you
will still hear the word “no” from people. I’ve heard a lot of
no’s for a variety of reasons and this leads me to an important
point about sales, persistence: To be successful at selling you
have to be persistent.
You may hear a dozen no’s or even a hundred no’s before you
hear the word “yes.” This will challenge your ability to deal
with rejection. Most of us are horrible at being rejected in any
situation and this is the reason why so many people avoid
selling their ideas. Remember, the word “no” doesn’t mean that
your idea is garbage; it just means that someone else doesn’t
have the same vision that you have. You must be persistent and
power through. If you quit after just a few no’s then you’ll
never know if you could have realized your dream.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon heard plenty of no’s when trying
to sell their script for the film “Good Will Hunting” but they
believed in their dream and kept adjusting and pressing on until
they got a “yes.”

You hear stories all the time about business ideas that got
passed on by one company only to be picked up by another company
and become successes. Sure, many ideas and initiatives fail to
gain acceptance, but a good salesperson learns and moves on.
There’s another key in sales that allows you to persist even
in the face of mass rejection, belief.
BELIEVE IN WHAT YOU’RE SELLING
You absolutely have to believe in your idea, dream, art (or
whatever) to sell them effectively. As the part owner of a small
restaurant I hustled more than any employee ever would. And I
sold the restaurant to anyone I though might want a good meal,
which was everyone, in my opinion. Belief and passion gave me
the ability to keep going and try new things even after my
restaurant was empty for three nights in a row.
Ask yourself this question: What do I believe in?
You will always be good at selling something that you truly
believe in. Think of the difference in your energy when you’re
speaking about something that barely interests you. Then think
about your demeanor when you’re talking about something you
really believe in. It’s amazing to see someone’s face change
when the topic changes to a subject that really interests them.
Their eyes light up, they start to talk a bit faster and get

really excited. Their body language tells people that they’re
behind the topic one hundred percent and as a result everyone
around them is uplifted. That’s what you need in order to sell.
Anything less is just faking it and everyone will know it.
Take this moment and start writing down some things that you
strongly believe in. Include topics or hobbies that you really
love and enjoy. Imagine how you would sell each one as an idea
to a total stranger. I bet that you’ll have no problem getting
your energy up for this task.
Successful people learn to sell, persist, believe and make
things happen. The harder you work at it, the more positive
changes will happen faster.
A young man named Myles Kovacs is a shining example of a
business person who understands the value of sales. In the past
three years Myles has turned his passion for custom cars into a
multi-million dollar a year business that has gained nationwide
attention.
He started a custom car lifestyle magazine called Dub on a
shoestring investment of ten thousand dollars and has used his
magazine as a vehicle for selling car customization products and
services. He turned his passion into a successful business that
he loves. He’s also selling to and making deals with major
corporations to insure that his dreams continue to grow and
thrive. Myles has done all of this without a college education.

Myles is living his dream and his ability to sell with passion
is making that dream happen.
Your goals may be more modest or they may be even more grand
than Myles’ goals, but you’ve got to sell to make it happen.
Even with great sales experience all of us have come to
understand that just about anything can happen even if you’re
educated and strictly following the lead of this book. Bad days,
weeks and even months will pop up when you just can’t seem to do
anything right. Our business and personal lives can be fraught
with pitfalls. That’s why I need you to read on and find out why
it’s so important to have heart.

Lesson Five: You Gotta Have Heart
“Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success.
They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute
of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.”
- H ROSS PEROT
As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I used to watch the New York
Jets play football on TV every Sunday during the season. The
Jets lost a lot more than they won, but no matter what the score
of the game I would always stay tuned for the two-minute warning
at the end of the fourth quarter.
At the two-minute warning the TV station would play a segment
called Fantastic Finishes. The segment was sponsored by a large
corporation and featured video clips of teams making amazing
last-minute comebacks to win games. The clips were fun to watch
but they were also very inspirational. You got the feeling that
amazing things were possible if you gave it your best shot in
the face of likely defeat.
One thing I’ve found to be true is that just like those
fantastic finishes, you too need to give it your best shot even
when the odds are against you. Many people call this having
“heart.” Whatever you call it, it’s essential for success in the
world of business.
DEALING WITH ADVERSITY
Remember these words: You will be judged in life not by your
actions during times of success, but rather you’ll be judged by
your actions during a time of adversity.
It’s easy to feel good and face the world when things are
going great. When things start to turn for the worse, that’s
when you’ll truly be tested. Inevitably, most new ventures or
ideas traverse rough ground at the start and then get better
over time. Some situations have longer cycles of failure and
success then others. Some ideas become successful and then
suddenly have a major setback and you’ve got to start all over
again.
In your quest for something greater in life you’ll be in a
few adverse situations due to a personal or professional event.
And let me emphasize that everything I’ve covered up to now is
important, but without heart none of it will mean anything.
Tough times will arise and you’ve got to be prepared to stand
and meet them or be relegated to obscurity. Your ability to
react to adversity will ultimately define your existence and
determine whether or not you will reach your dreams.
I wish that my university had a class called Adversity 101,
where we would go through a variety of very difficult scenarios

to help deal with future problems. It probably wouldn’t have
been very realistic but it would have been something. Just once
I would’ve loved to have heard a professor say to me, “The odds
are against you and you’ll need guts and strength to make a
difference in this world.”
At this moment, I want you to ask yourself a very important
question. How do I handle adversity? The answer to this question
will lead you to a very interesting place. This place will
identify how you’ll react when your business, idea or ambition
hits the rocky ground that I spoke of earlier. Do you sulk and
wallow in your problems? Do you gain resolve and take action to
improve your situation? Do you do a combination of these things?
You don’t have to write anything down yet but I’d like you to
take 30 seconds to think about this question before reading my
example of how not to react during adverse times.
One tale of adversity that begs to be explored is that of the
once-great Enron Corporation. Enron originally existed as a
pipeline company that changed its name and acquired a myriad of
other interests in highly speculative industries such as energy
and data bandwidth trading.
The leaders of Enron were ambitious and determined to build a
large, powerful and financially formidable corporation. For a
decade Enron enjoyed steady and profitable growth while
promoting a culture of backstabbing and greediness amongst its

employees. Life inside Enron could be defined as a survival-of-
the-fittest culture. Weakness was not tolerated and high
performance was rewarded. Even as this dog-eat-dog culture was
being criticized, Enron’s stock price was high and this made
many people very happy, especially the thousands of people whose
pensions were fully invested in Enron stock.
In the fall of 2001, Enron fell apart like a house of cards.
It slowly came to light that revenues and profits had been
inflated for years through a variety of complicated schemes that
were completely illegal.
As Enron’s stock price fell, the company leadership prevented
employees from converting (selling) their Enron stock in the
pension plan. By the end of November 2001 Enron stock tanked to
less than a dollar a share from over $70 a year earlier. The
company declared bankruptcy, which effectively made its stock
worthless. As a result, thousands of people lost hundreds of
millions of dollars in life savings.
All the while, the architects of these sophisticated
schemes, including the CEO and CFO of the company, insisted that
they were innocent and vowed to fight any government charges of
fraud even with an ever-growing boatload of evidence against
them. The executive team of Enron made themselves poster
children of how not to deal with adversity.

In their zeal to build a powerful corporation, the Enron
leadership team created a monster. The goals were so lofty that
any setback would seem like a major disappointment to
shareholders and the business world. Afraid to deal with these
setbacks head-on, key leaders devised schemes to cover up losses
while maintaining the veneer of a corporation continually on the
rise. These activities constituted one big lie. Even worse, as
things were collapsing around them, Enron’s leaders took actions
to make the situation worse for employees and shareholders by
preventing sales of stock.
The leadership of Enron showed their mettle in the face of
being caught red-handed. And their mettle did not include an
ounce of heart. Enron’s leaders faced moments of adversity when
they realized they could not grow the company by honest means
and then later when they were caught lying to the business
world. Faced with making hard decisions, they were dishonest,
which in this case lead to a very hard fall.
HONESTY
You cannot succeed in business or in life if you don’t have the
heart to move forward, and do it honestly, when you’re faced
with tough times. You have to be honest with yourself and you
have to be honest with the people around you.

Being honest with yourself means that you have to
acknowledge your problem, whatever it may be. In the case of
Enron, one of its early problems was the fact that the company
could not continue to meet its lofty goals. Instead of
acknowledging this fact, the leaders chose to lie. The leaders
of Enron decided to fool themselves by denying the obvious.
In that case, the obvious move would be to change plans and
readjust expectations of growth. The business world is a hard
one and although there would have been criticism and doubt for
the new plans, in the long run the company would have probably
been saved. Enron’s leaders didn’t have the heart to make the
changes and handle the criticism; thus, everyone suffered.
Being honest with others is essential as well. The two really
go hand-in-hand because people who can’t be honest with
themselves will rarely be honest with other people. These folks
will continue to perpetuate a cycle of half-truths and outright
lies in order to cover up their indiscretions. The leaders of
Enron excelled in covering up to the business world and their
own employees. They created companies that looked legitimate
while they were really just instruments to help Enron be
dishonest. Had these folks been honest, there may have been more
than a few employees with the heart to step up and pitch in with
practical ideas on how to keep the company moving toward its

goals. Instead, the executive leadership led thousands of
employees down the road to disaster.
Being honest takes real heart because it can often mean
that you’ll have to expose your missteps. Somehow, we’ve all
been conditioned to be afraid to acknowledge our mistakes. If we
live with this fear then we’re building our own walls between us
and our dreams. You already learned in Lesson Three that
mistakes are a part of life. Have the heart to admit your
mistakes honestly and you’ll stay on the path to your dreams.
FRAME OF REFERENCE
My first real test of dealing with adversity in the business
world came only a few months after graduation from college. I
was miserable with my position as an operations manager for a
shipping company. The hours were long and the job was more about
survival than growth into a career.
One day I decided to confide in one of my bosses that I was
about to quit due to the heavy workload and stress of the job.
My boss, a guy named Doug Hartman, was a good person and I felt
like he would respect my feelings. I laid out my feelings while
he listened intently. When I was finished he said these words,
“Do what you feel is right for you because this life is your
own. But do yourself a favor and think for a second about how

you’re going out. The job has you beat and you’re walking away.
That’s a bad way to go. Why not give it a little bit more time
and try to turn things around? Then you can go out knowing that
you don’t have to walk if something gets tough.”
Maybe Doug was being a good salesperson and selling me on
the idea to stay in my job, or maybe he just cared enough to
give it to me straight. Either way, I took Doug’s words to heart
and I devoted myself to leaving for a new career on my own
terms. I spent the next three months working to turn things
around and do a better job. It was a tough time and I was
challenged in every way but I walked out to begin my next career
feeling like I could handle any tough times ahead. Without that
speech from Doug Hartman and my acceptance of it, I would have
had none of the success that I’ve had to this day.
That first experience of standing up for myself and walking
out feeling good about things turned out to be the cornerstone
of dealing with adversity in my life. As the next adverse
situations arose in business, I looked back to my time as an
operations manager and gained resolve that I could deal with
things and continue to be successful. Each adverse situation was
stamped in my memory and created what some people call a frame
of reference.
A frame of reference is information in your brain that you
can mentally refer to when dealing with adverse situations. I

learned more about frames of reference during my extensive
military training. In the Army I endured some of the toughest
physical and mental training that you can imagine while
preparing for real-life missions.
Often I would be taxed to my physical and mental limits,
going for extended periods without sleep while being extremely
active physically. There’s no way to truly create a fully
realistic combat situation in a training environment but you can
condition someone to go back to a frame of reference to assist
them when the time comes.
Someone who’s done something once will always be more
confident when they find themselves in a similar situation at a
later time.
And so it is in the world of business that the more times you
hurdle problems, the more heart you will have for dealing with
them in the future.
WALKING THE HARD ROAD
Remember, you can be humbled in this life and more than likely
you will face a few tough situations as you make your way. You
have to stay in the game and deal with it.
One specific example of dealing with adversity while I was in
the military was when I joined the U.S. Army as an infantryman.

As a newly enlisted combat soldier in the Army I faced
challenges that I would never have seen otherwise. The mental
and physical stress that a person is put under in basic training
can’t be replicated by anything in civilian life. Me and the
fifty-three other recruits in my platoon slept little and worked
to exhaustion as the Drill Sergeants controlled our every move
throughout the day and night. While many saw no point to this
exercise, I could make a direct correlation to making it through
basic training and succeeding in the civilian world.
After a few days there were some people who wanted nothing
more than to get out of there. But where would these people go?
They weren’t thinking ahead and they certainly weren’t looking
to their left and right to see the others persevering with them.
They had lost the heart needed to go further and would never
know how far they could have gone. You see, in business and in
life quitting is a disease. Taking the easiest way out is a form
of quitting. Losing heart and quitting do not challenge you to
go one step further in your existence.
In the weeks to follow I would find my own theories tested
numerous times, but they couldn’t have been tested any more than
on the final road march of basic training. The infantryman must
complete a fifteen mile march in full battle gear with a weapon.
As we started to walk very early in the morning the rain began
to pour down. Everyone was soaking wet. After the rain stopped

the sun came out and it became very hot. By the halfway point I
was drying out but my feet and back were beginning to ache. By
the ten-mile point I was hurting pretty bad. We would stop every
few miles but I was now unable to remove my boots since I feared
that my feet would swell and I wouldn’t be able to get the boots
back on. A truck drove up and down the line to pick up soldiers
who “fell out” of the march.
I wanted to stop really bad, but stopping meant quitting and
quitting meant going through this all over again. I thought back
to Doug’s speech. I made it back then, so why couldn’t I make it
now?
There was one person on the truck but I would never go on
that truck. I was taking the hard road, but often the hard road
can deliver the greater rewards. I finished the march even
though I was in tremendous pain. I couldn’t walk straight for
three days afterward but I felt like a million dollars. I felt
like I could do anything and that’s the way you need to feel to
be successful.
Have you ever had a moment in your life where you wanted to
“get on the truck” and quit during a challenge? I’d be willing
to bet that the answer is yes. We’ve all had moments like that.
Had everything in my life come easy I probably wouldn’t have
learned those early lessons. I did learn those early lessons and
you shouldn’t be afraid to learn them too. The going will get

tough in life and you will need to have the heart to move
forward in response.
Once again, there’s a direct correlation between your
willingness to take the hard road and your success in business.
The executives at Enron took the road that afforded them the
easiest path, in their eyes. They tried to take a shortcut to
success. They failed because there are no real shortcuts. You
have to put in the time and the sweat like I did on that road
march. The time and the sweat will pay off if you stay the
course, even if things get tough.
There is probably no greater testament to the power of heart
to overcome adversity on the tough road than the action in the
hours after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The city of
New York was gripped in fear with thousands dead and massive
damage downtown. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani marshaled forces from
all walks of life to begin a rescue and recovery effort unheard
of in the modern era.
Thousands of ordinary people took on the unthinkable task of
clearing away the World Trade Center wreckage alongside
coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, Red
Cross and dozens of other agencies. All the while, order was
kept in the city even though most police were assigned to the
area near Ground Zero.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his inner circle had the heart to
make tough decisions at the city’s darkest hours. As a result,
millions of people knew that all was not lost and immediately
began a very difficult rebuilding process.
The mayor’s actions on that day did not go unnoticed. Leaders
of business recognized that someone with so much courage and
heart has the potential to make things happen in ways never
thought possible. Mayor Giuliani’s skills shouldn’t have been a
mystery. Over the past eight years he had helped to transform
New York from a down-and-out metropolis into one of the world’s
great cities.
Through his firm, Giuliani Partners, the Mayor now provides
crisis management, emergency preparedness and leadership
services to cities and corporations around the world. When
speaking praise for Mayor Giuliani, few cite his advanced
education but rather his experience running the city and ability
to handle even the toughest tasks as his strongest traits.
SEEING THE RAINBOW’S END
Henry Ford once said, “Obstacles are those frightful things you
see when you take your eyes off your goal.” The rewards that you
get from having the heart to face adversity can be elusive.

