The Secret of a Lifetime

Are we at the end of the week already? In this five-day series, we’re talking with Barry Moltz about five key facets of his book, Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, which goes on sale January 28, 2008.

Barry has explained what he means by the idea of Bounce! He’s shown us the three paths we’re told lead to success and why we should honor our failures. Then he’s explained how to enjoy a one-hit wonder. With this last question, we explore the mythology of success.

Barry, You talk in the book about ways to free ourselves from success myths that strangle us by “Downsizing our Dreams” and “Striving For Minimal Achievement.” People search a lifetime to find this type of secret. Can we really do that?

We are constantly told to conquer that next mountain. To grow our businesses and our careers as big as possible. To get richer, bigger better faster, Achievement has become our addiction. If so, why can’t we just lower the bar a bit. Get in touch with that inner laziness that up to this point has eluded us.

That is why I want all of you to commit to me that after this meeting that you will downsize our dreams and begin too define our own brand of success – not someone elses. Forget the grand vision. Besides there is always someone that is going to be richer, smarter or better looking than you- I know, not you but for the most of us.

First, we need to set patient, interim goals…get small!. I remember when I asked my Zen master when I first began mediating, how long I should mediate for- 15 minutes, half hour or an hour each day? He said that I should try it for a minute for each day for the next few months. If I was successful, I should go to two minutes. He always taught me to strive for minimal achievement by focusing on one small goal at a time This is where I learned when striving for new goals, what we important in the climb was not even to get a foothold. Get a toehold…if you can get some progress toward your goal, you have a better chance of achieving it in the long run.

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Who won the race, the tortoise or the hare? And who lives longer. Hares live to 4 years old and tortoises, well the can live to 100

After downsizing our dreams and getting that toehold, we next figure out what will make us happily successful. Most of us will immediately say is to make a lot of money. Money is an important measure of success. It is how we keep score. But if we never get to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, will our life trip be for nothing. However, we can all take solace that many people that have a lot of money are really unhappy!

Thanks, Barry, for five days of great conversation!
And thanks for lunch yesterday too.

Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com And buy his book Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success !!! I’ve read it. You should too!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Getting to Success

This week, Barry Moltz, author of Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. has been telling us how to view our success and failures so that we learn how to Bounce! along the path of a business career. He’s shown us how we can let go of false ideas about success and pointed out that some failures offer us no lesson at all. Letting go of the “joy of victory and the agony of defeat” can free us up to move forward with confidence, enthusiasm and passion.

Sometimes we succeed brilliantly, but it’s just not something that we can repeat.

In Chapter 2, you talk about your fascination with One-Hit Wonders. Isn’t being a One-Hit Wonder a bad thing? Where do One-Hit Wonders fit in a successful career?

What happens if you go out there and only hit that big success one time like those one hit wonders? Remember, it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Wayne Gretzky said that “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” We can’t get caught up in the failures. It only matters that we met our success requirements that one time. When things go bad, we can think back to perhaps that one time where the planets aligned, and we got to the goal line.

With true business confidence, we can look back a single success and enjoy it for what it was. Maybe there is only one success on a particular path. We may need to bounce to an entirely different path to get another success. The complete answer to this puzzle can’t be known until the end of our lives. The order of successes and failures does not diminish the high point. Hitting it once can help root a sense of business confidence that will carry through whether the rest of the path is filled with failure, success, or a mix of both. It will give us the resiliency spring to bounce through the rest of our business lives

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow Barry explains how to break free of the success mythology. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Failure as an Ingredient

Yesterday we talked about how people say the road to success follows three archetypes. Barry names and exposes them as myths in Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.

But what about our failures?

Hi, Barry. I like that you find it important to take a moment to stop talking about our success in order to honor our failures. What do you mean by that? How do we honor a failure?

Well the first thing we need to do is stop letting our egos brag about our successes but instead Honor Our Failures. A year after leaving a 9 year career at IBM, I was fired from my new job. Then I was kicked out of business in my second company by my two partners. This was the first place where I learned I could actually fail in a huge way. This is the first place I diverged from the master plan of success my mother had for me.

Now unfortunately in our culture, business wisdom tell us that when we fail there is always something to learn

We are continually reminded by those around us that failure is an important ingredient in the next success, possibly even a prerequisite. We tell ourselves that failure “happened to us” so that we could learn some important lesson that would later propel us to even more success.

Let me tell you the truth, when we fail. Sometimes it just sucks. There is absolutely nothing to learn. When I lost my largest client because they were indicted by the SEC, what did I learn? That I wasn’t suppose to do business with criminals? I knew this… When my best employee left my company because her husband got a job in another state, what was I to learn? Not to hire people who are married?

