Tellman Knudson, founder of ListCrusade.com, conducted this interview. List Crusade has become its own success story as Tellman has assembled some of the top authors, speakers, trainers, and internet marketers in one place to share their knowledge.
Tellman Knudson: Denis Waitley is one of the most respected authors, speakers and productivity consultants on high performance and human achievement in the world. He’s sold over ten million audio programs in over 14 different languages! He’s the author of 14 books and several international best sellers, including the number one best-selling book in the Chinese language, over the past decade.
His audio album, The Psychology of Winning, is the all-time, best-selling program on self mastery. Dr. Waitley has counseled winners in every single field, from Apollo astronauts to Superbowl champions, from sales achievers to government leaders. He’s served as a chairman of psychology on the US Olympic Committee’s Sports Medicine Council.
He is President of the International Society for Advanced Education. He counseled returning POWs from Vietnam and conducted simulation and stress-management seminars for Apollo astronauts. Denis Waitley is someone to listen to.
Denis Waitley: I didn’t recognize that. I applauded because I didn’t recognize who I was there. My mother is 96, and she said, Do you suppose anyone in our family will ever become successful?
I said, Yes, Mom, maybe one of the grandchildren, because she thinks I should get a job.
She said, Now you’re going to China and you can’t even speak the language. I really am anxious to pass on any experience that I’ve learned over my career.
Tellman Knudson: As you know, this series is called: The Passions of Real Life Legends and I’d really like it if you will take a few moments to tell us how you went about discovering your own passions and specifically, how they led you to the work that you do today.
Denis Waitley: That’s a great question to begin with. First, I’ll have to say that people need to understand that it’s never too late to discover your passion, and most multi-millionaires are made after the age of 50. If you’re somewhere between 20 and 40 and haven’t become a multi-millionaire or achieved all that you want to achieve, don’t worry. Some of the greatest people in history did it much later in life because many times, what I’m going to say right now didn’t occur to them, or maybe they buried it deep down.
When I was about ten months old, my mom said that she put me out in my little jump swing out in the front lawn and people came by, and in those days there were no pedophiles to worry about, so she said I’d bounce up and down laughing, and babble some nonsense to everyone in earshot, and I guess nothing’s changed because it seems as if I still do that today!
By the time I was about three to five, I was telling stories and singing songs for neighbors, for cookies. By the time I was 14, I was mayor of my junior high and giving speeches. By the time I was 16, I was student body president, and at that time, there was no such thing as a career in public speaking, and the Korean War was on, so I gave up all of my early passions and stirrings.
I went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis and I became a warrior and a defender. I found myself, in the 1960s, as a carrier-based, top gun pilot, and my training was to deliver nuclear weapons, and yet my true passion was to develop people rather than defend against them or destroy them.
Another thing happened to me. I was raised in a poor family with a lot of alcoholism and divorce, but I rode my bike about 20 miles one way every Saturday because my grandmother was an optimist and she kindled my passion by telling me that I was going to go forward, do good, be something.
She would tell me, as we were planting the victory garden, that we were planting the seeds of greatness. She said the seeds of greatness are ideas that you learn from people who’ve been great in their service to others. My grandmother was my inspiration to dig up my passion, which had been subdued for many years as a carrier-based pilot.
I always thought back to my grandma, planting seeds of greatness. That’s why I think that passion is what drives all of us, and you have to stay true to your passion even though you’re going to get off on a tangent when you’re chasing some money for your early responsibilities after you get out of college or when you get married. That passion still underlies everything else and therein lies the secret to your destiny.
Tellman Knudson: I know that you personally have worked with heads of corporations, Olympic athletes, POWs, network marketers and people with all sorts of different backgrounds. In your experience, what role does passion play in an individual’s success? I mean, can you give us some examples of how that works out for people?
Denis Waitley: I think I can, Tellman. I’ve had a long road on it. Ross Perot was my big brother at the Naval Academy and he went on to become a billionaire with Electronic Data Systems. He was always a man of passion. Ray Kroc was my next door neighbor, and as you remember, he founded McDonald’s when he was 54, so it’s never too late. Ray Kroc always said, Love it or leave it.
I think back to the role passion plays. Let’s look back at Steven Spielberg doing his little home movies, always about some great, powerful figure that’s going to solve the world’s problems. Andrew Lloyd Weber, as we remember, he wrote Cats, Evita and did the Phantom of the Opera. When he was nine years old, he had a little home theater with puppets.
