Steve Sax has had both the highs and lows

that can result in great substance and multiple

achievements. His book, SHIFT: Change
Your Mindset and You Change Your World,
reflects the wisdom he has gained through
his experiences. Its a terrific and motivating
readand Steve is a true winner.
DONALD TRUMP

SHIFT

SHIFT
Change Your

M i n d s e t

and you

Change Your

w o r l d

STEVE SAX

Copyright 2010 by Steve Sax

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without prior written consent of the author, except as provided by the
United States of America copyright law.
Published by Advantage, Charleston, South Carolina.
Member of Advantage Media Group.
ADVANTAGE is a registered trademark and the Advantage colophon is a trademark of
Advantage Media Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN: 978-1-59932-223-0
LCCN: 2010917661
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To my Parents, John and Nancy

Who gave me their fabric of life...
And the attention to stick by me,
And the need to stick it to me,
And set this path for me...
Until we meet again, I remain,
Your Most Affectionate Son,
Stephen

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: 11

MaKing the shiFt

CHAPTER 1: 23

MotiVation
Ho w Big Is Your Why?

CHAPTER 2: 35

MaKe Your gaMe Plan For suCCess

CHAPTER 3: 61

Creating the suCCessFul attitude

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 4: 73

get oVer YourselF

H u m i l i t y, Responsibility and Integrity W ill Carr y the Da y

CHAPTER 5: 91

true leaders helP others aChieVe

CHAPTER 6: 103

oVerCoMing oBstaCles
CHAPTER 7: 117

Choose suCCess
(Miser y Is Optional)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 127

INTRODUCTION:

MAKING THE SHIFT

m sure youve read a lot of motivational books that promise to tell

you the secret of easy success. These books always claim that right
after you finish reading them youll immediately start a successful
new business or move right into the corner oce. Well, weve all been
around long enough to know that theres no quick and easy route to
achieving your goals in business and in life. Yes, you need to dream
big, but you also need to recognize that theres no such thing as an
overnight success.
Im not saying you cant start your own business or get the
promotion you desire. In fact, I know you can. The only catch is that
theres no such thing as overnight success. Achievement only comes
through planning, practice and hard work, but all that sweat, sacrifice
and elbow grease you expend is the reason your success will be so
rewarding.
When I hear people wish for overnight success, I think about
Muhammad Ali beating Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing title
in Miami in 1964. Ali shocked the entire sporting world when he beat
the heavily favored Liston. Nobody thought Ali could do it. Liston had
knocked out the previous champion, Floyd Patterson, in the first round
just two years before. Yet Ali beat Liston in six rounds. Thats only 18
minutes in the ring. Suddenly Ali was the heavyweight champion and
the most famous athlete on the planet. After the fight, some wiseacre
said to Ali, Not bad for a nights work, eh?
A nights work? Not exactly. Ali answered that he didnt win the
fight that night. Winning the fight was the result of his hard work and
12

M A K I N G

T H E

S H I F T

preparation. I won this fight three months ago when I decided to train
and beat this man, Ali said. I won this fight in the gym three months
ago.
The truth is that success is built on a series of small conquests that
over time build up momentum and take on a life of their own. Success
is not about one grandiose event; its about shifting your mindset so
that youre pretty good every day and create a wave of positivity that
makes success a habit, as natural and unstoppable a force as inertia.
Lets talk about inertia. It is one of Sir Isaac Newtons laws of
motion. The law of inertia states that an object in motion remains in
motion until it is interrupted by an outside force and that an object
at rest will remain at rest until it is started into motion by an outside
force. The same principle applies to achieving success. You are the
outside force. You create the momentum of your lifes journey. If you
want to move forward, youll move forward. If you want to remain in
the same place, thats where youll stay. The only force that can stop
your momentum is yourself. In other words, if you keep doing what
youre doing, youll keep getting what youre getting.
Imagine your life is a blank canvas and that you are a painter. You
need to start painting something positive and creative on that canvas
every day, no matter how small it is. Youre going to find that when
you make all those positive strokes with your paintbrush, the canvas
will begin to take on a life of its own. Every little thing we do affects
whether we will accomplish our goals in life. With every positive act,
youre putting pennies in the bank of successpennies of confidence,
pennies of self-esteem, pennies of positivity. When you put those
pennies of positive energy and good-natured feelings into the bank of
success every day, over time youre going to build yourself a fortune,
both professionally and personally.
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S H I F T

STEVE'S TIP
How do you start creating something positive
every day? Each morning write down a list of everything you want to do that day to help you stay on
track and create something positive. Write down
the task you have to do and when youll do it, and
then the next task, and the next, so you know what
youre doing the entire day.

