Mike Litman's Interview with Jim Rohn (America's Foremost Business Philosopher, Bestselling Author, Motivational Speaker and Trainer)
(Introduction)
Over the last 38 years, spanning
almost four decades, this
individual has influenced people
that have trained a whole
class of personal development
students. People like Mark
Victor Hansen, Anthony Robbins,
and more.
He’s the author of dozens of
books and Audio Programs
on success, on living a life that
is your potential, and
realizing your dreams.
We, I will bring to you shortly,
the one, the only, Jim Rohn.
One of America’s foremost
Business Philosopher, Author and Motivational Speaker.
Jim, is going to shall with you how
you can live a
life of success in business,
career and in family etc.,. He is the mentor for millions of people worldwide? He’s
influenced over 4 million people worldwide in his career.
Mike:
Jim Rohn, my dime, your dance floor.
Welcome
to The Mike Litman Show.
Jim: Hey, thanks Mike.
I’m happy to be here.
Mike:
Great. I know myself and everyone is very excited for
you
to share some wisdom tonight and talk about the concept
of
success and about the principles for achieving it in our
next
57 minutes together.I’d like to start out by defining the word.
What
is being a success? What does success mean to Jim Rohn?
Jim: W ell, I think the
ultimate success, which I teach
in my seminar, is living a good life. Part
of it is income. Part of it’s financial
independence Part of it is objectives
that you achieve, dreams coming true, family, children,
grandchildren, good friends,
productivity. It’s a wide range.
It’s all encompassing, the word
“success”. It’s not just your job, your income, your fortune.
Not just your paycheck or your bank
account. But everything. From all of your achievements during your life to
trying your best to design a way to make it all give you a good life.
Mike; So, we’re to talk
about design.We’ll get to ambition. We’re talking about goals. We’re talking
about planning.You talk about something in your book. You mention that success
doesn’t need to be pursued. It needs to be attracted. What do you mean by that?
Jim : That’s true. I was
taught, starting at age 25. when I met a mentor of mine by the name of Mr.
Schoff. He taught me that success is something you attract by the person you
become.
You’ve got to develop the skills. He
talked about personal development: become a good communicator, learn to use
your own language. He talked about the management of time.
But primarily developing yourself,
your attitude, your personality, developing your own character, your reputation.
Then developing the skills; from sales skills to recruiting skills, to management
skills, leadership skills, how to work with a variety of people. You know, the
full list.
He taught me to work on myself,
because I used to work on my job.
He said, “if you work on yourself, you
can make a fortune.”That turned out to be true for me.
He turned it all around and said,
“success is not something you run after, like a better job.” Although that is
to be desired. You’ve just got to ask yourself, “am I qualified for
doubling, tripling, multiplying my
income by three, four, five?’
If I look at myself and say, “No, not
really.” Then I need to ask myself, “Who could I find? Where can I go that
could pay me three, four, five times as much money?” Then, you have to say, “at
the present there probably isn’t anyone. I can’t just fall into a lucky deal.”
But, if
I went to work on myself immediately. Work on my attitude, personality,
language, and skills. Then that begins the process of attracting the good job,
the good people, and building a business or creating a career that could turn
out to make you financially independent, perhaps wealthy.
Mike; Jim, so really
what we are talking about is a change of mindset. Of changing our thinking and
getting in tune with the universe. Talk about something that you mentioned.
Changing
your language. Describe what that
means.
Jim: There is the
language that can fit. You can use careless language around home
and around the community. But, if you
want to start stepping up, then you’ve
got to learn the language. The
corporate language. You’ve got to learn the sales language.
Then you’ve got to be careful not to
be careless with your language in the marketplace. It can cost you too much. You
know, a guy that is inclined to tell dirty stories, inclined to use a bit too
much profanity. It might be okay in the inner circle and at the bar
or whatever. But when you start to move into
the
world of business and finance where you want
to be
successful, earn a better paycheck, move up
the
scale, you just have to be careful. So, one
of the
major things is your language.
