Chris Attwood: It is my privilege and honor to introduce a man who is exemplary in having demonstrated one of the things that our readers have told us many times is one of their biggest questions. "How does one take one's passions and turn those into something that can support you, something that can create wealth and financial freedom in your life?"

 
David Riklan is the founder and president of www.SelfGrowth.com
, the number-one ranked self-improvement website on the Internet. He started that website some seven years ago with his wife, as a hobby, and has built it into an Internet powerhouse, a portal into the world of self-improvement.

 
He has given us all a place to go to identify who are the greatest and best people who can support us in our own journey in discovering who we are and how we can give our own gifts.

 
David is also the author of Self-Improvement: The Top 101 Experts Who Help Us Improve Our Lives, and I'm excited that we get to hear his story, and to hear how he has achieved such great success, starting from just a hobby website some years ago.

 
I'm also very honored that our co-host is Scott Martineau, one of the co-founders of Conscious One, and those of you who have not yet been to www.ConsciousOne.com
, you absolutely have to go. It's another amazing introduction and source of online learning in the self-improvement and personal growth area.

 
Scott Martineau: I get the distinct pleasure to interview someone whom I've worked with for the last three years. While we have not yet seen each other face to face, I feel like he's a brother already. He was very kind to us when we got our business started three years ago. He's been like a big brother, and so there might be a sense of real familiarity or almost familiar feel to this interview, because we talk quite regularly, and help each other out.

 
David, I get to ask you all kinds of questions tonight at a formal level, but I just appreciate you being there, and I want to start off by saying we admire everything you're doing at www.SelfImprovement.com
, and have for a long time.

 
David Riklan: Thank you very much, Scott. I greatly appreciate it.

 
Scott Martineau: David, you started and really created an Internet portal which gives access to an incredible array of self-improvement resources, and you've worked with and researched the top self-improvement experts in the whole world. What role did your passions, the things which are most important to you in your life, play in leading you to do what you're doing today?

 
David Riklan: For me, passion is critical, and when I take a look at the passion and the desire, I kind of mix passion and desire together; there are really three things that I look at in my life that are really driving for me, especially tied into the business.

 
I think of my passions – one of my long passions is a desire to have my own business. I had that passion for many years, and equally I had another passion, a passion about self-improvement. I had an interest in self-improvement that was very strong, and it was a very strong desire to really learn how to improve my life, how can I be the best that I can be?

 
A third passion that's really driven me was really a strong desire or passion to be a strong provider for my family. I'm married. We have three young kids, and those three passions really are driving my business and a lot of what I do.

 
Scott Martineau: One of the things I'd like to share with everybody is that David and I have tried to get together two or three times, and both of us share a commitment to our family that rarely gets us away from our family very often for an overnight or two nights. That's really strange.

 
What role has your family played in your success? I know it plays a big one, because that's why we've never actually shaken hands, because we can never get scheduled in the same city together, because we don't like to leave our families.

 
David Riklan: Absolutely. I think my single biggest challenge is the balance, the family and the business balance. To give you a sense, I feel like I have two 12-hour jobs. I have my business, which I'm very devoted to, but I also go home, my wife and I have three very young kids, they're two, three and five. For anybody who's spent any time with a two, three or a five-year old, you know that having all three of them together is a challenge.

 
When I come home, it's definitely time to help out with my children. I make a commitment as much as possible to really help and be part of that. Some of the things I've done, for example, is I opened up an office that's literally one mile away from my house, so I can come back and help out when I can.

 
I try right now to devote as much of my weekend time to my family, which has meant I really haven't traveled. I haven't left, and I tell folks if it needs to be more than an hour away, it's going to be a challenge, because it's so important at this young age for me to stay close to my family and help out.

 
Scott Martineau: That's an important commitment for me to make so that I can stay passionate about my work. They work together. I'm passionate about my family, and passionate about my work. I'm assuming it's the same for you. If you got into your work so much that you couldn't spend much time with your family, I think the passion for work would lose.

 
David Riklan: Absolutely. I'd say that one of my driving forces, one of the passions I mentioned earlier, is my family. It tends to tie together, because one of the things that I'm looking to do with my business, and was looking to do is really provide me the financial freedom where I can spend more time with my family.

 
It's a catch, because I'm balancing almost competing passions. You're passionate about your work, so you're driven at work, and you're passionate about your family. I almost feel blessed that I have at least two things that are very important to me. The big challenge, almost on a daily basis for me, is the balance.

 
Scott Martineau: I think that's one of the things that's maybe different with our generation than with previous is that we're trying to blend the two lifestyles together as seamlessly as we possibly can, without sacrificing either one.

 
David Riklan: We try. We're doing the best we can.