Its extremely important to stay on task, so make sure you

complete those tasks on your list when you say you will. Dont say,
This can wait for tomorrow. Do it today, so that tomorrow you can
take your next small step toward your goals. In addition to the lists I
make every day, I also make a list of what I want to accomplish at the
beginning of every year. I ask myself: "What do I want to accomplish
by the end of the first quarter of the year, by the halfway point, by the
end of the third quarter, and finally at the end of the year?" Make lists
for both your professional developmentwhat you want to achieve at
work and in your careerand your goals for your personal lifewhat
you want to achieve as a parent, a spouse and a friend. Making lists of
your goals both daily and long-term is one of the most important steps
you can take toward achieving success. Those positive things you keep
in your head are only good intentions, but once you write them down,
they become tasks you can complete.
The key to realizing your goals in life is to shift your mindset away
from immediate gratification and toward the long process of building
something of value that lasts. If youre committed and you work hard,
you will achieve success, but your journey wont be a line going straight
14

M A K I N G

T H E

S H I F T

up in the air. Youre not going to rocket to the top like a hit record.
Anyone who tells you that is selling you an empty promise, because
its impossible to achieve anything of real value without hard work and
sacrifice. On the road to success, youre going to have times when you
doubt yourself and times when people will question whether youre
doing the right thing. Youll have setbacks. Youre even going to have
times where that line is going to go down, but when you shift your
outlook and create something positive every day, over time that line of
success will keep climbing up at a 45-degree angle.
Its like the stock market. When you follow the market, you know
not to overreact to the daily ups and downs of a particular stock you
own. What youre looking for is long-term performance. You should
approach your goals in life the same way. Youll have ups and down
every day and every week, but if your mindset is to create something
positive every day, youll see movement steadily toward your goals over
time, just as a successful stock increases in value over time despite the
daily blips of the market.

STEVE'S TIP
People who work in the stock market know
that you cant get caught up in daily fluctuations
or hiccups. The same thing goes on in our lives,
whether at work or home. Dont overreact to the
daily dramas and quasi-emergencies.Instead, stay
focused on your long-term goals.

15

S H I F T

One thing I can tell you for certain is that you will face obstacles
and diculties as you work toward accomplishing your goals in life.
The important thing to realize is that those setbacks often are the times
that strengthen your character and help you prosper in the long run.
Adversity has a way of introducing you to yourself, as I know firsthand.
I had a successful baseball career with the Los Angeles Dodgers,
New York Yankees, Chicago White Sox and Oakland Athletics. I won
two World Series rings and made five all-star teams, but in my second
season in the big leagues I developed a throwing problem, which
threatened everything I had worked so hard for.
I got drafted into baseball by Dodgers scout Ronnie King in the
ninth round of the 1978 draft, and Ronnie always told me that one
of the main reasons he drafted me was because I had an exceptional
throwing arm.
Well, early in my second season I made an error in one of the
first games. It wasnt a simple misplayed ball or poor throw to first. Id
thrown a ball from the outfield on a relay play back to home plate, and
the ball ricocheted off of catcher Mike Scioscias shin guard and went
to the backstop and the run scored. I didnt necessarily have to throw
the ball on this particular play because the runner at third had stopped,
but I went ahead and hummed the ball in toward home plate and the
ball ricocheted off the catchers shin guard and my error allowed the
runner to score.
It was the kind of thing that could happen to anyone, but I started
thinking about this error way too much. It really got in my head. Then
I looked in the newspaper and saw that I had made a couple errors early
in the season. I started to think, Wow, Im on pace to make 100-andsomething errors this year. So I began to place all this horrible pressure
on myself, and of course I made a throwing error the next day. Then I
16