Failure is valuable only when we realize it is a normal part of the business process even when there always isn’t something to learn.

And there can be a lot of fear involved in this whole failing process. We have all heard about being afraid of failure and more recently, we are supposed to be now be afraid of success.

The fear in this process is not brought on by our competitors or other outside people. It mostly originates within us. The biggest fear we have is that someone in our position would have done better than us, made better decisions than us and would have built it faster and more profitably than we did. We believe that that we should be in a different place than where we are right now, and that we would be, if only we had made better decisions. Nonsense. You can’t be anywhere except right here right now. Zen Philosophy says that we need to start from where we are.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow Barry explains the upside of One-Hit Wonders. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Getting to Success

Yesterday, Barry Moltz, the author of —Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, and I talked about what it means to Bounce! Barry explained that by letting go of successes and failures, we can Bounce! We Bounce! from success and failure, failure and success. Being able to Bounce! leads us to develop resiliency and true business confidence, passion, and enthusiasm.

Today, we’re talking about success.

Barry, in the book, you talk about three archetypes that we all follow to achieve success. Would you talk about them and why they’re true?

Most of us look to follow one of three paths to get to business success:

You can create something from nothing. You have few financial resources but you do have an idea and you are willing to work very hard. Your many years of hard work and bit of luck, finally result in a million dollar payday This is the American Dream, right. No matter where you start from, there is the infinite possibility that you can get there!

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You fail miserably, you may even go bankrupt, but you are able to learn something important from this failure. As a result, this new information propels you to even greater financial success this time around.

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Finally, once you get there after you made that first million, success leads to even greater success since we all know, it takes money to make money. I love the business adage that says how do you make $100M ? Start with $10M!

And there are places where this is true.

Bill Gates after he dropped out of Harvard, he did create something from nothing in building Microsoft and became as a result one of the richest men in the world.

Simon Cowell, my favorite American idol judge, did have a miserably failure. He went bankrupt, lost a million dollars and had to move back in with his parents. With the success of the show, American Idol, he now makes over $8M a year and in 2003 he sold half of his S Records to BMG for $43M. Pretty good comeback

And finally, Donald Trump was able to take over his father’s real estate business and become even richer. I laugh because in a recent issue of a pop-culture magazine, Stuff, one of the headline read, How to Get Rich, by Ivanka Trump. I did not even have to read the article to know the answer—have “The Donald” as your father!

These stories are great to read about and sometimes they even inspire us. But are they always true? For most of us they are not. No matter how hard we look for the ten steps to success, we each have to make our own way.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how honoring our failures is also important. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Bounce! Not Bounce Back

Barry and I met the first time in a local coffee shop. We shared a bit about ourselves and quickly got to the many facets of Barry’s business career, his books, and his experiences. We talked about his first book, You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business. He told me a few stories about his own successes and failures and how they contributed to his new book —Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. Bounce! is about how to gain true confidence by learning from and letting go of past success and failure.

Barry, I love the cover of Bounce! So let’s start there. What is Bounce! anyway? Is it about bouncing back? Why a rubber band ball on the cover? What does the rubber band ball mean and how can I get one?

I don’t believe that we bounce back. That is too simple. The business world is not structured in a linear way,

Bounce! is about letting go of what you were taught was the secret path to succeed in business. Letting go of the idea that something to learn comes from failure or that you can always duplicate your success. Let go of the shame of losing and the enlarged ego that comes with a big win.

If we let go of whatever the last result was — we can actually Bounce! We can learn what — if any thing — from the last success or failure and get ready by bouncing to the next decision that we have to make.

Any success or failure is just a part of the entire business lifecycle. Individually, a particular result or outcome actually means nothing. No event will guarantee the same result in the future. By learning to bounce through this repetitive process of “success and failure, failure and success”, you will develop a resiliency that will lead to the true business confidence that ultimately determines which ones of us succeed.

More importantly, it allows each of us to have passion and enthusiasm regardless of where we are in the cycle. It allows us to get ready our next great success!

I love the rubber band ball for a lot of reasons. I grew up making rubber band balls. They became somewhat of an obsession for me. I loved how you take a simple rubber band and make it into a cool toy ball that could bounce. The biggest one I ever made was about 6 inches in diameter. Recently I went on YouTube and there are so many videos with rubber band balls doing a lot of things.

I concept of the rubber band ball is that while there are not 10 steps to success, there are building blocks. In order to build true business confidence, you layer on these bands or foundations for yourself. Rubber bands are also very flexible and that is what you have to be in the business world to succeed.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the Archetypes that lead to success. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like to invite Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com