There was a minute crack and he saw a single leaf. And in one of our classes, our Born to Win Seminar, he said, “You will never know what it meant to me to see a single green leaf after having seen no sign of life other than my tormentors all of these years.”
I don’t know how the story impacts you, but that day I made a new resolution. And that was I’d be very careful about what I complained about and very sensitive to the things that I have to be grateful for.
Pam Lontos that day, listening to the radio, caught somewhere just a glimpse, a glimmer of hope in what the commercial said. She decided to get up and go down to that club and she watched the people there and everybody was smiling, everybody was busy, everybody seemed to be in a good mood and having fun. She decided to join. Well, you see, that’s step number one, and that’s so important. We’ve all got to have that first step. My friend Joe Sabah says, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you’ve got to start to be great.” And so Pam saw that; she’d taken that first step. She joined the club. And when she started exercising, she started feeling so much better. As a matter of fact, she got a job selling the enrollments in that club and was very successful at it, but she was very spasmodic. She was up and down, she was on the rollercoaster, because you don’t cure depression like that, just by a few exercises and a few weeks, and so her manager gave her a set of my tapes which contained the information I’ll be sharing with you. She started listening to those tapes and that was the encouragement she needed to fuel the hope. She stabilized her productivity, which consistently got better and better, and then she decided she wanted to sell radio advertising because she really loved radio.
She applied to her favorite station. They weren’t even interviewing anybody, wouldn’t even talk to her. So all she did, because she had that hope (and if you’ve got hope you’ll take action), she just showed up at eight o’clock when the manager got there, sat just outside of his office, from eight o’clock until five o’clock when he left. She did it one day, two days, three days, four days, and on the fourth day the manager said, “You know, I believe this girl wants a job.” He interviewed her and she sold him. She got the job and almost immediately she became number one in production, the number one salesperson there. As a matter of fact, a few months later she was out-producing the other four salespeople combined! And then she got a big break—she broke her leg. And it was a serious break. She was in a cast from her hip to her ankle. The doctor said it was going to be “ten months before you’ll be able to go back to work.” So ten days later she showed back up at the radio station on crutches, hobbling around, hired a driver to drive her around, but it was so difficult getting in and out of the car, she knew she had to do something else. But she was being fed with hope! She saw what she was able to do. She saw the changes that came to the inevitable question: What can I do now? People with hope get to be pretty creative, you see. What can I do now that will enable me to retain my productivity?
Chapter 2
Taking the First Step to a Brighter Future
I want to share something written by Dr. Joseph Sizoo, and the title of it is Unsung Heroes.
Let it never be forgotten that glamour is not greatness, applause is not fame, prominence is not eminence, the man of the hour is not apt to be the man of the ages. A stone may sparkle, but that does not make it a diamond. A man may have money, but that does not make him a success. It is what the unimportant do that really counts and determines the course of history. The greatest forces in the universe are never spectacular. Summer showers are more effective than hurricanes, but they get no publicity. The world would soon die but for the fidelity, loyalty and consecration of those whose names are un-honored and unsung.
If you’re a golf fan you know that John Daly won the British Open in 1995. What you might not know is that there were some unsung heroes involved there. Corey Pavin, Brad Faxon, Bob Estes, Mark Brooks and the caddy. The first four names were professionals who had also been in the tournament, and when Constantino Rocca sank that 65-foot putt to send it into the playoff, a lot of people thought, ‘Well, you know, he snatched it right out of John Daly’s hands’, and they wondered if John Daly would be able to recuperate, recover and respond to what had happened. And these four guys—Pavin, Faxon, Estes and Brooks—came over to Daly. Mark Brooks supplied Daly with a distance card because Daly had misplaced his, and measured the exact distances from every spot on the course. Later, John Daly said that meant everything in the world to him and the caddy who helped him read those tricky British greens, which was what made the difference. Oh, Daly got the publicity, but the question is, had those people not been behind the scenes, would he have won the British Open? I think not.
You’ve got to look at the physical, the mental and the spiritual. Just as a matter of curiosity, is there anybody reading this who has a race horse worth over a million dollars? If you did have one, let me ask you a question: Would you keep him up half the night, letting him drink coffee and booze and smoke cigarettes and eat junk food? And if you did, how many races would he win? I think you’d probably agree he wouldn’t win very many races. Would you treat a ten-dollar dog that way? Five-dollar cat? What about a billion-dollar body? Ohhhh, but that’s mine! I’m doing it for me. Well, what have you got against you?
In the last twenty-three years, I’ve read an average of three hours a day. I read a little bit of everything. I try to read my Bible and the daily newspaper every day. That way I know what both sides are up to! We need to get balanced information. And then you’ve got to look at the spiritual side of life. Among other things, you’re going to be dead lots longer than you’re going to be alive.
The April 28, 1986, issue of Fortune magazine did a study of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies. Over fifty percent of them came from lower middle class or poor families. Ninety-one percent of them were either Catholic, Jewish or Protestant. There was evidence that they were at least semi-active in their faith, meaning they got their ethics, their morals, their judgment, their values, and their wisdom out of the Bible. Now, as the great LBJ would say, “Come, let us reason together…” though that was not an original quote! What I would like for you to think about is this; if Steven Covey or Tom Peters or Zig Ziglar or anybody else were to write a book, and ninety-one percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies said, “That’s the one I read, right there!” We all know what would happen, don’t we? We know everybody would go down and get a copy of that book.
You ever wonder why sixty-five percent of college graduates, seventy-two percent of Rhodes Scholars, seventy-five percent of military academy graduates, sixty-five percent of US congressmen, eighty-five percent of airline pilots, eighty-five percent of FBI agents, and eleven of the twelve astronauts who walked on the moon were all Boy Scouts, according to The American Scholar in the autumn 1992 issue? Well, let me see if I can explain to you why that is. First of all, Boy Scouts talk to themselves. I was a Boy Scout. Now all of us talk to ourselves. I’m going to do a lot of talking about self-talking because that is one of the keys to success. Every Thursday night in Yazoo City, Mississippi, I used to stand up there as a Boy Scout and say, “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.” Boy! That is good stuff! And when you look at the Scout Law, it says, “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.”
Let me tell you something else the Scouts did. Every Thursday night in Yazoo City—I say every Thursday night—one Thursday night a month we had Court of Honor, and that was when we were given merit badges for what we had been doing all during the last go-around. That was a goal we had. We knew exactly what it took to be a first-class Scout. We had the merit badges all laid out. That’s goal setting! We knew what it took to be an Eagle Scout. And Eagle Scouts are successful in all facets of life that go far, far beyond the numbers of them. I tell you, if I were raising a young boy or a young girl today, I’d have them in the Boy Scouts, the Cub Scouts, the Girl Scouts—I would have them taking that training. You know their motto is Be Prepared. And you know what they say? Do a good deed every day.