Many times you probably won’t be able to see the end in sight
when you’re working through a difficult idea or dealing with
tough times in your career.
One thing that keeps me and many other successful people
going is vision. Having vision allows you to feel and experience
your outcome while still in the midst of your journey. I liken
it to believing in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Although the pot of gold is only a legend, your goals in
business can be achieved if you allow yourself to focus on the
outcome as a motivator through hard times.
Focusing on the outcome that you can’t see requires great
effort. Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned some of the
hardships I endured during military service. Those times are
some of the most relevant memories of times when it was
difficult to see the end of the rainbow.
My first military test was a fourteen-week infantry basic
training course at Fort Benning, Ga. Instantly, my life changed
from being a civilian with all the say over my time to being a
soldier in training with every moment decided by Drill
Sergeants.
The first few days of this training were some of the toughest
times at that point in my life. There were a number of young
recruits who decided to quit training and return home. On one of
those days early in the training, the Drill Sergeants sat

everyone down to talk about the people who wanted to go home.
One of the Sergeants urged everyone to remember why they came
and what their goals were. I took this message to heart, as I
was having my own doubts about the whole situation. I thought
about my original goals in joining the military. I wanted to
accomplish something in my life, learn about leadership and
serve my country. To quit at the very beginning would always
leave me wondering if I could have achieved those goals.
These goals were my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
A couple of years later I had the same feelings during my
fourteen-week stint in Officer’s Candidate School (OCS). Once
again, I thought about my original goals in wanting to become an
officer and those thoughts helped me to get through OCS and earn
my commission. To this day I’m not sad that I stuck around to
accomplish my goals in the military, as the journey itself
provided me with valuable knowledge and a strong frame of
reference for what hard times are about.
What I learned during my first few weeks in the military and
continued to learn throughout my military career and afterward
can work for you. If you allow yourself to visualize your
outcomes, you have a much greater chance of success.
The key to being able to visualize your outcomes involves
remembering why you undertook a particular venture in the first
place. You will have days when you will be working hard and

working late into the night. At those times your morale may get
low. You may think about giving up. It’s during those moments
that you need to stop and think about the overall goal and also
think of the alternatives if you abandon your efforts. Great
champions and successful business people are all able to harness
their vision. It is essential that you do the same.
Take a moment to perform an exercise that involves
visualizing your goals. Think of a goal in your life right now
that you’d like to achieve but haven’t been able to complete as
of yet. It’s preferable to think of a goal that’s been difficult
to achieve. Write down some of the things you’ve been feeling
while you attempt to reach your goal.
Ponder these thoughts for a few moments and then write down
all the reasons why you initially set out to achieve your goal.
Take a few more moments to ponder these reasons and then ask
yourself if it’s still worth it to keep trying. I think you’ll
find that the answer almost all of the time is yes.
THE SCHOOL OF HEART
So how do we learn about heart? There’s no school out there that
can teach it. Even this book can’t give you a true idea of the
emotional strength that it takes to get through tough times.
Heart is an intangible trait that can’t be measured. Thus, it

does not fit into the A, B, and C grade structure of higher
education. Heart doesn’t find its way onto the evaluation forms
you’ll encounter while working at a big corporation. And while
this fact may seem frustrating, it gives hope to people who
never fit into the system in the first place. And since this is
an intangible trait there’s no simple way to go out and “get”
it.
I do believe that you can develop heart like one develops any
discipline. Being willing to face challenges is the first step
to building this inner strength. You simply need to want
something bad enough and then go after it. Test yourself.
When I was lifting boxes on a freezing loading dock in the
middle of a winter night I was learning about heart and I didn’t
even know it. I wanted something (money for school) bad enough
and I saw the goal (a fulfilling, financially independent
future) clear enough to keep moving forward.
The same goes for when I was marching those 15 miles in the
rain and heat. Each time I took on a serious challenge in my
life I learned something about myself and what I was made of on
the inside. Each time I completed a challenge I felt stronger
and surer of myself than the last time. I’ve slowly built on my
heart by taking on challenges and using them as a frame of
reference for future challenges. You will benefit by doing the
same.

Ask yourself this important question: Are you the kind of
person who takes on challenges or avoids them? Avoiding
challenges is usually called the path of least resistance. The
path of least resistance may get you further ahead in the short
term, but it won’t help in building heart.
Somewhere along the line you will run into an obstacle that
you must go through. When that time comes you need to be ready
for it. Take some time to ponder this issue. Do you look for the
path of least resistance or do you face challenges? Be honest
with yourself and decide how you will conduct yourself from this
day forward. Your decision to face challenges will have an
enormously positive effect on your life.
I understand that you may still have doubts about your
ability to persevere through very tough times and be successful.
I’d like you to take some time to think of situations where you
faced a hardship. Write the situation down and then consider
your reaction. Write down your reaction as well. You should have
a handful of these situations on the page. Look closely at them
and try to determine if there’s anything that you would have
done differently.
If you did persevere through a tough time, then remind
yourself what it took to get through. Remember the motivations
that you’ve had to come through adversity. Those same

motivations will serve you well in the future. When you’re done
with this exercise, come back to the book and read on.
Hopefully you’ve got a much better idea of what “heart” means
to you now. Remember that tests of your heart in this life won’t
happen just once, ten times or even a hundred times. There may
be hundreds of situations in your lifetime where you’ll need to
exhibit that inner strength and courage which guides you to a
greater goal. Don’t fret because you can do it. In order to have
the ability to sustain through tough times it helps to focus on
the next tenet of my philosophy…

Lesson Six: Leverage the Power of a Team
“Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a

team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
- VINCE LOMBARDI
Remember those three-card monte dealers that I talked about in
Lesson Four? Every time I went back to Times Square I would see
them running the same con in the same spot. After all those
years I figured that they must have been successful since the
average small business startup in New York City lasts for less
than a year. Their secret to staying in operation for so long
was this: Teamwork.
The three-card monte crews used teamwork to leverage their
efforts and outsmart the police as well as the unsuspecting
tourists who lost their money. You see, in addition to the
dealer and the patsy who would play as a show for the crowd,
there were always at least one or more lookouts who kept a
watchful eye for the police.
If an officer was approaching the game then the lookout would
make a signal and the dealer would scrap the game immediately
and walk away. As crazy as it may sound, their consistent
teamwork allowed them to keep operating and generating income
over a long period of time.

The dealer himself could not run the game since without the
patsy it would be harder to generate interest in playing their
game. Even the dealer and the patsy could not do it alone
because if they got caught in the act of the game they’d be
arrested and that would definitely cut into their profits. So
the three-man team worked.
At least, it worked until Mayor Giuliani decided to have the
police force use some smart teamwork of their own to rid the
streets of these hustlers. In a city like New York there’s
always a bigger fish that can come along and swallow you up.
The three-card monte example may not seem like a practical
one, but it underscores the following fact: No matter what
you’re doing, you’ll need to build a solid team in order to
succeed.
David Ogilvy, who turned $6,000 into an advertising empire,
once said, “Surround yourself with partners who are better than
you are.” Many other successful business people follow that
sentiment and focus on surrounding themselves with a quality
support team.
I first learned about the true value of teamwork while
dealing with dozens of complicated situations as an officer in
the Army. I was a platoon leader in a tank company, involved in
operations where groups of soldiers from five to 200 worked
together to complete a mission or solve a problem.

One of the most important tasks we performed on a daily basis
was maintenance on our tanks. As a platoon leader, I was one of
the least-experienced people in my platoon in the area of tank
maintenance. At the same time I was ultimately responsible for
the mechanical health of the vehicles in my platoon. I simply
could not succeed in this situation without leveraging the power
of a team.
I knew that the Sergeants in my platoon were very
knowledgeable about the mechanics of the tanks so I put them in
charge of day-to-day maintenance of the vehicles.
While the Sergeants handled the day-to-day items that they
were skilled at, I focused on planning for our maintenance needs
and determining the items that our platoon would focus on in
each maintenance session.
All the while, I continued to build my proficiency in tank
maintenance by watching and listening. This approach resulted in
a higher quality of operation for our tanks, which meant we were
ready to handle our core mission.
I watched as some other people tried to take on too much
responsibility. Their results were not as good, as you can
imagine, because they were overwhelmed with details. By
utilizing teamwork as a necessity, I realized that using the
knowledge and motivation of people around me was the way to go.

I kept these experiences in mind when I was running a large
New York City restaurant. There’s a lot more going on in a
restaurant than what is seen by the customer. When I started
running the restaurant I learned fast that the restaurant
business required the leverage of a great team in order to have
a chance in hell of surviving.
I immediately knew that my areas of strength were around
leadership, logistics and customer service. Obviously, the food
had to be great, so the first thing I did was evaluate my chef
and his kitchen staff. Lucky for me, the chef was first-rate and
I could trust him to run the kitchen.
Then I evaluated my servers who, thankfully, were very
reliable and friendly with customers.
Next, I looked at the bar staff and realized that they were
very weak and that we needed a newer and more motivated bar
team.
I also identified weaknesses with our after-hours cleaning
crew and started work on finding a new group for that effort. I
leveraged my abilities as a good evaluator who can manage
personnel.
I left the setting of the tables and the choice of décor to
my head waiter, who had a lot more style then I did. By focusing
on my strengths and weaknesses, evaluating each area of need and
adding (or replacing) the necessary team members, I was able to

create a business environment where the restaurant had a strong
chance of success.
Take a few moments to assess the level of teamwork that you
utilize in your business life. Ask yourself a few pointed
questions. Am I using a quality team to insure that I get the
best results? Do I try to do everything myself? Am I overwhelmed
by the tasks I need to perform on a regular basis? Does quality
suffer because of my lack of experience in certain areas of
skill? Write these questions and the accompanying answers on a
piece of paper. Take a few moments to ponder the answers, then
read on.
LIGHTEN THE LOAD
While utilizing teamwork seems like such an obvious practice, I
keep meeting many people who get focused on trying to do
everything themselves. I’ve been one of those people.
I got used to doing everything I could in all my jobs as a
teenager since teamwork was rarely needed or stressed by my
employers. Later on, as an operations manager for a shipping
company, I tried to do the same thing and it drove me crazy. I
spent hours on tasks that would have taken me a fraction of the
time if I’d been smart enough to use some of the folks that I
had working for me. Utilizing a team makes sense because it

lightens your load and gives you that much more chance at being
successful.
People who are running small businesses often try to carry
the complete load themselves. Imagine yourself running a
business and dealing with sales, marketing, accounting, customer
service, clerking, etc.
The simple fact is that it’s just not possible to do all
these things by yourself and still run a business effectively.
Maybe that’s why many small businesses fail within the first
year of operation. There are so many intricacies involved in
business that if you try to do everything yourself, then some
really important things will fall by the wayside.
One reason that many entrepreneurs try to do it all involves
money. It’s hard to enlist a lot of help when the budget is
tight and you need to make your dollars go far. You have to be
creative financially and really know the areas where getting
assistance brings you the most bang for your buck.
When I first started to assist my wife with her photo
business, I explained the facts to her so she would understand
and fully respect the enormity of the task of starting your own
venture. I wanted her to imagine having to do all the important
things a business owner needs to master while still having to do
the photo work as well.

After taking a close look at the situation, we decided that
she should account for her own money but hire an accountant to
insure that she was in compliance with the tax laws and
regulations. We also decided that we’d consult a lawyer to make
sure that there were no potential legal problems with her
contracts for photo services. And I agreed to be her webmaster
and deal with marketing on the Internet.
Whenever she has a big photo job, we hire an assistant to
make sure that she can focus on the photography and the
assistant can focus on the less technical aspects of the photo
shoot.
What we’ve done is put together a small but highly effective
team that allows my wife to manage a quality small business.
Without the assistance of a team she would have a great deal of
difficulty fulfilling all the needs of her business while still
producing quality products and services. Running the business is
still difficult but it’s manageable and very, very rewarding for
her.
Looking around New York City, it’s easy to find other
examples of people utilizing teamwork to thrive. You can’t walk
down a major thoroughfare in Manhattan without noticing the
dozens of street vendors selling everything from coffee and
donuts to hot food cooked to order. These savvy entrepreneurs
make a good living working from their food carts but they

certainly don’t do it alone. They have suppliers for all of
their food items and dry goods. They have storage spaces nearby
where they place their carts overnight and they have repair
shops where they take the carts for service. All of this allows
them to focus on the tasks of preparing and selling food.
Leveraging a team isn’t only important at the small entrepreneur
level, though. My example from the previous lesson about Mayor
Giuliani’s team illustrates how powerful effective use of a team
can be in larger organizations.
Mayor Giuliani was able to leverage the experience of the
commissioners of the police and fire departments when figuring
out how to make the city a safer place. He would consult with
the heads of the Parks Department and Department of Community
Affairs when dealing with issues related to improving the
quality of life for the city’s millions of citizens. Mayor
Giuliani knew the value in having the best people advising him
in each of these areas. He put a premium on taking the time to
select the right person for each job.
The mayor’s use of a team paid off nicely for the city of New
York. During his tenure, New York City experienced a renaissance
that defied everyone’s expectations.
Leveraging a great team made it all possible.
In the corporate environment the concept of teamwork can be a
puzzling paradox. I’ve experienced more than a few situations

where people failed to work together as a result of petty
bickering or jealousy over someone who was in line for a
promotion over another person. Large corporations are very
competitive, with many people vying for a few big promotions
every year. Fostering teamwork in these kinds of competitive
environments is challenging, to say the least, but it can happen
if you’re smart and resourceful. I’ve seen both good and bad
examples of teamwork in the corporate environment, and when it’s
working right everyone feels good about it.
One of the reasons that people in corporate environments fail
to properly utilize teamwork is related to entrepreneurship.
People who are running their own businesses feel like
entrepreneurs and as such they value the leverage that a team
gives them. I know I’ve felt much more empowered and motivated
as a small-business owner than a corporate employee.
The fact is that many corporate employees aren’t empowered to
think like entrepreneurs. As a result, they shun teamwork in
favor of completing big tasks with minimum help so they can take
the credit for themselves. This is understandable since most
folks are just trying to make sure they get credit and have more
opportunities for the future. Lifting the whole load at the
office may seem achievable in the short run, but in the long run
it will wear a person down and reduce motivation. It certainly

wore me down when I tried to run the whole loading dock by
myself.
Do you feel motivated to utilize teamwork in your work
environment? If the answer is yes then you might want to
consider selling your bosses on the power of teamwork. Either
that or you might want to find a workplace where you’re
encouraged to leverage a team. Remember, your working life is a
marathon, not a sprint, and you can’t win a thing if you burn
yourself out in the first half of the race.
Focus on your strengths, lighten your load and you’ll be well
on your way to brighter days!
EVALUATING YOUR NEEDS
In order to field the proper team to assist you in your business
endeavors, you need to evaluate your needs. Earlier I explained
the areas where my wife needed assistance with her photo
business. I helped her to determine those needs by asking some
questions. The following three questions went a long way in
evaluating her needs.
What area of my business do I do best?
What else do I do well?
What are things that I need to do that I can’t do well or
learn in short order?

