For more than 25 years Mark Victor Hansen has influenced society’s top leaders and the general public on a global scale. His credentials include a lifetime of entrepreneurial successes, in addition to an extensive academic background.
Mark is also the co-creator of the widely successful Chicken Soup for the Soul® series.
The series TIME magazine calls the publishing phenomenon of the decade has collectively sold over 60 million copies worldwide, making it one of the most successful publishing franchises in America today.
He is reshaping the vision of what is possible and is credited with having a remarkable influence on the attitudes and actions of those whose hear him.
Today on the pages of Healthy Wealthy nWise our own Chris Attwood is speaking to Mark about his views on Purpose, Wealth, and Influence, and how he’s combined them to become the consummate Enlightened Empire Builder.
Chris Attwood: So Mark, you and your partner Bob (Robert Allen) have set a goal of creating one million millionaires
and over one trillion dollars in charitable donations. How is it possible to achieve a goal like that?
Mark Victor Hansen: You look at it in terms of what football coach Bear Bryant used to say, I never lost, I just ran out of time.
We can’t lose if we don’t run out of time because we’re galvanized on trend.
First of all a lot of you would like to be self-sufficient and independently prosperous so you’re reading our book the Chris Attwood:
Wow!
Now Mark, you just had over 600 people at your Mega Book Marketing University in California. You introduced there,
one of the people who has been inspired by you, Richard Tripp, and he’s doing just the sort of thing isn’t he?
Mark Victor Hansen:
Richard Tripp is a guy who never graduated from high school, was personally homeless, lost his hackers license,
(his ability to drive a cab) and used to sleep in a homemade tent that he made by ripping the plastic off a pallet from a Home Depot in Kansas City MO.
He had just a candle in there and that was enough to keep them warm night.
But then he got it back together, after being in a coma for something like 30 days.
He started driving a cab again.
And, he picked me up fortuitously at the Hyatt when I was leaving for the airport at 5 AM, from a Re/Max convention. He showed me his little office in the most derelict dilapidated downtrodden part of town you could ever imagine. But
that is the headquarters for operation C.O. P. P., Care of the Poor People.
This guy feeds houses and clothes 10,000 people per year in Kansas City and now he’s moving on to bigger and better things with a lot of support.
Just about everybody at the Mega Book Marketing University bought his book.
We happened to have in the room, the biggest clothing manufacturer for Wal-Mart there. They said they would give
him 1000 units immediately. You see Richard doesn’t ask for money, he asks for gloves for these people, socks for these people, and underwear for these people.
In some instances he asks for suits and attire so that once they start getting new skills they can go to a better job and look the part they want to look.
Its enormously exciting and its hands on. Things like this make me want to cry, they touch my heart and soul.
Chris Attwood:
Mark that’s just amazing! yes, And what’s really great is you’re not just doing the charitable things, you’re teaching
people how to create great wealth and their own lives so they can do more of this.
Mark Victor Hansen:
You know the most important concept we teach is leverage. Leverage is where you do so much with so little that you get everything done. Leverage as we originally redefined it is If you use Archimedes definition of, Give me a lever long enough, a fulcrum strong enough, and I’ll move the world, we’re going to move the world with the concept, and the vision, and the hope, and a dream that exceeds any other
dream. One that includes and encompasses 6.5 billion concurrently alive people — 3.5 billion of which are
illiterate, don’t have a glass of water, or a plate of food — and we’re going to change all of that. We’re going to change it all this decade and make a monumental shift.
Chris Attwood:
I believe you are too Mark.
You know you’re teaching people such practical, practical, techniques, I mean you are the master infopreneur on the planet…
Mark Victor Hansen:
No, really Bill Gates is the master infopreneur based on results. He’s got 1600 projects going on at one time.
I’m paltry in comparison. But in the book business I’m #1 in nonfiction so I’m deeply thankful for that.
You know for me the first phase was I had a job, then I built a little business, now I’m building an empire, and now I want to build other empire builders.
Building empire builders, that’s my fourth phase, and I really believe that is THE phase.
You know my friend Dr. John Maxwell says that Leadership Is Influence. And hopefully I have influence over the people. I believe we are getting inside them and they’re willing to change. I believe based on the letters, phone calls, and e-mails we are getting. I believe that its permanent and it’s going to do 2 of the things that we teach.
Create residual income for people and their families, and on a bigger level
Create residual philanthropy
That way philanthropy can go on into perpetuity like Paul Newman’s, Newman’s Own. Each person can then take care of what ever need level they want.
What a nice lever to put out into the future.
You know that will cause peace with prosperity. You must know that you can’t create peace and prosperity without having it yourself and getting everyone else to be peaceful and prosperous also.