Steve Cauthen, who won the Triple Crown at the age of 17, was riding a bale of hay around his farm and his father said, Put that bale in the truck. Steve Cauthen said, I will as soon as I win the Kentucky Derby.
My good friend, Jacques Cousteau, before he died, told me that he broke both arms and he was watching a water spider. A little water spider was taking a bubble of air down to her babies in a lake, and he had to swim. He wanted to be an astronaut, but he broke his arms and had to become an aquanaut instead. He saw the bubble of air in this little spider, and wished that he could breathe underwater, and invented the aqua lung.
As I’ve looked at people like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Fred Smith of Federal Express and every great inventor or innovator, they weren’t trying to make money. They had an inner fire of passion to drive them, rather than a desire for wealth. That’s why I believe that most successful people achieve their greatness because they have something to express inside.
It’s not the idea of a pet rock to make a lot of money, but many of them earn a tremendous amount of money and respect. I think that Shakespeare, Thomas Edison, Estée Lauder, Walt Disney, Oprah, and Sam Walton – they made a lot of money, but far more than thinking about money when they were doing it, the key to their success was their passion.
It was this inner drive by creating or providing something excellent in a product or service. They were all motivated by the desire to produce the very best that was inside of them. I call that the Stradivarius effect. Antonio Stradivari made violins for other people to play.
He couldn’t play the violin very well, but when he made a violin, he signed his name to it and said, If you like me, refer me, and if you like me, renew me. If you don’t like it, I’ll fix it for you, but play me and play the music of your life on my instrument. What he didn’t realize is that by signing his name to his work and living his own passion, his name and work would outlive him and each violin would be worth more than a million bucks, 350 years later.
To me, the Stradivarius ethic is the way I love to live by, really uncovering and discovering your passion. That is the secret to people who make millions. Even Donald Trump – don’t think it’s just the money – it’s the art of the deal with the Donald. Sure, the Donald has an ego and he likes to do his you’re fired and all of that, but the Donald is a deal maker and he loves the deal. I think passion drives us all much more than we think.
Tellman Knudson: When you’re talking about passion and highly successful people, I think great examples of that are Olympic athletes. People go for years, from being on a high school team to being on a college team, continuing to push through that, going to a semi-pro and then a pro level.
They build themselves up in their abilities until they reach the status where they can compete in the Olympics. That’s pure passion. There’s no way you can deny that. For people like Olympic athletes, one really has to believe in their natural, God-given talent. It has so much to do with determining what their passions are. If that is true, do everyone’s talents lead them to their passions?
Denis Waitley: Boy is that a good question. That’s a loaded question that is a double-edged sword. First of all, talent and passion are definitely the twin powers. They’re the twin towers of power. Sometimes we discover our talents at a very early age, which is true for most of the Olympians. Most of the Olympians had a coach.
First they loved what they were doing, they probably were really neat; then a coach said, I see world class potential in you, and the coach gave them the correct swing or the correct way to do it, and they found that they could hone that natural talent, with passion, not their parents’ passion, because too often parents tend to push their children in a direction that the parents try to vicariously live their lives over again.
It isn’t always the talent that creates the passion. Sometimes the passion uncovers the talent. I’ve been working with Olympians for many years, helping mentally train them. At the world class level, it’s almost all mental. You have these natural talents, but at that moment of truth, the mind over muscle wins.
I think back to my good friend Bill Toomey. A lot of people don’t remember Bill Toomey, but he was a school teacher. He was at the Olympics in Munich, Germany, sitting in the stands, watching this German win the decathlon. Twelve hundred days later, four years later, he won the decathlon in Mexico City, and I was there. That’s because he was training in the rain.
The high jump took place in the rain and because the German fouled out in the rain, he won. Here’s the guy who was a school teacher with a passion for sports. He was a coach and a school teacher, but he never really uncovered those tremendous talents until he did a four-year deal on becoming an Olympian.
A person like Scott Hamilton, for example, overcame a life-threatening disease to become a champion figure skater. So sometimes, the passion for problem-solving or something that we’re making up for gives us the motivation to dig out our talents. Sometimes our passion comes first because we express an interest in something that excites us, and that passion uncovers the natural, undeveloped abilities.
