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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Where’s Your Head At?

There are essentially two types of travelers in this world. There are those who are consumed by ‘ticking boxes’ and traveling to all the ‘major attractions’ just to say that they’ve been there and done that. Then there are those who truly travel for the experience of traveling and who soak up everything along the way. The real purpose of traveling is not to reach a destination, but to travel.

This is also true in the journey of life. So many people go through life reaching for destinations and they end up never ‘traveling’. Wherever your mind is, that is where you are. See, your whole life is actually lived within the confines of your mind. It is not what happens to you, but how you process it in your mind. Wherever you put your focus is where your attention will be. So often we fall into the trap of the ’someday-somewhere’ mentality, where we think that ’someday’ when we are somewhere else or with someone else or with something else we will be happy. ‘Then’ we will do x, y and z. We almost live in this other place that we aspire to and we end up forgetting where we are right now - which is all we’ve really got anyway.

Life is lived in the ‘now’. Now is all you will ever really own. Although you can escape to some future place in your mind, a place that you think will make you happy, you only really want that to experience that in a moment of now anyway. It’s only when you are firmly rooted in the present moment and when all of you is here, that you can really experience something fully. Read more

Interview with Drew Rozell

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.?

When I think back to my experience growing up and what was unique about my family compared to the others I saw, the fact that my parents allowed me so much freedom stands out. Unlike most of my friends, I never had a curfew. I was never grounded. Even though both my parents were teachers, neither of them ever asked me if my day’s homework was completed. More often than not, I was able to make my own decisions and would have to deal with the consequences. Read more

Take a Chance, Win a Prize!

I think that we’re all probably familiar with the fairground rant ‘take a chance, win a prize’. Whenever I hear this call to action, I immediately break out into a cold sweat. Whether the test is to knock down 6 cans in pyramid formation or to throw a dart at a balloon, I’m there, almost hypnotically, pulling coins out of my pocket. And it doesn’t really matter what prizes are on offer either. It could be stuffed panda bears, bubble makers or even Velcro wallets. What’s important to me is rising to the challenge and having a go.

Now I know that many of you may have suffered from this fairground fever at one time or another. But do you actually take this fearless enthusiasm out into the real world when the carnival is over? Read more

Success And Your Journey To An Abundant Life

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” —Robert Collier

Your journey to success is a pathway that only you and you alone can take, it is paved with gold as well as a little black and blue. The truly valuable lessons are in the learning and in the acquisition of all the necessary requisite tools, to not only make manifest your desires, but to also assist in the development of your well of resources. These will be resources that you will always have, and will be tools that you can use to help others achieve, what you too have been able to achieve.

Taking inspired and motivated action to get out of your current groove is the first step in living and enjoying the life you’ve always dreamed of, the life you are capable of. So if you want to change your life, start with ‘changing your mind.’ Positively! Read more

The Mindset of the World’s Most Successful People

It doesn’t matter who they are - businessmen, artists, sportsmen, inventors - successful people have more things in common than you think. These common attitudes and qualities have been very effective in helping them see things that other people don’t see, rise above their personal troubles and outperform their competitors. In other words, they have a successful mindset.

You too, can develop this mindset and harness its power to change your life. You just have to realize that half of what earns you success is being prepared for it. Here are some ways to change your current mindset into a mindset of success…

Have vision and focus. Successful people are conditioned to look forward, to always ask what if and why not. It is this innate curiosity and openness for new things that help them develop a creative mind. A creative mind can see beyond the present; it can see possibilities and combinations that are otherwise unavailable to closeminded people. It is this sense of vision and tenacity of focus that keeps them crying out, Eureka! while everyone else are scratching their heads. Read more

Focus on What You Can Control

As I write this, the sun is rising over the hills to the south-east, hidden behind a pillar on the corner of my home. When I sit at this table during the summer, the sun rises off my left shoulder, but now it has moved dramatically to the south. It shifts slowly, and from one day to the next I see no apparent difference, but over time, the earth changes from summer to winter.

Without noticing it, and with no effort on my part, in six months my relationship with the entire solar system has changed! The light in my office has changed, and so I shift positions, re-arrange my computer screen, move the furniture, and even work at a different time of the day, all because of changes over which I have no control, and take no notice.

Success and failure are often like that. We cannot control many of the things and events in our lives, including the sun and the tilt of the earth. What I DO control is whether or not I put curtains on the windows, arrange my furniture to take advantage of the light, and use the seasons to add variety and perspective to my office. Actually, I depend on the changing angle of the sun to “make” me move the furniture and dust behind my desk every few months. I use these predictable changes to enrich my office and make me look at the world differently. Read more

The Seller’s Creed

You can listen to an audio version of The Seller’s Creed and download a beautiful PDF at the bottom of this post.

I will not make sales. I will make Customers.

I will target the heart of my Customer. Never their wallet.

My Customer is the lifeblood of my business.

Though I may sell my Customers what they want, I will deliver what they need and make their lives better.

Courtesy and Service are cornerstones of my relationship with my Customer.

I will view complaints as opportunities . . . opportunities to create lifelong Customers. Read more

Tough Times Never Last But Tough People Do

Ninety-five percent of all new businesses go out of business within the first five years or less. Why do they fail? There are many starters in life - but very few finish what they start. When the going gets tough, most people fold. They don’t persist hard enough or persevere long enough. They don’t have a red-hot flaming burning desire to succeed. They don’t make it their definite major purpose. They don’t take enough personal initiative to make it happen - they don’t go the extra mile. They don’t want it bad enough. They don’t have enough self-control and discipline. Shall I go on? I could write a book on why so many people fail, but I’d rather talk about those who succeed.

There are three kinds of people: people who make things happen — people who watch someone else make it happen — and people who don’t know what’s happening. Read more

The world is more financially flexible than you think

When we’re having problems with money most of us will experience high levels of anxiety and feel threatened. This means that your brain’s natural response mechanism to danger is constantly being triggered. This response automatically diverts energy away from non-essential brain functions such as rational or creative thinking: basically away from anything that could interfere with our physical ability to run or fight.

Now this response makes a lot of sense if a truck is heading straight for you on the wrong side of the road. After all, you don’t want to waste valuable seconds contemplating all of the different things you could possibly do; you just need to act. Read more

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