Secrets to the Success of Motivational Speakers Might Help Us Succeed as Writers
Writing in BOOK PROMOTION newsletter, Francine shares the following quotes and biographical information about four dynamic motivational speakers and book authors:
“Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.”
“You become what you think about.”
Earl Nightingale (1921-1989)
“You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
“Fear of failure becomes fear of success for those who never try anything new.”
These four prominent motivational speaker-authors share similarities:
- Childhoods laden with hardships
- Insatiable curiosity about human potential
- Desire to help others
- Backgrounds in careers that required speaking and outgoing personalities, i.e., sales, broadcasting or journalism.
- Persistence, persistence
Napoleon Hill
Napoleon Hill was born into poverty in rural Virginia and his mother died when he was 10. From an early age, Napoleon Hill tried to find the answer to how people from meager backgrounds with no discernible advantages manage to reach tremendous heights in life. Striving to overcome a handicap of birth of ignorance and superstition, he studied the greats–Emerson, Paine, Edison, Darwin, Lincoln, Ford, Carnegie and his namesake, Napoleon–and tried to reshape his own character by emulating them. As a mountain reporter working his way through law school, Hill had an assignment to write a series of success stories of famous men and interviewed Andrew Carnegie. The steel magnate then commissioned the young reporter to interview more than 500 millionaires to find a success formula that could be used by the average person. It took Hill over 20 years to produce his groundbreaking book, Think and Grow Rich, in 1937.
In the book, Hill tells a story that illustrates his philosophy “whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.” A man named Barnes was bent on partnering with Thomas Edison. One day Barnes showed up at Edison’s door and Edison thought he looked like a tramp. But impressed with the determination on his face, Edison offered Barnes a job in his office at a nominal wage. It was not exactly the golden horseshoe, but when the opportunity did present itself, it turned out differently than Barnes expected. Edison had invented a dictating machine that left his salesmen unenthused. Barnes knew he could sell it so Edison gave him a contract to market the machine all over the nation. Barnes made a pile of money and proved that he could really “think and grow rich.”
Earl Nightingale
Earl Nightingale also grew up poor, in Long Beach, California during the Depression, and his father left the family when he was 12. Like his idol, Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale was hungry for knowledge. As a young boy he would frequent the Long Beach Public Library in California, searching for the answer to a question similar to Hills’s: “How can a person, starting from scratch, who has no particular advantage in the world, reach the goals that he feels are important to him, and, by so doing, make a major contribution to others?”
As a member of the Marine Corps, Nightingale volunteered to work at a local radio station as an announcer. Years later, he would become host of his own daily commentary program and for three decades was heard on more than 1,000 radio stations across the U.S., Canada, and 10 foreign countries. When he was 29, he read Think and Grow Rich and its message, “We become what we think about,” would become his credo. As owner of an insurance company, Nightingale spent time motivating his sales force to greater accomplishments. His sales manager begged him to put his inspirational words on record. The result, entitled The Strangest Secret, reveals the answer to the question that had inspired him as a youth. The recording was also the first spoken word message to win a Gold Record by selling over a million copies.
Zig Ziglar
Zig Ziglar was born in rural Alabama during the Depression and his father died when he was still a boy. Zig Ziglar grew up with insecurities and small expectations. As a salesman, he had little confidence until a sales exec told him that if he would only recognize his ability he’d become a great one. Ziglar went on to become a star salesman and many of his books focus on improving the self-esteem of sales people around the world.
Dr. Wayne Dyer
Dr. Wayne Dyer spent the first decade of his life in foster homes and orphanages.
Author of 20 self-help books, he is the only author in the self-improvement section of Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street and Broadway, to have a shelf embossed with his name. Affectionately known by fans as the father of motivation, Dyer began his career as an educator and eventually earned a doctorate in counseling psychotherapy.
He too borrowed from Napoleon Hill, especially the philosophy that we become what we think about. One principle he lives by is to focus on what you want and refuse to let anyone stand your way. He uses the example of the Wright Brothers. “I don’t think Orville and Wilbur said to each other, ‘This thing is heavier than air, so how will it get off the ground?’”
