I'm going to share information with you today and in the future that literally has the power to change your life. Now, you see, I'm not able to change your life but you certainly are. And I have found that it's ideas that literally change everything in our life.
Many many years ago, I'm going back over 50 years ago, I was fortunate enough to be handed a book, Think and Grow Rich. But along with the book, the man that gave it to me gave me specific directions on how to use it. I guess today you'd have called him my coach or my mentor.
He was just actually a real good friend that was able to see something in me that I couldn't see in myself. Now, up to that time, I had gone down every road you could think of but none of them lead to a good end. I was on the wrong road and my life was just dull.
I couldn't earn any money. I wasn't particularly happy. I never got a good job.
I had no formal education, a couple of months high school and I had no actual business experience but you know by following this man's direction, oh, by the way, he said, "If you do exactly what I tell you until you find out that I'm lying to you or I don't know what I'm talking about is you're gonna end up a big winner. " Now, he said, I don't lie and I do know what I'm talking about. I wouldn't even wanna guess the number of people I've said that to over the past 40 some years but at any rate, I started to follow his direction.
I went from 4,000 to 175,000 in a year, and then I took it over a million. Now, you may be wondering what I was doing. I was cleaning floors.
I started to clean one office. I got $30 a month for washing the floor twice. And I ended up in less than five years cleaning floors in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, London, England.
The thing took off like a rocket. But when I got there, I'm sitting, thinking, how the heck did this happen? You know there was a lot of people cleaning floors but they weren't doing what I was doing.
There was a lot of people reading Think and Grow Rich but they weren't doing what I was doing. And I had to ask myself what happened. I had been raised to believe probably much the same as you that if you're gonna earn a lot of money, you gotta be really smart.
I knew I wasn't very smart but I was earning a lot of money. So, I started looking and I started searching. It took me nine years and I finally got the dots to connect.
And when I got the dots to connect and I figured out why I changed, I realized I had discovered something very very valuable. You know this may sound odd but it's true. You can go into the largest companies in the world and they all have stars but relatively few of them can tell you why they're stars.
They don't know why they're stars. Find the top sales person in any organization. 99 out of a 100 of them cannot tell you why they're the top sales people.
You see, if they knew or if the company knew, the company would can it and give it to everybody. Well, I knew why I was winning. Now, mind ya, it took me nine years to figure it out.
I studied with some of the most brilliant people in the world and when I got it figured out, all I wanted to do was share it. I wanted everybody to know it. It was such a simple thing and it was such a phenomenal discovery for me but I had a problem.
I was shy, and I was very quiet, and I was withdrawn. I mean, I wouldn't ask a question in front of four, five people. Sometimes, I wouldn't ask a question anywhere because I was so insecure in that area.
Very knowledgeable in one area, but very insecure. And one day, I was standing in the back of the ballroom at the O'Hare Hyatt Hotel and there were 1000 people in the audience and they were broken into two banks, 500 here, 500 here with an aisle down the center. Bill Gove was the speaker.
Now, Bill's gone now, God bless him but he was considered the Frank Sinatra of speakers. I mean, he was the best in the world and I was watching him and he had a handheld mic and he was on the front corner of the group on the right hand side of the ballroom. And he's saying, "If I wanna be free, I've gotta be me, not the me I think you think I should be, not the me I think my wife thinks I should be, not the me I think my kids think I should be.
If I wanna be free, I've gotta be me. " Now, he said, "I better know who me is. " Now, I'm standing in the back of the room watching him and I was thinking, if I could only do that.
I wanted to share this information so much but I was shy. Now, let me digress for a second. I had to listened to Earl Nightingale for years.
I burned Earl's messages into my mind. The first recording in a great series of recordings, the Lead the Field program, the first recording was on the magic word and it was 'Attitude. ' And at one point in the record, he said, "Now, right here we come to a rather strange fact: We tend to minimize the things we can do, the goals we can accomplish and for some equally strange reason, we think other people can accomplish things that we cannot.
" He said, "I want you to understand that's not true. "You've got deep reservoirs of talent and ability within you. " Now, if you asked me if I understood that, I'd say of course I understand it.
I listen to that. I'll bet I had listened to that at least 1000 times in the nine years that I was searching for why was I winning. And if you'd asked me, I'd have said, yeah, I understood it.
I didn't understand it at all. And I'm sitting there, standing actually watching Bill Gove and that record started to play in my head and I could hear Earl Nightingale say, "Now, right here, we come to a rather strange fact. We tend to minimize.
" And I thought, that's what he means by that. And I made up my mind. I was not only going to do, and learn to do, what Bill Gove had just done in front of me, I was gonna get him to teach me.
And I did. And Bill Gove and I became great friends. In fact, the last speech Bill Gove made was for my company.
That's right. It was about five years ago. It was in December.
On the 13th of December, Bill Gove passed away. If he had lived till January, he would have been 90. He did what he loved right up until the last day.
But I owe him such a vote of thanks. Now, I don't speak at all like Bill Gove, but I speak all over the world. I've spoken to groups of 50 people to 20,000 and you know something?
He taught me to be comfortable in front of the camera or in front of the people. And he said, Bob, if you wanna be effective, just think of the people you're talking to. Just fall in love with the idea of helping them and he said and you can help them because you've got valuable information.
Now, that was 46 years ago. I didn't lose the shyness like that. It took a little while, but with the proper coaching, it left me.
I didn't lose the good side of shyness. I can enjoy being by myself. I spend a lot of time by myself on the road.
But the bad side of it is I was afraid to express myself freely in front of other people, and I got over that. I got rid of the doubts. Now, I would imagine you have doubts in a number of different areas and possibly in an area you really don't want them and they're certainly not serving you well.
You're gonna find Six Minutes to Success is a program that's designed to show you how to eliminate the doubts and how to get results. We get results that stick and that's so important because I've studied a lot of material. I've watched a lot of people working.
And you can read a book or listen to some recordings or going to a seminar and you'll find that right away there's a blip in your results, they get better but they come right back down. They don't stick. Here in our company, in the Proctor Gallagher Institute, we deal with results that stick and you're going to love this because we give you phenomenal information.
Now, the one point that I want you to burn into your mind right now and it may be totally illogical at first, watch this over and over and over and over again. It's the repetition that fixes it in your mind. And when it's fixed in your mind, baby, you've got it.
And you know you've got it. We're gonna give you results that stick.