A few days ago, I pointed out to you how very successful people can have significant differences. I used as an example the differences between Sam Walton and Donald Trump.

However, one of the principles that they both practice if you study them, for example, is hands-on-management. You’ll find if you read their stories they both pay particular attention to details.

Trump drives people nuts. One of the most recent things that I read about him is he’ll tour his hotel and if he spots cob webs or dust in a corner the next time he’s in that hotel he goes right to that corner.

He doesn’t make note of it, he remembers it. Of all the stuff he’s got to deal with he remembers that that corner in that restroom wasn’t the way it should have been. And he goes back to check. And then if it’s not he will stay there until somebody corrects the problem.

What’s this guy’s time worth?

I don’t know – thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour if you took his annual income and broke it out into the number of hours a year he could work his time might be worth that much. But he’ll stand there and wait until they correct that problem in the men’s room.

Walton – what did he spend his time doing? Visiting his stores, inspecting what he expects. You see they have a principle in common even though their personal styles are very disseparate and what we want to do is identify the principles and make the principles work for us.

Then the next thing we can do is then practice those principles we identify.

I saw a TV special on ESPN about Lombardi and one of his ex-players Jerry Kramer. He said, “If one thing stands out of your entire experience with Vince Lombardi what it is?” And Kramer said it was the constant, continuous, unending repetition of fundamentals.

He said, “We didn’t just practice taking a snap from center fifty times. We practiced it thousands of times.” The repetition of practicing principles that work. How much practice do you do?

The sales person says, “Gee my closing average isn’t very good.” How many times have you practiced that presentation? What do you mean practice? How many times have you practiced?

Yule Brenner performed the King and I. I forget now the number but more continuous nights on Broadway than any performance has ever happened on Broadway and Yule Brenner also practiced his part every single afternoon.

Practice!!!

At a speaking engagement in Seattle a couple of years ago for doctors, a guy came up afterwards and said he wanted to become a speaker. And he said, “You know one of the things that mystifies me is that how do you know the first time you tell a joke to an audience the joke’s going to work?”

I said, “You never tell it to an audience for the first time. You practice it on people that don’t count. And then it works a few time with those people, then when you get it right you practice it over and over again right.”

You practice it over and over again. You tell yourself that joke over and over again until you are sick of it then you tell it to an audience.

In the previous post we have been discussing one of the most important characteristics of the truly successful entrepreneur which is the ability to handle crisis.

I pointed out that in order to really understand this, you need to study people who not only handle crisis, but are able to handle crisis where the recovery can take place in the blink of an eye.

The next step we can do then is when we are certain we’ve identified someone or some series of people with a common characteristic that can turn us to success we can emulate them. We can make a point. And there’s a difference between emulate and copy. We can emulate them. We can model our self after their performance of that particular characteristic.

Perhaps the best way to accomplish this is by identifying principles as a result of our study.

What’s the principle behind those people?

Years ago on the Forbes 400 there were two highly successful people on that list who in most personal style – mannerisms and probably in much of their philosophy are as far apart as the front of the room and the back of the room.

They were Sam Walton and Donald Trump.

Isn’t it strange how different they are?

One commonality they obviously have is they both have an awful lot of money. They have tremendous ability to get things done… don’t they? That they have in common.

But look at the differences in style. Walton in his old pickup truck. Donald Trump with a different limousine to drive him around every day and a helicopter with his name on it. Walton with the same old, dumpy office building that they had when they opened their first store in Bentonville. Trump with the edifices and the palaces.

Tremendous difference in style isn’t there?

So you can’t copy their style. You can’t emulate their style because who’s do you pick? Who’s right? Is Walton right and Trump wrong? Is Trump right and Walton wrong? No their both right for each other and for certain people their styles are right.

So you have to go beyond the surface style and find the principles that they both practice that you can identify and then emulate.

