Fear is the Mind Killer

“Fear is the mind killer,” wrote Frank Herbert in the novel, Dune.  When people are overcome with fear, they freeze.  They stop thinking.  They stop behaving rationally.  They are paralyzed. 

Growing up, everyone experiences points of fear where we freeze for an instant or perhaps longer.  Some freeze at the top of a high dive.  Others freeze when sledding or skiing down a steep slope.  For some, it’s facing a fastball.  Many lock up when forced to stand up in the front of the classroom and give a speech or report. 

If we try, all of us can remember a point in childhood where we froze, where fear became our mind killer, if only for a few moments.  A degree of fear in childhood is healthy.  Many of us would not have survived childhood without fear acting as a brake against our more idiotic notions. 

What’s beneficial for preventing an eight year old boy from trying to sail off the roof of his house, using a beach towel as a parachute can be devastating among an adult who is struck by one or more of life’s setbacks and freezes, forestalling any act or motion. 

I’ve seen it with the business owner who all but loses his business in a tough economy.  Confronted by a series of setbacks and reversals, he becomes locked in place.  He spends more time on Facebook than prospecting.  He stops trying because he’s convinced he can never succeed again.  As long as he’s convinced he can’t succeed, he won’t succeed.

I’ve seen it with the business executive whose career doesn’t pan out as planned.  Rather than try for new career in a new company, he mails it in.  He retires without notifying anyone and each day… just… shows… up.  He’s scared to apply with another company.  He’s worried that he’s too old.  He’s afraid he’ll have start over.  He’s questioning his sense of worth.

Fear has frozen these people in place.  They worry that no move can make things better and any move might make things worse.  Life ceases being a proactive event.  Afraid to change, they do nothing.  They wait for things to happen to them. 

The great business philosopher, Dr Seuss, wrote about this in the classic motivational book, “Oh, The Places You’ll Go.”

The Waiting Place…

…for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go, or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a yes or a no or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a better break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or another chance.

Everyone is just waiting.

Fear has trapped these people in hell.    The only way out is to take action.  Take a risk.  By taking a risk, risk failure.  Risk it again and again and again, if necessary.  The only certainty is success will ever elude those who refuse to reach out for it.

As a child you failed and failed and failed before you learned to walk.  Failure precedes success as naturally as falling precedes walking.  Few men experience one success after another from the outset in a repetitive string of victory.  Most find it only after tasting failure, and usually after much more than a taste.

If you find fear becoming your mind killer, break the cycle.  Take one positive action today, no matter how small.  Tomorrow take another.  Take another the day that.  Progress is made by putting one foot ahead of the other, over and over again. 

The mere act of action breaks cycle of fear.  When fear no longer halts you, it no longer holds power over you.  It all begins with one small act.

As Dr. Seuss put it, “Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying.  You’ll find the bright places

where Boom Bands are playing.”

© 2011 Matt Michel

The Raving Fish Got Cheesed And Didn't Get It

Are you a fan of business parable books? You know, the little books that spin a fictional tale with underlying meanings that pertain to business. Fish, Who Moved My Cheese and Raving Fans are just a few examples.

Perhaps this is a tale of my own ignorance, but I hated parable books with a passion. Once I reached the age of fifty however, I began to mature. Looking back it wasn't the books that cheesed me off, it was corporate America's mandate: "Here is a copy of Fish. Read it. Afterwards we'll have a meeting to discuss how your morale KPI charts. We're expecting a significant increase."

Other than Mark Matteson's work, parable books had been off my radar for a long time until recently reading, They Just Don't Get it! Leslie Yerkes' book is about those times when you're trying to tell someone something and they just don't get it and what you need to do to transform their resistance into understanding.

Holy light bulb Batman! You mean if I read Leslie's book I'll be able to transform my technicians into correct-paperwork-completing-machines? Maybe. Maybe not. I'll give you one hint but you really need to read the book. Transformation begins with that really good looking person in the mirror.