Chris Attwood:
Absolutely! Now to come back, one of the things that you and Bob teach is to create wealth with balance in your life…
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Since 1947, The Horatio Alger The Association brings the In 2000 Mark Victor Hansen was honored To find out more about the Horatio |
Mark Victor Hansen:
Oh yeah! I take a week off every month and I need it because I drive really hard to get out there. Like right now I’ve
been traveling all-day and working. I’m on my way to the Horatio Alger Awards where we raised $190 million to make sure At Risk Kids get to go to school. And I’ve redefined At Risk to mean at risk of losing their vast potential.
These kids have the most horrific, awful, horrible stories, and myself and my 500 other winning peers, of which 283 are still alive, have decided to make a difference. As part of the awards the kids get a $10,000 scholarship for school. And wherever they go the leader of the school, the chairman, chancellor, or president, has to interface with our students.
Plus the student has to maintain high academic standards and not miss
classes other than due to sickness.
This was set up by my great dearly departed minister Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and his partner who created it with him. Now his wife Ruthie, Mrs. Peale, is 95 and she is still the godmother of it.
I mean, when I won, Tom Selleck was one of my nine peers (there are 10 of us selected each year) she went up and gave him a great big kiss and said, I love you, Tommy. So great-grandmotherly…
I think every one of us is coded in the DNA and RNA to give at levels we’ve never given and it’s my commission by God, I think, to inspire people to do it.
That’s why I wrote the best-selling ebook, Idea Tithing.
Idea Tithing says there are four things you’ve got to give — the 4 Ts
Thinking, your ideas
Talent
Time
Treasures
I’m the only one I know of who’s written it like that. It seems to me that the first thing, you’re lever, needs to be you’re thinking, your ideas…
That’s how I got the blood for the American Red Cross when we were out; where I got $80 million for the March of Dimes with Melanie Griffith… with ideas.
There’s always a way to do it and most people just aren’t thinking big enough. That ‘s why I created a whole
tape set called, How to Think Bigger Than You Ever Thought You Could Think.
Chris Attwood:
I know that not long ago you and Dr. Mansuk Patel, of the Life Foundation, sponsored a convocation of thinkers on the whole subject of world peace. That seems to be a really critical issue these days.
Mark Victor Hansen:
Now what we did with Dr. Patel, the living Gandhi, on Dec. 17 was say, Hey look, it appears to us there’s going
to be a war. Let’s put these people together and see if we can’t make this an evolutionary flashpoint.
The Yin and the Yang of the Taoist philosophy says that every adversity has in it the seed of an even greater
opportunity. I think this war shows that as an evolutionary flashpoint we’ve got to figure out how to consummate
peace in a way that we can have it maintained. And hopefully it doesn’t have to be maintained under military vigil.
That was the penultimate of that meeting. We’ve got to have peace because as far as I’m concerned, either war is obsolete, or we are. We’ve got to get peaceful insight and peaceful unsite to teach peace, and live peace; to create a living Garden of Eden on Spaceship Earth.
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Every adversity has in it the |
-Mark
Victor Hansen
Chris Attwood: You are so right Mark. Well let’s take this back to some practical steps for our readers so they can start creating like this too.
What were some of the things you and Jack did to make Chicken Soup such a phenomenal best-seller?
Mark Victor Hansen:
Well first you write a great book, you have a great title, and then you have a relentless marketing plan. Most importantly you understand that once you have the first part of it, the great book and a great title, you’re only 10% done.
Most people think that when you’re only at 10% you’re finished and that God is going to rain manna down from heaven — that just doesn’t happen. It takes a year and a half to make any book a best-seller, whether it ourselves or our friend Bruce Wilkinson with the Prayer of Jabez, or my friend Dr. Spencer Johnson with Who Moved My
Cheese. Every one of them did butt-breaking behavior for at least a year and a half. It takes you that long to get momentum.
Now that’s the good news, because very few people will do it, so once you do it, you got it. You can maintain it forever and ever. That’s why we can have multiple bestsellers. The Guinness Book of World Records says it we’ve had the most on the bestsellers list simultaneously. Seventeen in a row at Christmas two years ago.
You know somebody is going to be hard pressed to be where Jack and I have been. My friend Wyland, the consummate artist, The Michelangelo of the Sea, says, When you get to where I am, I’ll be someplace different.
Now that isn’t ego talking, it’s that each of us is such a driver. Jack and I, Wyland, Bob, all are crusaders.
Let me tell you. I want each and every person to go out and try and beat me at the game. I want everyone to be doing more and to top me because that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before and see higher still, then make it real for everyone.
Chris Attwood:
So in that context, can you tell me whose shoulders you and Bob are standing on to create the success of the