I have been talking about what is perhaps the most important characteristic of success that truly great entrepreneurs possess, which is the ability to handle crisis. Now I want to point out a related characteristic that is perhaps even more important which is you need to fine tune the ability to such a degree that the recovery takes place in the blink of an eye.

You can’t go somber and be in depression or irritation or frustration for a day or a week or a month or a year. It’s like this and then you’re on to the next productive thing and that’s the characteristic of these highly successful people that we observe.

How do you get in step and stay in step with such people? That of course is why we crack the back of a success book isn’t it? That’s why we push play on a CD. That’s why we subscribe to an online course. That’s why we attend a Boot Camp or seminar. That’s’ why we move forward.

We try and educate ourselves more and learn more about how we tick so that we can do a better job of getting in step and staying in step with those highly successful people.

I suggest to you that there are these things that we can do. One is to really study such people and I don’t mean in a cursory manner. You know when you say to somebody did you read Iacocca’s book? A lot of people say, “Yeah I read Iacocca’s book.” And if you happen to be in their home or office and you look at their copy of Iacocca’s book it could go back on the shelf of the bookstore and be resold it’s in such mint condition.

Well they read it but boy they didn’t study it did they? Cause if you really study a book the thing looks like it’s been shoved through the garbage disposal and run over by a truck.

That’s how most of my books look – highlighted, written on, corners folded down, bottom page corners folded up to separate that from the time I folded them down, notes stuck in them, battered, bruised, abused, studied.

So you study those people. You don’t just read about them. You don’t just take notice of them you study them.

Strategy I want to talk with you about what is perhaps the greatest success commonality and the greatest success characteristic that spans all eras. You will find it heavily riddled through Napoleon Hill’s work going all the way back to the 1930’s and before.

You will find it in today’s business leaders and I am convinced we will find it in the next century’s business leaders.

In fact, several years ago at a political function that I attended, one of the things that I had an opportunity to do was to observe President Reagan up close speaking and I tell you this and ask you to sit aside whatever your political preferences are for a second, not that I make mine a secret, but it really doesn’t matter what your political preferences are, but we would all probably agree that he did an amazing job under crisis.

Yes…the greatest success characteristic is the ability to handle crisis.

This characteristic if you think about it is common of all super successful people – super successful pro athletes, super successful coaches, super successful business people, super successful sales people.

Who succeeds best in sales? The person who does it the same way whether it’s immediately after having made a sale or having lost a sale – the person who’s performance doesn’t deviate.

You see that quality we find it’s an ability to recover from adversity so rapidly that the observer doesn’t notice the recovery. You’ll find that in all of the training in the Napoleon Hill books. You’ll find that in just about anybody’s book you want to open up, about any texts, any material, about being successful you’re going to find a discussion of the necessity to overcome adversity.

Why?

Because everybody fails on their way to success. It happens. Try to find a highly successful person who hasn’t actually had more failures than they’ve had successes. Try and find one. You won’t.

We have been talking about the key components of success and now I’d like to share with you my final one. It is the ability to process information.

There’s more information to process than ever before. There’s more stuff to know. There’s more stuff to read. There’s more stuff to listen to. There’s more stuff to sort through in order to succeed in business.

I really can’t call it a skill because I really didn’t develop it wholly as a skill – but some may say one of my talents is speed reading with good comprehension. It is becoming increasingly important over the years.

It’s very valuable to me because I can get through a ton of stuff and I see the amount of stuff increasing year after year, month after month and as you get involved perhaps in more and more things and the more successful you get the more information you’ll have to process.

I subscribe to trade journals and newsletters and magazines today that I didn’t know existed three years ago that I’ve got to get through to stay current on the things that we do. So there’s more information than ever before to process so you’ve got to be a great organizer.

Kind of tied in with that is the organization of people resources. Your ability to get the most out of people and that really is a coaching kind of thing and this is just an incidental piece of information but it kind of shows you how big business prizes this.

