When I was eighteen, I left high school without graduating. My first
job was as a dishwasher in the back of a small hotel. From there, I
moved on to washing cars and then washing floors with a janitorial
service. For the next few years, I drifted and worked at various
laboring jobs, earning my living by the sweat of my brow. I worked in
sawmills and factories. I worked on farms and ranches. I worked in the
tall timber with a chain saw and dug wells when the logging season
ended.
I worked as a construction laborer on tall buildings
and as a seaman on a Norwegian freighter in the North Atlantic. Often I
slept in my car or in cheap rooming houses. When I was twenty-three, I
worked as an itinerant farm laborer during the harvest, sleeping on the
hay in the farmer's barn and eating with the farmer's family. I was
uneducated and unskilled, and at the end of the harvest, I was
unemployed once more.
When I could no longer find a laboring
job, I got a job in straight commission sales, cold-calling
office-to-office and door-to-door. I would often work all day long to
make a single sale so that I could pay for my rooming house and have a
place to sleep that night. This was not a great start at life.
The Day My Life Changed
Then one day, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down an outrageous
goal for myself. It was to earn $1,000 per month in door-to-door and
office-to-office selling. I folded up the piece of paper, put it away,
and never found it again.
But thirty days later, my entire
life had changed. During that time, I discovered a technique for closing
sales that tripled my income from the very first day. Meanwhile, the
owner of my company sold out to an entrepreneur who had just moved into
town. Exactly thirty days after I had written down my goal, the new
owner took me aside and offered me $1,000 per month to head up the sales
force and teach the other salespeople what I was doing that enabled me
to sell so much more than anyone else. I accepted his offer, and from
that day forward, my life was never the same.
Within eighteen
months, I had moved from that job to another and then to another. I went
from personal selling to becoming a sales manager with people selling
for me. In a new business, I recruited and built a ninety-five-person
sales force. I went literally from worrying about my next meal to
walking around with a pocket full of $20 bills.
I began
teaching my salespeople how to write out their goals and how to sell
more effectively. In almost no time at all, they increased their incomes
as much as tenfold. Today, many of them are millionaires and
multimillionaires.
Life Goes Up and Down
I have to admit that since those days in my mid-twenties, my life has
not been a smooth series of upward steps. It has included many ups and
downs, marked by occasional successes and temporary failures. I have
traveled, lived, and worked in more than ninety countries, learning
French, German, and Spanish along the way and working in twenty-two
different fields.
As the result of inexperience and sometimes
sheer stupidity, I have spent or lost everything I made and had to start
over again—several times. Whenever this happened, I would begin by
sitting down with a piece of paper and laying out a new set of goals for
myself.
After several years of hit-and-miss goal setting and
goal achieving, I finally decided to collect everything I had learned
into a single system. By assembling these ideas and strategies in one
place, I developed a goal-setting methodology and process, with a
beginning, middle, and end, and began to follow it every day.
Within one year, my life had changed once more. In January of that year,
I was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture. I was $35,000
in debt and driving a used car that wasn't paid for. By December, I was
living in my own $100,000 condominium. I owned a new Mercedes, had paid
off all my debts, and had $50,000 in the bank.
Then I really
got serious about success. I realized that goal setting was incredibly
powerful. I invested hundreds and then thousands of hours reading and
researching goal setting and goal achieving, synthesizing the best ideas
I could find into a complete process that worked with incredible
effectiveness.
Anyone Can Do It
What I found was that these ideas work everywhere, for everyone, in
virtually every country, no matter what your education, experience, or
background may be when you begin.
Best of all, these ideas
have made it possible for me and many thousands of others to take
complete control over our lives. The regular and systematic practice of
goal setting has taken us from poverty to prosperity, from frustration
to fulfillment, from underachievement to success and satisfaction. This
system will do the same for you.