 


* * * * *

 

Scott Martineau: How about your interest in self-improvement? Was that a trait you had from your youngest days?

 
David Riklan: That started a little earlier. I remember back in high school, it goes back a few years as well. I took one of these Evelyn Wood speed-reading courses when I was in high school, and I remember I doubled and tripled my speed reading ability, and I thought, "This is just great."

 
It was phenomenal, and I kind of started to get my interest there, but I was really hooked probably a little after college, during my Hewlett-Packard years. They sent me to a Dale Carnegie course to learn how to be more effective at what I was doing.

 
I remember taking my first Dale Carnegie course and I just got hooked. I said, "There's something special here, something powerful there," and I continued with Dale Carnegie for some time. It was really the self-improvement spark that stayed with me.

 
Scott Martineau: I think it's a common theme for those of us in the self-improvement genre or field. I remember my first Tom Hopkins course that I was introduced to, and a Karrass negotiating course, as being really big, eye-opening events for me. I learned that there were other ways to learn how to do things other than just the school of hard knocks.

 

* * * * *

 

Scott Martineau: You researched the top self-improvement experts in the world. How important is passion from the perspective of these experts?

 
David Riklan: Passion and desire – I kind of look at them as closely tied together. They're critical. I think they drive everything else. I think passion for people creates a motivation, which creates action. It's that action which is going to create success.

 
I'm a big proponent of motivational, inspirational quotes that I use to kind of keep me going on a daily basis. One of my favorite ones is from Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich. His quote is "Desire is the starting point of all achievement…" so I'm a strong believer that passion and desire are critical if you want to be successful.

 
Scott Martineau: At this time in your life, who are two or three of your favorite experts in the field, people maybe you're reading right now or really enjoying?

 
David Riklan: Deepak Chopra, I have a strong spiritual bond to some of the things that he's provided, but I still go back to Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie early on provided a lot of seeds for me, and one of the things about Dale Carnegie, I mentioned that I took the course, I also ended up being a Dale Carnegie instructor for some time.

 
A lot of what he taught really became a part of what I believe. I also love reading a lot of material. Og Mandino is one of my favorites. It depends on what I'm looking for. It depends if I'm looking for spirituality in my life, more business focus, or more financial focus. There's really a wide range. Out of everybody, Dale Carnegie still holds a special place in my heart.

 
Scott Martineau: The Think and Grow Rich tape by Napoleon Hill, I think, was the first self-help tape I ever listened to. Think and Grow Rich with Earl Nightingale announcing it, I just thought that was the most amazing thing in the world.

 
David Riklan: Yes. There are a lot of powerful resources. Going back to my earlier premise, it's a matter of finding what's best for you, and really leveraging that.

 
Scott Martineau: What was your wife interested in when you first started the business? What was her area of interest in self-improvement?

 
David Riklan: My wife came from a human resource background, so very much into training, human resource development, personal development, that kind of thing. She was working with a number of large corporations, doing training and development, and human resource-type things.

 
She had a strong personal interest in that as well. We thought it was a great connection. Let's go out there and really start working together and finding resources. It was a lot of fun. We were in the dating stage of our life. Things were a lot of fun. We were spending time building something together.

 
Scott Martineau: Could you share some of the obstacles and some of the challenges that you've experienced, and how did you overcome those so people understand that it's not just a rocket ship straight up to the moon when you start a business?

 
David Riklan: Sure. I'll bring you back to a previous business first, that I had before SelfGrowth.com, and before the Internet business. I started another business a few years back, and it was a total failure.

 
This was before I met my wife. I was still single at the time. For the first time, I left corporate America, and I was filled with passion and desire, and not much business sense and not really a strong understanding of what I wanted to do.

 
I started my first business, spent all my money, and basically ended up without having any money. I had to sell my home at the time to pay off my bills. I remember thinking at the end of that experience, there was a point where I was so depressed, I was just kind of sitting around, waiting to figure out what to do.

 
After a couple days of just sitting, pretty much doing nothing, I said, "It's time to get back up there, and to take action." I remember saying, "All right, I've got to do something," and I picked up the phone. I made the first phone call and set up an interview.

 
I got back in corporate America, started earning money again, and kept my sights on long-term, getting back to the desire of my own business. It was devastating at the time. I found that the only thing that really got me out of it was just that I didn't care, took that first action, made the first phone call, got back on my feet and was at it again.

 
When I finally got back to SelfGrowth.com as a business, one of the big obstacles, as a quick challenge – everybody, I'm sure, gets spam of one sort or another. Spam for us is a big issue, and one of the things that we ran into maybe a year or a half ago that was extremely painful. There was a German company that was sending out pornographic advertisements or pornographic spam in German. It was basically German words and pornography.