These three simple questions will go a long way in
determining where you need the assistance of a team. They
allowed us to easily identify that my wife would do all the
photography, picture editing and organization of photos. We also
decided that she would keep track of all her income and
expenses.
By answering the first two questions, we had a clear focus on
what my wife could do best. The third question helped us to
identify where she would need help. In this case we immediately
identified that my wife needed help with marketing and Web site
construction and maintenance. I had some free time and the right
knowledge, so I offered to help with that. This question also
helped us determine that it was worth it to engage the services
of a lawyer and a tax accountant. Armed with a good vision of
her team, my wife was ready to move to the next step in her
business life.
While the previous example of evaluation works very well if
you’re an entrepreneur, you may feel a bit helpless if you’re an
hourly employee or in a large department of a corporation.
Strangely enough, the same example can still apply. The
difference is that instead of evaluating only your needs, you’ll
want to try to gather where the strengths are among your co-
workers. An easy task this is not. Evaluating people takes time,

patience and a lot of observation. It pays off, though, when you
know where your strengths are and act accordingly.
You should evaluate your peers, subordinates and even your
bosses. Many companies don’t have a formal process to evaluate
up the chain. That doesn’t matter a bit. Know the strengths and
weaknesses up the chain and you’ll be able to react accordingly
when a situation comes your way that could leave you hanging out
to dry.
I like to think of myself as a manager of a baseball team.
Whenever I’m in a situation that requires a certain expertise I
think of the people available on my roster of possible helpers.
I remind myself of each of their skills. Then I get the right
person in the game to help my team win.
It’s time for an exercise about evaluating the need for a
team. First I want you to think of a current job, project or
idea that you are working on. Write down the details of the
situation as much as you can. Then think about the necessary
skill areas and write them down. For each area of skill, notate
next to each one whether you’re weak or strong in each area.
Isolate the areas where you are weak. Figure out which of the
weak areas you can learn in short order. This exercise should
help to show you what you do well and where you need assistance.
Now ask these two questions of yourself: What kinds of people
can help me? Are these people in any way available? If you have

problems coming up with good answers, then ask for advice on the
matter. Remember Lesson One and find a good counselor on the
subject. In almost every situation there’s a way you can add
people to your team so you can focus on what you do best.
BUILDING YOUR TEAM
Once your ideal team is identified, you then have to set out to
bring the right people together. This may be the hardest part of
teamwork. Many people fall into the trap of picking team members
just to fill the roster and say your team is complete. This
approach is a bad idea. When assembling your team you’ll want to
keep in mind that the quality of your team members matters as
much as anything. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link
and the same goes for your team.
Use some very basic rules when assembling your team and
you’ll be much more likely to have a good group. Choose people
who you can get along with. Choose people who have the skills
that you really need. Choose people who are motivated and want
to be a part of your team. Choose people who meet all of the
previous three criteria.
If you’re thinking that finding people who meet all the above
criteria is hard, then you’re right on. My best advice to you is

to leverage the power of friends and people you trust to
recommend those folks that you might not know already. And if
you make a mistake and pick a poor team member, don’t hesitate
to find someone who better suits your needs. You don’t want a
weak link in your team to bring you (and your dreams) crashing
to the ground.
Once you’ve assembled your team, you’ll need to manage the
team. You manage the team in order to make sure that you’re
getting what you want out of the situation. Knowing what you
want was an important point in Lesson One, so don’t hesitate to
look back to that lesson to freshen your mind on the topic.
MAKING IT WORK
If you’re on track with me you’re probably asking the question:
How can I become better at utilizing teamwork to lighten my load
and make positive things happen?
First of all, you need to know how to relate to a team. As I
said earlier, in the corporate world I’ve seen many situations
where getting people to work together seemed impossible. In the
military I faced the challenge of getting people of a large
variety of social backgrounds and mindsets to work together
under a myriad of terrible conditions.

There’s no definite formula for team success but there are
three things essential to having a chance at managing well:
1. Know your team members.
2. Respect your team members.
3. Don’t play favorites.
If you know your team members’ abilities, then you’re more
likely to put them in the spot that helps you the most. This
creates positive results. If you respect your team, you’re much
more likely to get that respect back and that leads to strong
performance. If you treat everyone equally and maintain an open
system where people feel like they count, then your team members
will feel unthreatened and be much more likely to give it their
all. This advice is good in theory and difficult in practice.
You build this expertise over time with a combination of
experience and an open mind.
When I started work on the shipping dock I had no idea
about how to make teamwork happen. I was a good worker at
loading trucks so I was quickly promoted to managing the team.
To me it was all about getting the freight out the door, so I
focused on that. I also ended up spending many hours after
shifts loading boxes.
One of the more experienced managers came in early one
morning and told me, “You’ve got to use your team.” I took those
words to heart. I made many mistakes like not following the

three essential tips that I mentioned above to pull the team
together. I wanted to get better so I took the time and learned.
The key message here is that achieving success with even a
great team can be difficult. Think of all the sports teams
packed with great players who failed to win a title. In 2003,
the Florida Marlins shocked the New York Yankees to win the
World Series. The Yankee team was stacked with stars but was no
match for a solid and cohesive unit of hungry and not very well-
known players.
The 2003 Florida Marlins proved that a well-managed team can
make great things happen. Manage your team well and you can make
things happen for you.
You’ll see that you’ve greatly improved your chances for
success in business and in life by taking this advice and
leveraging the power of a team rather than trying to do
everything yourself.

CHECKPOINT
Three more lessons complete. You’re doing great. Review lessons
four through six to reinforce the material you’ve learned so
far. It’s critical that you grasp the previous lessons before
moving forward. These checkpoints are important in evaluating
your progress. Once you finish your review you can read a lot
more about the importance of evaluation in the next lesson.

Lesson Seven: Constantly Evaluate
“An unexamined life is not worth living.”
- SOCRATES
Back in my early twenties, I started this process of self-
evaluation. I read a great book by a guy named John Bradshaw
called “Creating Love.”
In the book, John advocates examining your life to figure out
your motivations and true goals. This exercise of life
examination was also designed to improve personal and business
relationships, which hopefully would lead to some sort of
breakthrough. I was sold on the whole concept so I decided that
a true evaluation of my life was in order. As a part of this
evaluation I took a look at my current situation and asked
myself where I wanted to be in five years. I made an action plan
and set out to achieve my goals.
Five years passed and I realized that I had been where I
wanted to be for several years but had no idea where I wanted to
go from there. I thought that this whole evaluation thing was
something that you did every so often but not all the time. I
realized that I had a lot more work to do to get to the next
place I wanted to be.

Here’s a key point: You need to be constantly aware of your
situation in order to insure that your career is heading in the
right direction.
In other words, you must constantly evaluate your situation.
You might be screaming at the pages right now, “But I’m
living my life and I don’t have time to stop and evaluate every
step of the way!”
Do you remember the introduction where I gave the example
about the rookie NFL quarterback feeling rushed with only three
seconds to throw? You may be at a point where you feel like
there’s no time, but one of your goals should be to develop the
poise necessary to take the time to evaluate. Most of us are
really good at evaluating the small day-to-day things but we get
caught up and don’t evaluate the BIG things. I’m sure you’ve
heard someone say, “so and so has lost sight of the big
picture…”
Unfortunately, we all tend to lose sight of the big picture
and this jeopardizes our chances for success in business.
Let’s go one step further with this and do a quick exercise.
I want you to write an answer to the following question: How was
the last day of my life? Think of the last twenty-four hours of
your life, consider everything that happened, and then write
down your feelings about it.

How long did it take? Probably only a few minutes. Now
consider the answer to this question: How has my whole life
gone? WHOA! That’s pretty heavy and likely to take hours or
longer to work on. It’s a difficult task, but only if you rarely
step back and evaluate where your life is headed.
Most of us, including myself at one time, rarely look at the
big picture. We get lost in the small details and we go off
course. Before we know it we’re in the wrong place and the
journey to where we need to be seems insurmountable. No worries
though, because if I can rediscover the importance of
evaluation, then anyone can. Besides, regular folks like you and
me aren’t the only ones who need to evaluate things.
CHANGE OR LOSE
American auto companies learned the importance of repeated
evaluation in the 1980s. With soaring gasoline prices and a
downtrodden economy, people became very aware of the costs
involved in purchasing and maintaining their vehicles.
Vehicles with large, gas-guzzling engines and high
maintenance costs were the norm from the big U.S. automakers.
Between the high cost of purchasing the vehicles, the small
warranties, and the cost of gas and regular maintenance, people
were getting fed up. So while the big U.S. automakers were

coasting down the river, assuming that they could set demand by
producing the cars that they wanted, Japanese automakers like
Honda were preparing to shake things up.
Honda began to introduce smaller, less-expensive cars with
better gas mileage. On top of those things, Honda’s cars had
much better warranties than U.S. vehicles. What started out as a
trickle turned into a flood and within a few years the big five
automakers were losing tons of money, laying off workers and
generally causing a shocking ripple effect throughout the
economy of the United States.
It took over a decade for the U.S automakers to adjust and
recover from their sales slump, but the damage had been done.
Meanwhile, Japanese automakers kept evaluating and adjusting.
After the U.S. created import quotas in 1983, Japanese
manufacturers began moving production to the United States in
order to continue to increase their market share.
The U.S auto industry learned the hard way that not taking
the time and spending the money to evaluate things is a huge and
unacceptable risk. The Japanese auto manufacturers had an edge
because they were focused on constantly re-evaluating their
business.
It has become increasingly clear that from the biggest
corporation down to the single individual, constant evaluation
is essential to success in business.

Read the news every day and you’ll see that business is
changing. Your business is likely to change as much as any
other. Without evaluation of your situation, assets and goals
you will be lost. Still, many folks don’t take the time to
evaluate and insure they’re heading in the right direction.
CONSCIOUS EVALUATION
Every moment of every day we’re all evaluating something. Right
now I’m evaluating whether this sentence I’m writing makes sense
to me. This morning as I opened my eyes I evaluated whether or
not I was too tired to get up. You’re probably evaluating
whether or not to keep reading or put this book down. All these
things are part of our unconscious evaluation process. This is
the evaluation process that we go through every waking moment of
our lives and it’s second nature to us.
In order to be successful in business we all need to tap into
the conscious evaluation process that deals with the more
complex and abstract issues in our lives. My reading of John
Bradshaw’s book helped wake me up about consciously evaluating
things. Once I began to take the time to examine the things
happening in my life I realized where the gaps existed between
my actual life and the life I wanted.

A very important area of that life was my career. It didn’t
take much examination for me to realize that my career was
falling short of my expectations. I began to evaluate the status
of my career and positive changes followed. Without taking that
time for evaluation I would’ve never been able to move forward
and make the changes necessary to keep my business life moving
in the right direction.
In business as in life people get used to their everyday
tasks and much evaluation can fall into the unconscious realm.
This is a dangerous situation for a business to be in because it
is essentially on autopilot. When you’re on autopilot in
business there are many ways that the forces of the world can
act upon you and cause bad things to happen. The big U.S.
automakers set their business on autopilot for years and the
market forces of the auto industry acted upon them and they lost
market share.
I meet so many people who are on autopilot in their careers.
As a business consultant I meet hundreds of new people every
year and get to spend some time in their work environment. For
every motivated planner who’s thinking of the future, there are
three people muddling through in the present. These folks are
just trying to get through the day.
They are generally unproductive and certainly don’t appear to
be very happy. I totally understand where these people are

coming from. Daily tasks and the pressures of life can force you
into autopilot mode. I’ve been there myself and that’s why I
recognize the importance of getting conscious and making the
choice to plot your course.
Are you on autopilot in your business life? When was the last
time you really thought about your current situation and
direction? Ponder the answers to these questions for a moment,
then read on.
THE BIG PICTURE
Looking back at my high school and college years, I could see
that my ideas and perceptions about any kind of evaluation had
been skewed.
To me, an evaluation was something that occurred for a
specific instance or piece of work and nothing more. The way
people are graded in school on a class-by-class basis lends
itself to people focusing on individual classes instead of the
big picture of a total education.
In fact, after four years of college I still hadn’t pulled
together the meaning of all those different classes that I had
just taken. Because of the grading philosophies I had viewed
them as individual exercises when they were really supposed to
be one collective lesson. I learned this fact over the next

couple of years as I was learning how to make a living for
myself.
The necessity for constant evaluation didn’t really start to
hit home until it began to affect my personal training business.
The freelance nature of personal training required me to
constantly evaluate or lose out on desperately needed cash.
Within a few months of getting into this exciting new industry I
was training a handful of clients and making a nice wage. I
thought I was doing very well since my clients were looking
better and commenting on how much better they felt. I was
focusing on what I was seeing on the surface, the small picture.
Then in one week I lost two of my five clients, who decided
to stop working with me. One former client decided to start
working with another trainer in the same gym. I was highly
distressed since these losses were going to take a toll on my
pocketbook.
After some inquiries I found out that the clients had been
happy with my service and the results initially but then became
bored and wanted different and more strenuous workouts to keep
them excited about the routine. Like the big U.S. automakers, I
had assumed that my clients would accept what I gave them and I
never took time to talk with them to elicit detailed feedback.
As a result of these events I immediately re-evaluated how I was
dealing with my clients. The last thing I wanted to do at that

point in my life was lose money. I realized that I had been
treating my clients like a class from college.
Once I had attained their business and showed them some
results I felt like I had earned that “A.” I didn’t learn about
constant evaluation in school but once it began to affect my
life and cash flow I gave the concept a good hard look.
Are you focusing on the big picture all the time in your
business life? Do you achieve things and then continue to follow
up to insure you’re on the right track? If you answered no to
either question then you should readjust your priorities to
include constant evaluation.
EVALUATE EVERYTHING
You use constant evaluation to lead you to success by evaluating
everything around you, whether it seems like a big deal or a
small deal. You evaluate the things that you are choosing to do
and you evaluate the forces that you can’t control.
My current business as an energy market consultant provides a
perfect example of how important it can be to evaluate
everything that affects you. My job is to advise companies on
the rules of regional electricity markets and provide guidance
on how they can better conduct business in these markets.

