Success is a Journey #ThrowbackThursday

Did you ever stop and ask yourself, why is it that some people are more successful than others? Why is it some people make more money, live longer, have better relationships, while the great mass of men, as Thoreau said, live lives of quiet desperation? When I was 15, I set out on a lifelong journey to find the answer to that question. Why are some people more successful than others? You see, when I was growing up, my family never seemed to have enough money. My parents grew up during the Depression, and I heard the same things over and over again throughout my childhood. We can't afford it. We can't afford it. We can't afford it. I don't know if you heard that when you were growing up. It seemed to be the national anthem. I was not a great student. I passed out of high school when I was 18. I say passed out because rather than graduated because that's what happened. I passed out in the half of the class that made the top half possible. The person in front of me. There's a lot of people out here in the same half. The person in front of me on the stage and the person in back of me received the pomas and I got a leaving certificate. When you open it up, it says goodbye. And that's what they meant, goodbye. Don't ever come back. Anyway, since then I've traveled and worked in more than 80 countries on six continents. I've sailed on all the great oceans. I've been around the world two or three times. I became fluent in French, German and Spanish, as well as learning to get along in several other languages. When you need to eat, you learn. Anyway, I started off as poor as I could be, searching for the secrets of success. And over the years I've read and studied for over 30,000 hours in business, economics, psychology, philosophy, religion, metaphysics and history to find the secrets of success. And I'm happy to say that I eventually found the answers I was looking for. Today I live in a million dollar house on a golf course in Southern California, and I have business interests in nine countries. Today I know, and I've proven that success in any field, including this field, is as predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting the west. And my purpose in speaking with you today is to share with you some of the most important things I've ever learned. However, as Aristotle once said, you can't teach a person something that they don't already know. You're already high achievers and great successes in your careers. You're already the cream of your profession. So many of you already know what we're going to talk about. And the rest of you will recognize these principles as soon as you hear them. About five years ago, I met a wise and wealthy man who had spent his entire life studying success. And he'd reached a clear conclusion concerning the reason for success in life and especially in business. He's dead now, but I'll never forget what he told me, Because I immediately recognized that he put the finger on my reason for success and yours, as we'll talk about in a minute. He said the key to success was to set a goal and then to stay with it until you achieve success in at least one important thing. He said that your subconscious mind will then accept that success experience and store it as a pattern, like a template. And then from then on, your subconscious will drive you and direct you and guide you to repeat the pattern of success in other things that you attempt. Another way of saying it is that nothing succeeds like success. Psychologists have demonstrated that achievement brings you a natural high. Once you've experienced your first great success, Then not only are you unconsciously programmed to repeat it, but nothing else will ever give you the same wonderful sense of satisfaction. All high achievers know that anyway. I learned the truth of this idea many years ago when I first started traveling. I spent eight years traveling around the world. And in many ways, a trip or a journey is a metaphor for life. My first big trip was that and much, much more. It had such an enormous impact on me that I've never really gotten over it. My whole life has been different as a result of what I call the Sahara crossing. Let me tell you about it. When I was 18, three friends and I decided we'd go off and see the world. We were well out of high school, and we were laboring in sawmills on the west coast. This is in 1963. And a lot of our friends were heading for Europe to travel around with backpacks. So we decided to do something different. Nobody else was going to Africa, so we decided we'd go to Africa. Of course, it never occurred to us to ask why it was that no one else was going to Africa. And that was our first mistake. After working and saving for a year, the four of us piled into an old 1946 Chevy and drove out of Vancouver, bound for Montreal via Toronto. Actually, we just passed the a couple of blocks from here on our way on that trip. It was late at night when we left. It was pouring rain. We were all 20 years old, and we were off to see the world anyway. I learned later that almost every Great venture begins with an act of faith, like driving into the dark, into the unknown. In a way, nature protects us by shielding us from knowledge of the difficulties and obstacles that lie ahead. Because if we really knew all the problems we would face, the setbacks, the suffering, the temporary failure and the disappointments, many of us would hesitate about ever even starting out at all. Then our plan was to drive across country to Montreal, get jobs on ships to work our way across the Atlantic, and then head south across Europe to Africa. Pretty basic plan. However, as it happened in Montreal, one of the guys decided to give up and go home. And so he left us. Well, that left three. The other two, after one day. I still remember that after one day of looking for work on the waterfront, decided to quit. Decided to quit trying and to spend their limited savings to pay their way across the Atlantic rather