 
They were sending out literally millions of emails. We really didn't see any of them because they were going out to German-speaking countries. Lo and behold, at the end of the German pornographic emails that were being spammed throughout the world, there was a little unsubscribe button that said, "If you have any complaints about this pornographic email, please send your complaints to David Riklan @ SelfGrowth.com," just out of nowhere.

 
That wasn't the actual email address. It was one of our email addresses, and suddenly, one day, we just started getting inundated, literally with thousands of complaints, cursing at us in English, German and every language imaginable. We were just overwhelmed with email coming to us with complaints about the German pornographic spam.

 
I had some people translate it, and started finding out what people were saying, and I didn't know what to do. We had absolutely nothing to do with it, and we were getting literally a thousand-plus emails, every single day, sent to us. We didn't know what to do.

 
I contacted an attorney. I contacted the US Government and asked, "How can I stop this?" We finally found out that it was German spam being sent from a country in former Soviet Union that was being done for a Polish company.

 
They basically said, "It's going to take you tens of thousands of dollars to track this down. You're going to have to hire attorneys in three different countries to stop this." It was killing us, and we weren't sure what to do, and we just kind of rode it out for a week or two there.

 
We made some changes to our website and did what we could, but for a couple of weeks there it was just painful. It was difficult to do any kind of business, but we realized that we just needed to stay focused and do our business, and figure out what the best approach would be.

 
Scott Martineau: This too shall pass.

 
David Riklan: Exactly, but at the time I wasn't thinking it could pass. I knew that I needed to stay focused, that one way or another, we had to figure out a way to get through it.

 
Scott Martineau: It had to be a tough couple of weeks.

 
David Riklan: Oh, yes. I remember the first one, "What's going on?"

 
Scott Martineau: What did you take away from that? What do you apply to your business going forward from that episode?

 
David Riklan: A few things on the more practical side, I learned some practical ways to deal with this. We were given some specific ways and approaches. For example, we set up an auto responder. We set up something where something sends us an email, we explain what happened with the complaints. We automated a lot of the stuff, so we would know how to deal with it in the future.

 
One of the things that I realized and took away is that there are certain things that are just not under my control. You need to really focus on the things that you can control. For me, the things that are out of my control, I do a better job at controlling my frustration with them. They're still frustrating, but I realize there isn't much I could do. I do what I can, and just continue, stay focused on what my mission is.

 
Scott Martineau: For those of us who were getting the good stuff from you everyday, and using your resource, we were unaffected. We want you to stay focused on that because we want you to be doing what you're doing because we're enjoying that content everyday. We had no idea about the German spam.

 
David Riklan: Exactly. Unless you were German speaking, and got German email and were probably in one of the German-speaking countries, you never would have seen those emails or never would have seen our email address.

 
Scott Martineau: As a business owner, as an entrepreneur who started this up, there are a lot of different ways that you can be taken off your game. This is a pretty extreme example, but there are a lot of different things that can come up and take you off the focus of what your work is each day, aren't there?

 
David Riklan: Absolutely, and things come up, even if it's a small business, you're looking at two parts. Generally, part of it's something that you love, but you're running a business, so there's the financial aspect of it. There's the accounting aspect of it. There's the marketing aspect of it. There's a whole number of other pieces where you might not necessarily have a lot of expertise in them.

 
A lot of times, they're pulling you in different directions, and for me, the challenge is just keeping your eye on the ball and staying focused. It goes back to some of the key things for me were having a clear and set goal of what I needed to do, and a clear plan on how to do it.

 
No matter what, things are going to try to grab your time, things are going to try to dissuade you and everybody wants your time. For me, it's on a daily basis – reminding myself of what my focus is and what I want for myself, for my family and for my business.

 
Scott Martineau: You said earlier that one of the key elements, or common themes, you saw in the experts was taking responsibility. It sounds like that's exactly what you're doing – taking responsibility, being responsible for what's going on around you, including how you utilize your own time.

 
David Riklan: Absolutely. It's interesting, as I mentioned, one of the key things is a strong belief that you need to take responsibility for your life, for how you feel and for what you're doing. My general feeling is, if you look back on your whole life, a lot of things – you weren't responsible for deciding where you grew up, what public schools or grade school you went to, or choosing your parents.

 
A lot of the things that impacted you and made you who you are today, you weren't really responsible for. My view is that you might not be completely responsible for who you are today, but you are completely responsible for where you're going to be tomorrow. The challenge, I believe, for everybody is right now, to take full responsibility for where your life is going to take you.

 
This cover story is an abridged version of the full 1-hour-plus interview with David Riklan conducted in front of a live Tele-Audience.

 
To hear the full hour long interview for FREE –> Click Here

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