In order to do this effectively I need to evaluate the rules
of the market, which are constantly changing. I also have to
evaluate the effect that rule changes will have on my clients’
businesses. I have to evaluate changes in technology to see how
they might affect a particular market as well as my clients. I
have to evaluate my level of knowledge on the energy markets and
my clients. There are more evaluations that I have to make on a
regular basis. Without these evaluations I would quickly become
a non-valuable resource in my industry.
Unfortunately, for many people the task of setting goals and
evaluating is one that seems to fall by the wayside as life gets
busier and we get wrapped up in day-to-day living. Living and
running a business day to day is one of the simplest traps to
fall into, but luckily it’s also easy to get out of that trap.
You can stop at any point in the process and evaluate your
current situation.
THE EVALUATION PROCESS
The process of evaluation begins with a few questions, continues
on with action and never really ends. An exercise is in order to
get your brain jumpstarted on the process of evaluation. You can
start by taking stock of where your life is at this moment. A
powerful exercise involves some open-ended statements that allow

you to elaborate and understand how you feel about your current
situation. Try working through these statements:
My life is…
My career is…
My family is…
My finances are…
My love life is…
Write down the continuation of these statements and you may
be surprised at what you find out about your life, or more
exactly your perception of your life. Our focus here is mostly
on evaluating your business life, so I’d like you to follow up
with some more direct questions that will address specific
business issues. Some relevant questions are:
How do I feel about my current career?
How many clients do I want to have?
How knowledgeable am I about my business?
What other fields of endeavor am I interested in exploring?
How knowledgeable am I on the latest trends in technology for my
business?
What promotions or incentives would I like to receive at work in
the near future?
Be as detailed as possible when addressing each question.
Include suggestions for building on the positive areas and

improving on the negative areas. Write it all down, then take
some time to ponder it and review.
Ask yourself these questions and as many others that you can
think of. You should keep asking questions until you feel like
you have enough answers to paint a realistic picture of your
current situation. When I had my personal training business
dilemma I asked myself some of these questions:
Do I have enough knowledge of fitness to provide my clients
with varied workout routines?
Have I paid enough attention to the needs of my clients?
How many clients do I want to have three months from now?
These questions and the resulting answers shined a light on
my weak areas and allowed me to take action, and action must be
taken. The big U.S. automakers had to act in the 1980s or they
faced a possibility of extinction. Their evaluations led to
changes in the their approach to the car business. The
evaluation of my training business resulted in information that
allowed me to improve my business situation and get a better
grasp on my future goals.

TAKING ACTION
The first part of my discussion on evaluation deals with
questions and answers. The second part deals with action. The
process of evaluation is indeed an action in itself, but
following up on the information gained by evaluation is what
makes the effort worthwhile.
Once I evaluated my personal training business, I took action
in order to change the direction of my business. You’ll need to
take action to change your situation as a result of your
evaluation.
Taking action is a critical and very rewarding part of the
complex evaluation cycle. You’ll notice that I referred to
evaluation as a cycle because it’s a continuous process that
ends when you quit growing, which should be never!
The cycle goes like this: Evaluate, take action and evaluate
again. It may sound like you’re going round and round but you’ll
actually make great progress because you’ll have a much better
idea about what critical issues need to be addressed in order to
keep moving in the direction that you want to go.
After evaluating the changing auto industry, U.S. auto
companies built smaller cars that required less maintenance and
had longer warranties. I took specific actions to save my
personal training business. I changed my training philosophy and

re-evaluated my clients’ workout routines every six weeks. I
devoted more time to studying exercise science so that I could
offer clients more varied and exciting workouts.
The moves paid off and I was soon able to get and, more
importantly, keep clients for a longer period of time. The net
effect was a steadier flow of income and the ability to continue
in a business that was much more desirable to me than a nine to
five job.
Let’s start an exercise on taking action with the results of
the exercise from the previous section. You asked yourself a
number of questions aimed at evaluating your current situation.
Armed with those answers, I want you to spend some time thinking
about the actions that you should take as a result of your
evaluation. Here are a few examples from situations in my life
to get you rolling on taking action:
Question: How do I feel about my current career?
Answer: Good, but I’d like to explore other opportunities.
Action: Perform research on other careers that might interest
me.
Question: Do I have as many clients as I like?
Answer: No, I’d like to have more clients.
Action: Create a new marketing plan. Make it a daily priority to
talk with people about my business.

Question: Am I as knowledgeable as I need to be about my
business?
Answer: No, I need to learn more about my business.
Action: Seek out more knowledge by reading a new book each month
on topics related to my business.
These are very simple examples but they can be as complex as
you need them to be. I recommend that you start working on
evaluating the simple things before you move on to more complex
issues. This approach will help get you used to the cycles of
conscious evaluation and action.
Go through the cycle of evaluation and action at least every
month from this point forward. Identify areas for evaluation and
continue to monitor them. Once you’re in the swing of evaluating
your business situations, I recommend evaluations on a quarterly
basis just like companies evaluate their finances. Regular
evaluations will keep your ship heading in the direction of your
choosing.
As you go through continuing cycles of evaluating and
adjusting you’ll notice that your goals will always seem more
attainable. You will know where you stand and you will have the
opportunity to consciously plan your future. At the same time,
it will be hard work because evaluation will force you to look
at things that would otherwise go unresolved.

I liken the evaluation cycle to facing a tiger that lives in
your closet. You know that the tiger has to go if you want to
feel safe. You figure if you keep the door closed maybe the
tiger will leave your house on its own. Facing the tiger is
tough, but removing the tiger is very rewarding.
I hope you’re excited about self evaluation. You should be,
given that it will change your life in a very positive way and
open the door for the next liberating tenet of my philosophy…

Lesson Eight: Never Stop Learning
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone
who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to
keep your mind young.”
- HENRY FORD
I woke up one morning in May of 1991 and breathed a great sigh
of relief. “That’s it,” I thought. “I’m finally finished with my
education.”
It was my graduation day from college and I was to receive my
Bachelor of Science in Business Management. I had been worn down
by sixteen years of schooling while trying to grow up. I was
ready to put education by the wayside for the rest of my life. I
was ready to practice everything that I had learned and do great
things out in the world.
I had a problem, though. The problem was that I wasn’t even
mature yet. I knew very little about what was in store for me in
the business world. I may have been a graduating college senior
but I was still a freshman in life.
Like many young people I thought that I knew it all and was
ready to move forward in life without investing any more time on
the pursuit of knowledge. What I was primarily interested in was
the pursuit of some money and a chance to live on my own.

This philosophy seemed to work for a short while, as I earned
a regular salary and gained a small measure of financial
freedom, but then I hit a hard wall. You see, the knowledge I
gained from high school and college was enough to get me my
first job, but it wasn’t enough to help me achieve the continued
goals that I would have in life.
I wanted to get a place of my own, do things that were
important to me and, of course, make more money along the way.
After a few months of full-time work I felt like I wasn’t making
any progress. I had a lot more to learn before I could start
moving in the direction of my goals. I needed to embrace the
following fact: You can never stop learning if you want to
succeed in the world of business.
My journey to a renewed attitude about education came around
the same time that I wanted to leave my job at a shipping
company and pursue a more fulfilling career. Having already
spent four years in college with my parents eager to see me make
it for myself, I had no choice but to embark on a journey of
self-learning.
Frankly, I had neither the money nor the time to go back to
college. One positive note that helped me move forward was the
fact that I had taught myself to play guitar over a period of
about three years. Knowing that I had some ability to learn
effectively without a teacher in my face spurred me to go out

and gain the knowledge needed to get in on the ground floor of
personal fitness training.
Take a look at your own situation for a moment. Have you
reached a point in your life where you’re coasting on the
knowledge you gained five or ten years ago? Are you actively
seeking out new learning experiences? If you don’t have a plan
for continued learning, your business skills will erode and your
possibilities will be limited.
EDUCATION DRIVES BUSINESS
If you take a look at the events in this world over the last ten
years, there are some pretty powerful illustrations of the need
for ongoing personal education.
Since the early 1990s the technology revolution has swept
over the world like a massive tidal wave, turning paper-based
communications into a flood of bits and bytes. The Internet,
high-speed and wireless networking have enabled an information
superhighway that has transformed virtually every industry on
the planet.
Back when I graduated from college the computer skills that
were being taught focused on programming in languages like BASIC
and using non-graphical spreadsheet programs like Lotus 1-2-3.

Twelve years later, you probably couldn’t find three people out
of ten who even know what those things were.
In 1991 the Internet was something that was only used by the
government and the military. Now everyone is aware of the power
of the Internet. And of course, there’s e-mail, which has become
the single most efficient and cost-effective communication
method in modern society.
While technology changed, industries changed along with it
and people’s perceptions about how business can be conducted
changed. As a result, the expectations of people’s knowledge
have changed as well. So now a secretary is not just expected to
know how to type and file, but how to use Microsoft Word,
navigate the Internet, manage e-mail, and maybe a database or
two. This expectation is all fine and dandy for someone who’s
been to school in the last few years, but what about the people
who graduated in 1991?
The answer is simply that you must continue learning or face
extinction in business and in life. Without continued education,
it’s impossible to keep up with all the changing trends and
standards in the world of business. The people who turned their
backs and refused to recognize the technological revolution have
become marginalized, downsized and phased out.
It’s a horrible thing to realize that people can be pushed to
the edges of society by technology, but similar circumstances

have occurred in every era. People in the early 1900s who did
things by hand were replaced by people who operated machines.
Those people who operated machines were replaced in the 1990s by
people who programmed computers that operated machines. Anyone
who was resting on their laurels thinking that they could coast
along for twenty or thirty years to retirement got a big shock
when their boss let them know that they were being replaced by a
newer model that never takes a coffee break or has to use the
restroom.
The skills that the average person needs to continue working
on to be successful go far beyond technological ones.
Interpersonal and communication skills need to be honed in order
to deal with people in the myriad of situations that you’ll
encounter in your business life. Do you think you learned all
the interpersonal skills you needed in college? Wherever you’re
at now, do you think you know everything about these types of
skills? Or any other skill, for that matter? The masters of any
subject know that there’s always more to learn.
THE GRADUATION CONCEPT
The process of going through high school and college with big
fanfare at the end of each fosters what I call “The Graduation
Concept.”

The graduation concept involves the impression of finality
given by the completion of structured educational programs.
Graduation is portrayed as coming to the end of a road. This is
not reality, though.
In reality, the end of one learning experience is the
beginning of another in a process that goes on and on until you
die. If we adjust our thinking, we can realize that the purpose
of higher education should be to learn how to learn rather than
trying to learn as much as you can in a four to six-year period.
After all, you’ll spend much more time out of school than in it.
I once read a Zen proverb that said, “Before enlightenment,
chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and
carry water.” To me, this statement reflects the exact opposite
of the graduation concept and it’s exactly the attitude everyone
needs in order to succeed in business.
I could beat you over the head all day with quotes about the
importance of ongoing learning. You might even be thinking that
what I’m saying is simply common sense. Yeah, it is common
sense. But how many people stay on course and follow through on
this common sense throughout their lives? Are you continuing to
learn by actively taking steps to expand your knowledge and
understanding in this world? Do you feel like you’ve “graduated”
and have no more need for seriously educating yourself? If you
feel like you’ve graduated then you’ve got some work to do. Even

as you read this the world is changing. Your ability to adapt to
those changes will be a major factor in determining your
business success in the future.
Remember, the brain is a muscle. Like any other muscle, the
brain needs exercise to stay strong.
MAKING TIME TO LEARN
If you’re like most people you lead a busy life. So you might
have some objections like, “But I’ve got to work and raise a
family and I don’t have time to be a student of life.” That’s a
good point and leads us to an important question. How do we
continue meaningful learning while functioning in the world,
meeting our responsibilities and forwarding our goals?
In response to that question I’ll feed you some more common
sense for dinner and tell you that like anything else, you need
to make time for learning. Think about it. We make time for so
many things in this life like television, magazines, extra hours
of sleep, overtime at work, vegetating, spending time with our
family, etc. Now some of that time is very well-spent and some
of it is not. You need to find the time that is not well-spent
and carve some of that out and make it learning time.
As children we made time for learning without even knowing
it. Take a look at kids playing and you can see them using their

imagination, asking questions and repeating things that they
hear. Children are like sponges that absorb all kinds of
information. And as a result they learn things at a rate that
most of us can’t comprehend as adults.
Take language, for instance. Children will learn the basics
of a language just by listening and observing. A child can learn
to speak just about every language that they’re exposed to
during their formative years. As adults that learning curve
takes a lot more time. Part of this is because we’re so used to
speaking and hearing our native language, but it’s partly a
result of the fact that we’ve denied our ability to continue to
learn rapidly even as we get older.
As adults we have to work a little harder and consciously
make time for learning. All successful people make that time and
there’s no reason that you can’t. When I started my personal
training business I used to read fitness books while on the long
subway ride from Queens to Manhattan. Things like audio books
allow us to gain knowledge while driving our cars or listening
to a portable music device. Leveraging technology is a great way
to make sure that you have more time for learning. Of course,
you have to take time to learn about new technology in order to
get the benefits.
Take a few moments to think about how you use your time.
Write down a time overview of the last few days of your life.

How many hours did you spend watching TV? How many hours did you
spend commuting to work? How much time are you spending with
family and friends? Do you have a steady routine or does your
routine change on a regular basis? How many hours are you
sleeping a night?
Seriously take the time to evaluate how your time is used.
Then find what I call “moments of opportunity.” These are times
when you can afford to make time for learning. You might watch a
little less TV. You could wake up half an hour earlier. You can
listen to an audio book while commuting to work. Commit some
time to mapping out how you use your time and you’ll have a much
better chance of utilizing moments of opportunity.
WHAT YOU NEED TO LEARN
Once we realize how important it is to embrace continued
learning in our lives, we’re presented with an important
question. What things do we need to continue to learn? The
answer to that question really depends on the person. I believe
there are certain areas that everyone should continue to develop
no matter what your goals in business are. These are areas that
I call general knowledge areas.
On the other hand, each person has individual goals and
interests that don’t necessarily relate to what other folks are

trying to accomplish. I call these areas specific knowledge
areas.
The most important general knowledge areas are the ones that
will support the possibility of success in business no matter
what your goals are. No matter what business you’re in or what
your goals are, you’ll always need to be highly skilled in the
management of people and money.
Owning up to the reality of the high-tech landscape has
caused me to dedicate myself to building skills in the area of
computer technology. The simple fact is that any job or business
that you’re involved with will require strong computer skills in
order to be successful. In addition to computer skills, sales,
marketing and customer service experience have proved to be
important general knowledge areas which have helped keep me
competitive in the business world.
Let’s make quick list of the general knowledge areas that
will make the greatest impact in your business life.
Management of people
Management of finances
Computer skills
Sales and marketing ability
Customer service

I want you to spend some time thinking about your background
in each of these areas. Make an honest assessment about how much
time you’ve been spending in trying to gain the skills that you
need. I wouldn’t expect you to become an expert overnight, but
you must consider these skills in your action plan for continued
learning.
The general knowledge areas will support you no matter what
business you’re in, but the specific knowledge areas will make
the difference between you and your competitors.
When I became a personal trainer my specific knowledge area
involved physical fitness. This differed greatly from my job as
a shipping manager, which required me to have strong logistical
skills. I was very motivated to make a change and I spent many
hours cracking the books and learning about physical fitness in
order to make the switch from one career to the other.
My ability to learn made the move possible and gave me the
freedom of choice in my profession.
Your specific knowledge is your bread and butter. If you want
to change industries or careers, then you need to figure out
your new specific knowledge area right away. If you want to
improve on your current situation, then you’ll need to shore up
on your existing specific knowledge area.
Take a few moments right now to think about what specific
knowledge is required for either your present career or the

career that you want to move into. Write down a summary of this
information and keep it in mind as you continue your lifelong
learning process.
CULTURE OF LEARNING
When you’re learning new things it’s a fact that the process
requires a serious commitment. In most cases you will be engaged
in learning activities while practicing your chosen craft and
earning a living. This balance can be a difficult one, but it’s
hard for most people to forego a paycheck for a few months while
they learn a new discipline or refine an existing one.
More than likely you’ll need to learn on the fly and you’ll
need to be smart in the first place to make that happen. The
good news is that you can do it! I’ve been involved in six very
different careers since college graduation. In addition, I’ve
learned to play the guitar and build Web sites. I learned all
the skills needed for my endeavors while I was working, dealing
with everyday responsibilities and forwarding my goals in life.
If you ask me how I did it I can tell you simply that you
need to: Create a culture of learning in your life.
Whole companies have learned that creating a culture of
constant learning can provide enormous benefits and give their

business a decided edge over their more stagnant thinking
competitors.
General Electric Corporation (GE) is a perfect example of a
company that has developed a culture of learning, which has in
turn fostered success in the world of business. GE is a large
company with multiple business units and they’ve promoted a
learning culture in order to continue to diversify and grow
their business.
Some might see a diverse array of businesses as a difficult
environment in which to foster a culture of learning. The
leadership at GE realized that they could use this diversity to
their advantage. GE views their diversity as a limitless source
of learning opportunities and a storehouse of ideas.
Besides just having the ideas and sources of knowledge, GE
has taken action to insure this information is spread across the
organization. They do this by bringing together people from all
levels of the organization to work on problems, share knowledge
and create action plans to help in all areas of the company.
GE’s leadership makes sure that these types of learning and
sharing events occur across all the diverse business areas,
calling it “Horizontal Learning.” There’s no doubt that this
approach has been a major factor in GE’s growth and success over
the past twenty years.

