Books : Simple Steps to Impossible Dreams : Excerpts

CHAPTER 2

If My Dreams Came True, Anyone's Can!

How could a corporate failure become a multimillionaire? How could a high school student with no money for flying lessons become a licensed pilot without spending a penny? How could a nonmusician create successful music groups and even direct a symphony? And how could an ignorant, insensitive husband achieve a loving and fulfilling marriage?

Now, maybe these statements sound a little far out, or even impossible. And yet, these "impossible" dreams all came true as a result of utilizing the art of Dream Conversion. My high school dream of getting my pilot's license came true even though I had no money for flying lessons. At the time, flying lessons cost $40 an hour, and I didn't have a dime in savings. And yet the Dream Conversion skills enabled me to receive those lessons and achieve a private pilot's license without spending a single penny.

My college dream of creating two successful music groups came true, even though I knew nothing about music. My dream of directing the "William Tell Overture" with a great symphony came true in the summer of 1994, even though I still knew nothing about music. My dreams of succeeding in business and making millions of dollars came true, even though I failed at nine jobs in my first six years after college. And most important, my dream of a loving and fulfilling marriage came true, even though I used to be an insensitive husband who was totally ignorant when it came to knowing how to meet the deepest emotional needs of my wife.

"Yeah, but that's you, not me...we're a lot different" might by your first reply. Well, we are different, but you are most likely in a better position to make your dreams come true than the position I was in a few years ago. Chances are pretty good that you think people who achieve their "impossible dreams" are in a different league from you. That's simply not true. I have known and worked with billionaires, Academy Award-winning actors and actresses, and superachievers from all walks of life and I can tell you: they don't have higher IQs; they have not been better educated; and they do not have better backgrounds than you. They simply learned and utilized some specific techniques that enabled them to "dream big," and then to achieve those dreams. Instead of just being "dreamers" they became "dream-makers." Everyone in life is a dreamer, a dream-maker, or a dream-breaker. If I had to guess, I'd say 30 percent of American adults are dreamers, 69.9 percent are dream-breakers, and only one-tenth of one percent are dream-makers. Which category do you want to be in? I've been in all three, and I can tell you with all certainty that being a Dream-Maker is infinitely more rewarding.

My goal for this book is twofold: number one, to prove to you that you can become a dream-maker, achieve your dreams, and help others to achieve theirs; and number two, to equip you with all the specific skills and techniques you need to become a dream-maker.

But first I must prove to you that you can achieve your highest dreams, because if you do not truly believe you can, you won't take the time to learn and practice the very skills and techniques critical to achieving your dreams.

The Night My Whole Life Changed

At forty minutes past midnight on December 22, 1971, my life was instantly changed. At that moment I felt a kind of love I had never felt before; not simply more of the love I had felt for my wife or my parents, but a completely different kind of love. You see, at that precise moment I looked into the beautiful blue eyes of my first child, a brand-new baby girl, As I looked into those eyes, and they looked back at me, I was overcome by a wave of love unlike any I had ever felt before, I wanted to tell my little girl how much Daddy loved her. I wanted to tell her that I would always take care of her, that whatever she needed, Daddy would provide.

But as I began my three-hour drive home from the hospital that night, reality began to set in. How could I even begin to think that I could meet any of my daughter's material needs. I had only been out of college for a little over a year and I was already on my third job. In fact, I had lost my second only four days before my daughter's birth. At the time, my income was less than half the national average. As a college graduate with a degree in marketing, I was failing miserably in my chosen field.

About nine months later I was driving to work from the tiny apartment where we lived. As I passed a neighborhood of small homes and saw the backyards with their swing sets and sandboxes, I felt a lump in my throat and tears began to well up in my eyes. I realized that my little girl would never have her own backyard. She would never play on her own swing set. I was sure she would be spending the rest of her life growing up in apartment courtyards because no matter how hard I worked, I simply could not "get ahead." The bills were always bigger than the paychecks, and it seemed as if I couldn't hold a job for more than a few months.

I walked into my office that morning more discouraged than ever. Unfortunately, things only got worse as the day wore on. After lunch my boss called me into his office. He was the senior vice president and the number-two man in the company. He had a beautiful office, and because he was head of marketing, I had tremendous respect for him.

As I entered his office, he looked at me very gravely and I knew I was in trouble. "Steve, you are the single greatest disappointment in my entire career," he said. "You will never succeed in marketing and I've decided to let you go. You have twenty minutes to clean out your desk."

As I walked back to my desk I saw that everyone around was pretending not to notice me. My boss had told the entire department that he was going to fire me after lunch. As I cleaned out my desk, I began to cry. Everyone was sneaking peeks but saying nothing. The last item on my desk was the one that hit me the hardest. It was the picture of my precious little newborn with those great big blue eyes wide open and looking up at me. Daddy had failed again, failed his company, failed himself, and failed his little girl.