For the most part, I think that if you dust off your childhood passions and think back to the talents you had; let’s say when you were seven to 15. Think about the things you loved to do as a child and then think about your current hobbies. As you think about the things you love to do in your off hours, or the things you loved to do as a child, therein will lie your natural talents.
Natural talents begin to bud and blossom early, but they get nipped in the bud by what I call the parent, the peer group and the professor who tell us we should be concentrating on something like computers that will earn us money, instead of chasing this crazy passion of ours, and the talent in that passion which may be the key to riches untold.
I think hobbies are normally the best examples of talents, and childhood talents and hobbies will give us a combination of blending passion and talent together.
Tellman Knudson: There’s one person in particular that I know you’ve worked with who is very, very good at announcing to the world what they want. Not only that, but it’s very interesting that as a result of his efforts, one way or the other, we’re all on this call tonight. I think everyone would agree that one thing we all have a connection with is the computer.
The one individual we’re talking about here is Michael Dell. You’ve worked very closely at times with the Dell Computer Corporation. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to take a few minutes and share the Michael Dell story. It’s a very interesting one. More importantly, how can people apply the same principles, ideas and concepts from that story in their own lives?
Denis Waitley: I could give the whole call on Michael Dell. He bugs me; he drives me absolutely crazy because here’s a guy, who was born in 1968 [1965]. In 1968, I was a brilliant psychologist. Where have I been? I don’t have a clue. He was sucking a pacifier, crawling around in his diapers, when I was already thinking of myself as successful.
Somehow, in the next 30 years, he became the richest person in the world under the age of 40. I have to say under 40, because Bill Gates is the richest person in the world but he’s an old man now at 49. The Google and Yahoo guys are almost catching up with Michael Dell, but they’re catching up pretty fast.
The first thing he did was get a stamp collection and form the Michael Dell stamp auction. The next thing he did was quickly try to take the GED exam so he didn’t have to go to school. He had somebody come over to give him the equivalency exam, and his mother said, He’s taking his bath.
The woman said, I thought he was a Vietnam veteran. She said, No, he’s in the third grade. She said, Oh my gosh! Well, I came here to give him the… and he came out in his bath robe and said, Why can’t I take it? Why do I have to go to school? It’s a waste of time.
We should have known then that Michael Dell was going to be a special guy because the next thing he did was sell newspaper subscriptions. You know what the business is, everyone will tell you, it’s the number of calls you make that will make you successful. He doesn’t want to buy just that.
He wants to be high-probability prospect oriented. We all need to find out who wants to buy what we’re selling. What did Michael Dell do? He didn’t knock on every door in Houston. Instead, he went to the post office and the bank and he went to the library, and he found out who had just bought a home, who had just gotten married, who had just moved into the neighborhood, and then he formed the Michael Dell Welcome Wagon and gave them the Houston Post.
The first day they moved in, he said, Do you want it all during the week or on Sunday? He gave them the alternate close, showed up at their door the minute they were moving in. He said, I’m not going to knock on people’s doors who probably already have the newspaper. I’m going to find people who probably are just moving in to upscale neighborhoods, who want the newspaper.
He drove to the University of Texas in a new, white BMW with an Apple IIe computer on his lap. We should have known it was dangerous because then he took it apart and found out there’s nothing different in computers, so he just made them to order. He saw a Burger King ad and it said, Have it your way.
Sesame seed bun, hold the mayo, hold the lettuce… So he made computers to order and he had a little business going. He quit school in his freshman year and the rest is history. The interesting thing about him is that he was first into retail for computers and first out.
In 1990, Dell Computer was sold in all the ComputerLand stores and in 1991 they were no longer sold there. Why? Because he knew that direct, direct, direct was the battle cry of the future, eliminating the middle person, eliminating the inefficiency, giving it to them their way, quick.
Real time inventory, off the shelf but make them think they’re getting it exactly like they’re designing it – design it for the customer. He’s been able to move from mass marketing to me marketing by giving each individual what they want and doing a desire analysis in advance. Then still giving them computers that are just like everybody else’s, but you’re made to believe, because of the personal service you get from the Internet and the telephone, that you’re getting something customized.
He’s the master of customization, of me marketing and of saving time. He now owns the lion’s share of the PC market and the lion’s share of this whole industry and it’s all because he’s impatient, he wants to save people time and money, and he wants to give it to them their way.