As an individual, you need to believe that you can learn
continuously in order to break through to a culture of learning
in your life. It also helps to have good reason to want to keep
learning. Once I started on the personal training business I
quickly realized that in order to be competitive and make good
money, I needed to be highly knowledgeable in not only specific
knowledge area of physical fitness, but the general knowledge
areas of marketing, sales and customer service as well.
I learned bits of all these areas over the years while
working on many jobs during school but this was like a master
course because there could be no excuse that this was just a
“part-time” job. I needed to learn in order to survive in this
new world, so I went out and found information where I could. I
scoured books, audiotapes and magazine articles for relevant
information, filtering out things that seemed counterproductive
and applying information that made sense. I also learned much-
needed personal training and business skills from other
successful trainers in the gym.
I left no stone unturned in my post-college education aimed
at achieving my goals. Knowledge will not necessarily find you.
You need to seek out knowledge wherever you can find it. All
kinds of knowledge are freely available if you’re willing to
take the time and the effort to go out and find it.

My culture of learning involved absorbing learning into every
aspect of my life. Using this technique, I was able to process
large amounts of information and get smart on a lot of important
topics very quickly. This approach took up a lot of my spare
time, but I was at a place in my life where I was willing and
able to make those types of sacrifices.
My experience creating a culture of learning in my life came
in handy during my time in the military as well. One of the key
missions that we had as soldiers was to constantly learn and get
better at the basic skills as well as our military specialty.
From basic training to officer candidate school to my time as an
armor officer in Germany, almost everything I did involved
learning something new.
When I was in charge of maintenance for my tank company, the
weekly maintenance day was not only about insuring that our
vehicles were in great shape. Every week we would focus on a
different part of the tank and have a training class about it
that involved hands on training and lectures. Each week,
different people were assigned to lead the class so they
themselves would learn about preparing and delivering training.
This process insured that everyone in the unit was knowledgeable
about the vehicles, which were our lifelines during combat.
This is just a single example from my military experience but
there are hundreds more. Given the way I saw the culture of

learning embraced in my military experience, it’s no wonder that
our armed services are able to do incredible things while under
amazingly short deadlines.
Chances are that you’re in a different place in your life
right now then I was at the start of my personal training or
military careers. That’s okay because no matter what your own
situation is like now you always have the time to decide how you
will shape a culture of learning in your life.
You might be wondering exactly how you can begin to shape
this culture of learning in your life. The best advice that I
can give is first and foremost to make every part of your life
about learning.
I’ve frequently put myself in positions where continued
education was not only helpful but completely necessary. From my
time as a personal trainer to my stint in the military, the
restaurant business and then consulting I’ve been challenged to
master new concepts. I recommend that you take the same approach
and take advantage of challenges to help spur learning in your
life.
You should seek out the most relevant and available sources
of information on the things you want to learn. These days there
are so many learning options, with the Internet, books,
magazines and even continuing education learning classes as
viable options. You need to take the time to evaluate these

sources to see if they can fit into your learning culture.
Evaluate these sources based on the time you have to spend as
well as their cost.
Another very important way to help build your learning
culture involves people. Just like I recommended a counselor in
Lesson One for advice on important issues, I recommend
surrounding yourself with people who know more than you do and
learning from them. These people could be friends, co-workers,
employees or simply people who share the same goals as you do.
Just as GE uses diversity to their advantage, you too can use
the diversity of people’s knowledge to help you be more
successful in business.
GETTING THE KNOWLEDGE YOU NEED
Getting the knowledge you need starts with making a commitment
to lifelong education and then following up on it. After all,
everyday life has a way of nudging its way into our best-laid
plans. Before you know it, months and years go by.
For me, the commitment came at the point where I realized
that my school education alone wasn’t going to take me as far as
I wanted to go. You might commit under similar circumstances or
you might be the one who ends up laid off (or downsized) and in
need of a new profession.

You might also be at a point in life where everything is
going well but you feel like you want to expand your horizons.
Whatever the reason, you can see that a commitment to ongoing
education is essential to being successful in any business. The
toughest part, though, is the execution of the action plan for
educating yourself.
First, you need to decide on the areas that you feel need
improvement. Then you need to be able to access the proper
knowledge and set aside the necessary time to learn. Finally,
you need to teach yourself or work with others who will teach
you.
Next, you need to find your best sources of knowledge and
mine them for all they’re worth. You just have to take the time
to seek out knowledge. You can’t take for granted that knowledge
will just come to you. You must be on the hunt, period.
My experience in the lifelong learning process is that if one
has an open mind, one learning experience will lead you to the
next one. I’ve also learned that you can’t learn everything at
once, so patience is a key here. Your skills in a particular
area of knowledge will be limited as you start to learn
something new, and it can be frustrating. Don’t worry. Lean on
your stronger areas of knowledge until you learn what you need
to in other areas. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so be patient and
learning will pay off.

The process for making the commitment to learning happen also
hinges on your ability to follow the evaluation steps laid out
in Lesson Seven. Taking the time to properly evaluate your
situation will give you the necessary information to move
forward with your learning action plan.
CREATE A LEARNING ACTION PLAN
When I decided to make the move from the military world back
into the civilian world, I came up with an action plan for
learning.
The first question that I asked myself was, “What do I want
to do for a career after the military?” I tried to think of
areas that I found interesting that could also provide a source
of income. Computer technology quickly came to mind since I
really enjoyed working with my home computer and using the
Internet.
The second question I asked myself was, “What do I want the
job to be like?” My answer was that I didn’t want to be in a
normal nine-to-five office job. I wanted more autonomy and a
flexible schedule. Basically, I wanted something very unlike the
military.

After deciding to focus on a computer-related industry I had
to do some research on the types of jobs available in the field
of computer technology.
I read a few books, magazines, looked on the Internet and
asked advice from friends who were working in the civilian
world. There were so many job possibilities like programmer,
designer, database technician, Web developer, technology
architect, and on and on.
I was completely puzzled and a little frustrated. One day a
friend mentioned the field of technology consulting, where
companies work with clients to assist them in meeting their
computer needs. I was immediately interested because this work
involved computers as well as customer service. I’ve always been
very excited about serving people. Other components of the job
included travel and the possibility of having Fridays off. All
these things appealed to me, but I still had more learning to
do.
I began to research the different companies in the field to
try to find out more about what they did for their clients.
Knowing facts about a company is key to getting in the door. I
asked myself another question: “How do I go about landing a job
as a technology consultant?”
Within a few weeks I was able to find a company that
specialized in placing former military officers with consulting

firms. They even gave me homework to increase my chances of
having a successful interview with my prospective employers.
This whole process took place over the two months before and
two months after my discharge from the military, and it involved
non-stop evaluation and learning. I wasn’t able to save too much
money as a military officer and I needed to pay for a place to
live back in New York, so I was motivated. The motivation paid
off because within two months of my discharge I was starting a
new position as a technology consultant with a very large and
well-respected firm.
Without taking the time to evaluate and develop a learning
action plan, the results that I achieved might not have been
possible; at least, not so quickly. I’ll never really know how
things would have gone differently without the preparation but I
don’t think that they could have gone better.
Here’s the big question for you. Do you think that your
future is as promising without an action plan to continue your
education? We both know the answer to that question. Today is
the day to start a learning action plan. Take this on as an
exercise and write an action plan before moving on to the next
lesson. Ask yourself those important questions, come up with a
simple plan and execute!

I’ve done well on my journey so far and none of it would have
been possible without a commitment to continued learning.
Experience has also taught me that I would need to keep my eyes
open for new learning experiences if I wanted to continue to
have success.
Once your horizons start expanding you’ll also be ready to
make some more moves in your career and in life.
Although a time like this can be very exciting, it can also
be stressful because a lot will be happening that you’re not
used to. That’s why you’ll need to follow the next tenet of my
philosophy and beat the world to the punch.

Lesson Nine: The Power of Anticipation
“Change is coming in your life. Sometimes it comes quietly and
sneaks up on you. Sometimes it bowls you over like a sudden
storm. Either way, change is coming, change is happening and you
need to be ready to deal with it.”
- ROBERT J. SAFUTO
Back around the time I was searching out a new direction after
college I took the time to read a few books about management and
organization. My plan was to try and find a few nuggets of
information that made sense to me and then apply them in my
endeavors. It seemed to me that the information I had gotten
from my college business textbooks was very sterile and didn’t
really apply to any of the situations that I found myself in
after college. I found a book called “Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People” by Stephen Covey. Unlike my college textbooks,
“Seven Habits” contained plenty of common-sense knowledge that I
could apply.
There was one particular nugget of information from “Seven
Habits” that ended up being really valuable to me. That nugget
was the directive to “Be Proactive.” I had never even heard the
word proactive in high school or college. I was intrigued by
this new concept.

Being proactive means getting things done before they need to
be done. It’s about using your mind to anticipate activities and
take action to deal with them.
As a student I was very used to being reactive. Situations
just seemed to pop up and I would handle them as they occurred.
I wouldn’t focus hard on a particular class until right before
an exam, at which point I would cram for two days before the
test. Immediately after the test I would do a complete brain
dump so I could focus on the next class with an exam coming up.
It would get pretty rough around final exam time when I’d
usually have back-to-back tests. I’d usually end up with B’s and
an occasional A grade.
While all this was going on I don’t think I was learning the
subjects of my classes as much as I was learning to react. As I
stated earlier in the book, higher education rewards you based
on your performance on tests and not your overall approach. This
convinced me that I was succeeding at my studies since my Grade
Point Average was a solid B.
Success becomes redefined as you get older, though. In
college I was somehow able to work out juggling a job loading
trucks and going to school with my reactive approach to things.
As my responsibilities grew, the reactive approach became more
and more difficult to sustain.

When I started working a full-time job as a shipping manager,
I began to realize that every day was a test. I couldn’t do a
brain dump nightly and start fresh in the morning like I did
when I was taking classes or loading trucks. I had
responsibilities that carried over from day to day and more
often than not things occurred that forced me to address
unforeseen issues.
If I couldn’t locate a particular missing package, instead of
passing the responsibility off to the next shift I would have to
stay until I tracked the package down and gave the customer an
answer. If one conveyer belt had a breakdown I would have to
figure out a way to keep the packages moving and get the belt
fixed. If on a certain night, there was a higher volume of
freight than another I needed to adjust and handle the increase
in volume of packages in the same amount of time as any other
night. And I would have to handle these things in addition to
the daily tasks that I was expected to complete. It all became a
bit overwhelming for me.
The fact that I was learning was this: Effective business
people anticipate situations rather than reacting to them.
Life, more often than not, conditions us to react rather than
plan something out and prepare for all the actions necessary to
be successful. Take a look around society and you’ll see what I
mean.

Have you ever talked to a bride who wants to lose weight so
she can look better for her wedding? Instead of starting an
exercise plan months earlier to help get her into shape,
inevitably she ends up cramming all the diet and exercise into a
short period just before the wedding so she can fit into her
dress and look “good” for all of the wedding guests.
The resulting stress from trying to cram a six-month plan
into two months throws off her equilibrium and makes the poor
bride miserable. This misery causes the bride to react and eat
like crazy when the frustration peaks. I saw this scenario more
times than I would like when I was a personal fitness trainer.
If you’re having trouble dealing with the many curveballs
that life can throw at you, then you’re probably reacting rather
than anticipating.
Anticipating in life and in business will make the difference
and give you an edge over your competition. Anticipating is all
about knowing what you’re going to face in any situation,
deciding how to prepare and then taking the appropriate action.
In short, you cannot be a success unless you learn to
anticipate!

THE POWER OF ANTICIPATION
Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, was a master
of anticipation in the early days of his career. He trained hard
for each opponent and easily beat them every time he stepped
into the ring. Mike had this great knack for eyeing his opponent
and beating him to the punch every time.
Mike’s early career was made of anticipating and taking
action, while his opponents had no choice but to react to his
punishing blows. Like everyone else who makes a habit of
reacting, Tyson’s opponents were behind the power curve and at a
serious disadvantage.
Mike Tyson rode the power of anticipation and preparation to
a world boxing title and great financial fortune. Unfortunately
for Tyson, he failed to maintain his great anticipation skills.
He looked like a poorly prepared, slow fighter while defending
his title against Buster Douglas in 1990. Instead of beating his
opponent to the punch, Tyson was the slow fighter who ended up
on the receiving end of a bad beating.
I ended up with some bad beatings working twelve-hour days
trying to handle all the unexpected situations at my job as a
shipping manager. When things got really bad I sought out the
advice of some older managers. They suggested that I actually do
some planning prior to each night’s work.

The idea to plan was a new one to me but I immediately gave
it a shot since I needed help badly. What I found was that the
planning added more tasks onto my daily activities and initially
this frustrated me. After all, I was trying to reduce my
workload, not increase it.
As time passed I realized that all the preparation was
actually saving me time. I began to analyze the freight patterns
so a big volume day wouldn’t catch me by surprise. I discovered
that I could expect a big spike in volume on the Friday before a
holiday weekend. Businesses wanted to get all their shipments
out the door so their employees could take the following Monday
off. This helped me plan for the number of personnel that I
would need for a given shift.
I also began checking the conveyer belt system long before a
shift to try to identify any maintenance problems. I put
measures in place to deal with the loss of any particular belt.
For the first time in my life, I was anticipating rather than
reacting. Problems that usually took hours to get straight were
being dealt with in a fraction of that time. It certainly wasn’t
a concept that I completely embraced overnight. It took me a
couple of months of making mistakes, learning and trying new
things to get it right at that particular job. Getting it right
and learning to anticipate gave me the power to control my
career.

