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