Interview with the Success Doctor

The following interview is an excerpt from the 2002 top-selling eBook, Success: A Spiritual Matter, compiled by 10 Million Clicks For Peace co-founder, Rick Beneteau.

Your History

Many of our values come directly from our childhood and upbringing. What are the most important values you feel you still carry today from your parents and other family members, friends, teachers etc.?

Many of the “values” we’re self-taught. You see, I’m a perpetual student. And I have been BECAUSE of my upbringing, which was not a perfect one. Scarred from an abusive father, it pushed me to learn and learn and learn. I finally came to the realization that my upbringing was the most beautiful, powerful and rewarding lesson I have ever been given — it made me what I am today.

In order for me to fight early bouts of depression and fear, which were incredibly devastating for me, I became a student … I listened and read from the masters: from spiritual leaders to modern-day philosophers. I read the Bhagivad Gita, the Bible, the Torah, the Qu’ran, the Dhammapada (Buddha), the Tao, you name it.

I also became engrossed with works from Wayne Dyer, Jim Rohn, Henry David Thoreau, Tony Robbins, Marsha Sinetar, Joseph Campbell, Dr. Maxwell Maltz, Florence Scovel Shinn, Rene Descartes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louise Hay, Stuart Wilde … You name it, I read it.

Let me back up a little, so you may understand what I mean …

I was emotionally and physically abused by an alcoholic father. Today, he is institutionalized, suffering from a mental illness called “Korsakov’s Disease,” which resulted from years of alcohol abuse.

You see, I entered this world with a physical disability. And my father, being a perfectionist, regarded me as a “failure.” This is when he started to drink heavily. I believe it’s because he couldn’t accept the fact that he “failed,” in other words.

I was a big baby — born at over 11 pounds. And my mother is a petite woman, measuring no more than four and a half feet tall! So, being such a big baby inside her tiny womb, my legs and feet grew crookedly. I had to wear special crutches until the age of three.

Over the years, my father called me “stupid.” I was told that I would never amount to much. I was a “failure.” And as a result, I became a recluse. Agoraphobic-like. I just hated being around other people because I feared rejection immensely.

Consequently, I practically lived inside my bedroom most of my childhood. And it lasted pretty much the remainder of my teenage years.

But deep down, I wanted to prove my father wrong. I wanted to succeed in order to show him that I am someone, that I’m not a failure.

How does one fight the fear of being with people let alone the fear of rejection? As Henry David Thoreau said, “Do what you fear and the death of that fear is certain.”

So, I decided to dive into the world of sales in order to fight my fears head-on. In my mind, I had no other choice.

Well, commissions were my only source of income. And since I wasn’t successful, I fell deeply into debt in order to survive. Eventually, I declared bankruptcy at the still young age of 21.

It took me another four years before I became a top producing salesperson in a Fortune 500 company. Since I hated prospecting (and still do, in fact), I developed more effective strategies that caused high quality prospects to come to me instead of the other way around. I no longer had to prospect. I no longer had to be rejected. I no longer had to force myself to be with other people (unless they wanted to be with me). And over the years, I started teaching my techniques. I became a marketing consultant.

For the rest of my values, I guess most of them stem from my grandparents. Because of my parents’ situation and my father’s distaste for his own son, I grew up with my grandparents pretty much throughout my early childhood. My grandfather was a hard worker, which became an endearing value for me. More important than that, he loved what he did. In fact, he told me something that I keep remembering (and falling back on), even to this day:

“A buzzy bee
is hard to see,
It teaches us all,
great or small,
We have a job to do.”

I was about nine years old when he told me that. And it still rings true to this day.

Bottom-line, he inculcated in my psyche the idea that one should do what one loves. That’s the ultimate rule of life, I believe. There’s no other rule any greater than that, since everything else falls naturally once that “primary directive,” if you will, is followed. When you do what you love, everything else seems trivial. Challenges, hard work, problems, even people.

Jim Rohn said: “Turn your vocation into a vacation.”

I even tell my students to follow their hearts, their desires or their passions, even when this process could mean that they feel they must change their academic majors. (I’m sure my superiors at the college are not happy when I do that because some students may leave the marketing program altogether, but I believe in it so strongly that I feel my students are much better off – and they can become much better students, too, in whatever field they choose — if they follow their hearts and not their minds, their families’ wishes or their wallets.)

As Confucius once said in 500 B.C.E., “Do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” Marsha Sinetar, author of “True Wealth,” once said, “Do what you love and the money will follow.”

One of my favorite contemporary philosophers is Joseph Campbell. A mythologist, Joseph professed that number one rule, which pervades all cultures and religions …

“Follow your bliss.”

Do what you love or love what you do. That rule is the basis of any religion or social belief system. (Or it should be, anyway.)

When you do what you love, everything else becomes so clear. And every problem or challenge you encounter seems so trite. It also makes everything else so much easier: from living and working, to accepting yourself (and others) and achieving true inner peace.

I mean, if you do what you love or love what you do, you’ll do it with so much passion and zest that everything else follows. Money becomes a byproduct. A thriving business becomes a byproduct. A
life filled with peace and joy becomes a byproduct. Happiness and finding that “one true love” also become byproducts.

Speaking of business, when you love what you do you deliver superb customer service because you want your clients to feel the same passion you do. You fall in love with your business and your product, and as a result you automatically transfer that passion into other people, creating a much greater sense of credibility, trust and believability — from vendors to clients.

In my marketing seminars, I talk about this “rule” by saying that it is the greatest marketing secret of all. If people follow that rule, marketing becomes natural. In fact, the more you love what you do, the less you need to promote your business — it emanates from everything you do. You become a marketer by extension, not by position. That’s why, in those seminars, I often add:

“Do what you love and the business will follow.”

I know that personally, in my life, since I’ve never made so much money and had so much fun since I followed that number one rule. I’ve got enough clients to feed me for a lifetime. It’s so true.

Did these come from your socio-economic status, your home life, spiritual and/or religious experiences? If so, please describe.

I think I was pretty clear on that one, earlier.

Exactly how did you get started in your business or career? What prompted or pushed you to be attracted to your field?

As stated earlier, I became a sales rep in order to fight my overwhelming fear of rejection — it certainly wasn’t for the money or because of career advancement. It was simply to prove my father wrong.

But I hated rejection so much that I found ways to pre-qualify my prospects and get them to come to me, not the other way around. Seeing how successful I was, my techniques became an object sought after by coworkers, colleagues, employers and now clients. One thing led to another until it grew into the speaking and marketing consulting career that I work in and enjoy today.

I realized that you have to market in such a way that causes the right kinds of people to come to you. Too many marketers suffer from the “build-it-and-they-will-come” syndrome. That’s even more true on the web. Many rely on mere search engines for producing their traffic. That’s not good.

Instead, you can become a magnet and attract qualified traffic to your website by using the same techniques I teach today. That’s why my consulting career later spilled onto the web … It was a natural extension, I guess.

Today, as a speaker, copywriter and consultant, I give seminars on marketing, copywriting and sales training (and now Internet marketing) all over Canada and the U.S. (and still do). Bottom-line, all of my talks are somehow based on my unique set of experiences. Call it the “school of hard marketing knocks.”
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