One question has haunted me for nearly fifty years.
Why does one person live an extraordinary life while another, with equal talent and opportunity, settles for average?
I first heard that question in 1977 while listening to Earl Nightingale’s timeless recording, The Strangest Secret. Years later, sitting in a seminar on the principles of success, I finally discovered the answer. It wasn’t what I expected, and I certainly didn’t like hearing it.
At that point in my life, I wasn’t living the life I knew was possible for me. From the outside, things looked pretty good. Compared to the average person, I had accomplished more than most. However, that was exactly the problem; I wanted nothing to do with average.
I wasn’t interested in becoming the best of the worst, the worst of the best, or the cream of the crap.
Deep inside, I knew there was another version of me waiting to emerge. I had gifts I wasn’t fully expressing, leadership I wasn’t embracing, and potential that remained trapped inside one person…ME.
So there I was at this seminar, still trying (and yes…trying) to figure it all out, when this outrageously successful multi-gazillionaire walked on stage and dropped a bomb that hit me like a lightning bolt.
He asked, “Have you ever wondered why some people seem to get everything they want while others spend their lives living on leftovers? Why some people make things happen while everyone else spends their lives asking, ‘What happened?'”
Then he smiled and said, “Some people stay broke because they’re too stupid not to.”
Needless to say, I was furious. Even before today’s cancel culture, I was aghast, mortified, peeved, and just plain irritated. Who does this arrogant S.O.B think he is?
Then he said something that changed my life forever. “If you’re hearing me, it’s because it’s true for you. If I make more in one night while I sleep than most people make in a year, and I tell you exactly what to do, exactly how to do it, and exactly when to do it…and you still don’t do it…one of us is stupid. You decide which one.
Here’s the good news. You can become un-stupid. To do this, you simply need a new level of thinking.
Those words stopped me in my tracks. That’s when everything came together. Earl Nightingale, Albert Einstein, and this gazillionaire. Three completely different people but one identical truth.
Einstein famously said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.”
Earl Nightingale answered the question that had haunted me for years when he said, “You become what you think about most of the time.”
Suddenly, I understood. I wasn’t limited by my intelligence, circumstances, or opportunities. I was limited by my thinking.
I realized right then what an idiot I had been for becoming a prisoner of my own beliefs. I had been relying on my own thinking, which I had a high regard for (stupidly…), to get out of my problems.
I believed that if I just worked harder, put in more hours, or found one more shortcut, everything would eventually fall into place. It didn’t.
Then came the moment that changed my life, when I stopped asking, “What do I think?” and started asking, “What do the people who already have what I want think?”
I stopped defending my current beliefs (which weren’t working) and became a student. I became obsessed. Not with success per se, but with understanding success. I immersed myself in studying the greatest achievers in history—not because they were famous, but because extraordinary results always leave clues.
I wasn’t interested in copying their lives. I wanted to understand how they thought. I studied business icons, HOF athletes, inventors, entrepreneurs, Presidents, and world and spiritual leaders. I wasn’t looking for motivational quotes; I was looking for patterns.
What I discovered surprised me. The world’s most successful people didn’t think differently by accident. They shared remarkably similar ways of seeing the world. Over the past 30 years, I identified seven principles that consistently distinguished ordinary lives from extraordinary ones.
Next Friday, I’ll begin sharing the first one with you because the quality of your life will never consistently exceed the quality of your thinking. Change your thinking… and you change your future.
Be Larger Than…