A super huge red flag moment for me came when I read what some others had to say about They Just Don't Get It! To sum up: "I could read five bullet points about the book, get it, and save fifteen bucks." At first I thought wow, they don't get it! Then I thought, no, their left brain gets it. If they could only step off the Hamster Express for just a few minutes and engage their right brain a whole new world of possibility will pop right before them. At this point their left brain will kick back in and say, "the return on this fifteen dollar investment will pay back in 1.15 days."

Next week I'll offer suggestions on how to read business parable books using the right side of your brain.

Photo credit, Jan Tik

The Miracle Mile

This short video uses the words of Roger Bannister, talking about running a 4-minute mile in a dramatized fashion. Bannister's words are equally applicable to life, which is the point of the video. Watch it. It's good.

Don't Quit Computer Wallpaper

Remember Edison

Often success lies just beyond the horizon of failure. Napoleon Hill was given letters of introduction by industrialist Andrew Carnegie to study the country’s top achievers. Hill captured his research in his classic book, “Think And Grow Rich.”

Napoleon Hill wrote, “Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do.”

“More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step *beyond* the point at which defeat had overtaken them. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.”

One of the people Hill met and studied was Thomas Edison. No one illustrates the value of persistence and tenacity better than Edison. Many people know that Edison failed 2,000 times in his effort to find the filament for the light bulb. But did you know his attempt to create a better battery resulted in the failure of 50,000 tests?

A discouraged assistant figured even Edison would quit after 50,000 failures. “You must be pretty downhearted with the lack of progress,” said the assistant.

“Downhearted?” replied Edison, “We've made a lot of progress. At least we know 50,000 things that won't work!”

Edison’s kept at it, through 50,000 failed tests, through ten years, and through one million dollars of his own money until he developed the nickel-iron alkaline storage battery, which is still used today!

Maybe you don’t have Edison’s tenacity. I know I don’t. Yet, when I think about Edison, I find I have just a little bit more tenacity. Edison inspires me. Edison helps me see failure in a different light. It’s not failure. It’s progress. Edison helps me to stay positive while I’m making progress.

“Don’t Quit” is an inspirational poem many people have read that may have been written about Edison. Though many claim to have written the poem, its author is lost.


Don’t Quit

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and debts are high,
And you want to smile but have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but don't you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won if he'd stuck it out.
Don't give up though the pace seems slow,
You might succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man.
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might captured the victor's cup,
And he learned too late, when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown,

Success is failure turned inside out,
The silver tint of clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar,
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst that you mustn't quit.

For a nice winter wallpaper featuring the poem, “Don’t Quit” to boost your attitude and tenacity, click here to visit the "Free Stuff" section of the Service Roundtable.

Vinnie's Learning (Dis)Ability

http://www.flickr.com/photos/txberiu/ / CC BY 2.0

Vinnie grew up in an Irish Catholic family with four brothers and two sisters in the upper Midwest. He described his childhood family life as everyone “pounding he heck out of each other, never liking to lose.”

It was largely a typical childhood, in a typical family. Largely. Vinnie’s childhood was distinguished by a learning disability. In the third grade, he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He had trouble spelling. He had trouble reading. He had trouble writing. He struggled to make C’s. Vinnie said he “went to those classes, SLBP, slow learning behavior problem.”

“You just think that you're not as smart as all the other kids,” Vinnie said. He described his childhood dyslexia as “nearly incapacitating.”

“You feel like you're stupid. You feel like you're in the back of the classroom, you don't get it. It's coming natural to everybody else and you feel stupid.”

“I have such bad memories,” recalls Vinnie, “sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn't stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school. And it gets to me and I'd be going, ‘ah, ah,’ horrible reader — ran from the problem.”

“I hid from the problem. I did just enough to get by. I was a good athlete so that got me by, that gave the confidence to go forward.”

Playing football, Vinnie managed to attend a local college. Academically, little changed.

“I'm taking a class pass/fail and hand a paper in,” Vinnie recalled. “It comes back. It’s got a big red F on it. I'm not there the day it comes back. I show up at lunch the next day and a buddy of mine had picked it up and it's laying there on the lunch table and it's got a big red F and underneath it says, ‘I don't know how in the hell you got into college. I don't know how you're going to graduate. This is the worst paper I've read in 10 years I've been teaching.’”