than to work their way. I tried to talk them out of it. I told them that quitting is a habit. If you quit the first time you run into difficulties, you'll always quit when the going gets rough. You will, in effect, establish a pattern for failure rather than a pattern for success. But their minds were made up. So we split our savings and they took passage on a ship to England. I worked on a construction site in Montreal, hauling heavy things for the entire winter. And then I got a job on a Norwegian freighter out of Halifax in late February and arrived in England in mid April. As I had predicted, my friends had quit and stayed in England, working at odd jobs. However, we soon made up good buddies again. Once more, we headed for Africa. At this time, all we had was an 8.5 by 11 inch page, about this size that had Europe and Africa all on the same map on the same page. And it seemed to be a very simple thing to go from London, which is up here, to Johannesburg, which is down here. It's just one page. We sort of drew a straight line and we thought, well, oh yes, there was a little orange part right across, sort of a band right through the middle there called the Sahara Desert. Well, we thought, well, we'd just whip over that and get down to the green part on the map. There's no problem. Without a word of a lie. This is true. We didn't stop to think that the total distance was about 8,000 miles. See, we were big picture people. We didn't let ourselves get bogged down with details. We were young and we hadn't learned that it's the details that get you every single time. So we took a train down to London. There we bought Bicycles. See, we never heard of anyone riding from London to Johannesburg on bicycles. So we decided that we would do it first and become famous. That was another mistake. We soon learned that when you ride bicycles across France in the springtime, you find that the hills are all uphill and the wind is always in your face. Likewise, I found that when you embark on any new venture, you often find the same thing. Everything seems to go wrong. Usually at the worst possible time and in the worst possible and most expensive way, like starting a new business or a new career. Anyway, after two weeks of grinding along on bicycles uphill the whole way, which seems like a geographical impossibility, but it's true. We said the heck with this. We loaded the bikes on a train and we rode across France and Spain to Gibraltar. There we sold the bicycles and bought a Land Rover with our last dollar. We had definitely learned why no one had ever crossed Africa on bicycles. It was darn near impossible to cross France on bicycles anyway. So now we had a little problem. We were out of money. We'd exhausted our meager finances buying the Land Rover. And we didn't have enough money for fuel and equipment. So we all sat down. We consider ourselves great writers at that time. We all sat down and wrote letters to everybody that we knew pleading for money, telling them how desperate our case situation was. Sitting here looking across the Straits of Gibraltar to Africa. All we needed was just a little bit of money to get us over there. Anyway, we got. Eventually we got a little bit of money here and a little bit of money there. And then we got one big score. I'll never forget this. An uncle of Jeff's that he'd only seen once in his life sent us 100 pounds. 100 pounds at that time was $300 worth. More than $1,000 today. And we were ecstatic. We were saved. So this is another lesson. Nobody ever makes it on their own. One of the great lessons of life. We all need help from others to get over the rough spots on the journey of life. Well, with the additional money, we loaded up with food and supplies. We took the ferry over to Tangiers and Morocco. And then we out of Tangiers toward the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara, full of excitement, singing as we drove down the road. 20 miles out, the radiator blew up. The Land Rover had never been driven on the open road. It had spent its whole working life tooling around the narrow streets of Gibraltar. And once on the open road, it began to fall apart. The radiator was just the beginning. Over the next 10 days, the steering rods bent and threw the front wheels out of alignment so the tires blew one by one. We had trouble with the carburetor and the ignition system. We were so poorly equipped, if you can believe it. We didn't even have a jack or a lug wrench. When we got a flat tire, and we got lots of flat tires, we had to sit by the side of the road patiently, sometimes for hours, until somebody came along with the proper tools to help us change the tire. But we pressed on anyway. As we drove deeper into Morocco and over the Atlas Mountains and onto the Sahara escarpment, we entered into a world that had changed very little in a thousand years. There were long, long stretches of barren country roads and an occasional oasis surrounded by primitive farms, which was irrigated from wells and underground rivers. And that began an experience that I still remember quite clearly, and I think you'll be able to relate to this. By this time, I was speaking French fairly well. We could converse with the natives in the occasional small towns that we passed through. And in one town, early in our slow, halting trek across Morocco, someone asked us where we were headed. And we told them that we were going across the Sahara and into Africa. And he said, oh, no. He said, you can't do that. He said, you'll die in the desert. Well, I looked up my dictionary quickly because I didn't understand the expression, vous allez mourie dans de lust. You will die in the desert. We then began to hear this on a regular basis. Everywhere we went. We stop in a small town and people would bring their friends up to us and introduce us as the young men who were going off to die in the desert. Well, they seemed quite cheerful about it, but after a while, we found it kind of irritating. I mean, and by the way, these were not your