The "Torn Sweater" Strategy: Why Humiliation is Often the Catalyst for Success

The world needs more successful people, needs more founders. It needs more high achievers, record breakers, million dollar earners. People will make a big impact. Have you ever felt worn out, like it's never going to happen to you? And the reason you're working hard and the results are not coming in? Keep your hope alive, because we all go through it. Let me just tell you why. I went through one of about the lowest and most important moments my entire career. Back in the summer, I think it was like 1979, I just moved up to North Carolina and my friend Rusty Cross and he was grinding away down in Atlanta. I don't think he relocated yet. But in 79, we're both grinding away, you know, we're both motivated, we both are high achievers, like to be at the top. And I'm in North Carolina, he's in Atlanta. We're both basically broke. We both had family and wives that didn't work outside the home. So we're still trying to figure the business out, life out, everything out. And so I just made a massive leap of faith. I was living on food stamps and unemployment. Scraped together enough money, literally by having a yard sale, to rent a moving truck and move out of Atlanta up to North Carolina. Started an expansion organization. Don't ask me what I was thinking. I was absolutely out of my mind to do that. But anyway, that's what you do when you're, you know, you're obsessed and you're starting. So no salary, no. No guarantees, just commission, no savings. But, you know, I had a belief that I could do it. I've been training for four years and I was surrounded by people who are having success, I'd had success. And so go, go, go. So six months later, reality hit me straight in the mouth and I woke up and realized, what have I done? But at that point it was like, well, it's too late now. Keep on going. So even though I recruited eight people, my premium was only about $1,800, which amounts to about $1,000 in commission, less than 1,000 in August of that year. I had office rent, house rent, a wife and two little boys to feed, plus myself. And, and that was my reward for putting myself in this life. So you could say, you know, you're going to debtors prison or some kind of thing like that, you know, if they still had that. So we had leader sheets that came out every month. The company sent out leader sheets, reports, and that's how we were unified. And mainly we were in the Southeast at that time. And so they Would put little comments, little this, that, the other, about how people were doing and, and I got a special recognition that month. I was awarded company wide turkey of the Month. That was the sympathetic treatment, you know, that, you know, at some point you need, you need that kind of encouragement. Like, yeah, we know it's tough. Figure it out. You put yourself down there, you gotta find an answer. It doesn't matter if it's hard. Figure it out. And so I wasn't figuring it out too good. They wanted me to pick out the pace. Art Williams gave me Turkey of the Month. Now, you can't call people turkey of the month if you don't have special relationships with them and if they don't know that you really care about them and you know, would do just about anything to help them. But in those kind of situations, you can gig people, you know, you don't do it with people that you don't know well and all. But, you know, I knew Art real well. I knew where his heart was. Art. Angela. But Turkey of the Month still stung me to the bone. But so what, what could I do about it? By the way, I was already, by the time that came in, it was already two weeks into the, the next month. And, you know, we had some positive things happen. So I didn't let it bother me too much. I did know the whole. I was in the spotlight, right out in the open, and it wasn't a trophy, it was a punch in the gut. And now we had a convention shortly after that, the following September, we had a convention as a company. And Rusty, my buddy Rusty that I mentioned earlier, he got his kick in the mouth, kick in the cut. We passed out all kind of awards and recognition and we were a big company on giving T shirts with different sayings on them and addition to plaques and whatever. But Rusty got the now infamous Torn Sweater Award. He thought he's going to get some kind of big recognition, you know, toughness award or something. No, he got the Torn Sweater Award. And he told me later that was the most humiliating day of my career. And that's the day my motivation got triggered. And it did, because the next next year, Rusty's team won MVP of the entire company. And here's what, you know, here's what we eventually realized in basically 18 months after I got the Turkey of the month, you know, because I didn't crawl into a corner and I was rebuilding and I felt good things were going to happen. They did happen, you know, I wasn't an idiot. You know, I had a lot of experience, but it just wasn't happening yet. And so we kept on going. And within 18 months, by April of 81, just, you know, short time later, my, my team, my training center was number one in the company. We were