National Speakers Association: Master of Influence Award

Please welcome back to the stage Kristen Arnold.

Isn't this pretty? So in 1993, NSA President Al Walker and NSA's board of directors created award to recognize those who have literally influenced the world and the speaking profession in a significant way. And each year thereafter, the NSA president has presented the Master of Influence award to the speaker they believe have influenced generations of other speakers. I am pleased, in fact, I'm more than pleased. I'm like really excited to announce this year's Master of Influence award to a gentleman. He's truly a legend in our business. In fact, I don't think we've had a lab, a conference or a convention lately where his name is, is not brought up on the main platform. He's a true innovator and a thought leader on the subjects of leadership, business strategy, sales and personal success. He's spoken in every major city in the United States and Canada and in 55 other countries. 55, that's an awful lot. He's written 55 books, countries, 55 books that have been translated into 36 languages and sold in 52 countries. Most of us would be happy if we sold our books in 52 counties. He's produced more than 500. That's not a typo on this 500 audio and video learning programs. And in fact, if you stack them on top of each other, it would be pretty, pretty high. He's been a member of NSA since 1984 and makes a mean Caesar salad. Please help me congratulate my friend and fellow board member Zone, this year's Master of Influence Award winner, Brian Tracy, CPAE speaker hall of Fame.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please sit down. Thank you. I am so happy to be with you. My dear friends, my colleagues, people I've known all my adult working life are here today. And I'm so happy. It was a great introduction. Of course she screwed up the beginning of my thank you talk, so I'll have to make it up. When I began my career, I began it quite humbly. I was a high school fail out. A fail out is not a dropout. I stayed till the end of the year. I just failed everything. And so instead of a diploma, they give you a leaving certificate. It says goodbye, which means that they don't want you to come back. And I didn't. So I started off as a laborer. I started off washing dishes. In fact I had almost like a classic rags to riches story. I started off washing dishes and from there I worked in sawmills on the night shift and I dug ditches And I worked in construction. One summer I worked digging wells. That's where you start at ground level and you work down rather than up. And when you succeed, you fail, because when you find water, they fire you. It's not a great incentive system. It's very much like our federal government today. Anyway. Well, so I drifted. I lived in my car, I traveled, I worked on ships longer find a laboring job. I got into sales, like many of you, and in sales I spun my wheels. And I spun my wheels for months and months and months until I began asking the question, why is it that some people are more successful than others? And I began asking other people and they began to tell me. And I asked the most successful people in sales what they were doing differently from me. And they told me and I did it. And it was one of the great influences in my life. Taking this convention's title, the great influence was that you can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. And still today, if you were asking me what was the climatic or epiphany in my life, it was that, wow, here I was a laborer, a high school dropout. I had no friends, I had no money, I had no past and a limited future. But you can learn what you needed to learn. So I began to study selling. And I studied it and I studied it. And I would get up at five or six o' clock in the morning and I would read for two or three hours. And I practiced what I learned during the day. And I would listen to audio programs. And then I began attending seminars. I still remember the first seminars where I went to where speakers like people from NSA were speaking and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. And my sales went up and up and up, and finally they made me a sales mangler. And so I began to teach other people. And today, all over the world, I meet people who are today millionaires and multimillionaires who came to my seminars as humble salespeople, again, lost doing poorly, not making any sales, including people here in this room who are now worth an enormous amount of money. And at one time they were struggling. Well, what I learned was the law of cause and effect, which says that for every effect in your life, there's a cause. And if you decide what effect you want, you can trace it back to the cause. And if you duplicate the cause, you get the effects. What it basically says is that if you want to be a successful person, if you want to get great results, then you have to do what other successful people do. And if you do what other successful people do, nothing can stop you. And if you don't, nothing can help you. And the world is full of people who are doing what unsuccessful people do and they're surprised and the results that other unsuccessful people get. So I got into management and I studied management. I was fastidiously, I studied hundreds and then thousands of hours in. I rose up to the head of a 265 million dollar company. One of those ones that neato buys and sells before lunch every morning. Little companies. But I took thousands of hours of study in management. I began to teach the subject and so on. And so I finally one day I decided to get into speaking. I was 36 years old and I learned to sell again. When I started professional speaking, I sold my house, I sold my car, I sold my furniture, I sold, I sold everything I had. Barbara and I had to move to a small house where we lived for two or three years. While we were learning the joys of getting started in speaking, I worked out that I spent $110 for every person who listened to me for the first year. If you want to know about advertising, I know how to fail in radio advertising, television advertising, billboards. Somebody talked me into that direct mail. Run out of money and I couldn't find. I could not attract anybody to listen to me. I began knocking on doors. Thank you. All right. As the philosopher said, life is just one damn thing after another. Well, and so I began speaking, I began working. And then when I was in 1984, I ran into OG Mandino and OG encouraged me to attend. Well, I'd never heard of NSA. I was making it all up by myself. My first talk was two days. It was a two day seminar. I worked down from there. It took me about five years to get to a keynote. My first paid seminar I was promoting my own seminars was $50. $150 to an after dinner talk to a room full of construction executives. But they had an open bar for an hour before dinner and they'd had wine and liqueurs on the table during dinner. And by the time I got up to speak, and I had planned it and planned it, planned it and planned it, planned it. I could still remember that was the most shit faced audience I've ever seen in my life. Have you ever seen the experience when a person's really drunk and they're looking at you like this? The whole room was like that. And I was talking about leadership and the future and everything else. Talk about Pearls before swine. Anyway, I moved from Edmonton, which is not the North Pole, they say, but you can see it from there. And I moved to San Diego and I had a couple of great experiences. The first NSA meeting I went to, I met Patricia Fripp, who's now become a friend of mine. She's not only a great speaker, she is a great of speakers. And I remember she walked onto the stage, it was her year of the presidency, and she gave a talk and I never forgot it. She said it takes seven years to excel in this field. And I subsequently learned. You've seen Malcolm's book, the Outliers. I subsequently learned over the last 20. And it takes about seven years to become an excellent plumber or an excellent diesel mechanic, or. I heard Art Linklater say many years ago is they don't know if there's anything wrong as long as you don't act as if there's anything wrong. So you just keep smiling, smile though your heart is breaking, you know. So I moved to San Diego. So I listened to Patricia Pfipper and this is what she said, which, which is one of the great influencers on my life. She said it takes seven years to become excellent at speaking. But it's not seven years of just working at it. It's seven years of total head down, focused, hard, hard, hard. You know what kind of work. In order to become an excellent speaker, that means you have to read the books and you have to attend the courses and you have to listen to the audio programs and you have to go to the seminars and you have to work and rework your material. Nito Kabin had a great influence on me many years ago. He talked about giving a speech here that he spent hour after hour after hour rehearsing and walking and talking and rehearsing to give once in his whole life. And when he gave it once, he gave it without notes and he gave it Benito's inimitable, smooth style. And it was a beautiful talk. But the hours that went into it, and I've been given 20,000 people to speak to in 15 minutes. Do you know how long it takes to prepare a 15 minute talk for 20,000 people? 15 hours, anyway. So I learned that from Patricia. So I never expected it to be easy. And it's a very important thing. If you don't expect it to be easy, then it's not as hard as it might be. If you expect it to be easy, then you'll always be frustrated. So I moved down here and then before I moved from Edmonton, I had another great experience that changed my life as well and had a great influence on me. It's my friend Joe Sharon who's right here. One day I got a call from someone who'd been through one of my seminars who also worked for IBM, and I hope I can use the name. And they called me at IBM and they said, we heard that you are speaking. We'd like to audit you to see if we will use you as a speaker for our managers. And so I went down to Toronto, and Joe was in charge of manager development at IBM in Canada at that time. And he and a group of people had me come in and give a talk. Then they send you outside and they discuss you, and then, you know, it's almost like you're going to sentence you to death or not. And then you go back in. And they said, well, on balance, we have decided to have you speak for our managers. I learned later that Joe cast the deciding vote. That's what he says. But nonetheless, that gave me an opportunity. And I put in more hundreds of hours planning for those talks. And I got 25 talks for IBM over the course of the next few years. And it broke open corporate America for me. As a result of that, I've spoken to 1,000 corporations over 25 years. But Joe opened the door for me. And I want to thank you, Joe. You had a great influence on my life. You know that. And then after I moved to San Diego, I started doing public seminars just a little bit. And one day I got a call from what I consider to be one of the great people in this industry, a man named John Hammond. And John Hammond was going from city to city with a team, going out knocking on doors, selling seminars for Zig Ziglar and other speakers. And he asked me if I would like to share the stage with Zig Ziglar doing public seminars. And it was a great opportunity, and I said yes. And we worked together for years and years. And John is right here, and he's one of the great men in this industry. And thank you very much, John. I appreciate you. You've had a great influence on my life. And I could go on and on, but I'm running out of time. But I will say this, that other people here have had a great influence on me. Nito Cabin was one of my dear friends who actually read my talk for the CPAE Award. He asked me who I would like to give the talk. And I said, him. And he said he doesn't normally do it, but he did. He was my dear friend for years. And also Naomi Rode has been a great friend of mine. And Ty Boyd, I've learned so much from, and Jim Cathcart and so many other people here that have been such inspirations to me. Of course, the most important of all has been my wife, Barbara. My wife Barbara is the love of my life. And from the time I decided to speak until now, she has supported me 100%. She supported me, as I say, through thick and thin, and there's been lots of thin, and anybody who's been in speaking knows that. So thank you, my dear. You know how much I appreciate you. And I appreciate you as well. Glenna was saying that if you could write something on a T shirt, what would you write on your T shirt? And my words are the same words, and I write them in foreign languages, and the words are, you can do it. Abraham Lincoln once said, the fact that some people become rich is proof that others can become rich. What I Learned from the 8020 rule is that everybody's in the top 20%, started in the bottom 20%. And there are no limits to what you and I can accomplish, except for the limits that we place on ourselves. So what I teach every person that I speak to, including my children, is decide exactly what you want, write it down, make a plan to achieve it, and resolve to pay the price. And if you do that, then there are no limits to what we can accomplish. And I will be in the audience when you are up here getting your award sometime in the future. Thank you very much. God bless you. Thank you. That. Okay.