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All great journeys must start somewhere, now is as good a time as any, following are my thoughts on the how and why of 30 wasted years and the lost self motivation. Please click on the player above to have a listen. You may also subscribe to my podcasts to the right. Thanks and lets stop those WASTED Years!
Jeff
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Jeff Grundy: Hi! Welcome to “30 Wasted Years.” I’m Jeff Grundy, your host, and I’d like to welcome you to the new series. I’m not sure, exactly, where to begin. We’re talking about such a huge topic here. They say it’s a $6 billion industry, this self-improvement industry.
I think you’ve all been part of it or you wouldn’t be here right now.
Are you frustrated as I am? That’s why I call it “30 Wasted Years.” It’s a huge question, why it works for some people and not for others? What we’d like to do is get you involved, the listener, making comments on the web page and get a conversation going. Pretty much a Mastermind as in Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.” Hopefully, out of it, we can all be a little better and maybe understand a little better.
We could back as far as Socrates, but let’s stick with the last century here. How about Napoleon Hill? For you new listeners, I’m the kind of person who’d like to say, “Hmm.” So, if you get bored, just count how many times I say, “Hmm.”
Back to Napoleon Hill. Most people say he’s the father of the motivational industry at this point in time with his book, “Think and Grow Rich.” So how did Napoleon Hill do? Recently, I heard him intro to a book by W. Clement Stone. If you’re not familiar with W. Clement Stone, he started “Success Magazine,” made a fortune in the insurance industry.
He claims he got a copy of Napoleon Hill’s book, “Think and Grow Rich,” and that’s what turned him around and made this fortune. He then said he was so excited about it, so enthralled with Napoleon Hill, that he found him, took him out of retirement and had him lecturing to all his insurance agents. Then that caused them to make even more money and got him thinking, well, then, self-help is perfect. You teach people how to do things and they make more money and it grows and grows.
Now we’re going to talk about whether success and making money or not, a little further down the line here. So, that’s W. Clement Stone’s story.
But I’ve heard told many more times that Napoleon Hill died broke. That he was living, not in retirement, but he just had no money and no work. W. Clement Stone found him, gave him a job to help him out, and that’s how Napoleon Hill ended his years.
So, here’s the person, the father of the self-motivational/self-help industry of the 19th century, wrote the book, and he dies broke. I mean, how does that happen? There’s something missing here. Did he not understand what he was writing? I think that’s a great place for us all to start.
So this is not going to be a chance to complain and say, “Oh, it doesn’t work, blah, blah,” and on and on about that. What we’re going to do here, we’re looking for actual questions to stimulate all our minds. So get on the website, fill in the comments, ask your question or answer a question. I mean, I’d love to hear what you have to say, your recommendations. Maybe for you, you think the self-help industry, self-improvement industry is the greatest thing in the world and couldn’t live without it. Let’s hear it, that’s what the Mastermind is all about.
But what I think, is going to be important about our Mastermind is there’s no gurus. There’s no experts saying, “This is the way, then this is the what you have to do.” Actually, I heard a CD today and the guy was very happy with himself, very proud of himself. He started saying how all these gurus and experts and their own thing of what the key to success is and, “They’re all wrong. I know what it is, it’s motivation.”
So here we’ve got another person saying he’s an expert. That’s what I hope you’re never going to hear from me and my co-host, when my co-host shows up. Not here yet today. It might take a week, it might take six months, but I’m going to find just the right person.
But that’s not what we’re about. We’re not about telling you, “Hey, this is the right thing.” We’ll talk about the “Key to Success,” and further ones, “The Secret” and all that stuff. But what I’m going to pose is that success, getting there is different for each individual person. That’s why the self-improvement industry as a whole doesn’t work for so many people.
Everyone says, “This is the way to go.” For most people, that’s not the way to go, they have to go another way. So you have to get lucky and find the piece that fits you, individually.
It’s just my opinion. It may be right, it may be wrong. I don’t have any idea. But if that is true, what I’m hoping is the members that listen and make recommendations for other members and hopefully can start fitting pieces of the puzzle into each individual person. I think that would be really cool.
So I think we started enough today with our question: Does the self-help industry really help or not? Or is it somewhat of a scam? I mean, $6 billion a year industry. Maybe, what do they say, 3% of the people that buy the stuff, purchase it, and read it, if they even read it, become successful. It means 97% of the people don’t? $6 billion and 97% of the people purchasing the stuff have no results? I mean, why? Let’s talk about it, let’s dig in to it.
So each week we’re going to do a success quote to get us thinking for the next week. I’ll open up my book. I’ve a really neat book I got probably 25 years ago; someone gave it to me as a gift. It’s called, “The Best of Success,” and it’s all these quotes.
I just opened it up to a success quote, and here it is. “One of the rarest things that man ever does is to do the best he can.” It’s by Josh Billings. So is that the answer? We’re just not trying hard enough because it’s really rare to try hard? And those that do, succeed? I don’t know. I think that’s going to be a great topic for next week.
Also I have to mention, of course, what got me started on this was doing “Six Minutes to Success” with Bob Proctor. That really gets my mind going. I think it’s something you might want to look into if you’re as frustrated as I’ve been all these years.
I find part of it is I know a lot, I know a whole lot, maybe more than I need to know. And yet I don’t follow through. I think a lot of people are in that boat. “Six Minutes of Success” is really helping me each day focus on what I need to do. Of course, out of that, has come “30 Wasted Years.”
So, thank you, again, and I look forward to talking to you in a couple of days.
