Denis Waitley and Vishen Lakhiani discuss using evenings and weekends to build skills toward your passion without risking your day job. Waitley gave 500 unpaid speeches before getting paid. Both men practiced their real interests at night while keeping steady income, then transitioned when ready.
Questions this video answers
About 500 speeches.
$45.
Chapters
I loved personal growth even as a 14 year old. That's when I first started reading personal growth books. I love being on stage. In my case it was theater. Being in front of the camera right now is no different. So I'm actually doing what I'm doing now. But like many of you guys, I got diverted. I ended up studying computer engineering because I'm Indian. And if you grow up in an Indian family, you are either going to grow up to be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, or family embarrassment. And so I wanted to study drama and theater, but I ended up studying computer engineering, which I had no interest in because I felt I had to. And many of you guys may have been in that same sticky situation. How do we correct ourselves? Because I'm sure there's some risk and apprehension towards it.
Tremendous risk, you know. And your story is kind of like mine as well. War on, Korean War. Get drafted? No. Go to the Naval Academy. Of course, after the Naval Academy, the war still on, Become a pilot, Become a Navy pilot. Can you imagine a guy like me, who's a poet and a writer and a talker, talking to my airplane, trying to make it land? No, on a carrier in the middle of the night in the fog, with no homer on the carrier. My flight mates were frightened to death saying, oh my gosh, Whateley's leading the flight. All he wants to do is talk to the whales. This guy is a poet and he's flying a ten million dollar aircraft with a nuclear weapon underneath. So the worst possible career for me would have been to be a nuclear weapons delivery pilot. When I wanted to be a writer, author, talker, nice guy. So in order to change, I had to go back to my childhood and I had to begin doing at night and on weekends. When everyone else is watching television, everyone else is into sitcoms and into comedy. You see, what they're doing is escaping from the goals they didn't set and the careers they didn't want. And they're using television and other activities to make up for the mediocrity and the drudgery of life, right? So they're doing things that are tension relieving instead of passion achieving. Tension relieving is when you watch other people making money having fun. You watch them having fun, they're getting the ratings, they're having fun, they're making the money and we're watching because it's so easy to get lost in someone else's success. What I had to do is say, wait a minute, I'm wasting my life watching them Enjoy their lives. So that's why I decided to go back and at night speak and Zig Ziglar and I gave 500 speeches before we were paid. My first paid speech was $45. It was a women's club and they just wanted a speaker for the day. And then I spoke to the Kiwanhas and the Rotary and the Lions Club and hundreds and hundreds of speeches. When? At night and on weekends. Why? I have a job. I have to work. So what you do is you in your prime time, your free time, you live your passion because you don't just quit and chase your dream because that would be risky. You earn your money and you do things in prime time when everyone else is watching. And that was the biggest breakthrough for me is to start doing and sit there and stop viewing, stop viewing, start doing.
So question to you watching is what can you do in your prime time to help you steer back towards your passion? In my case, I was working in technology sales in New York, couldn't stand my job. And in my prime time, I taught myself web programming, built a website to sell meditation courses. And I got and I was teaching meditation classes in my primetime for very little money. But it's because I was obsessed with personal growth and I wanted to be in front of an audience teaching. So what is it that you could do in your prime time? I think that was the first key.
Absolutely. Hello, I'm Dennis Whateley. You know, for the past 40 years I've been training astronauts, Olympians, prisoners of war and top executives how to be a winner. I'm the author of the all time best selling audio program, the Psychology of Winning. If you like what you've seen so far and are ready to take it to the next level, then register for my new masterclass.