I’ll tell you, he’s really a study for me to figure out how I can eliminate all the extra steps in bureaucracy in my own life that I’ve done just by getting into bad habits. What I’m doing is taking an audit in my own life and saying, What routines am I going through that are a total waste of time and are not leading me toward the achievement of my goals? I’m starting to get rid of the dead wood in the time I’m spending just majoring in minors and reading emails that don’t mean anything.
Tellman Knudson: I know that those different habits we all get into, whether they’re physical habits or thought-pattern habits, can definitely rule our lives, especially when people have intensely negative or traumatizing-type situations, it can really throw you for a loop. I know that one of the things you’ve specialized in is working with returning POWs. What was that like? What types of lessons can we learn from those experiences?
Denis Waitley: I did my dissertation on why no American prisoner ever escaped from a minimum-security camp, but many prisoners escaped from a maximum-security camp. The reason for that is that leaders are always put in a maximum-security camp because they’re always trying to get home or get out or get a plan. People who are not motivated are put in minimum-security camps because they know they can’t get out and they don’t try.
What I learned from POWs is that we all, no matter where we are, are living in our imaginations and we’re caught in this world between our ears. We’re all doing within while we’re doing without. The problem with a POW is that he’s not an Olympian, because an Olympian is training for the games he knows he wants to participate in.
An astronaut is training for the moon shot, but a prisoner of war has to train while he’s in prison, not knowing whether he’s going to get out or not, but believing that he is. What the POWs did is they rehearsed positive things by recall and precall. I call it instant replay of past success. When things are not going well, you need to replay your success.
Then you need to project in your imagination where you want to be, because the mind can’t distinguish between simulated activity and real activity. So that’s why I’ve always told the story of Colonel George Hall, who was a four-handicap golfer. He always played one round of golf in his imagination, in his eight-by-eight cell, with black pajamas, bare feet and a pail and a plate of rice.
He never went outside, his teeth rotted, his eyes went bad, and he got atrophied and withered, but he played one round of golf, very well incidentally, in his imagination. He played every putt, every stroke; he played games that the pros had played and he played games that he had played.
He played in his mind, and for some reason, when you play it in your mind, you create a pattern in your brain. When he came back, he played in the New Orleans Open and shot a 76, four over par, right onto his handicap. The news media was astounded and said, Congratulations – beginner’s re-entry luck! He said, Luck, are you kidding? I never three-putted the green in five and a half years of solitary confinement.
What I learn from POWs is if you get in the habit of feeling you’re never going to get out, you may never get out. It’s an imaginary prison as well as a real prison that we live in. Therefore, you really have to do within when you’re doing without and create the habit pattern and experience of a winner so that when you actually get there, it’s like old home week, and it’s like nothing new.
Therefore, it’s so comfortable to succeed; it’s because you’ve been through so many dress rehearsals. The POWs taught me that dress rehearsal can take place. Even in the most trying and negative circumstances, you can still play to win from within.
Tellman Knudson: Wow. That’s a pretty powerful concept when you’re using your mind in a way that can literally change the results you’re getting in your life and whatever you’re doing. With that idea in mind, what else would you like to elaborate on? What’s the single biggest, most important idea that you’d like to leave people with?
Denis Waitley: I guess the idea I’d like to leave everyone with is that you have to believe you’re as good as the best, but not necessarily better than the rest. That’s what I say, Denis, you’re as good as the best, but no better than the rest. In other words, winners believe in their passion when that’s all they have to hang on to.
You have to believe in that passion when you really don’t have a track record that shows that you shouldn’t believe in it – you still need to believe in it because the passion is what’s going to drive you to success. Failure is always a detour rather than a dead end. It’s an event, not a person.
I’ve always looked at failure as a learning experience or target correction. I’ve got so much failure in my life that if failure were fertilizer, I’d have big bags of horse manure all over my room. However, failure is the fertilizer of success because it enables you to mulch it, lay it down and grow future ideas without making the same mistakes. Look at a mistake as something you’re not going to repeat.
Finally, I think the most important idea is that your self worth will, to a large extent, determine your eventual net worth. In other words, you will earn and accumulate, probably what you believe you’re worthy of having. Unless you’re worth it, you won’t be worth the effort that it takes to get it or do it.
with Dr. Denis Waitley conducted in front of a live Tele-Audience.
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