Not just that, but learning the
language of success. Learning how to treat people with respect.
Giving people inspiration when they
need it, correction when they need it. The same thing as learning to work with
your children. Language opens the door for fortune. It opens the door for help.
It opens the door for better living. It opens the door for a good marriage. It
opens the
door for a stable friendship. A big
part of it starts with our thinking, our attitude, and then a major part of it
is the language we use.
Mike: Okay,
something that we are sharing tonight with people worldwide now, is we are
talking about an inner change, then the outer result. So many times people are
trying to change the outer, without changing the inner. Is that what we are
talking about?
Jim: Yeah, that’s true. The
big part of it, of course, is to start with philosophy. Making mistakes in
judgements can just cost you so much in the marketplace, at home, with your family,
whatever it is. Errors in judgement can really do us in. It can leave us with
less of a life than we
could’ve had. We’ve got to learn to
correct those errors whether they are errors in philosophy or something else.
My mentor asked once why I wasn’t
doing well. I showed him my paycheck and I said, “This is all the company pays.”
He said, “well, that’s really not true. With that philosophy, you’ll never
grow.” I said, “No, no, this is my paycheck. This is all the company
pays.” So, he said, “No, no, Mr. Rohn. This is all that the company pays you.”I
thought, ‘wow, I’d never thought about that.’
He said, “doesn’t the company pay some
people two, three, four five times this amount?” I said, “well yes.” He said,
“then this is not all that the company pays. This is all that the company pays
you.”For your income to multiply by three, four, five, you can’t say to the
company, “I need more money.”You’ve just got to say to yourself, ‘I need a
correction in my philosophy. I can’t blame circumstance. I can’t blame taxes. I
can’t say it’s too far, too hot, too cold. I’ve got to come to grips with
myself.’ That is really where it all begins. It’s corrections of errors in judgments
and in your own philosophy.
Mike: We’re talking
about philosophy. Is it really like ironing down a purpose? You’re talking
about the word “philosophy” to someone listening right now and they’re trying
to put it into actual practice. Someone right now that’s in a rut, lost, how do
you go about the process of putting together a philosophy that excites you and
that benefits others?
Jim: You start with the
easy stuff. Ask most people, “what is your current philosophy for financial
independence that you’re now working on?, and usually the person says,
“Gosh, I never thought about that.” Unless
you have an excellent financial philosophy that gives you guidance to correct
errors, accept some new disciplines, and make some changes, you can forget
being financially independent. Ask yourself, “What is your philosophy on good
health?” Is it to cross your fingers
and sort of let it go and if something goes wrong then you fix it? The answer
is, no. You should try to learn up front. Ask yourself, “what is your
cholesterol count?” The average guy’s philosophy is, ‘I don’t know and I don’t
care. If something goes wrong, I will try to fix it.’ But, by then usually it’s
too late. Now it’ll cost you a fortune. It costs you time. Maybe even it costs
you your life. If someone can help you with errors in judgment, or help you correct
your financial philosophy, your spiritual philosophy, your philosophy on a good
relationship, that’s where it all begins. We go the direction we face, and we face the direction we think.
It’s the things we think about and
ponder. What are your values? What’s good? What’s not so good? What’s the
better way? What’s the best way? Unless we do some constructive thinking on
that, we usually take the easier way. Easy causes drift, and drift causes us to
arrive at
a poor destination a year or five
years from now.
Mike: So, we’re
talking about increasing our self-awareness. We’re talking about philosophy. I
want to transition to a concept of planning, but before I do, Jim, let’s talk
about something you have been talking about for decades. You give people
options and you give people a choice.
You say, “You can either be in
somebody else’s plan or playing in your own life.” Can you talk about that?
Jim: That’s true. Some people sort of resign to letting somebody
else create the productivity, create the business, create the job, and it seems
to be easier for them to punch the clock and let everyone else have the
responsibility. Then they go home and try to make the best of it.
But, I think it is also good to start
pondering and thinking, ‘how could I take charge of my own life? Or how can I
qualify for a better position where I am. Or how I might create my own
business, start something, developing from my personal productivity.’