Little did I know that I had six more jobs to lose in the next four years. I was mastering the art of failing, an art no one likes to dabble in, much less master. Every failure I went through was gut-wrenching, though I later discovered that my dismal failures would become the very foundation for my ultimate success. As you'll see, my story didn't always remain discouraging. In 1996, Simon and Schuster published my first book, A Millionaire's Notebook, and they would not have selected that title had my daughter spent her whole life playing in apartment courtyards.

But it's the subtitle of that book, How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Success, that truly defines what the book was all about. This subtitle confronts one of the most commonly held, achievement-crippling misconceptions in our society today, that people who achieve extraordinary success are in a completely different "league" or "class" from the rest of us! That simply isn't true. In fact, many have risen from far worse circumstances and backgrounds than you have likely experienced. Let me give you three examples.

A Man Named Gene

Gene Orowitz was raised in Collingswood, New Jersey. Because he was a bedwetter into his adolescence, his mother regularly humiliated him by hanging his wet sheets out of his bedroom window for all his friends to see. She told him he would never amount to anything, and his failure in high school seemed to bear her words out -- he graduated 299th out of a class of 301. He later told me that the two students who graduated lower than he could barely read and write.

Things didn't get much better for Gene after high school. Because he excelled in track, he was awarded a track scholarship to the University of Southern California, but he lost that scholarship during his freshman year because of a disappointing track season. He had no money to return home, and he ended up sleeping on park benches in Santa Monica, California. His first job was selling blankets door-to-door. And yet, in terms of success rate, Gene went on to become the most successful television writer, director, and producer in television history. I say that because his success batting average was 1,000. In other words, 100 percent of the shows he created were successful. To my knowledge, no other producer in Hollywood history can claim that high a success rate. I knew him as one of the truest and most wonderful friends a man could ever have; you knew him as Michael Landon.

Two Stevens

As part of my high school's color guard, I had the privilege of raising the American flag at every home football game. The reward for this duty was a free ticket to each game and a reserved seat with the school's marching band. At many of the games I sat next to a clarinetist who was a lot like me. I didn't know his last name, but his first name was Steven, too. He was skinny, shy, and totally unknown to me and to most of the other students at our high school.

Now, back in the sixties, the last place you really wanted to be at a football game was in the band or the color guard. But with both of us weighing around 120 pounds, the other Steven and I had no chance of making the football team. (Even if we had weighed more, our lack of athletic prowess would have kept us from making any of the sports teams.) Like me, the other Steven never dated anyone from our high school, and neither of us was a great student. In fact, he was a C-minus student in a good semester. This other Steven was totally unknown to most of the students and teachers at my high school; you, however, know him because his name has appeared on five of the top ten grossing films of all time. In fact, who in America, or the world for that matter, doesn't know the name Steven Spielberg?

Twenty years after I graduated, my mother phoned me one day and told me that Steven Spielberg was a classmate of mine at Arcadia High School. I told her that was impossible; I knew nearly everyone at Arcadia, and there was no way I wouldn't have known Steven Spielberg. Mom told me to get out my high school annual and look up his name. Sure enough, his name was in the index. When I finally reached the page with his picture, I was shocked. It was the same Steven I had sat next to at nearly every football game. When we ran into each other a few months later, I said, "Steven, if only I had known," and he replied, "Steven, if only I had known!"

As for me, I graduated from high school slightly above the middle of my class. In high school, I excelled in nothing "significant." In the first six years after graduating from college in 1970, I flunked out of nine jobs. My income between my second and eighth job rose from only $1,000 per month to $1,100 per month. This was less than half the average income per married household in America. My average length of employment was six months per job. Put it all together and I wasn't even "ordinary," I was "subordinary"!

However, on my tenth job, which has lasted twenty years, I have sold over $1 billion worth of goods, and along with my six partners, I have created numerous multimillion-dollar companies from scratch, creating more than forty millionaires. After I lost my eighth job there was no way you could have convinced me that on my tenth job I would one day earn as much as $500,000 per month. And yet it happened.

So What Happened?

What took Eugene Orowitz from failure in high school and turned him into Michael Landon? What took Steven Spielberg from unknown, below-average student and turned him into one of Hollywood's all-time greatest directors? And what took Steve Scott from corporate and financial failure and turned him into a successful business builder and multimillionaire? Or, to put it another way: What enabled these three "underachievers" to become achievers beyond their wildest dreams?

The answer is fairly simple. We all learned some critical strategies, skills, and techniques that enabled us to begin to dream bigger than we had ever imagined, and convert our dreams into reality. As I've come to know many other men and women who have achieved incredible dreams, I've discovered that like Steven, Michael, and me, they've all employed many of the same strategies and skills that we have. Strategies and skills that are learnable and can be used by anyone.