M A K I N G

T H E

S H I F T

made a couple more throwing errors later on in the week. Pretty soon I
had this horrible monster in my head that I couldnt get rid of.
The monster of negative thoughts just got so big that I couldnt
overcome it. I was going to bed with it. I was waking up with it. Sleeping
with it. Pretty soon it just got to be something I couldnt control anymore.
And then finally it got to the point where I had to admit to myself that I
had a huge problem, and I had to get over it.
After a couple of months of regularly making throwing errors,
I was sure that my career was in jeopardy. The more I worked at my
throwing problem, the worse it got. Conventional wisdom tells us that
if we work at something hard enough we get over it, but that wasnt
the case for me. The team and I tried everything. The Dodger brass
would bring me out to second base at Dodger Stadium in the middle
of the afternoon when nobody was there, blindfold me, and have me
throw the ball to first base. Id throw it to first base without an error
every single time blindfolded, but I just couldnt make the throw in the
game.
My low point as a ballplayer was when I made a humongous error
against the San Diego Padres on a beautiful late spring day. It was the
most perfect setting for a baseball game you could imagine, something
that Norman Rockwell would have painted. There were 60,000 people
watching the game in San Diego and we were winning. And they hit
one to me and I threw the ball away late in the game and we lost. That
was the low point for me. I just couldnt take it anymore. It got too
heavy. After the third out, I ran up to the clubhouse, threw my glove
in my locker, and I just screamed it out: Man, I cant take anymore.
If this is the last thing I do in my sports career, I am going to beat this
throwing problem, and I do not care what it takes. I dont care. I will
come within an inch of sacrificing my own soul. I will give up every17

S H I F T

thing I have before I give up. I will burn every bridge Ive ever had in
this world to beat this. I was tired of being controlled. I was tired of
being manipulated. I felt like I was being violated. It was time to plant
my flag and summon all my inner resources.
Thats when my dad talked to me. You need to understand that
my dad was larger than life. He was the strongest man I ever saw. And
he was tough. He made John Wayne look like a wimp. When I was a
kid, I saw him in a fight once someone had flipped him offand I
knew no matter how big I got I would never want to mess with him.
A German immigrant, my dad was a truck driver and a farmer
in Sacramento. He was the kind of guy who never said I love you,
never said Im sorry. He was born and raised during the Depression
and thats how men were back then. He wasnt a big talker, he was a
doer. My dad was never going to star in Laughs Unlimited or write a
romance novel. Thats just the way he was with us kids. (However, he
was extremely affectionate with my mother and thought she was the
greatest thing to ever walk on earth.)
My dad was a darn good ballplayer too. When he played American
Legion ball, he beat out Woodie Held for shortstop and Held ended up
playing 15 seasons in the major leagues. Needless to say, my dad was
my hero, the greatest man I ever knew.
Unfortunately, my dad also suffered heart problems. Not that
he ever complained about it. I remember once talking with my dad
while he was laying in bed right before having open-heart surgery. He
was about to undergo serious surgery and he was relaxed and talking
with me like it was just a normal day. I once saw him crawl from the
garage through the kitchen and into the bathroom to relieve himself of
a slipped disc by laying in a hot tub. He never asked for anyones help,
and he never said his back hurt, thats just the way he was.
18