An example of getting the most of your resources is utilizing webinars for a conference or seminar.

In fact, many companies have taken advantage of that today like for their annual sales meetings. So that instead of the expense of putting all the sales people into one place they let the sales people go to 200 different places and they have the meeting anyway and in many cases that works fine.

You can even use this type of resource for coaching sessions. Executives from many of the Fortune 500s and many companies of all different sizes and types often come together for conferences to listen to coaches’ talk to them about coaching techniques and how to apply them in the business environment and that is of supreme importance to you if you will be highly successful today.

Tony Hsieh is the #1 NY Times Bestselling Author of “Delivering Happiness” and the CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.

We were both featured speakers at the “Summit of the Year” event last November in Vegas (which was a WILD trip…”Holla!” ) and we have been in contact ever since.

Tony has been out promoting his new book hardcore over the last month. I actually saw him on Fox News one morning, and it reminded me that I needed to call him for this interview.

Tony was cool enough to let me ask him a few questions about success, business and his views on social media.

Here are some excerpts of our conversation:

How do you create such a great customer service culture at Zappos?

It really just comes down to 2 things: making sure that you hire people whose personal values match the core values of the company (one of which is to delivering WOW through service), and making sure that everyone understands the long-term vision of the company (for us, it’s about building the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service).

How have you incorporated social media into your customer service?

I personally dislike the term “social media”, as it distracts from what’s actually important: forming personal emotional connections with customers. While this can be done to some extent through Twitter and Facebook, our belief is that the telephone is actually one of the best ways to build that human connection.

What are you doing to survive as a retail company in this down economy?

Because we’ve always invested in customer service and the customer experience (we take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising or paid marketing and instead invest it into customer service), we actually continued to grow over the past 24 months, despite the economy.

A lot of this was due to the loyalty of our customers (on any given day about 75% of our orders come from repeat customers).

How important do you think blogging and keeping your customers updated on a regular basis is?

The most important thing to do is to maintain a personal emotional connection with customers. Blogging is one of many things that we do in order to try to achieve that. Our philosophy is that the more meaningful touch points there are, the better.

Where do you see Zappos heading in the next year? 5 years?

For the next several years, we will be making a big push into clothing. Longer term, we really just want to build the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service, so the possibilities are endless. We’ve even talked about one day building a Zappos Airlines.

How has merging with Amazon positively affected business? How has it changed business?

Unlike most of Amazon’s other acquisitions, they’ve left us independent so that we can continue to build the Zappos brand, culture, and way of doing business our way. It’s effectively as if we’ve swapped out our board of directors with a new one, so we fly to Seattle instead of San Francisco now once a quarter.

We are able to move even faster than before because we now have access to Amazon’s resources, but we leave it up to each individual department or sub-department to determine how much or how little they want to tap into that.

Who are you mentors? Who do you look to for guidance in your business life?

I really enjoy reading a lot of business books and try to learn something from each of them and think about how to take certain parts and apply them to Zappos. Some of my favorite business books include Good to Great, Tribal Leadership, Peak, Made to Stick, and Tipping Point.

What is your strategy for continuing to learn the tools you need to grow your business?

I’m always interested in reading new articles and books!

Wow….

Cool stuff from my man, Tony.  That trip was a total life changing one for me. Aside from the hanging out with top notch entrepreneurs, all the Grey Goose & Tonics, the moving side-walks, world class sushi and incredible shows…I also got to meet an amazing person that changed my way of thinking.

Don’t get opportunities like that very often. Be on the lookout for them.

Get Tony’s book too! 

I want to share with you a very important key factor in my success, and the success of other entrepreneurs… keeping control!

We are finding that highly successful people are doing a better and better job of blending new technology with keeping control. Now there’s a lot of businesses and a lot of people who get trapped, being controlled by the technology and that’s why many of us often sound anti-computer, for example.

But the truth is the reason that I don’t like a computer is…

I can’t get it to cringe.