More Than Business Success and Money

These dream-achieving strategies and techniques can be applied to any important area of life. They can enable you to capture your dreams in your relationships, in your hobbies and passions, as well as in your careers, businesses, and personal finances. I have used them to reach my dreams in my relationship with my wife, my relationships with my six children, and my relationships with my friends. I have used them to achieve my dreams in my writing and television directing, my marketing, and in every facet of my business and financial life. I continue to use them every single day.

So why did I bother to tell you the stories of Michael Landon and the two Stevens? To prove to you that ordinary people can achieve their highest dreams. Remember, in many ways, we were way "below average." Right now, you've probably got a much better start on achieving your dreams than Michael Landon, Steven Spielberg, and Steven Scott had on achieving theirs.

"Wait," you say, "that may be true for you three, but that's certainly not true of others." Au contraire! As Zig Ziglar points out in his studies of over three hundred historic and contemporary world-renowned men and women, more than 75 percent rose to the heights of human achievement from the depths of disheartening and discouraging circumstances and backgrounds. Almost none rose from an advantageous background or set of circumstances. Thomas Edison had only three months of formal education. By the time he was twelve, he was working full-time on the railroad. He never had a class in calculus or physics, and yet we all enjoy electric lights, movies, and recorded sound because he learned the art of Dream Conversion. Bill Lear dropped out of school in sixth grade, and yet he gave us car radios when high school physics books said "small radios were physically impossible." He also gave us the first airplane "autopilot" and the first business jet, even though the greatest aircraft companies of his time said such advances were impossible because of economic constraints. Oprah Winfrey not only had poverty going against her, she was the "wrong color" in a region of the country where the wrong color created almost impossible odds for any achievement. We could fill volumes with the names of men and women who, through the ages, have achieved their dreams despite their backgrounds and circumstances.

So no matter how you rate yourself, your talents, and your abilities, starting right now, you can begin to embark on a pathway that will lead you into the extraordinary -- extraordinary relationships and extraordinary accomplishments, both personal and professional. Whether your dream is to lose fifty pounds, to have the most fulfilling marriage you know of, or to enjoy a rewarding career and income far beyond your wildest imagination, you can have it all by learning and utilizing the art of Dream Conversion.

A Few People Who Brought Me Their "Impossible" Dreams

* A struggling makeup artist who dreamed of creating her own line of cosmetics.
* A marriage counselor who dreamed of helping millions of marriages instead of only hundreds.
* A college instructor who dreamed of teaching students of all ages how to learn more effectively.
* A hair stylist who dreamed of seeing her hair care products in stores all over America.
* A weight-loss expert who dreamed of helping discouraged overweight people lose their excess weight and regain their health and self-esteem.

These are a few of the people who brought me their dreams but had little or no hope of seeing them come true. And yet, by using the art of Dream Conversion, my partners and I were able to make all of their dreams come true, almost overnight, Makeup artist Victoria Jackson was able to create a cosmetic line with over a hundred products, one million customers, and over $300 million in sales. Marriage counselor Gary Smalley was able to write two best-selling books and create the best-selling video series ever distributed, helping millions of couples achieve their dreams of a more fulfilling relationship.

Dr. Claude Olney saw his little learning seminar turned into a video series, "Where There's a Will There's an 'A,'" that enabled millions of grade school, high school, and college students to learn far more effectively than they had ever imagined possible. Hair stylist Lori Davis saw her hair care products, which she had only been able to sell in her salon, transformed into a hair care line represented by Cher. It is now sold in nearly every retail drug, grocery, and discount store in America. And Richard Simmons saw his "Deal-a-Meal" dream turned into a reality and has helped millions of men and women to lose weight and regain their fitness. And these are just a few of the men and women I have worked with, using the art of Dream Conversion to turn their impossible dreams into tangible realities.

Yes, dreams do come true if you know how to make them come true!

I love Zig Ziglar. He is not only a great motivator and teacher, he is a great person. He has made a dramatic difference in my life, and I quote him from time to time throughout this book. In his seminars, Zig leads his audience through a very simple, yet liberating and empowering exercise. I would like to do the same thing with you right now by asking you three questions.

1. Do you believe that there is something you could specifically do in the next two weeks that would make your personal life, your family life, or your business life worse? __Yes__No
2. Do you believe that there is something you could specifically do in the next two weeks that would make your personal life, your family life, or your business life better? __Yes__No
3. Do you believe that every choice has an end result? __Yes __No

If you answered yes to all three questions, you got a perfect score. More important, here's what you've agreed to. You just said: "I don't care how good or bad my past has been. I don't care how difficult my circumstances are at this precise moment, There's something I can do right now that will make my future either better or worse...and the choice is mine!"

Yes, the choice truly is yours! If you choose to learn the principles, techniques, and strategies that make up the art of Dream Conversion, and begin to incorporate them into your daily routine, you will begin to achieve your dreams like never before.