Archive for the ‘Jim Rohn’ Category

READ THIS If You Want More For Your Life

By: Dan Kennedy on: December 20th, 2012 17 Comments

This time of year, where I am, it’s a good time to catch up on some reading…

Inside, by the fireplace, while outside, cold winds wail and snow swirls.

I have a relatively large library with thousands of books. Here are some of the books in my permanent and/or current reference libraries that I consider among the most valuable and valued. I believe working your way through this list will transform your life in ways you cannot even imagine. Note this is only a partial list of the books that I highly recommend reading, owning and using.  (NOT in any order of preference.)

Marketing

  • How To Write A Good Advertisement by Schwab
  • How to Make (At Least) $1 Million In Mail-Order by Joffee
  • Greatest Sales Letters Ever Written by Dartnell
  • True Believer by Hoffer

Biographies/Autobiographies

  • Be My Guest by Conrad Hilton
  • What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School by McCormack
  • Secrets of Millionaires by Sterne

Business and Professional Success

  • The Success System That Never Fails by Stone
  • Winning Through Intimidation by Ringer
  • Psycho-Cybernetics by Maltz
  • Think and Grow Rich by Hill

Anything and everything by Jim Rohn. Anything and everything by Foster Hibbard. Anything and everything by Earl Nightingale.

One more that if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note I recommend often, is What a Way to Make a Living—The Lyman Wood Story. This is for everybody, everyone who would call themselves a direct-response marketer. Rich lessons, but more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Having just spent time at Info-Summit with legendary copywriter John Carlton, direct-response radio wizard and the brain that built Priceline.com, Fred Catona, author of Fascinate!, Sally Hogshead, and other rich direct marketing pros, an observation is fresh: these people are distinguished by their voracious reading, by their exchanging and scribbling down recommendations of things to read, by their “on alert” curiosity.

Theirs are very inquiring minds that want to know.

While there, I also joined a little dinner party of multi-millionaire venture capitalists and serial start-up backers. The two richest were the two most curious, the two least interested in b.s.’ing, most interested in discovering something they did not know from the new, odd fruit plunked onto their table—me.

“Have you read…?” – “You should read…” are very common exchanges among the uber-successful.

Rarely do I conduct a consulting day that I don’t get, from the client, a worthy recommendation of something to read, scribble a note, hand it off to my assistant, and get a book sent from Amazon.

Occasionally, people drop out of the No B.S. Marketing Newsletter, with the excuses that “it’s all too much to read” or “I don’t have time to read it”. Really successful people laugh when they hear this. It is as inane as saying you have no time to eat or breathe. Too busy to sustain life.

Earnest acquisition of electric knowledge is the “secret” of the successful. Not having time for it is a choice of the poor.

If you ask a successful or rich person at 5:00 P.M. what he knows that he didn’t know at 7 A.M., he usually has an interesting answer.

If you ask a poor person the same question, he almost never has an answer. He’s been busy, though, that you can count on.

NOTE: Speaking of books, I’ve just released No B.S. Guide to Marketing to Leading Edge Boomers & Seniors. This is a manual about getting money from those who have it and are, given reason and their interests met, very willing to spend it—on just about everything, and more of it, at higher than average prices than any other consumers.

Jim Rohn: The Sinatra of His Business

By: Dan Kennedy on: December 17th, 2009 28 Comments

jim rohnIt’s an unfortunate subject for the holidays, death. Jim Rohn very recently passed away, at, I believe, age 78 or so.

I knew Jim very well as a student of his written and recorded works, and reasonably well, personally. We appeared on a number of events together, including a multi-city tour in Canada; some of the SUCCESS events; and twice, at my SuperConferences. On the trek through Canada, we spent quite a few hours talking, largely about a shared favorite topic: philosophy. We corresponded from time to time.

In his career, Jim went from being a MLM-industry flak, a speaker promoting one such company after another – a characterization he would not find flattering, to a venerated elder statesman of the personal development field. Of the Earl Nightingale school, he was a compiler of material, author, philosopher, and speaker. As a speaker on personal development, he was the Sinatra. I’ve not seen anybody with better stuff who could put it across better, as smooth, as relaxed, as seemingly personal – regardless of audience size, each person felt Jim was talking only to them. And like Sinatra, long after this year’s departure, he will be remembered, shown on film, talked about, his books and CD’s popular. Not long enough by as many, and not as long as Sinatra, I suppose. But for quite some time. Unlike a great many speakers, Jim was sincere and authentic; he knew he spoke truth. There is no gimmickry to his material, nor were there gimmicks to his presenting. No proprietary, made-up language or psycho-babble, no way-out-there concepts, no Power Points or props or firewalks or costumes. He just went out there, for years with only a chalkboard, later, grudgingly, a whiteboard, and talked. And could for hours or days. Plain-spoken. A little Will Rogers-y.  Every time I saw him, I thought of Sinatra’s own disdainful statement: “Anybody who needs more than a microphone and a spotlight is a punk.”  Although he could do so persuasively, he grew less and less willing to sell his own products from the platform in later years, and he was one of only two speakers I’ve ever seen who connected with audiences well enough that significant buying occurred even when neither he or a surrogate “did a pitch”.  He was a consummate professional: honest, reliable, respectful of audience and client/host and peers. He worked entirely “clean” 100% of the time. And he did affect people deeply, and motivate a goodly number to making significant and sometimes dramatic changes in their lives, in which he genuinely took great pride.
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