When you were fourteen years old what did you dream you would do with your life?
I wanted to own an NBA basketball team and travel the world doing public speaking. Life has a mind of its own though.
If you are not careful it grinds down most of your dreams.
I think it's because we all basically give up too easily.
We try once or twice when we are young and innocent, fail and then spend the rest of our lives fearing a repeat of that failure.
We get older and set up our lives in a nice little secure box.
We fail ironically enough, because we fear failure.
Today's book of the day is "When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead" by Jerry Weintraub.
[Check out my Youtube video summary above]
This is a book about the life of a man who didn't fail. He was rejected. But in the end he didn't fail - he actually pulled off his childhood dreams (how many people can honestly say that).
I like books with this theme. They stretch my brain and build my courage.
I believe that success is not really learned. It rubs off on you. Mostly from being around mentors 20 years ahead of you (and the easiest way to find an amazing mentor is by reading about their life with a $10 book like this one).
Jerry was born in New york in the 1930's. From a young age, five or six, after seeing a Hollywood movie he decided he would be in the entertainment business.
My favorite story in the book is how he actually pulled it off because making it in Hollywood isn't for the faint of heart.
Skip to when he was 26 years old. He was married, still living in New York, a nobody in the industry, and broke ($60,000 in debt and that's in the 1950's so that's a lot worse in today's dollars).
But one morning he woke up from a dream and told his wife "I have decided I'm going to take Elvis Presley out on tour."
Now remember at this time Elvis was literally the biggest name in the world. He was like Bono and Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga all rolled into one. And Jerry was just starting out, a broke kid with big ambitions, no money, and no connections.
But he had done his research about "The Colonel", Elvis's manager, and found the Colonel's home phone number.
He had also read that the Colonel was an early riser. So Jerry picked up the phone and called Elvis's manager at 6 am.
The manager answered and said "Who are you" and hung up.
Here is where most of us would have given up.
But Jerry was on a mission.
He called for 365 days in a row. Every time with the same result - the Colonel hanging up. I'm not religious but this reminds me of the parable of the persistent widow:
"Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
Jerry was like that persistent widow and almost exactly one year later, after having called each morning for a year, the Colonel answered and said "Jerry, you finally want to take my boy Elvis out on the road?"
The Colonel said to bring a check for $1 million dollars to a hotel in Vegas the next morning by 11am or Jerry would lose his one chance.
This presented a whole new set of problems. One, Jerry was broke and in debt. Two, this was the 1950's, a million dollars was a lot of money. Three, Jerry lived in California not Vegas.
But Jerry was fearless. He got on the phone and spent the whole night calling everyone he knew and any lead he could get his hands on.
Amazingly he found a radio station owner near Seattle who was a huge Elvis fan to front Jerry the money. The guy literally wired $1 million to Jerry without even seeing him in person (the moral of that story is ask enough people for something outrageous and someone will probably do it).
Jerry jumped on a plane to Vegas, went to the bank to get the check made out to "Elvis Presley" and ran across the street to the hotel where Elvis and the colonel were staying.
Jerry handed the Colonel the check and they just shook hands on it. No contract, nothing. They could have screwed Jerry, but they kept their word and that year Jerry took Elvis out on a national tour that turned Jerry into one of the most powerful people in showbiz.
He ended up making something like $10 million dollars on that tour.
But more importantly he gained momentum.
Momentum is the secret of my favorite chess player Mikhail Tal.
It is the secret that John Maxwell talks about in the "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership".
Once a little momentum was created guess what happened next?
Frank Sinatra called and asked if Jerry could manage him.
Led Zeppelin called.
John Denver called.
Neil Diamond called.
Jerry's momentum gave him clout and status in the entertainment world.
Jerry created a positive feedback loop - One good thing led to another.
Read the book, it's a dream. On his rise to the top, Jerry became friends the world's movers and shakers.
He was close with President Bush. He says that whenever he went to DC instead of staying in a hotel he got to stay in the White House guest room.
Jerry became a producer, made the movie Karate Kid and the Oceans Eleven series.
He had an amazing life full of amazing friendships with fascinating people and he made about $250 million dollars along the way.
Allan Nation told me once "An entrepreneur remakes the world in his own image."
It's a little glimpse of the "creator energy" humans have deep inside. Most of us never let it out.
Jerry created the world in his own image. He was the quintessential entrepreneur. He lived the American Dream.
He possessed the formula. Everything he touched turned to gold.
That formula was simple:
1. Figure out your destiny
2. Take action and never give up till you get what you want no matter how long it takes.
3. Don't let rejection phase you.
4. Take the momentum from your first success and keep rolling with it.
Let me talk about #2 and #3 in that formula now (Don't have room to cover the others in this article but will in some upcoming ones).
I once read somewhere that something like 70% of people will quit after failing once, 80% will quit after failing twice, and 90% will quit after failing three times.
Interestingly, the average millionaire has failed 3 times according to The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy.
So do the math 10% of the world has all the wealth and what's different about that 10% besides the fact that they have money?
Those 10% of rich people have failed at least 3 times while the rest of the 90% of people have given up after 3 failures.
So ipso facto the deciding factor of the 10% of millionaires is never giving up. It's no coincidence that the figure is 10%. 10% are wealthy because that is the same 10% that doesn't give up.
It's not because they are special.
It's because they follow what Winston Churchill said: "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”.
Speaking of Winston Churchill, most people don't realize but the first half of Winston churchill's life was a failure.
Watch the movie Gallipoli.
Churchill led England's navy to disgrace in World War I.