If we just sit back and not take
responsibility, that is what happens. Then we fit into someone else’s plans,
rather than designing plans of our own. If you don’t have plans of your own to
fill that vacuum, you’re probably going to fit into someone else’s plan.
Mike: Jim, what if
you don’t know what the plan is? What happens to someone when they’re at a job
right now, 9 to 5, working the clock, they don’t know what they’re passionate
about, they don’t know where to go, where do they start?
Jim: You don’t have to
operate from passion to begin with. You operate from necessity.
My friend, Bill Bailey, said when he
got out of high school he went to Chicago from Kentucky and the first job he
could find was night janitor. Someone asked him, “how come you settled for
a job as night janitor?” He said,
“malnutrition.” So, the first passion is to survive. To somehow
make it. Then start to build from
there with something that you could find to do even if it is distasteful.
You don’t have to love what you do. Just love
the chance or the opportunity to begin the process. Because where you begin is
not where you have to end a year from now, five years from now, ten years from
now. You just begin, first of all, to correct errors.
Find something, anything, it doesn’t
matter what. America is such an incredible country especially. The ladder of
success is available for everybody. If you have to start at the bottom and make
your way to the top, who cares? As long as they let you
on the ladder. Then, if you study, and grow, and
learn, and take classes, and read books, burn a little midnight oil, start
investing some of your own ambition, I’m telling
you, the changes can be absolutely dramatic. That
is what happened for me starting age 25.
Mike: At age 25, in a six-year period,
you went from being broke to becoming a millionaire. Obviously, you put this
stuff into practice. You started your own, I’ll use the words, “mental make
over”, changing your thoughts, changing your attitude. It seems to me, and this
is personal for me, Jim, this quote of yours influences me tremendously even
today, “discipline versus regret.” Talk about the importance of that. Talk
about how to live a disciplined life and stay disciplined so you can get what you
want.
Jim: It is true. We suffer one of two things; either the pain
of discipline or the pain of regret. You’ve
got to choose discipline, versus regret, because discipline weighs ounces and
regret weighs tons.
Mike: Say that again.
Jim: Discipline weighs
ounces and regret weighs tons. The reason is because the regret is an
accumulated affect a year from now,
two years from now. When you didn’t do the easy discipline. It’s like having a
cavity in your tooth. The dentist says, “if we fix it now it’s only $300, and
if you let it go someday it’s going to be $3,000.“So, the easier pain of the
$300 and sitting in the chair for just a little while takes care of it. But, if
you let it go that’s no good. You know, the dentist says, “this cavity is not going
to get better by itself. This is something you have got to take care. You can’t
cross your fingers and hope it’s going to go away. That’s not going to
help.“ Whatever you see that needs to
be corrected, you start taking care of it.
If you don’t have a splendid diet,
you’ve got to be incredibly thoughtful about how to change that. If your kids
don’t have a splendid diet, you’ve got to say, “hey, maybe I should give some
attention to my kids and their diet.” Nutrition affects behavior I was taught
at age 25.
Nutrition affects learning. Nutrition affects
performance. Nutrition affects vitality. Nutrition
affects decision making. Nutrition
affects longevity. My mother studied and practiced good nutrition and talked to
me about it, an only child, and my father too, who lived to be 93.
The doctor told me that my mother
extended her life at least 20 years by paying attention to nutrition and
practicing the art.
The benefits are so incredible by
taking a look at a few simple disciplines. You know, if mom said, ‘an apple a
day’, and the guy says, ‘well, no. I’m not into the apple a day, I’ve
got my fingers crossed and I think
everything is going to be okay.’, you’ve just got to say, ‘this is a foolish
person.’ It doesn’t matter what it is. You don’t have to take giant steps at
first.
To have an incredible increase in
self-esteem, all you have to do is start doing some little something. Whether
it is to benefit your health, benefit your marriage, or to benefit your
business, or your career. You can eat the first apple of the new apple a day
philosophy along with some other things you have decided to do. You could say
one of these days I will never be healed again. I’m going to have all the breath
I need. I’m going to have all the vitality I
need. I’m munching on the first apple.