Vinnie’s life changed when basketball coaching legend, Al McGuire spoke at Vinnie’s university. Vinnie said, “He talked about how he was dyslexic and he grew up, he got his way through high school and college cheating. And on a basketball scholarship and went back after they won the national championship and taught himself how to read and write.”

Vinnie thought, “If this guy can do it, I got to do it. So, I went back and I taught myself the fundamentals of writing, and I started reading for the first time. My mom and dad had been on me for years. So, I finally picked up ‘Trinity’ by Leon Uris. I plowed through it and I was hooked.”

Vinnie began reading voraciously. He read book after book, but gravitated towards Tom Clancy type action thrillers.

He began to see his dyslexia in a different light. “Every time I sat down to read one of these books, I knew what was going to happen. It was the weirdest thing. It was the gift.”

It wasn’t just books. He could watch a few minutes of a TV drama and anticipate the ending. He could foresee actual events in the real world years in advance.

“Part of it is the dyslexia,” he explains. “It's the way the brain is wired. I think we just think in a leap frog fashion if that makes sense.”

Vinnie earned his degree and took a sales and marketing job with Kraft General Foods. He did well, but felt stifled in corporate America. He quit his highly paid position to become a Marine pilot.

Unfortunately, Vinnie was medically disqualified for the flight program. He eventually got a medical waiver and left the Corps.

Now what? The dyslexic Vinnie decided he wanted to write a novel and took a job tending bar to pay the bills.

“He treated it as a full time job, he'd work eight hours a day on it,” said the owner of the bar. “He basically worked here nights and then he would write during the day, all day long.”

He finished the novel and sent it off to New York publishing houses, but it was rejected. And rejected. And rejected.

“I had 60-plus rejection letters. I put them all up on a bulletin board where I wrote every day. And I'd say, ‘I'm going to prove you people wrong.’”

And yet, it wasn’t easy. “There were moments when I was bar tending at O'Gara's and I would get another rejection letter and I'd think what am I doing. Why am I doing this?” he confessed.

He drew inspiration from the experiences of writers. He said, “It was a great source was strength that Clancy and Grisham had been rejected by every publishing house in New York City. So I figured, ‘You know what? I'm going to stick with it.’”

Vinnie self published his book. People told him he was crazy, but had a plan. He was going to sell enough books in his market to catch the attention of a New York publisher.

“Once at number one at Twin Cities,” Vinnie said, “It got picked up by Simon and Schuster. And now, the 11th book just came out this past month.”

“Anybody who knew me growing up calls me Vinnie,” says best selling author Vince Flynn.

His first book, the one he self published, is titled “Term Limits.” I’ve read it. It’s a page turner.

One after another, Flynn's books are successes. He's popular with kings and presidents. Flynn's been invited to the White House by Presidents Clinton and Bush. He was flown to Jordan by King Abdullah, who is also a fan. Not bad for the guy who wrote the worst paper a college professor read in 10 years of teaching.

Cursed with dyslexia, Flynn realized it gave him a different set of capabilities. It enabled him, for example, to write about a terrorist attack on the United States by Islamic radicals four years before 9/11. Today he sees the curse as a gift.

“I'm a horrible speller,” Flynn said in a recent interview when he was discussing his dyslexia. “I omit words. My editor, Emily Bestler, she deals with this all the time. I just leave words out of my manuscript, I'm typing so fast and I come up with creative ways to spell things, but what I didn't know is it's a gift.”

Flynn added, “The ad agencies of the world, the creative people on Broadway and in Hollywood, they're all — it's just a disproportionate number of dyslexics.”

Flynn’s story is one of looking at a disability as a different ability, at a curse as a gift when viewed from another perspective, and at obstacles as challenges to be overcome. Had life been easier, he might not have climbed so high.

How high do you want to climb?

Churchillian Proverbs

Winston Churchill overcame a childhood speech impediment to become one of the world’s great orators and writers. He was also a visionary, standing nearly alone in warnings about the rise of national socialism (i.e., Nazis). The combination of keen insight, the ability to turn a phrase, and a lengthy career as a writer and speaker resulted in lots of quotable material. Here are some of my favorite quotes from Churchill. Enjoy them. These are gems!

1. Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.


2. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.


3. We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.


4. Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.


5. Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.


6. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.


7. You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.


8. We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.


9. Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.


10. It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required.


11. The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.


12. The first quality that is needed is audacity.


13. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.


14. The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.


15. The price of greatness is responsibility.


16. The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.


17. There is no such thing as a good tax.


18. A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.


19. A joke is a very serious thing.


20. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.


21. A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.


22. All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.


23. An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.


24. Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.


25. Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.


26. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.


27. Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.


28. Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.


29. Eating words has never given me indigestion.


30. However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.


31. We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.


32. I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.


33. I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.


34. There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.


35. These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.


36. If you are going through hell, keep going.


37. Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it.


38. No crime is so great as daring to excel.


39. No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.


40. One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!


41. Play the game for more than you can afford to lose... only then will you learn the game.


42. Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.


43. This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.


44. To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.


45. True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.


46. We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.


47. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Would You Rather Call a Strange Plumber or Visit a Strange Mosque?

I saw this whine by Jenny Allen and found some truth in it...

Our house is an old farmhouse, and it has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, except the shower in the upstairs bathroom doesn't work. The shower per se works, but if you use it water streams from the ceiling down below into the living room, and then you have to stick a bucket underneath to catch the water. It's like living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, only with much lower property values. So please limit yourselves to the downstairs
shower. Thanks!

Speaking of the downstairs bathroom, sometimes the toilet doesn't flush. That's because that piece of wire that connects the bulb thing inside the tank to the rod thing sometimes comes unhinged. The wire is actually a replacement for the real piece of hardware; in fact, it's a bit of coat hanger wire that our friend Augusta rigged up when the toilet broke years ago. She got tired of waiting for our plumber, who promised to come and fix it but never did. Just lift the tank and hook it up again.

Try not to call our plumber unless it's an emergency. I'm afraid of our plumber, who barks at me, but plumbers call all the shots here. You do not want to rankle your plumber, because the other plumbers are all tied up, and then you won't have any plumber. Our plumber has been coming to our house longer than I have, which is twenty-six years, and he seems to think I am some kind of interloper, a Janey-come-lately.

"Jeff," I said on the phone when I asked him to come and turn the water on this spring, "I've known you for twenty-six years, and I'd like to ask you a favor."

"Depends what it is."

"I always call you by your name, and you never call me by my name, and I wonder if you could call me by my name."

"I know yah name!"

"Well, thank you for turning the water on," I said.

"All right," he said, and hung up.

Jeff's phone number is on the attached list of other repair and service people, who will not bark at you but will probably not come. They are too busy in August to come. Whatever the problem, you'll have better luck just fixing it yourself.

"I'm afraid of our plumber, who barks at me," writes Allen.

"Whatever the problem, you'll have better luck just fixing it yourself," she adds.

Wow. Is there any more damning criticism of the state of service companies than that? I think a large segment of the DIY market exists not out of consumer cheapness, but that consumers perceive it's simply easier to fix it yourself.

Calling a contractor, for most people, is unsettling. It's filled with uncertainty and unknown.

• Will you get a responsive company that will treat you well?
  
  
• Will the serviceperson be pleasant or gruff, treating you like an idiot?
  
  
• What kind of person will show up? Will he or she be honest?
  
  
• How long will it take to get someone to show up?
  
  
• Will someone arrive when promised or will you wait and wait and wait?
  
  
• Will the work take days to complete?
  
  
• Will it be done right the first time, or will you have to call the company back again and again?
  
  
• Will the serviceperson make a mess and not clean up?
  
  
• Will you get ripped off?
  
  
• Will you know what the costs are before the work begins or will you get an unpleasant surprise?
  
  
• Will there be an unpleasant conflict?

These are some of the questions that cross consumers' minds. Your marketing should address these issues. You should address them on your website, in your yellow pages ads, and in your direct marketing.

Finding a new service company is unpleasant and unsettling. To give you a sense of the discomfort, imagine walking into a church, temple, or mosque during services for the first time. That feeling of unease is similar to the consumer's feeling of unease when calling you.