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In her BOOK PROMOTION newsletter article, Francine posed this question to writers, “How can we emulate these four masters of self-improvement?”
Here are some of my ideas:
“Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.”
When I approach the blank screen or page, I have to believe not only that my mind will achieve what I conceive but also that it will conceive of something in the first place based on my playing around with words or trying to create my experience on the page. The trick here is to believe my mind can conceive something from my word play and then believe I can achieve my goal of getting my experience on the page in such a way that I learn why I have chosen to write about it. My writing has to teach me something or it will not be a new conception I have to trust, find and deliver.
Like Hill, I have been interviewing people for years and helping them write from their personal experience based on the interviews. Like Hill, my interviews have led to something larger: I have been talking with applicants to MBA programs and as they are all experienced in business, I have been learning about overcoming obstacles and learning from failures, among other things. Certainly these business school candidates’ attitudes and experience as project managers have helped me face writing challenges of my own, piece by piece. If these candidates can motivate team mates across the globe, make presentations to decision makers and meet timelines to increase company revenues and gain a client base, certainly I can reach the end of each page and find out how my words can serve me–are my words working together to further a goal my writing wants to reach? Are they throwing up obstacles I have to figure a way through? I borrow my interviewees’ spirit and keep writing, shaping, revising, editing.
Paying attention to our day jobs in particular ways may help us strengthen our commitment to our art and to practicing it well.
“You become what you think about.”
Earl Nightingale
That’s certainly true of us as writers! How often do we refrain from writing something because we don’t want to revisit feelings or events we’ve lived through, even though we want to write about them! When we are writing, our purpose is to think about what has happened differently than we would if we were not writing about it. We will change when we have finished our writing because we will be thinking differently. However, many of us have blocks to changing and thinking differently, even about something painful. We are used to the pain, don’t know what would be on the other side of it, and don’t want to find out. Or so we think. Allow yourself to get even painful experience on the page and pay attention to Nightingale. Your writing will succeed and you will be better off for having articulated and reflected on the painful events in ways that lead you to putting much of them to rest.
“How can a person, starting from scratch, who has no particular advantage in the world, reach the goals that he feels are important to him, and, by so doing, make a major contribution to others?” Nightingale asked. When we sit down to write, I do not believe any of us, no matter how well published, actually feel that we have any particular advantage; we stare at the blank page or screen and start from scratch to become what we allow our words to make us think about.
“You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
Zig Ziglar
Often, if not usually, when we write our material we have no idea if anyone will find it interesting or valuable. We must write it anyway. If someone, a teacher, a friend, a writing group member tells us they connect with something we say, we are apt to continue trying to say more or say it more clearly. Like Ziglar, others’ belief in us is very motivating and sustaining. Try to surround yourself with people who are interested in work-in-progress and like to notice and respond to parts that are moving them or entertaining them. When they tell you they are confused or disappointed or feel let down by something in the writing, try writing to make that confusion or disappointment go away. Give them what they want and you will probably succeed in writing richly and fully. I do not mean to write only what people want you to write. I mean that once you have written something and a sympathetic reader asks for more in order to stay in your essay or poem, give it to them.
“Fear of failure becomes fear of success for those who never try anything new.”
Wayne Dyer
As writers we are all probably especially envious of Dyer and his numerous books and the space he gets in Barnes and Noble’s. Well, let’s drop envy and listen to what he is telling us. How many times have you not put something at all on the page because you felt you couldn’t come close to articulating and evoking what you experienced? How often do you think writer’s block is exactly fear of failure becoming fear of success–what would happen, our squirrelly minds ask us, if we didn’t actually fail but succeeded? Well, that doesn’t always feel comfortable either because what it means is that we have to work for success-we have to draft many drafts and evaluate them and think about where we have gone astray. Every time you worry that you can’t possible be getting it right or strongly on the page, stop worrying. You are getting something down and from that something, you will work until something successful is there. That’s the attitude–that’s how he go so many books out the door and onto book store shelves and into the readers’ hands. That’s how you’ll get what is most important for you to say, said. I’m sure of it. And that’s what really makes the motivational speakers’ talks work–certainty breeds certainty.
I hope you take some certainty from these speakers and keep it nearby as you write.