You know the staff’s out of the room now so I can say that. Most of the staff people, even though they are family, it only takes me about five or six minutes to totally intimidate them but that machine just sits there and blinks and I emotionally don’t like that. But beyond that we are very, very careful and very, very picky about technology controlling us or are we controlling the technology?

You know one of things I find when people get computers is they begin to use them for more than they ever intended to use it for just because it has the capability to do it.

The Xerox folks are constantly in our office saying, “You know you’re not using this system to its fullest capability.”

I say, “I know, I know. We’re not ready yet to use that capability. We start doing that now we are going to lose control of what’s going on like you guys. That’s why when we call you we can’t get service because you have plugged so much into your system that nobody knows who we are.”

But the successful people have faced the fact that they have to use technology.

Let’s take Federal Express…you see that system couldn’t exist without highly sophisticated technology. One of the reasons they are so successful is they can track their packages. Within minutes they can tell you where any package is in their system – millions and millions and millions of packages a day and they can tell you where that thing is within minutes…but that’s technology and that’s technology properly managed. And so we have to do a good job.

You know I say I’m semi-computer illiterate and I am. I used to be completely computer illiterate, but those times are gone. You’re going to have to get with that in order to keep pace but control it not let it control you. And successful people and successful companies are able to do that.

Perhaps my favorite example of innovation is Tom Monahan of Domino’s Pizza. In fact, I spoke about him for the ten years that I was speaking on The Success Tour.

Tom is a very innovative and creative guy and his innovative attitude has communicated through his ranks and I’ll tell you my favorite Domino’s story.

There is a Domino’s franchisee who bought a Domino’s pizza place and opened it at a resort area near a resort lake. Now the first problem with his market area is most of the residences live there only six months out of the year. It’s a place where people come in the summer and really nobody stays there in the winter.

The second problem he discovered shortly after he was opened was there was no way that he could deliver the pizza in thirty minutes or less consistently…you all know that’s Domino’s guarantee…because it’s a big lake and the houses are stretched all the way around the lake and trying to do it in a car was impossible.

He needed to get the shortest route between the two points so he began to deliver the pizza by boat because every house was right on the lake with a little dock. So he was the first Domino’s franchisee to do it by boat.

The next problem he discovered was that boats don’t exactly stay stable like a vehicle does and so the pizza was getting there in thirty minutes but it was all smooched to one side of the box and stuck to the lid. Kind of the opposite of what it is that they advertise.

You know what they did?

The Domino’s engineers got together and invented a device solely for his use, no other reason, invented a device that holds the pizza’s in the boat, keeps them hot and keeps them stable regardless of what the boat does underneath it, which must somehow involve a gyroscope.

The next problem he had was that at night, unlike the lighted road and lighted address, the docks and the lake are dark. So his delivery guys were getting lost out there in the lake with the pizza. So he had to go around and put lights on everybody’s dock at his expense and paint numbers on the docks so when people ordered their pizza they could just give their dock number and the guy in the boat could get there.

That’s a lot of invention isn’t it to make a pizza business work? Here’s the up shot. That franchisee in a six month period of time out grossed two-thirds of what the Domino’s franchisee’s do all year long, and on an annualized basis (if you take what he does in six months and multiply it times two), he out grossed all 2,999 other franchisee’s last year as a Domino’s Pizza franchisee, delivering pizza by boat on his lake.

The ability and the willingness to innovate, to make it work is a very important characteristic.

All successful people have many, many differences that they are able to operate with and put together sort of into formulas of their own… but all successful people do have certain commonalities.

And that’s what we try and do.

That’s what any of one of us who records or writes material tries to do is to help people focus on the commonalities and still allow them room for the differences because when you finally put it all together your formula for success will undoubtedly be a little bit different than the one that works for me.

And the person next to you will undoubtedly be a little bit different than the one that works for you and me. But in all three of us there will be certain commonalities and when we’re focused on those commonalities the differences kind of take care of themselves.