You don’t have to revolutionize all at once. Just
start. But, the first apple you eat,
if it’s a plan to better health, I’m telling you, by the end of that first day your
self-esteem starts to grow. Say to yourself, ‘I promise myself I’ll never be
the
same again.’
It doesn’t take a revolution. You
don’t have to do spectacularly dramatic things for self-esteem to start going
off the scale. Just make a commitment to any easy discipline. Then another one
and another one. It doesn’t take but just a collection of those new easy
disciplines to start giving you the idea that you’re going to change every part
of your life: financial, spiritual, social. A year from now, you’ll be almost
unrecognizable as the mediocre person you may have been up until
now. All of that can change. It
doesn’t change overnight. But, it does change with a change in thought and
philosophy. Pick up a new discipline and start it immediately.
Mike : When you
bring up action, like Jack Canfield on the show awhile ago talking about the
universe rewards action, we talked about the concept of doing it personally. We
can both concur on this, amazing things happen. Those little baby steps create
momentum. They create energy, force, and they create something that I want to
steer back to. You talk a lot about ambition, the fuel of achievement. You talk
about being ambitious. I personally saw my life revolutionized when I found something
that I enjoyed and made it a necessity to be ambitious about it.
Talk about the power of ambition.
How do we build a life where we become ambitious?
Jim: Sometimes ambition
just lingers below the surface. All of the possibilities for ambition are
there. But, if you live an undisciplined life drifting on health, drifting on
relationships, drifting on
developing a better career, if you’re
drifting, it doesn’t taste good at the end of the day. But, if you start something,
I
promise you, not only will you feel better about yourself in terms of self
esteem, which develops self confidence, which is one of the greatest things in
stepping towards success, it’ll also start awakening a spark of ambition.
A person who has never sold anything
in their life. Finally they get a product they can believe in.
They make the first sale and all of a
sudden they say, “gosh, if I did this once, I can do it again.”
By the time they’ve made the 10th sale
they say, “this could be the career for me. It could be the steps I need to
become a leader. To become a giant in my field.”
All of that stuff has the
potential of awakening your ambition. To make the flames start to burn. It starts
to grow. But, it just doesn’t grow unless you start the process. You can’t just say,
“I’m praying and hoping that ambition will cease me tomorrow morning and everything
will change.”
Just start with some little something
to prove to yourself that you’re going to develop a whole list of disciplines. Start
with the easy ones first. It doesn’t matter. Like making the necessary contacts
in whatever business you’re in. If you make three phone calls a day, in a year
that’s a thousand. Three does
not sound like much. But, in a year it’s a thousand.
If you make three positive calls a
day, if you make a thousand positive calls, something
phenomenal is going to happen to
your life. I also teach that the things that are easy to do
are easy not to do.
If you want to learn a new language,
three words a day, at the end of the year it gives you a
vocabulary of a thousand words. It’s
just easy to, but it’s easy not to. It’s easier to hope it will get
better than to start the process of making it better.
That is really the theme of my
seminars.
Mike: Talk about the
power, simplicity, and importance of
having strong reasons.
Jim: That’s major. If
you have enough reasons, you can do anything. If you have enough reasons,
you’ll read all the books you need to read. If you have enough reasons, enough
goals,
enough objectives, enough things that
you want to accomplish in your life, you’ll attend whatever classes you need to
attend. You’ll get up however early you need to get up.
Sometimes we find it a little hard to
get out of bed. We want to linger. Part of that is not just being tired, or
weary, or a little bit of poor nutrition, some of it is just lack of the drive
in terms of having a long enough list of reasons to do it. Then you’ve just got
to let the reasons grow.
Things you thought were important this
year, you go for them, then next year you look back and you say, “I was a
little foolish about that. Here’s what I really want. That isn’t really
important to me anymore.” Then you just keep up this process of what’s important
to you.