average Arabs. These were Bedouin and Tuareg. These were desert people, members of tribes that lived in the Sahara for a thousand. I mean, they were in a position to know what they were talking about. And I learned a valuable lesson from this. I learned then and for the rest of your life, whenever you try to do something out of the ordinary, people will line up to tell you that you can't do it, why you can't do it, that you lose your time, you lose your money, that you will, in effect, die in the desert. Even people who should know better will try to discourage you. To achieve anything greater worthwhile, you must train yourself to rise above these people, ignoring them and pressing on towards your goal, regardless. Geez, you're great guys. I love it. We crossed from Morocco into Algeria and drove south to the town of Adrar on the edge of the Sahara. By this time, our vehicle was falling apart, and with the cost of repairs and gasoline and food, we'd almost run out of money again. One of the guys, sick from dysentery, decided to give up. He took his money and his belongings and he hitchhiked to the Mediterranean, 500 miles north and then back to England. That left two of us. We began wondering, what are we doing here? We were two young men, 20 and 21 years of age, thousands of miles from home, sick, tired and almost broke. With thousands of miles ahead of us. We couldn't even remember why we started out in the first place, except that we had set it as a goal and we were too dumb to change it anyway. But one of the things that kept us going was a book of poetry by Robert W. Service. Robert W. Service had driven an ambulance in World War I, and he'd written poetry to cheer up the soldiers in the trenches on the Western Front. And there was one poem that we read over and over. It always gave us a boost in the determination to go forward. It was called Carry on. And it started like this. It said, it's easy to fight when everything's right. When you're mad with the thrill and glory. It's easy to cheer when victory is near and wallow in fields that are gory. It's a different song when everything's wrong. When you're feeling infernally mortal. When it's 10 against one and hope there is none. Buck up, little soldier and chortle. Carry on, carry on. There isn't much punch in your blow. You're glaring and staring and hitting out blinds. You're muddy and bloody but never you mind. Carry on, carry on. You haven't the ghost of a show. It's looking like death. But while you've a breath. Carry on, my son, carry on. Well, by this time, we were in the Sahara, the largest desert on earth. It stretches across the Tropic of Capricorn from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red sea. More than 5,000 miles. And the part that we faced dead ahead was the Tenezerift, the emptiest single stretch of the Sahara. 500 miles of nothing. Not a fly, not a blade of grass, as flat as a tabletop. 500 miles. The enormity of what we had embarked on finally, finally began to sink in. We learned that more than 1300 people had perished in the Tenezer in the last 20 years, 42 vehicles had broken down in the desert, and many of their drivers were never seen again alive. By this time, Jeff and I were once more out of money. All our tires were scraped bald and they needed to be replaced. We needed additional tanks so we could carry enough gas and water for the crossing. We needed tools to do repairs. We needed a jack and lug wrench so we could change. Lug wrench so we could change tires. Obvious. For three weeks, we stayed in a drawer. Jeff hitchhiked north to Algiers to wire for more money, more creative writing, while I sold all our supplies. Except for a bare minimum. With that money, and by stripping abandoned vehicles, I got the Land Rover repaired and properly outfitted, with reasonably good tires, a reserved gas tank, proper tools and supplies for the crossing. It's amazing how enterprising you become when your survival is at stake. By the way, this story took place 24 years ago today. The Sahara desert in June is hot. How hot is it? It's very hot. It's damn hot. At midday it reaches 140 degrees Fahrenheit. An exposed man can die of dehydration in less than 20 minutes. When the French ran Algeria, they required travelers to carry five gallons of water per person per day for the crossing. That's how much you drank. Because of the heat, you can only travel before 10am and after 4pm the midday sun is so hot that if you drive your engine oil boils, it becomes as thin as water, and your vehicle seizes up and it'll never run again. Six weeks after crossing from Gibraltar, we were ready. Jeff came back with some money from his parents and the vehicle was in perfect condition for the crossing. We realized that if anything did go wrong and we couldn't fix it, we would most certainly die in the desert. Three days before the big push, the actual crossing, we met five Germans in a Volkswagen bus who were waiting for a truck convoy that would cross in a few days. They were going to play it safe and cross with the convoy. Safety in numbers. We told them we were going convoy or no convoy, and they decided to cross with us. The Algerian government stamps your passport out of Algeria 500 miles north of the border. From there on, you're on your own. And they couldn't care less what happens to you. As far as they're concerned, you don't exist anymore. So we set out, and I remember this clearly. We set out at sunset on a Thursday, following le piste, which is a French word for track, a very accurate word, track that led straight south across the desert we drove through the night. As we drove through the night about 50 miles, outer troubles began. The German's vehicle sunk in and started to get bogged down in the fine sand that had blown over the track and it also began to break down mechanically. It started getting sand in the carburetor and everything and it began to delay us hour by hour. We had to get across the 500 miles in two days or we'd be out of water. So we pressed on