So in this and the next couple of posts this week, I wanted to talk with you about some of those commonalities, some of those things that we observe in the people who are achieving the greatest success in business and in other fields today and sort of pass those on to you and talk about those a little bit.

The first thing that we observe in everybody that is doing very, very well today is a very innovative attitude. Now that’s extremely important because as you look around you and you see obviously that things are changing faster than they have ever changed before. Fortunes are being made today in industries and in businesses that did not even exist five years ago.

I spoke at a marketing seminar about a minute lube. Well, 15 years ago that whole industry of fast oil changes didn’t exist did it? That business was still the province of the service station. Today there really is no industry called service station. There’s a gas station industry but there’s not a service station industry because they got out of that business and they left that market behind and somebody created a whole new industry to take care of that market and do it better than ever before.

But 15 years ago if you had walked into your banker and said, “We’re going to open a store that does oil changes,” he would not have been real receptive to you because there was no such thing. And yet today it’s a huge and growing industry.

Another example would be Federal Express, which is really in the air freight industry but it’s a type of air freight that didn’t exist really until Federal Express kind of invented it and popularized it. And soon something else will come along and replace that and maybe Federal Express can adjust or not.

The people who are going to be very successful today and in the future will have to be more open-minded toward innovation than ever before because new industries, new businesses, new ways of doing things will be happening all around you and it is very, very easy to get left behind.

Many of you who have been with me since I spoke on The Success Tour know of one of my favorite examples of innovation. I’ll be talking about that one in few days.

I want to talk about my A-B-C thoughts about the formula of success.

Let me start out with a story to illustrate this.

It’s a little story about a Rabbi educator, very much respected, elderly, wise man in the Jewish faith who was on his death bed. Gathered along the side of the bed were his Rabbinical students of that particular year, apparently as custom, he had them ordered from the smartest student, his very best student closest to him all the way down to his very worst student – sort of the dunce of the class that no one had much respect for at the far end of the line.

And he was really on the verge of passing away and his favorite student leaned over to him and he said, “Rabbi before you leave please finally tell us, finally condense for us the meaning of life.” This student really wanted it in a condensed form and the dying Rabbi had no choice but to give it in a condescended form so he looked up at the student and in a barely audible voice he croaked to him, “Life is like a river.”

And his wisest student turned to the next one in line and he said, “He said that life is like a river. Pass it on.”

And he turned to the next student and said, “Life is like a river. Pass it on.” And it moved all the way down the line to the dunce, the student at the end that nobody had much respect for and he looked back at the one who passed it to him and he said, “Life is like a river? What does that mean life is like a river? Ask him what he means by that.”

And so they passed that back up the line in the other direction. One said to the other, “Guy at the end doesn’t know ask him what he means by life is like a river.” They passed it up with the guy at the end, you know, he doesn’t understand what he means by life is like a river.

All the way back up the student leans over to the dying Rabbi, he says, “What do you mean life is like river?” And the rabbi looks up and says, “Okay, so it’s not like a river.”

The problem with that, of course, is that if that highly respected Rabbi had expired before the dunce asked the question all across this country for the next decade or so the subject of all the sermons and talks from those graduating rabbinical students would have been life is like a river.

The mystical, magic word from on high, you know, for the sake of a second or a minute or one provocative stupid question and many times they are the same stupid and provocative questions. Something could have been considered the wisdom of the ages when it really wasn’t. The point of that is that we find as we look at successful people and as we get an opportunity to meet and talk with successful people in all fields that there are many, many, many differences between successful people.

There is no real one A-B-C formula for success that works for everybody. A friend of mine in the diet business said if there was one diet that worked for everybody there’d only be one diet. But open a National Enquirer this week and there’s 500 of them in there.

If there was one success formula that worked for everybody there’d be one book and nobody would have ever written another one.