For your family, build a financial
wall around your family nothing can get through.
I made that statement, about six years
ago, to a young couple that have twins.
Fabulous. They now earn about five to
six million dollars a year. I remember the day they came to me and said, “you
know that statement you made about building a financial wall around your family
that nothing can get through? Well, we resolved to do that. Now we’re happy to
report to you that we have just crossed the line. We have now finished building
the financial wall
around our family nothing can get
through.” I’m telling you, the power of something like that is
amazing. That’s just a small example
of all the things that can inspire your life.
Where do you want to go? Who do you
want to meet? How many skills do you want to learn this
year? How many languages do you want
to learn? I go and lecture in the Scandinavian countries. They all speak four
or five, six languages. In the school system you are required to learn four languages.
Three they assign, and one you can pick. I mean, there isn’t anything you can’t
do in terms of language, skills, business, financial independence, or being a
person of benevolence.
The famous story of Latorno, back when
I was a kid, was an inspiring story. He finally got to the place where he could
give away 90% of his income. My mentor, Mr. Schoff, knew the story and said to
me, ”wouldn’t that be great for you, Mr. Rohn? To finally get to the place
where you could give away 90%?” I thought, ‘wow that would be incredible.’ Somebody
says, “90%. Wow that’s a lot to give away.” Well, you should have seen the 10%
that was left. It was not peanuts.
But anyway, those kinds of dreams,
those kinds of goals are what really start the fire.
At first you just need the goals that
start triggering activity immediately. Say, “I want to be able to pay my rent
on time within 90 days. I’m putting in a little extra time. I’m
doing this, I’m doing that. I’m taking
the class. Whatever. After 90 days, I’m never going to be late on my rent
again. I’m tired of the creditors calling. What are my goals?”
I heard a knock on my door back when I
was about 24. I went to the door and there was a Girl
Scout selling cookies. She gives me
the big pitch. Girl Scouts, best organization in the world, we’ve got this
variety of cookies, just $2.00. Then, with a big smile, she asked me to buy.
I wanted to buy. That wasn’t a
problem. Big problem, though, was I didn’t have $2.00 in my
pocket. I was a grown man. I had a
family. A couple of kids. I had been to college one year. I didn’t have $2.00
in my pocket. I didn’t want to tell her I was that broke. So, I lied to her and
said, “Hey, I’ve already bought lots of Girl Scout cookies. Still got plenty in
the house.”
So, she said, “Well, that’s wonderful.
Thank you very much,” and she left. When she left, I said to myself “I don’t
want to live like this anymore. How low can you get? Lying to a Girl Scout. I
mean, that’s about as low as you can go.” SO, that became an obsession for me.
From that day on I said, “I’m
immediately going to acquire whatever it takes to have a pocket full of money
so that no matter where I am for the rest of my life, no matter how many Girl
Scouts are there, no matter how many cookies they’ve got to sell, I’ll be able
to buy them all.”
It just triggered something. Now,
that’s not a ranch in Montana. That’s no becoming a billionaire. But, it was
enough of an incentive to get me started. Schoff taught me that you have to
carry money in your pocket. He said, “$500 in your pocket feels
better than $500 in the bank.”I
couldn’t wait ‘til the moment when I had $500 in
my pocket. It doesn’t take much to get
started. Then the list goes on from there.
Then if you have enough of those
reasons, don’t tell me you won’t get up early, stay up late, read the book,
listen to the cassette, do the deal, take notes, keep a journal, work on your
language, or work on your skills. I’m telling you, it’s all wrapped up there:
dreams, visions, etting goals, starting with something simple.
…………………Hello Reader, this is the much
we can take today, we have covered a quarter of the whole interview
and a day after tomorrow we shall continue from where we stopped.
Don’t be selfish tell someone about
this blog and let them also benefit from the life-transforming information we
are dishing out here freely and liberally daily.
See you on top
For your Success,
Chiugo
Tony Nwokolo (Mr. Strategist),
Publisher,
SUCCESS
STORIES Blog
