Question: What is Bounce! anyways? Is it about bouncing back?
What is the rubber band ball doing on the cover of your book? What does the rubber band ball mean and how can I get one?
Answer: 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.
Order 5 books from any retailer and I will send you the official Orange Rubber Band Ball!
Question: What was the inspiration for the book?
Answer. I get sick and tired of people saying that failure is there is always something to learn from failure. 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.
Sometimes failure 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 supposed 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?
If failure was such a necessary ingredient for success, then when we fail we would be sending emails to all the people in our business network that read something like this:
To: Everyone I Know
From: Barry Moltz
Subject: Yippee! Another Failure
“I can’t help but brag that I have failed yet again. I am writing because I knew you would want to share this wonderful moment with me. I am so proud of myself because as a result of my latest failure and all the unbelievable things I was able to learn, I am now so much closer to that big financial success I deserve. I am certain that my time is coming soon since I have failed at an increasing rate lately, and I have learned so much. Please stay in touch so I can share with you when I even have an even greater failure and get that much closer to the success you all want for me.”---Your Close Business Friend, Barry
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.
Question: Who are the most interesting people you interviewed for this book?
They are all interesting. But one that stands out for me is Brett Farmiloe. Here is a guy that graduates college and decides that he will travel around the country in a Pursue the Passion Tour. (www.pursuethepassion.com) to discover what really makes people tick. There is also Scott Jordan, who left being a lawyer and started Scottevest (www.scottevest.com) to carry all those gadgets in pockets we didn’t have! He actually now has a clothing line that really is second to none if you travel so much like I do.
Question: You talk in the book that there are three archetypes that we all follow in order to achieve success. What are they and are they true?
Answer. Most of us look to follow one of three paths to get to business success:
1. 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!
2. 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.
3. 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 Trump1. 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.
Question: What do you mean that Good Process Trumps Good outcome? Isn’t outcome the only thing that matters?
We need to focus on the process and understand that Good Process Trumps any outcome, any single event or result
In the 1970s, there was a contest called the Kremer Prize for the first group that could build an airplane that would take off under solely human power and fly a mile before landing. Groups entered from many famed American technical institutions like MIT and Caltech. The winner was a group of hobbyists led by Paul MacCready whose team made up for their lack of theory with a design that allowed fast repair. Their airplane, the Gossamer Albatross, could be fixed quickly and inexpensively after they crashed it over and over again. Their process was that when a part failed on the Gossamer Albatross, they then would make that change and not spend a lot of time figuring out what went wrong. The Gossamer Albatross crashed 500 times. An observer at the time quipped that if they let the airplane crash 1,000 times it probably would have flown many more miles.
Our goal in business is to test as many things as possible with as little money as possible over as short of period of time as possible to achieve a desired result.
Drive for what you want, and accept the result you get. Accepting a result does not mean being resigned to fate or giving up. Rather, it gives the opportunity to use that result as part of a process to make a new decision that has a chance now to take our endeavor to the next level. This process is a progressive and constant cycle.
View Coach Nick's Previous Blogs |