I can’t tell you what it felt like the first time that I was
actually able to leave work on time on a Friday night so I could
meet up with friends and relax. Having that kind of freedom is
what the power of anticipation is all about.
KNOW YOUR BUSINESS
All this talk of anticipation brings us to a very important
question. How does a person learn to anticipate in a business
environment?
The first step to using anticipation effectively involves
knowing your business inside and out. This knowledge not only
covers what happens at your business on a daily basis, but also
understanding all the forces that act upon your business to
cause situations to change. Let’s look at a simple but effective
example of how knowing your business is an essential factor in
anticipation.
When I was running a restaurant in New York City I realized
how quickly I could be overwhelmed by business problems. In
other types of industries, situations develop in hours, days,
weeks or even longer time periods. I learned fast that when
you’re dealing with the public providing an immediate service,
situations can develop in a matter of seconds or minutes. That
piece of knowledge alone allowed me to anticipate a myriad of
situations, but understanding that things could occur quickly

wasn’t enough. I also needed to know what situations had the
highest probability of occurring.
At least once an evening a customer would become unsatisfied
with one aspect of our service. When you’re serving hundreds of
people each evening one of the things you learn is that
sometimes there are folks who won’t be pleased know matter how
hard you try. These situations occur quickly and must be
addressed immediately in order to limit their effects on the
overall situation.
The goal at my restaurant was to please the customer, so my
challenge was to watch for a dissatisfied customer, understand
why they were dissatisfied and then find a way to address the
situation to bring about a positive result for both the customer
and my business. Finally, I needed to record or remember the
situation so I’d have a frame of reference to deal with such a
situation in the future.
By using this technique I learned the following information.
On a given night we were likely to have at least one customer
who would express some level of dissatisfaction. That customer
would most likely express dissatisfaction in one of two areas:
speed of service and the noise level of the restaurant. I
learned that customers liked to be served quickly and wanted a
quieter atmosphere.

Luckily, I had a good chef and a floor staff or there could
have been a lot of other service issues to anticipate. Knowing
these facts, I took steps to make sure the process of ordering
and delivering food made sense. I also dimmed the lighting and
played more relaxed music to give the restaurant a more intimate
feeling.
When dealing directly with customers I learned to be as
attentive and accommodating as possible, even if their requests
were a bit unreasonable. Utilizing these techniques resulted in
generally happier customers and a much smoother process from
night to night, allowing me time to focus on situations that
were not as foreseeable.
The key to learning about your business involves watching,
understanding, addressing and remembering. By doing these four
things you can get to know your business quickly and stay on top
of all the forces that can cause a situation to change. If
you’re able to answer the following three questions then you’re
doing well at knowing your business.
How fast can a situation change?
What events are most likely to occur that will affect
my business?
How can I best address the events that will affect my
business?

Ask yourself these questions. If you can’t come up with
answers right away, you should take the time to investigate this
information before moving on with this book.
PLANNING TO WIN
Knowing your business is one great step to mastering the power
of anticipation. The next step is to take the time to plan.
Planning is the action that creates value from knowing your
business. Good planning makes the act of anticipation possible.
Just like everything else that is necessary, planning takes some
more time out of your day. Planning takes time out of actually
executing your business. Many people are great at executing but
not nearly as good at planning.
Even if you are not a natural planner you must take the time
to plan. You can learn better planning skills. The most
successful business people are the ones who learn that taking
the time to plan can make all the difference in a tough business
situation.
In order to help you internalize this concept I want you to
take a moment right now. Close your eyes and think of all the
little things taking time away from you on a daily basis. Think
of the things that cause you to end up catching a later train or
cause you to have to go in to the office for a couple of hours

on Saturday. Think about those things that happen in your
personal life that end up throwing everything out of whack.
Now for each one of those things think about how you could
anticipate them. Think about how and why these events occur. For
each event, think of one thing you can do to anticipate and deal
with it.
This exercise is a microcosm of the planning process. Take
this simple exercise to heart and use the information to head
off situations that would otherwise take time away from you. By
doing this you’ll be using up some time in the short run but
saving yourself a lot of time for more important things in the
long run.
Planning to win in business is what separates two groups of
people, anticipators and firefighters.
Anticipators are the folks who are planning and easily
handling all sorts of situations. They are the folks who take
bumps in the road in stride and keep on going.
Firefighters are business people who fail to plan properly
and get stumped by tough situations. They are the ones who have
to stop everything in order to deal with an issue. While the
firefighters are stuck trying to deal with obstacles, their
competitors are forging ahead and winning.
Examples of planning to win are everywhere.

Consider a football team as an example. Every college and pro
football team has a game plan that they follow. The game plan
focuses on each opponent, taking into account the opponent’s
strengths and weaknesses. The game plan also takes into account
the planning team’s abilities.
The abilities of both sides are fed into the game plan. The
weather outlook may feed into the plan as well. The coach may
also throw in adjustments to the plan based on his or her
personal experience. The coach of one team has probably scouted
the other coach to see how that person reacts in different game
situations. Basically, everything that the coaching staff knows
about the game, the teams and the forces that can create
situations are fed into the game plan. A strong game plan can
make the difference between a team that is cohesive and
effective and a team that is sloppy and ineffective.
In business, game plans are just as important as they are in
sports. I’ve seen the benefits of planning (and the pitfalls of
not planning) in every venture I’ve been involved with.
As a consultant to the energy industry, I create a project
plan as the first order of business in every engagement. This
plan lays out the major tasks, which are then broken out into
smaller sub-tasks.
Based on my knowledge of the business I estimate the amount
of time each task will take and think about potential pitfalls.

I evaluate the plan as a whole and I evaluate its parts,
anticipating the events that could alter situations. Taking
these steps allows me to be ready for the challenges that each
engagement offers.
When most people get started in the world of business, they
focus on production and execution. They eschew detailed planning
in favor of attempting to get immediate results. That’s OK,
we’re a results-oriented society and I know that I felt like my
duty was to produce first and plan later. Your industry or
profession of choice does not affect your need to plan. You
simply must take the time to plan to be effective in business.
Successful business people know that the planning time is time
well spent in the long run.
Say you take an hour at the end of each day to plan for the
next day. If you work a ten-hour day, this reduces your
production time by ten percent. A lot of people would be upset
at that lost ten percent. But the ten percent is not really
lost, it’s invested.
That time you spend planning at the end of each day could
save you several hours of dealing with situations that you
weren’t ready for. That’s how the investment in planning pays
off.
Take a few moments now for an exercise on the value of
planning. Think about the top five events that take time away

from producing in your business. For each one of those events,
write out how and why they occur. Then follow that with some
ideas to deal with each type of event.
These events can be very simple or very complex but it’s
important that you be truthful about what’s getting in your way.
By evaluating these examples you have begun a planning process
that will power your ability to anticipate the most critical
situations and give you an edge in business.
THE PLANNING PROCESS
It’s very important to more clearly define the planning process.
Planning involves analyzing your needs in a situation. Planning
is something that definitely needs to be practiced and perfected
over time. Planning takes time but it’s the key input to
anticipation. Simply put, without planning you will not be able
to anticipate a thing!
In the examples above I described specific situations where
planning led to positive results. In all situations there are
certain factors that need to be taken into account in order to
make the planning process an effective one.
I define an effective planning process as one that allows you
to anticipate nearly all potential issues so that less than ten

percent of your production time is spent on reacting to
problems.
Determining the factors to be considered in planning must
happen first in the process. We can start by breaking the
factors down into two categories: Forces that are under our
control (inside the circle) and forces that are out of our
control (outside the circle). Distinguishing these forces from
one another is a very important part of the process. Many
inexperienced business people will spend too much time fretting
about circumstances out of their control while not spending
nearly enough time on those things that can be controlled. To be
an effective anticipator, you need to spend the majority of your
time focusing on things that are inside the circle.
Let’s take a moment to look at the forces that are outside
the circle. These are the things that we should plan for but
can’t control.
The weather is a great example of a force that’s outside the
circle. Many people are in professions that are greatly affected
by the weather. When I was in the military we always had to
consider the weather when we were planning an operation. Weather
affects visibility and the condition of the ground, which in
turn helped us decide how and where we would move our forces.
In the energy industry, the weather can give an indication of
a very high or low demand situation. The weather can indicate a

possible energy emergency. As a result, energy industry planners
will prepare to meet the changing needs caused by the weather.
Weather also affects outdoor sporting events. Major league
baseball teams must monitor potential bad weather in making
decisions whether or not to play a game. These decisions have
decided financial effects on their teams.
I’m sure that you could come up with a number of ways that
the weather can affect your business. And even though the effect
on your business may be different from the effect on the
business of the next person, for all of us the weather is
outside of our control.
The simple rule of thumb for dealing with the forces like
weather that are outside the circle is to plan but not dwell. As
a young business person, I would get upset by too many things
that were out of my control. I would spend valuable time
fretting over situations that I had absolutely no control over.
I should have spent my time thinking and planning for the next
event but my inexperience kept me focused on being frustrated.
Over time I learned that if I spent my brain power focusing
on things I could control that I would manage my business in a
much more effective manner. Successful business people know that
being angry or upset at circumstances out of their control
accomplishes nothing. Instead, they accept the situation and
plan to deal with it.

In order to successfully plan for outside forces , you must
take at least four steps.
First, know the force. Second, know as much about how it can
affect you as possible. Third, make an action plan based on the
best information available and the forces that you can control.
Fourth, make changes as the situation develops.
The key to dealing with forces outside the circle is being in
control of the forces inside the circle. The forces inside the
circle are under your control and you should spend the lion’s
share of your time planning so that these forces can work for
you.
The forces that are under your control involve the quality of
the product or service that you deliver. They involve how you
deliver your product or service. They involve how you create
what you create. No matter what your business is, you must
consider these forces in your planning process.
Back in the days when I was managing a loading dock I had
absolutely no control over the amount of packages that came
through on a given day. I could only plan based on the time of
year and past experience. This was a factor that was outside the
circle.
The number of packages certainly affected how I would run
things, but not as much as the quality of my team. If one or
more of my team members failed to show up for a shift, or if

everyone showed up but didn’t perform well, it could be a long
night. The quality of my team was a factor inside the circle. I
had the power to hire, train, evaluate and fire my personnel. I
came to know very quickly that even on slow days things wouldn’t
run very well if the team didn’t perform. I had some rough days
at work until I started to realize that I needed to focus my
planning around the team and spend less time worrying if people
were going to ship a lot of freight that day.
Do you ever spend time worrying about forces out of your
control? Do you know all the forces within your control that
should be a part of your planning process? Think about these
questions.
I want you to take the time right now to think about your
business and list the major factors that are inside and outside
of your circle of control. Describe how much of an effect you
can have on each of these factors. If you can’t have any effect
on something, then it’s outside the circle. If you can, then
it’s inside the circle. Once you’ve made these determinations
you’ll know where you need to focus your efforts and you’ll be
more prepared to continue with an effective planning process.
Once you’ve considered which forces are under your control,
you need to think about some important constraints on your
planning.

The four key general constraints are time, money, people and
technology. Each of these areas must be addressed for a proper
planning process to occur. They are simply addressed by asking
yourself some questions and considering the answers.
For time:
How much time do you have available?
Is it possible to extend the amount of time available?
For money:
What are the costs involved in this situation?
What are the limits of my budget?
Will I have enough money to complete the project?
For people:
How many people do I have to assist me?
What skills do the people on my team have?
Do I have enough people to get the job done?
For technology:
What technology is available to assist me?
Do I have the knowledge to make use of the proper technology?
Is there technology that I need to acquire in order to get
the job done?
These questions are just a start. You need to come up with a
list of questions specifically for your situation in order to
make the planning process worthwhile.

TAKING ACTION
With the planning process started, you’ve got a big advantage
over many other folks who are neglecting to take the time to
plan. But planning isn’t foolproof and it isn’t the end of the
process. That’s why you need to make sure that you follow up
your planning by taking action.
Action is the common thread throughout all these concepts,
but it’s not always apparent to people that they should pull the
trigger and get something done. How many times have you heard or
said, “Well I was planning to get this done, but…”
BUT YOU DIDN’T!
Everyone does that some time or another. Some people skip the
action step all the time and they’re left wanting. Some people
fail to take action because they have a fear of mistakes.
Remember Lesson Three: It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you
learn something from them.
I got a master course in the action part of this concept as a
tank platoon leader in the U.S. Army. We would spend hours every
day at the motor pool checking, rechecking and performing
maintenance on our M1A1 tanks. Soldiers would constantly
question how many hours we were spending on preventive
maintenance and maintenance training. Of course, all those

thoughts would go out the window as soon as someone experienced
a breakdown in their vehicle.
In training and on the battlefield, an armor soldier’s life
happens on his tank. A broken-down tank is a depressing
situation that you want to move past as quickly as possible.
Those hours and hours of preventive maintenance and training
greatly reduced breakdowns and gave soldiers confidence that
they could quickly deal with situations that could not be
avoided.
It was all about avoiding a situation where they would have
to be caught off-guard and react at an inopportune time. Sure,
there will always be events that you have to react to, but if
you’re constantly evaluating your situation, learning, looking
for pitfalls and taking action, then you will be way ahead of
the game.
Action makes the difference between a talker and a doer.
Talkers make big plans and are always preparing for their next
action. Doers always take their plans to the action step and
deal with the results one way or the other. Talkers never have
to worry about negatives because they rarely take a chance on a
course of action. Talkers are likely to be very critical of
folks who act on their plans. Doers handle the results and make
the necessary changes in order to be successful. The talker

gains in the short run by lack of effort. The doer gains in the
long run via hard work and experience.
In business you need to be a doer and you should ignore the
talkers. As a doer you’ll run the risk of being criticized, but
you’ll be respected by those who know what’s really important.
From my earliest working experiences I’ve been a doer. My
first paper route at age twelve taught me the rewards of taking
action. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to recognize the
talkers in action. In general, folks who fail to follow up on
plans develop bad reputations and command little respect in the
world of business.
In the corporate world I’ve heard people espouse grandiose
plans that they would never follow up. I remember being at a
team-building event for a large technology corporation I was
working for and listening to an executive hold court about his
plans for improving things in our business unit.
Everyone was excited and hopeful that these changes would
take place and improve the workplace. Months passed, nothing was
changed and this caused me and other employees to get very
upset. In a nutshell, that executive lost our respect when he
failed to follow up on his plans.
The simple point here is that you need to be a doer in order
to be successful. Don’t talk about a plan unless you intend to

try to make it happen. Remember, the only failures in life are
those who fail to try.
You also need to avoid talkers. Recognize the talkers and
avoid them. People who fail to follow up on their promises will
cause you problems, either by failing to meet a commitment to
you or by other people’s view of you because you are aligned
with the talker.
I want to wrap up this lesson with an exercise about action.
I want you to identify situations in your life where you have
gone through the effort of planning and then failed to take
action. Write down a few examples of these situations and try to
figure out why you held off on taking action. Did you talk about
your plans to others? If you did talk about the plan, did you
follow up later to explain why you hadn’t moved forward? You
want to recognize whether or not you’re acting like a doer
instead of a talker.
Honesty in this exercise will help you to recognize your
tendency for taking action. It will also help you to understand
what’s holding you back from taking action on your plans.
Remember the power of anticipation to propel you forward in
business. Know your business, make detailed plans and take
action. By taking this to heart you’ve taken a great step
forward.

CHECKPOINT
Congratulations on completing Lesson Nine. It’s time for another
checkpoint. Look back at lessons seven through nine to reinforce
the knowledge that you’ve gained. Make sure that you take the
time to do this. The final lesson is extremely important but it
will not have a major impact unless you’ve truly grasped the
concepts in all of the previous lessons.