doing 140,000amonth, ranked number one in the nation. I think my income went over about, I don't know, you know, $40,000 a month or something like that. And so, you know, it was. Answers were on the way and you know, it was probably 50,000amonth now that I think about it. And I do know that my income continued to compound for like the next 18 years uninterrupted. Off of the torn sweater award. So that's what happened to me. Off the torn, I mean off of my turkey of the month. And Rusty, off of the torn sweater award went on to become MVP of the company. And so what looked like humiliation was actually a master level leadership psychology move. And Art Williams came out of coaching. He came out of a long line of coaches and where, you know, you've got to motivate your football team, you got to get them in shape, you got to have a game plan and you've got to have strategy and all that, but you gotta, ultimately you gotta be able to motivate your people to perform once they get in the field. And so Art Williams knew how to do that. He didn't conless, he challenged us. He provoked greatness on purpose. And so he didn't give me a trophy back then. He just gave me the recognition and eventually he gave me. I had my own time to be MVP for the company too. I think I was in the year after Rusty, but so it worked. And so, you know, it's one thing to teach people, train people, but when a part of motivation is sometimes you just gotta be a little tough love. And so the moral of the story is, whenever you're lowest, you know, be grateful if you're around a leader like that, you know, that, you know, cares about you, but okay, but it's not going to, you know, sit and let you whine and make, you know, feel sorry for yourself. You know, when you, they start to see any sign that may be starting to happen when you're down, they're going to kick you in the butt and get you going because they know you got greatness inside of you. And so sometimes your lowest moment is the one that flips the switch. And you got to feel pain before you can appreciate gain. And that's why you hear so many high achievers talk about having gratitude Journals and gratitude. Gratitude, gratitude. Writing down at the end of the day the things they're thankful for, not waiting for once a year on Thanksgiving. They're always practicing gratitude because they felt the pain. They know how hard it is to make something great happen. And you know, so the embarrassment, the failure, the gut punch, gut punch. If you let that pain can become fuel and the ups and downs and you're going to need fuel to do what you need to do and to dig down deeper. And that's what really changes you. That's how you change your DNA to be becoming a winner. How you think, how you react. All that because you've been through the furnace. The furnace will melt iron and you can form it into all kind of other things once it gets melted down. Sometimes we need the fire to melt us to make the changes, the deep changes. But you know, he form is, is priceless once as that DNA gets formed in you because you could go from that and have unlimited success the rest of your life. So the ups, the downs, the rebounds, that's the real path to success. And if stories like this light a fire underneath you, underneath you. Come hang with us inside Big hitters join big hitters dot com. It's where hungry people come to rise. We start off every week. We know that, you know, greatness comes step by step and that's why we have, you know, the format that's worked for me my entire life. And we've, I've got, I'll say dozens, I won't say over a hundred but you know, probably is, but there are dozens and dozens and dozens all over North America and Canada that million dollar earners that have come from plugging in to my Monday morning locker room calls where we focus on the thinking of million dollar earners, high performers and let people pick up the bits and pieces that they need for that week. Because one idea on a Monday can get you off to the races. You can hit the ground running. We've also called that the hitting the ground running call. But it's really a locker room. It's like even if you're in the super bowl, you never go play the super bowl without a locker room talk with a coach, it doesn't matter. Any game before the players go out of the field, the coach is going to get everybody on the same team. There are same game plan. They're going to like, okay, look at me, here's what's on the line, here's what's going to happen today. Forget about everything else, think about the next 60 minutes. And that's what we do on Monday morning. We focus in on what is at stake. This could be the greatest week of your life. This could be the week you look back to for the rest of your career and say, this is where it changed this week. I got this idea and you know, we used to say in financial services where we were in the race for outlets like it's recruiting and you know, you're one recruit away from an explosion, but in all life you're one idea away from an explosion. And so that's like unlocks the key that's got you bound up and locked in your own mental prison on one issue or another. You