as fast as we could. But over and over the German vehicle got stuck and we had to stop and drag it out with our four wheel drive Land Rover. Losing time and using precious fuel, Jeff and I took turns driving the Land Rover while the German vehicle drove parallel with us across the flat wasteland. And we kept ourselves motivated by quoting the poem Carry on back and forth to each other. And the next verse goes like this. And so in the strife of the battle of life it's easy to fight when you're winning it's easy to slave and starve and be brave when the dawn of success is beginning but the man who can meet despair and defeat with a cheer there's the man of God's choosing the man who can fight to heaven's own height Is the man who can fight when he's losing Carry on, carry on Things never were looming so black but show that you haven't a cowardly streak and though you're unlucky you never are weak Carry on, carry on Brace up for another attack it's looking like hell but you never can tell Carry on old man, carry on by morning. By morning we had only made 150 miles and we were all exhausted and a bit tense. There was an abandoned army fort in the middle of the desert and we had hoped to shelter there from the midday sun in one of the empty buildings. And now it was too late. The sun had begun its implacable climb up the eastern sky. Still we hurried on. Fortunately, you couldn't get lost crossing the Sahara in the daytime. The track across the desert is marked by black 55 gallon oil drums located every five kilometers, which is exactly the curve the earth's surface. As you drive you can always see two oil barrels, the one you just passed and the one you're heading for. So all you have to do to cross the biggest desert on earth is to take it one oil barrel at a time. Of course, traveling at night, if you wander from the piste, if you wander from the track, you can get lost in the desert and drive until you run out of gas. And many people have died that way. As we would approach each oil barrel, it was really neat. As we approach each oil barrel, we come to this oil barrel. We just come parallel with it. The next oil barrel would just pop up in the horizon. And as we pass this oil barrel, the one behind us would fall off the horizon as though it had been shot in a shooting gallery. Really neat. So in the years since then, I found that you can achieve almost any goal you set for yourself if you simply take it one oil barrel, one step at a time. If you go as far as you can see, you will then see far enough to go further. Now the sun really became the enemy. It sat on the horizon like a big evil yellow cat. And then it began to rise inexorably, getting hotter and hotter as we raced south. The temperature grew hotter and hotter. Finally, at 9:30am it reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit and the vehicles began coughing and stalling. We signaled between the two vehicles and agreed to stop and wait out the heat right there in the middle of that 25,000 square square mile parking lot. You never felt so small in your entire life. I'll never forget that day. Hour after hour, we sat in our vehicles like sitting in a bake oven, prostrate from the pounding heat of the sun that reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit by noon and seemed to hang there, seemed to stay there forever. We drank quart after quart of water, our throats going bone dry minutes after gulping down a full canteen. It was worse outside, so we just stayed in the vehicles and suffered hour and hour after hour. Finally, as the afternoon wore on, the temperature slowly, slowly began to fall. By 4pm it was down to 105 degrees. When it finally got below 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 5pm we started on. But now we were racing the clock. We only made about 200 miles in the last almost 24, and we still had 300 miles to go. There was a small oasis and army post on the other side of the Tenezer. And we knew we had to get there before the midday sun caught us again. We hadn't slept since Thursday morning. It was now Friday evening. We pushed on over the desert, but the Germans vehicle kept breaking down all night. Exhausted, we worked to get the Volkswagen bus with the Germans across to the other side. We were both desperate and scared. We knew that we could not last another day. Our water was almost gone when the sun rose slowly on Saturday morning, we were still struggling with the Germans vehicle. Finally, at 9:00am, with 20 miles to go, their vehicle broke down for the last time. We quickly abandoned it. We loaded the five Germans in the back of the Land Rover and headed for the fort and the oasis. An oasis, by the way, is a place where there's one well with a bucket that's an oasis. It was further than we thought, but we made it just before the heat forced us to stop. We were all aware of how close we had come to actually dying in the desert. Those Arabs knew what they were talking about. So we sat out the heat that day in a native hut near the fort. And then we went back that evening and towed the Volkswagen bus into the army post. We had done it. We were over the Sahara. We hadn't slept for two and a half days, but we had made it. Now I won't go into the details of what happened on the rest of our trip across Africa, except to say that we did finally get to Johannesburg two or three months later. I won't trouble you with how we had to cross two countries illegally with the police and the army on orders to shoot to kill if they saw us. And I won't go into how we were almost killed under the boots and rifle butts of a mob of soldiers in the Congo. That was another close one. And I won't talk here about the experience of meeting and working with Dr. Albert Schweitzer in his hospital village in Lambrini. No. I'll wrap up this story here by telling you what I learned about life and success in the Sahara crossing. Here are seven rules you can apply to any challenge that you face in achieving anything you desire. Rule number one. The most