It wasn't until almost 30 years later that Churchill led England to victory over the Nazis. He never gave up on himself even though for three decades most of England hated him.
But when the day came and his people needed him he famously led them by saying:
"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
I just finished reading the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell and guess what is rule #15?
"Leaders find a way to win". They never accept defeat.
Churchill had a rule:
“Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
So what makes of us "give in"? I contend it's fear. Fear of rejection, fear of being ostracized.
We are hardwired to be EXTREMELY sensitive to rejection from another human.
In fact our need to avoid rejection and gain acceptance is so strong that scientists created an experiment to see how sensitive humans really are.
They had three people play a ball game where they took turns throwing the ball to each other. But two of the people were told to start excluding the third person (the third person didn't know they were doing it on purpose).
They found it took only a few minutes for the person who was left out to start experiencing anger and sadness. It didn't matter how much self esteem or the personality type, people didn't like being left out - even if it was a stupid game played with absolute strangers.
Then the scientists took it even further. They had people play the game against a computer. The person knew they were just playing a computer but guess what? Same thing, if the two computers left out the human, the human got depressed.
They concluded, "Ostracism by a computer is sufficient to lower self-reported levels of belonging, control, self-esteem, and meaningful existence".
Kind of funny if it wasn't so real. Our brain is so hardwired to fear social rejection that it doesn't even differentiate between real rejection and rejection from an inanimate object.
Reminds me of that new movie "Her" with Joaquin Phoenix.
Somehow Jerry Weintraub got past this fear of rejection.
I think Jerry learned at a young age through what scientists call "exposure therapy".
Jerry's father was a gem dealer, a salesman, who went door to door selling his gems. If you know anything about sales you know that Jerry's dad had probably overcome his fear of rejection after having the door slammed in his face thousands of times.
My theory is that Jerry picked up this desensitization to fear from his dad. He was taught subconsciously that rejection wasn't really a big deal because there is always another opportunity around the corner.
If you didn't grow up around a salesman, don't fret, we now know that you can use "exposure therapy" to train ourselves to overcome our own sensitivity to social rejection.
Awesome new research has found scientific proof that exposure therapy works. You basically have to do something you are afraid of often enough that you get desensitized to it.
If you are afraid of dogs, lock yourself in a kennel for a week. At first you might almost have a heart attack, but eventually your brain builds "mental muscles" to overcome the old fear just like weight lifting builds biceps.
"The researchers found that exposure therapy not only silences fear neurons but also induces remodeling of a specific type of inhibitory junction, called the perisomatic synapse. Perisomatic inhibitory synapses are connections between neurons that enable one group of neurons to silence another group of neurons. Exposure therapy increases the number of perisomatic inhibitory synapses around fear neurons in the amygdala. This increase provides an explanation for how exposure therapy silences fear neurons."
Your brain is a muscle, exercise it.
We all have built up fear memories from past traumas. You must, and I repeat MUST, build up fear annihilation memories through exposing yourself to situations where you get rejected and then recovering again. It will train your brain that it's not the end of the world. That you will still be fine the next day.
Like the old saying goes, "If you fall off the horse you have to get right back on."
We now know the scientific reason why. Getting back on the horse is exposure therapy to make your mind forget the experience of falling off.
So go out and fail Damnit! Get rejected. Teach your brain that you will survive the failure.
Remember, if you want an extraordinary life it's a guaranteed law that you will have to develop thick skin.
Allan Nation used to tell me, "Tai if you want to know if you have a good business idea, ask your neighbor. If they love it, it's probably too late, it's not a good idea anymore. If they think it's stupid, you might be on to something good."
I saw that Ashton Kutcher movie "Jobs" about Steve Jobs.
The best part was when Steve Jobs and Wozniak presented the idea of the home computer to all these "genius" professors at Stanford and they all literally laughed Steve out of the building.
That was only 35 years ago! Now we think it was always obvious that home computers would be the norm. But it wasn't so obvious in the 1970's.
Thank God Steve Jobs somehow had built up fear annihilation memories in his brain or I wouldn't be able to type this article on my Iphone now.
Follow the example of Jerry Weintraub and the wise words of Winston Churchill:
"Never give up on something that you can't go a day without thinking about.”
Pick your destiny and be a bulldog.
What is something you have given up on? Go out and try it again.
Maybe you gave up on learning a new language, on reading books, or playing guitar. Spend 66 days building a habit (that's about how long new habits take to form) around something you have given up on.
Or if you have the courage, go back and start living out the dreams you had for your life when you were young and not yet jaded.
Create the mental momentum to annihilate the fear of failure so that when something big comes your way you will have built the mental muscle to "NEVER GIVE UP"!
COMMENTS
Best of Tailopez
-
Florida's Best-Kept Stone Crab Secret? -
The Church of Brunch: Why Republique in Los Angeles is a Global Pilgrimage Site for Food Lovers -
Tai Lopez Eats Brunch in the Valley?! (And Why You Should Too) Inside His Visit to Petit Trois Le Valley -
The Rise and Fall of Nikola Motors: Trevor Milton Tells All -
The Ultimate Mexico City Brunch Crawl: Tai Lopez Eats His Way Through CDMX's Best Breakfast Spots
- Resell Profitable Products | SMMA 9.0 | 67 STEPS | QUIZ | BOOKS | MOVIES | Careers | Win | ABOUT | Podcasts | BLOG | HELP | LOGIN
- Policies: TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY | DMCA POLICY © 2011-2025 Tailopez.com.
2 Comments