get that idea, that's a key, you get out and the sky's the limit on where you can go. So that's how we kick off the week. It's a proven system. You don't get, you know, it's a proven system for permanent change, personal, permanent development. You don't get that by going to a one time event. As good as they could be and as good as the people are that are put them on it. As good as the intent is the, you know, the leaders, their intent, your intent there. But you know, it just permanent like going to the core inside the bone of you, you know, your, your DNA doesn't change in one event, no matter how many one events you go to. Because I've been, I spent decades putting those things on. And you know, it's the people who put those things on and speak are the ones who get the biggest benefit. And I was right in the middle of it. But you know, that's not where the change came. The change came from being in the trenches week after week after week and applying. See the great, you know, you need the fundamentals, you need to be taught the fundamentals. But it's a matter of what you do with the fundamentals. And if you get four, it's like the nutrition you eat at a meal, you got to give your stomach. You can't keep eating, eating, eating because then you bloat and you'll throw it up or you have to go to the hospital and get your stomach pumped. What happens is you get a normal amount of nutrition, let your body process it, go out there, do what you need to do, get your activity and everything and then you go get, get another load. That's, that's, that's the way you grow your body and that's the way you grow your mind. One step at a time, one idea, one change of the time. You're probably not where you want to be right now because, you know, I'll tell you, you're not good enough. You know, if you weren't good enough, you'd be doing it. And you're not good enough because you don't know enough. You don't know what to do. You know, you're a hard worker, you're willing, you got the want to. But, you know, there's a mystery about, you know, what the next steps are, you know, unlocking the key. And so, you know, we're in. We've got a combination lock. We're determined to get in there, but we don't know the combination. If you don't know the combination, you're going to be frustrated. And you know, in life we don't always have the ability to just blow up the lock. We've got to figure it out or get somebody who does know the combination to tell us. Then we know it the rest of our lives. And so those are the kind of keys we get on Monday mornings at our Monday morning locker room talk. Because the people who have the keys are the people who've had the success and nobody knows it all. And that's why we have a variety of people and you want to have a variety of exposure over a long period of time. So that's why this approach, I know works. That's why I've got the community and otherwise I do a big event three or four times a year like so many people do, and be done with it. They'll be able to take off the rest of time. But that doesn't produce change. We all know people who've gone to these one, two, three day events and they come back and exact, they're the exact same kind of person. Not because the event was bad or they're bad. It's just that the format does not allow them, the situation to apply those pieces of information. They got one step at a time, digest it, work it into their, their schedule, their planning, their thinking and their experience. And so you could do that when you're getting, you know, the drip, drip, drip every week. So that's how why the locker room works. That's why every coach, every team and every sport will have locker room talks before they go play the games. And the games are where you compete and find out how good you are. And you know, you think you're good, think you've got this, you play the other team, you find out, but you're not going to go out there if you play half as good as you, you know, you need to. You need to play up to your best potential. And that's going to happen because the coach get you in there, wind you up, get you to lock in on giving this your best performance. And then you go out there and then you find out how good you are, what you need to learn, what you need to improve on, and then you go back into practice the next week and improve and then go out and try it again the next week. So that's the process that works in personal development. I don't hear anybody talking about that but me. Okay, so. And I talk about it because I know it works. I kind of stumbled into it over the years, but I know it works. And that's why we do things the way we do it. And I'm looking forward. You know, the world needs more successful people, needs more founders. It needs more high achievers, record breakers, million dollar earners. People will make a big impact because they're the ones who can make the world better for everybody else because they've done so well themselves. So that can be you. Come join us. Get in the game. We're building a team of winners at. Join Big Hitters.com. if you don't join, I can't help you. All right. Join big hitters dot com. See you there.