important key to achieving great success is to decide upon your goal and then launch. Get started. Take action. Do something. Move. A 12 year study at Babson College concluded that the act of taking the first step is what separates the losers from the winners or the winners from the losers. We set out at the age of 20 with $300 each to cross three continents and travel 17,000 miles from Vancouver to on the west coast to Johannesburg in southern Africa. And we made it in just under 12 months. But the most important step was the first one. All the rest followed from that. Number two. Once you've launched towards your goal, never consider the possibility of failure. The Germans have a saying, it's Immerfone nie Zurich. Immerfone nie Zurich. And it means always forward, never backward. Always forward, never backward. Never consider the possibility of failure. Every person here is here because they refused to Quit when the going got rough. Your ability to persist in the face of setbacks and disappointments is vital to all great achievement. And it's always a decision that you make. It's not the external environment, it's always the internal environment. Number three. The biggest goal in the world can be accomplished if you just take it one oil barrel at a time. Thomas Carlyle once wrote that our great business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. The only time you will ever have is now. If you live every day, every hour, the best you can. The rest will take care of itself. As the Bible says, sufficient unto the day are the cares thereof. Number four. Watch out for the naysayers. The negative people around you are always telling you that you'll die in the desert. Get around positive people get around winners like people in this room fly with the eagles and refuse to listen to objections and reasons why you can't succeed. Someone once said that if every possible objection must first be overcome, nothing will ever get done. And truer words were never spoken. Number five. Welcome obstacles and difficulties as valuable and inevitable steps on the ladder of success. Remember that difficulties come not too obstruct but to instruct. Difficulties come not too obstruction but to instruct. Our trip to Africa was one problem after another. We ran out of money. Over and over, we strained every muscle of our bodies trying to ride bicycles across France and Spain. Our Land Rover broke down again and again. We suffered from dysentery and heat stroke and exhaustion. But when it was time, we were ready for the Sahara crossing. In retrospect, we saw clearly that without the lessons that we had learned from our mistakes, we would have surely died in the desert. And when you look back on any achievement, you will find it was preceded by many difficulties and many lessons. They are the price that you pay for your success, and no success is possible without them. Number six. Be clear about your goal, but be flexible about the process of achieving it. Be willing to change, to try something new. Keep your mind open and fluid and flexible. Be willing to accept feedback from your environment and correct your course. This is a key quality of peak performers. They're not rigid, they're flexible. Remember, it's not what you have, but what you do with what you have that separates winners from losers. It's not what happens to you, but how you respond to what happens to you that counts. In the final analysis, your response to the adversity of life is the real measure of who you are and what you're Made of. The Greek philosopher Epictetus once said that circumstances do not make the man or woman, they merely reveal him to himself. When you find out who you really are, when you face adversity. And remember number seven, the last rule is nobody does it alone. At every step on our journey across Africa, people helped us with advice and with food and with assistance and with money, but especially with warmth and with kindness and with generosity. When life is over, it will be the people that we lived and laughed and loved with that we remember more than anything else. So don't be afraid to ask for help from others. It's a mark of strength and courage and character. And don't be reluctant to give of yourself to others generously. It's the mark of caring and compassion and personal greatness. The reason the Sahara story was so relevant for me was that because after the Sahara, I never felt that there was anything I couldn't do. I felt programmed for success, for life, although it took me many years to understand it. And the reason why this story may be of interest to you is. Is because I believe that everyone has a Sahara to cross. Perhaps more than one. Many of you are crossing your own Saharas right now. Everyone eventually goes through periods of great difficulty, their own private hells, their dark nights of the soul. But it is by facing whatever life gives us with courage and determination that we grow more surely toward the stars. Let me leave you with the last verse. Carry on. There are some who drift out in the deserts of doubt and some who in negativity wallow There are others I know who in piety go because of a heaven to follow but to labor with zest and to give of your best for the sweetness and joy of the giving to help folks along With a hand and a song why, there's the real sunshine of living Carry on, carry on Fight the good fight and true there's big work to do Believe in your mission Greet life with a cheer there's big work to do and that's why you're here Carry on, carry on Let the world be the better for you so at last when you die Let this be your cry Carry on my soul Carry on Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. If you will resolve with whatever life hands you to carry on, there is nothing that can stop you from achieving the greatness for which you were created. Thank you. Here. Be specific about the amount. Not just more money, but the exact amount by this particular day. This is accepted by your subconscious mind as a man.