Lesson Ten: Believe In Yourself
“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.”
- RICHARD BACH
I’m not ashamed to say that as a young man I suffered a crisis
of confidence. I had doubts about everything in my life, from my
physical prowess at sports, to my attractiveness to women, to my
ability to succeed in a career of my choosing.
That fact is a shame because knowing what I know now I could
have had a different and much more fulfilling past. As we all
know too well, the past cannot be changed. We can only change
our present and future.
Over the years I have gone through a slow, but steady
transformation of learning to believe in myself. My past fears
have created some disappointments in my life. That’s fine by me
because I feel very lucky to have learned to believe in myself
at any age. Many people go their whole lives without really
understanding their potential.
I realized that I had turned the corner a year after I was
discharged from the Army. I had taken a job working for a very
large and prestigious technology consulting firm and I was not
happy with the experience. I decided to leave my job and strike
out for a new experience. When I announced my intentions to my

boss, she immediately made an impassioned plea for me to
continue working at this company. The last thing she said to me
was this, “You’re so very valuable because you can do anything
you set out to do. People like you are in short supply.” I
thought about what she said later and realized that it was true.
Because her words rang true I knew I was destined for better
things.
Lesson Ten is the lesson on which all the other lessons are
balanced: The greatest goals in life can only be achieved if you
truly believe in yourself.
EGO
I want you to say the following statement out loud. I can only
achieve if I truly believe in myself. Does it sound silly to
you? There was a time when I thought it sounded real silly to
me, but that was my ego getting in the way.
Your ego is that little voice that pops into your head any
time you attempt to pursue something new, different and
challenging. Left unchecked, our ego will run roughshod over the
best of our plans and greatly limit our potential. The ego tells
us that something we want to do is too hard or will take too
long. The ego convinces us that our ideas are ordinary and our

dreams are out of reach. When our ego has consumed us we wake up
in the morning feeling helpless and hopeless.
Our potential is limited and one day bleeds into the next.
Imagine a prizefighter who can’t answer the bell for the next
round of a fight. When the ego has taken over, a person is not
ready to deal with the next round of life.
The fact that you’ve gotten this far in the book tells me
that you’ve overcome some important obstacles, but that doesn’t
mean there aren’t many more obstacles to overcome. The doubt and
fear engendered by our ego is powerful.
When I was still a teenager I realized that even the simplest
decisions were frightful ones. I agonized for months over
wanting to learn to play the guitar. All the usual thoughts
popped into my head. It will cost a lot of money. It will take
so long to learn. People will laugh because I’m not good at it.
The ego was talking to me big time and running the show. Somehow
I mustered the will to get started with guitar lessons and I’ve
continued to play for the last sixteen years.
How did I fight past my ego?
Maybe I’d reached the point where I was so paralyzed that I
had no other choice but to try something new. Whatever it was,
something clicked. Unfortunately, that experience wasn’t the end
of my belief issues.

Making the move to go from my first job after college to the
personal training business was like jumping the Grand Canyon. It
was very scary and I didn’t think I’d make it. I thought about
it for a long time prior to finally making my decision. I didn’t
believe in my ability to change and this cost me precious time.
I finally did make the change and after all of my trepidation
about the move I realized that it was something that I could
handle all along. I slowly began to believe that I could choose
the path for each day of my career and my life.
What spurred me to belief is still unknown to me, but I can
tell you that finding your belief in self is an endless process.
Like everything else that requires discipline, you start small
and continue to develop it every day for the rest of your life.
There are stops, starts and moments of doubt but if you’re
committed to creating your version of success (and I know that
you are) then you’ll stay on track.
MEASURE YOUR BELIEF
Before we go any further, I want you to honestly assess your
level of belief in yourself. The only way I know to do that in a
short period of time is to examine goals that you want to
accomplish but haven’t. Take a few minutes to think of things

that you’ve wanted to accomplish in your career but haven’t yet
done so.
Better still, think of things that you haven’t even started
to act on. Make a list of all the things that you can think of.
Then select the top five most important goals in the list. Some
possible examples could be: Wanting to learn a new skill,
approaching your boss about a promotion, wanting to go into a
completely new line of work, trying to promote an idea that you
have, making more money or wanting to start your own business.
Whatever your choices are, they’re your goals and they’re very
important to you.
Now that you’ve chosen your top five unachieved goals I want
you to write down the answer to the following question after
each one: Why haven’t I achieved this goal yet? After you’ve
written that out, I’d like you to write down the answer to this
question: What have I done recently to forward the possibility
of achieving this goal?
After you’ve done this, I want you to really study your
answers. If the reason that you haven’t achieved any of these
goals has to do with doubt or fear, then you have some personal
belief issues. If you’re not regularly taking steps to achieve
these goals, then you have belief issues even if fear or doubts
aren’t readily apparent to you.

Let’s say that you work at a Wal-Mart, make $6.50 an hour,
you have a goal of raising your wages to $8 an hour and you
really need this extra money. But you haven’t thought about or
made any serious attempt to get a raise for months now even
though you really need more money.
You may say that you have no fear of making more money, nor
do you have doubt that you need to make more money. So why
haven’t you been taking steps to make more money? The reason is
that you don’t fear the goal itself, but you fear the steps that
you’ll have to take to achieve that goal.
These steps will likely require some kind of change and we
all have a certain amount of fear and doubt with regards to
change. Once again, the ego is working overtime.
The difference between those who achieve their goals and
those who don’t is this: People who achieve their goals find a
way to diminish their fear and doubt through belief in
themselves.
This example is just one type of example and there are
thousands of other possibilities, some of which will apply
directly to situations happening in your life. I want you to
examine those situations as honestly as possible. That said, if
you have a belief problem and acknowledge it, you’ve taken an
important step to unlocking the possibilities contained in this
book.

GOALS
At this point in the book there should be no long faces on you,
the reader. This should be a happy moment. Jump up and scream
like a kid who’s learned that they’ve got a snow day because
every second that you step forward in this process is one step
closer to achieving your goals.
Although this chapter isn’t so much focused on goals as it is
in believing in yourself, I need to take a moment to explain why
goals play such an important part in self-belief. After all, if
you really believe in yourself then the goal shouldn’t matter,
right? Wrong!
Too often I’ve seen my own (and other people’s) hopes dashed
by ill-conceived goals. The fact is that no matter how much you
believe in yourself you will start to lose faith if you’re met
with consistent setbacks.
What I’m getting at is the important point that you need to
set yourself up for success by setting goals that are, first and
foremost, realistic. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid
shooting for the moon, but it does mean that you should consider
intermediate goals prior to getting to the moon. Your goals have
to support belief in yourself, and in order to do that your
goals must BE REALISTIC.

As a personal trainer I saw many people come into the gym
with strong belief in themselves but unrealistic goals. A person
would come in and state that their goal would be to lose thirty
pounds in six weeks. Without much investigation they begin an
ill-conceived program and after only the first week and two
pounds of weight loss they express frustration and begin to lose
belief in their ability to get fit.
How do we make sure that our goals our realistic? For
starters you can talk about them with your counselor. Do you
remember your counselor, that very important person that I
introduced you to way back in Lesson One? If not, then take a
little time to go back to reacquaint yourself with the
importance of this person. Your counselor should be able to help
put you on the right track.
You can also do your own independent research to figure out
if your goals are realistic. For example, if you want to become
an astronaut, you might want to consult the NASA Web site to get
more information on the program and any educational or age
requirements that exist. Read the biographies of past astronauts
to find out their experiences and to get a better idea of
whether outer space is where you want to go. In the meantime
you’ll also need to SET INTERMEDIATE GOALS.

Whether you want to be a college graduate, business owner,
professional musician, sports star or astronaut, you’ll need to
set goals that you can reach in the short term.
Turn a journey of a thousand miles into individual steps and
it becomes much more palatable. Michael Dell didn’t wake up one
morning in his dorm room and say, “I want to be the CEO of the
world’s largest direct marketer of personal computers by the end
of the month.”
He probably starting out by wanting to build and sell a
couple of systems, then later move into a small office and build
the company one step at a time. This approach helps us build our
skills and achieve goals while reinforcing a belief in
ourselves.
Let’s stop for a short time here and take a look back at
those five real important goals that you chose in the last
exercise. I want you to build on each of those by adding several
incremental goals to each ultimate goal. Write in time frames
for each intermediate goal as well, starting with things that
you can accomplish sooner and moving toward the more complex
goals that will take longer. The more you break a larger goal
down into intermediate goals, the better you will feel about the
process and your belief in self will be greatly strengthened.
As a tank company executive officer in the U.S. Army, I can
remember being responsible for understanding all the systems in

the M1A1 tank. The M1A1 tank is a large and very complex piece
of machinery, and considering the whole vehicle at once made my
stomach turn. I had no choice but to learn so I broke the tank
down (in my mind of course) into a number of logical sections
and spent a week focusing on each section.
I read manuals, asked questions and generally absorbed all
the information I could handle on that area of the tank. Within
a couple of months I had an incredibly strong knowledge of how
the vehicle worked from top to bottom and I felt very confident
that I would continue to be proficient to the level of expert.
The same philosophy of breaking goals down into smaller parts
has helped me immeasurably in the areas of playing and writing
music on my guitar. I like to break songs down into smaller
parts, mastering each part before moving on to the next part,
until I have the whole song down pat.
Whether you’re deciphering the inner workings of a tank,
writing songs or training for the space program, breaking larger
goals down into smaller ones will help you to believe in
yourself while pursuing larger goals.
If you’ve heeded the advice I’ve given so far you should be
in pretty good shape, with some goals identified and a good idea
about how to make those goals seem more attainable. There is one
more pitfall in the goal process that can’t be ignored.

In Lesson Seven I discussed evaluation and its importance in
this philosophy, so naturally I expect that you’ll be evaluating
the progress that you make on these goals. There is a huge
pitfall in goal setting that many people, especially those with
crises of confidence, fall into.
I’ve seen (and personally experienced) this pitfall in so
many different situations from my days as a paperboy to my time
as a personal trainer and in my stint as a restaurateur.
The pitfall goes like this: You set goals for yourself but
you look at other people or businesses to measure the results.
Let me explain this with some examples. When I was a
newspaper delivery boy I wanted to deliver as many papers as
possible. My goal was to have a bigger route so I could make
more money. I’d see other delivery boys with baskets full of
papers, a lot more papers than I had, and I got very frustrated,
even though I was steadily increasing the number of deliveries
on my route.
It felt like I was running on ice since I couldn’t catch up
to some of the other deliverers. Years later, when I was running
a restaurant, I had several plans happening to increase
business, including one for Sunday brunch.
We started out with only a handful of customers for brunch
and after a few weeks we had more than doubled that number to
around 15 customers. I should’ve been satisfied that we were

moving in the right direction, but I looked over at a restaurant
down the street and noticed that they were hosting over a
hundred customers for every Sunday brunch. I was frustrated and
for a moment I started to think my plans were hopeless. I had to
stop and remind myself that we were steadily improving. My plans
were working but they would take some time.
My point here is this: If you measure the success of your
goals based on someone else, then you always feel like you’re
failing. People who’ve moved to the next level and have strong
belief in themselves know that it pays to MEASURE AGAINST
YOURSELF.
Have you ever set goals for yourself and then gotten
frustrated because someone else appeared to be ahead of where
you wanted to be? I think that everyone does this at some point
in their life and it can lead to great frustration.
In the gym people say, “I’m not as slim and toned as she is
and I’ve been exercising for months. It’s just hopeless.” At
work they say, “He just got his second promotion since I’ve been
here and I haven’t been promoted yet. This is a dead-end job.”
Business owners say, “They’ve got twice as many customers as we
do. We’re doing everything wrong.” At the university students
say, “She’s in the best sorority on campus and has a GPA one
point higher than mine. I can never compete with that.” This
goes on and on.

Measuring your progress based on others will definitely sap
your belief in self and give you an unclear picture of YOUR true
progress. The main reason why this is the case is the fact that
everyone’s circumstances are different and as a result the state
someone else is in has nothing to do with you.
Other people who appear to be doing better (or worse) than us
are in a different place with different circumstances and, as
such, don’t portray an accurate picture of our situation.
Let’s take the slim woman in the gym, for example. When the
person who wants to reach a certain level of fitness sees that
woman and gets frustrated, there are a load of things that she
probably doesn’t know, like how long she’s been exercising or
what her eating habits are like.
Maybe the woman who looks more fit uses drugs or other
shortcuts to make herself thinner. In the meantime, all this
time and brainpower used up on envying others could be focused
on positive things like an honest evaluation of your progress
and actually doing some exercise.
The business owner who frets over the competition’s apparent
success would be better off spending her time refining her own
business plan and not worry about how her competitor did this
week. Remember, YOUR GOAL IS TO MAKE YOU BETTER, and not try to
engage in some sort of a horse race.

If all of this seems quite distracting, then you know that
it’s a function of the ego involved here. Our ego does its best
to keep us away from change and improvement and measuring
against others is one way that the ego achieves this.
The only way to defeat this is to make a conscious effort to
measure all of your goals based on yourself. Work on your
intermediate goals and achieve small victories every week. Stick
to your plan. Talk to your counselor. Avoid considering what
others are doing with regards to your progress. These are your
goals, so live them for yourself.
ENVIRONMENT
The next key ingredient to believing in yourself is your
environment. When I say environment, I don’t mean your physical
environment but rather your emotional environment. This is the
environment that is created by family, friends, co-workers and
anyone else whose opinion matters to you.
Does your environment foster belief in yourself, or does it
foster doubt and fear? This is a tough question to ask because
oftentimes people with a belief problem are hindered by those
closest to them.
When I was first developing my goals and dreams as a teenager
I always valued the opinion of my parents and they always seemed

to steer me in the direction of the route that they felt was
safe. As I got older, the safe routes were usually counter to my
adventurous goals. Mom and Dad didn’t mean me any harm, but in
their own way they were reinforcing my erroneous belief that I
had limited capabilities.
Later in life, my friends and co-workers were key figures in
shaping my emotional environment. I had grown up around a group
of kids who became abusive adults in a way that seemed innocent
at first but then turned very ugly.
My close group of friends seemed to be bent on tearing each
other down to the point where there would be fistfights over the
slightest comment about someone else. I didn’t fit well into a
group with that attitude but I’d grown up with these people and
didn’t know what I would do socially without them. Once again,
my emotional environment caused me to be fearful and doubt
myself.
The negative attitudes that cause you to doubt yourself will
find you at work as well. My varied work experiences over the
years have exposed me to a wide variety of negativity from
people who obviously felt helpless themselves.
At times this negativity has dragged me down and it can
certainly drag you down, too. Most of us don’t even realize how
damaging our work environment can be to our psyche. The fact is

that if you’re not confident at your chosen profession, then you
won’t be able to have the success you want.
You can identify a bad situation at work by paying sharp
attention to your co-workers and business associates. Listen for
the people who are always complaining. Look for those who yell
and berate people while doing their business. Watch out for
folks who put down your ideas without any rational reason for
doing so. These are the people who are eroding your confidence
in the workplace and you should avoid them.
Do any of the things I’m describing sound familiar to you?
Ask yourself this question once again: Does my environment
foster belief in myself? Ask the question three times and each
time I want you to place the following words in between the
words “my” and “environment”: work, home and social. Write down
the answer on a piece of paper. This is another important
exercise and it may be the most valuable one of all.
You see, in order to be able to believe in ourselves from the
inside, we first have to identify the forces that are acting on
us from the outside, then take action to defeat those forces. If
it all sounds very serious then you’re right on track because,
as I said earlier, learning to believe in yourself will unlock
all of your potential and change your life.
To take the exercise a step further, I want you to focus on
the areas where you answered “No” to the above question. You’ll

focus by answering the following question: What is it about this
situation that is stunting my ability to believe in myself? More
specifically, you’ll want to focus on the people who make you
feel less than you are. How do feel when you’re in this
situation? What is it about the situation that makes you feel
this way? Focus on these questions and put the answers down on
paper. Our feelings always seem so much more real when we see
them in print.
I’m willing to bet that this exercise brings out some strong
emotions. Keep those emotions with you because you’ll turn them
around and use them to build your belief back up to where it
needs to be.
Before we get there, though, I want you to look at the areas
where you answered “Yes” to the question, because while it’s
important to examine the negative areas, it’s just as important
to examine the areas where your belief is reinforced.
Ask yourself the same questions: How do feel when you’re in a
positive situation? What is it about the positive situation that
makes you feel this way? Internalizing and remembering the
positive moments is just as important as letting go of the
negative moments.