Now, imagine a friend recommends his or her church/temple/mosque. The friend tells you what to expect, how to act, and what to wear. You might still approach the service with trepidation, but you would feel much better about. Your friend's attended and survived. You can too.

It's similar when a friend recommends a service company. This is why people turn to friends and neighbors first when looking for companies. This is why referral marketing, affinity marketing, and social media are so important for service companies.

Let's say you know the pastor/rabbi/imam from a civic club. You mention something about he pastor/rabbi/imam about attending a service and receive a warm welcome and personal invitation. You feel much better about attendance.

Similarly, people who know you personally, as the owner of a company, are going to feel far more at ease calling your company for service. This is why it's so important to get involved in civic clubs, networking groups, the chamber of commerce, and more. The more people you know, the more opportunities you will create. And to make sure everyone knows what you do, always wear logoed shirts.

And when you are fortunate enough to be invited into someone's home, act like a guest. Be polite. Be friendly. Be helpful.

It's hard to imagine a worse example of service than Jenny Allen's plumber, Jeff. The guy's been serving her home for more than a quarter century and the upstairs shower is unusable. The toilet downstairs doesn't flush and was jury-rigged years ago.

What do you bet Jeff is the type of tradesperson who sips coffee at the supply house, complaining about his customers, griping about DIY, moaning about how cheap people are, and lamenting his lack of business.

(c) 2009 Matt Michel

Earl Nightingale - The Strangest Secret

The first motivational speaker I ever heard was Earl Nightingale. I listened to him on audiotape, mesmerized by his deep voice, compelling logic, and clear insights. He helped me change the way I looked at the world. And not just me. He affected millions.

Nightingale grew up during the depression in Southern California. Hungry for knowledge as a kid, he hung out in the Long Beach library studying success. He was compelled to solve the riddle of why some people succeeded while others did not.

If you think he was a wimpy kid because he liked to hang out in the library, you would be wrong. Nightingale enlisted in the Marines and was one of the survivors of the U.S.S. Arizona during Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor, he continued in the Marines for five years.

Following the war, Nightingale eventually moved to Chicago, where he secured a job with the legendary radio station, WGN. At WGN, Nightingale hosted a daily commentary program and also sold advertising. He negotiated a commission on his advertising sales and earned enough to retire at age 35. Clearly, Nightingale was one of the best salespeople in the nation.

Around the time he retired from WGN, Nightingale bought an insurance agency. He would provide regular motivational speeches to the sales force. His speeches were so effective that the sales manager begged him to record them before Nightingale left on an extended vacation. So he did.

Nightingale recorded what he discovered many years earlier in the Long Beach Library. He recorded what separates the successful from the unsuccessful, which Nightingale called The Strangest Secret.

His recording, in the late 1950s was on vinyl. This was eventually released to the public and became the first recording of the spoken word to go gold.

Here is Nightingale's recording. It's voice only, with a still image of Nightingale, and lasts 30 minutes. Listen to it when you can shut out distractions and give it its due. It's as powerful today as it was 50 years ago.

The Original Recording (Audio Over Still Picture)


Nightingale also made a short film on The Strangest Secret. Here it is, broken into three parts and recorded from a VHS dub. I think I prefer the fuller recording from above.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

Finish Strong

Need a lift? Watch this short promotional video for the book “Finish Strong.”

Lee Rosenberg's 100 Simple Business Practices

Often there is little difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one. Rather, there are little differences... lots of little differences.

Lee Rosenberg presents 100 simple business practices that every service business should perform. Undoubtedly you already do many of these practices, but you probably do not do all of them. This document will serve as a reminder of many things you should do, but may not. It will also give you a few new ideas, things that you hadn't really thought about. Add one or two new disciplines from this document and your business will improve and/or avoid the fatal pitfalls of companies long forgotten.

The file was prepared as an Adobe Portable Document File (pdf). Click to launch Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader and download the file.

Click for more Freebies from the Service Roundtable.

What Leads To Success

Richard St John boils down years of interviews of successful people into eight words, delivered in a three minute presentation...



The eight words are...

Passion
Work
Good
Focus
Push
Serve
Ideas
Persist