BELIEF ALLIES
At the end of these exercises you should create a list of belief
allies and belief enemies.
Your belief allies are people who make you feel strong and
confident, while your belief enemies are people who tear you
down and make you feel helpless. You’ll get the best results for
improving your belief in self if you increase your exposure to
your allies and decrease your exposure to your enemies.
I know that this may sound too simplistic, especially if your
belief enemies are involved in the most important areas of your
life. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect you to just up and run from
all the people who give you negative feelings. And while you may
not be able to decrease your physical exposure to these people,
you can decrease your emotional exposure to these folks.
You can decrease your emotional exposure by setting filters
in your mind. Now that you’ve identified your belief enemies you
can place your mind on guard and tell yourself to disregard the
negative vibe of those who make you feel bad. In the meantime,
you can also tell yourself to pay more attention to your belief
allies, thereby gaining more benefit from their positive vibe.
It’s important for me to stress that just because someone is
a belief enemy doesn’t mean that they are your enemy in life. It
does mean that they don’t share the same vision that you have

for your potential. You can still have a relationship with a
belief enemy, but you don’t allow them to influence your belief
in self in a negative way.
This is serious stuff here because it involves re-thinking
your relationships and making great CHANGES in your way of
being. As serious as all this is, it’s very necessary because
you’ve got a plan for success and can’t afford any freeloaders
on the train. The bottom line here is this:
Surround yourself with people who make you feel better about
yourself.
Your next question is probably, “How do I go about
surrounding myself with allies?” That’s a great question.
After all, there are some people out there who may have no
belief allies to start with. That’s okay because I’ve been there
and I’m here to tell you that you can make it happen even if
you’ve haven’t got one belief ally at the moment.
Way back in Lesson One I stressed the importance of finding a
counselor to assist you in your journey through the business
world. The counselor, in effect, could be your first and primary
belief ally. If you’ve recently started the process and haven’t
found that person yet, it’s OK. It’s not how fast you find your
counselor; it’s having the right person that counts. Belief ally
is only one role that your counselor will take on but it’s
probably the most important one.

In order to be able to find belief allies you have to be on
the lookout for your allies. In this case, the famous quote
“Seek and ye shall find” fully applies.
You want to be keeping an eye out for like-minded
individuals. Look at work, look at home, look at school, and
look at your church or any other place where you interact with
people. These people could be all around you right now. Think of
the people in your life who make you feel good about your
decisions. Think of the people that you wouldn’t hesitate to
talk to about a new idea or venture. These people are your
belief allies and you need to recognize them as such because
you’ll want to keep them around and continue to build your
relationship with them.
A light bulb may have popped into your head because you
realized that there are some belief allies that you’d originally
overlooked. Or you may be thinking, “No, I still don’t have
anyone in mind.” If you answered the latter, then don’t fret.
Remember, seek and ye shall find. But rather then just dumping
you off there I’ll provide you with an exercise that can help
you to find and recognize your belief allies.
Ask yourself this question: What type of person helps to
foster belief in myself? Write down the qualities that such a
person has and even write down some things that they might tell
you when you come to them with a new idea, plan or dream.

Next, you’ll ask yourself: Who do I know that fits my stated
criteria? Write down all the names that you come up with. If you
came up with no names, that’s fine because regardless of whether
you have one name or twenty on the list you should still
complete the exercise.
Your next task is to answer the following question: How can I
find belief allies to take along on my journey? Think about
where you could go and what you could do to bring these types of
people into your life. You have to be open to the possibility
that new belief allies can show up anywhere and at any time,
because they can. If you keep the set criteria in mind you’ll
know when someone fits the bill. Mark my words, once you
recognize the first one then many more will follow.
You’ve done a lot of work so far while reading this book. You
have a pretty impressive set of tools to work with. You’re ready
to slay the ego and break through that invisible barrier to
belief in self. I want you to go back to the beginning of this
chapter now and read it again.
Read the chapter and continue to absorb the concepts put
forth in it. Do the exercises again and see how you feel. I’ll
bet that you feel stronger the second time around. Read the
chapter a third time if you like. It can only help. Once you’ve
reinforced the material contained in this chapter we can take
the last few steps on this journey.

VICTORY OVER FEAR
At the end of the day, believing in yourself is ultimately about
victory over fear. The ability to defeat fear stands solidly
between you and your success in life and in the world of
business. We take our fears with us wherever we go and our
places of work are no exception. Even if you follow all of the
lessons in this book, fear can still hold you back. It’s that
strong.
As a child, I can remember having the same ridiculous fears
that all children have. I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid
of certain scary movies. I was afraid of the monster under my
bed. We all have fears like that as children.
As we grow older we get braver about those things but we tend
to replace the child fears with other adult fears. That’s
exactly what I did. I gradually replaced my childish fears with
things like fear of failure or fear of being ridiculed by
others. Fears such as these tend to feed on themselves. They are
heartily assisted by the ego and people never naturally grow out
of them.
My fearfulness led me to make decisions that pulled me away
from the things that I really wanted in life. As I reached my
late teens and early twenties I could feel myself being pulled

further and further from my dreams at a time when I should’ve
been as confident as ever.
Have you ever felt like this? Have you ever been driven by
fear to make a choice that was counter to everything you really
wanted? Read the news to see so many examples of other people
turning away from all that is right for them as a result of
fear.
People turn to drug abuse because they fear both emotional
and physical pain. People turn to ruthless business practices
because they fear losing their jobs and their status in the
world. People ignore their families and focus on work without
any balance in their lives. All the while they are being drawn
away from the things that are right for them in this life.
Is fear holding you back from achieving in business? If
you’re not careful, fear can and will hold you back. Fear will
have you turn to decisions like taking a job you know is wrong
for you just to please others. Fear will prevent you from
speaking your mind on a situation that you truly believe in.
Fear will prevent you from striking out on your own to start a
business.
How has fear held you back in business? Think about it.
All this talk about fear can make things sound pretty dismal.
Fortunately, things are going pretty well for you. If you’ve
gotten this far in the book you’ve achieved a lot and you’re

obviously motivated. The good news is that you can beat fear and
open up amazing possibilities in the process.
Beating fear is not an easy task. It takes not one battle,
but a series of ongoing battles. These battles, or
“confrontations with fear,” take place throughout your whole
life. They continue to take place because fear never really goes
away. It just manifests itself in different forms as you grow
stronger and your life changes. Confronting fear requires
stamina, belief and a whole lot of heart.
I first confronted my fear out of sheer frustration. It seems
as though extraordinary circumstances are required in order to
jog us out of our pattern of accepting fearful circumstances.
For me, the extraordinary circumstances involved feeling
completely helpless at my first job after college. I felt like
my whole life had been decided and that really depressed me.
This helplessness had a very strong effect, though. It
spurred me to want to investigate other options for my future.
These options would include a different path than the one that I
saw as inevitable. Fear still held me back. I hesitated for
months as I slowly began to get ideas of things I could and
should do to move my life in the right direction. I slowly began
to take action. I gained confidence from small successes.
You can use the same techniques I’ve used to beat the fears
that are holding you back. Set small, realistically achievable

goals. Once you achieve a few small things it becomes much
easier to move on to bigger endeavors.
Once I had a few small successes, the confidence I gained
allowed me to spend more of my time figuring out what I wanted
and less of my time worrying about what other people wanted from
me. It was around this time that I began to think in earnest
about new career choices. For you, this means starting to take
personal control over your life situation and making your own
choices. The things that everyone else wants you to do are not
as important as what you know is good for yourself.
Just knowing that I had some sort of control over my life
made me happier and less fearful. I was able to then trust my
instincts and take the next step to actually decide to leave my
job as a shipping manager so I could become a fitness trainer.
Many people might not consider this step a big deal, but any
person who’s been paralyzed by fear knows that it is a huge
accomplishment to make a bold career change while in a fearful
state.
This step signified a victory in the battle over my fear of
changing paths. I later realized that the previous steps allowed
me to confront my fear of changing my life’s path. So the next
step for you is to confront the fear that is holding you back
and take a big step forward.

Confrontation of your fears is probably the hardest part of
this process. Have you ever had to speak in front of a large
audience? Have you ever had a serious illness that threatened
your life? These are situations where people must confront some
of the more acute fears known to humans, public speaking and
death. These are moments where big steps are taken and important
decisions are made.
If you talk to people who have faced situations like speaking
before a large audience or facing the possibility of death, they
will tell you how relieved and excited they were after facing
these fears.
Once you face a fear, it doesn’t mean the fear is gone
forever. It just means that the fear has been defeated for the
moment. You see, the same fears are likely to come back again,
but your knowledge of beating fear in the past will propel you
the next time around and the time after that. The more you
confront fear, the less of an issue it turns out to be in the
future.
Your victory over fear should be on your own terms and on
your own timeline. Only you can have a true understanding of how
you are feeling about a certain situation. Now go out and face
the world, practice these lessons and watch as a whole new world
of possibilities opens up before you.

THE BEGINNING

Afterword: The Beginning
Every time I get to the end of a book I always think, “What
next?” When I enjoy a book I always seem to be left wanting
more.
My hope is that this book has left you wanting more. If this
book has left you wanting more then I feel like I’ve done my
job. This book is not intended to be the last book you read
about business skills. Rather, this book is intended to spur you
on to gather further knowledge and achieve further growth. The
ten lessons presented here are very important, but there are
many more lessons that you will need to learn. You have to start
somewhere, though, and this was an excellent start for you.
My recommendation for the first next step is simple. Read
this book again from the start. I’m a very strong believer in
reinforcing any information that I find to be helpful. The
information contained in this book constitutes the basics for
success in business. In life you can never get too much of the
basics. The basic things are the ones that you fall back on when
times get tough and you’re stumbling. So don’t hesitate to pick
up this book whenever you get into a rut and want to break out
of that rut.
My next recommendation is to continue your quest for
knowledge and take action to move closer to your version of

success. To help you in your quest I’ve included a reading list
that contains a number of very valuable sources of information
on different topics. You can’t go wrong by taking a look at some
of the books on this list. Somewhere along the way I’m sure that
you’ll start a good list of your own. The important thing is
that you continue to gain knowledge and move towards your
dreams.
I don’t consider this part of the book to be the end of
anything. I consider this to be a beginning for both you and me.
I wish you the best in your quest and hope to meet you sometime
soon.
Robert J. Safuto
August 2004

Reading List
I’ve found the following titles to be extremely helpful in
guiding the development of my business knowledge over the last
fourteen years.
The Artist’s Way. Cameron, Julia. Tarcher/Putnam, 1992.
The Road Less Traveled. Peck, Dr. M. Scott. Simon & Schuster,
1978.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey, Stephen R. Simon
& Schuster, 1990.
Principle Centered Leadership. Covey Stephen R. Simon &
Schuster, 1992.
The Winner Within: A Life Plan For Team Players. Riley, Pat.
Putnam, 1993.
All I Really Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. Fulghum,
Robert. Ivy Books, 1989.
Follow Your Heart. Matthews, Andrew. Price Stern Sloan, 1997.
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Bach, Richard.
Dell Publishing, 1977.
Ziglar On Selling. Ziglar, Zig. Ballantine Books, 1991.
The One Minute Manager. Blanchard, Kenneth Ph.D. and Johnson,
Spencer M.D. Berkley, 1982.

The Greatest Salesman in the World. Mandino, Og. Bantam Books,
1968.
Made in America. Walton, Sam with Huey, John. Doubleday, 1992.
Losing My Virginity. Branson, Richard. Virgin Publishing, 1998.
Leading the Revolution. Hamel, Gary. Harvard Business School
Press, 2000.
Awaken The Giant Within. Robbins, Anthony. Summit Books, 1991.
First Break All The Rules. Buckingham, Marcus and Coffman, Curt.
Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Leadership. Giuliani, Rudolph. Miramax Books, 2002.

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Welcome to the Beehive

A Beginner’s Guide to Conquering the World of Business

Lesson One: Protect Yourself ................................................................... 12

Lesson Two: Be Tough ............................................................................. 47

Lesson Three: Make Mistakes Then Learn From Them ............................ 68

Lesson Four: Sell, Sell, Sell ...................................................................... 83

Lesson Five: You Gotta Have Heart........................................................ 101

Lesson Six: Leverage the Power of a Team............................................ 120

Lesson Seven: Constantly Evaluate........................................................ 137

Lesson Eight: Never Stop Learning......................................................... 153

Lesson Nine: The Power of Anticipation ................................................. 175

Lesson Ten: Believe In Yourself ............................................................. 199

Afterword: The Beginning ....................................................................... 226

Reading List ............................................................................................ 228

I originally wanted this book to be a straight memoir. One day,

I just decided to start writing about my life, one story at a

In the process of writing, something unusual happened. I

began to see a common thread weaving through each part of my

life. That common thread happened to be related to all the

At the time I discovered this information I wasn’t sure that it

would make an interesting book, but it was sure interesting to

As I continued to write I came to another strong realization.

I realized that along the way in my experiences of working life

I had learned valuable lessons.

I learned lessons that propelled me forward and built on top

business I then began to learn a new lesson. I would walk

through one door and shortly thereafter another door would

appear in front of me. As I moved forward, I learned.

I thought back to the beginning of my work life and realized

that the vast majority of the things I learned were purely by

picked up a lot of information, but I was not able to link all

the information together well enough to use it to my benefit. I

progressed in my business knowledge slowly but surely. Over the

years, that slow processing of information has lead to many

larger breakthroughs. As a result of these breakthroughs I’ve

been able to increase my earning power and improve my lifestyle.

I’ve also been able to put myself in a position to make more of

the decisions to guide my life. By my own definition, I’ve been

I ended up asking myself why all of this information might be

so important to others. My personal breakthroughs aren’t

necessarily relevant to complete strangers. But it wasn’t the

breakthroughs themselves that I was drawn to. I was drawn to the

factors surrounding those breakthroughs. I was drawn to the core

lessons learned while working for each breakthrough. I wrote out

as being the most important. These ten common-sense lessons were

the bedrock of my personal business successes. I did a lot of

investigating and pondering the meaning of these lessons. I

discovered that these lessons are everywhere in the world of

So why are these lessons that I’ve learned so important to

Copyright 2004, Robert J. Safuto. All rights reserved. 2

in examples set by many other individuals.

Consider the fact that most of us will spend at least a third

time? Don’t you deserve to harness all the tools available to

assist you in finding your success? Invest some time in this

These lessons that I speak of weren’t always as clear to me

as they are now. To illustrate my point, I’ll take you back to a

definitive time in my life when I had yet to realize the power

of these common-sense lessons.

I remember the day I graduated from college. I felt like a large

weight had been lifted off my shoulders as the “burden” of

going to be a breeze compared to sitting in classrooms for 15

hours a week in addition to a part-time job. After all, I’d been

that many people would never want to do, so I figured that