M A K I N G

T H E

S H I F T

About a week after the Padres game, I called home to talk to my

dad. I couldnt get my mind off my throwing problemit was like a
bad piece of luggage that never went anywhereand so gradually every
conversation I had always led to that issue. I told my dad how desperate
I was to beat this problem, and how fixing my throwing problem wasnt
about sports anymore; it was a personal quest.
My dad said, Listen, Im going to tell you something. One day
youre going to wake up and the problem is going to be gone. I know
because I went through this same problem when I played baseball in
high school and it can happen to anybody.
When my dad said that, I understood that if this same problem
could happen to somebody as formidable as my dad, someone who is
that big and ominous, then maybe Im not so weird. Maybe Im not
so strange. If the same throwing problem happened to my dadthe
biggest, strongest man in the worldthen it could happen to anybody.
What my dad was telling me was that even the strongest people
arent immune to adversity. To get your confidence back, he said, you
have to face the thing thats bothering you and you have to bite it right
in the face. If you fight it a little bit at a time every day, pretty soon the
problem will be gone. That meant everything to me, because I wasnt
hopeless anymore. I could see myself overcoming this obstacle because
my dad had faced down the same problem.
My dad was absolutely right because I started getting my confidence back little by little, and pretty soon the throwing problem
dissipated. After a while, it just disappeared. I took extra grounders
every day and I started feeling so confident in my abilities again that I
couldnt wait for them to hit me the ball. I finished the final 34 games
of the year without an error, and I signed my first big major league
contract when the season was over. I had conquered this thing, and I
19

S H I F T

was able to do it in large part because of what my father had told me

that day on the phone.

THE LESSON
Great leaders are great storytellers. When you can tell
someone a story that relates to his or her own situation, then you
can change the way they feel about themselves. Thats what successful leaders do. I cant recount verbatim what my dad said to
me that day, but Ill never forget how he made me feel. He made
me feel like I could conquer this terrible problem. He gave me
belief in myself. When you lead people, always remember that the
most important thing you can do is improve the way they feel, and
stories are a great way to accomplish this.

That night after I spoke to my father, the team flew to Cincinnati. I

remember getting to bed at a hotel at quarter till 3 in the morning and
I got a call at about quarter till 6 in the morning. It was my manager,
Tommy Lasorda, and he told me I had to come to his room.
This was during the worst period of my throwing errors, and I
thought, Oh my God, theyve traded me or, even worse, Ive been sent
down to Triple A.
When I went to the elevator and pushed the button, the door
opened and I saw my brother David in the elevator. My brother was
also on the team, and Tommy had obviously called him first. We both
looked at each other and said, Its Dad. We knew it. When we were
in rookie ball in 1978 we had to go home because my dad had had a
20

M A K I N G

T H E

S H I F T

heart attack. So this was something that we had seen before. We got to
Tommys room, and he was in there crying. Ill never forget what he
said to David and me.
As a manager, this is the hardest thing Ive ever had to do,
Tommy said. But I have to tell you boys that you lost your father.
I dont think that my dad knew that he was going to die on that
day he talked to me on the phone, but he knew that he wasnt going
to be here forever. He was only 47 years old, but in that time he did
so much for his children and for my mother. And his final gift to me
helped me save my baseball career. It also helped me become a better
businessman, a better father, and a better man.
The whole concept of Shift: Change Your Mindset and You Change
Your World started that afternoon when I talked to my father and today
its still the backbone of how I plan for success. This book will show you
how you can realize your goals and dreams through the six elements
that will help you create lasting prosperity in business and in life: motivation, empowerment, attitude, humility, leadership and perseverance.
So lets get started.

21

CHAPTER 1

M O T I VAT I O N
HOW BIG IS YOUR WHY?

he best advice I can give you about motivation is to dream big.

Dream so big that it might even be unimaginable because some
of the greatest innovations the world has ever seen began as the
wildest of dreams. The first thing you need to do is to find what your
passion center is. You have to know what it is that you love to do.
You have to find your passion because when you are passionate about
something, chances are youre going to be really good at it.
Think about it. The best salespeople are passionate about their
product. The best financial analysts are passionate about creating
wealth. The best doctors are passionate about healing illnesses. Even
people who like to burglarize homes. Theyre criminals, but they love
being criminals. Its too bad, but frankly theyre pretty good at it. To
achieve something that is significant and lasting, you need to have a
burning desire to achieve your goal. Thats your why. And if it is big
enough, then the how-to doesnt matter.
When you have a burning desire to achieve something, youre
willing to burn every bridge behind you, youre willing to take a chance,
and youre willing to put it all on the table, roll the dice and say, I
dont care what the consequences are. When I was playing baseball,
and when I started my business career afterward, I didnt care what the
consequences were. I was willing to fail. Thats when you know your
why is big enough, when youre not afraid to fail. You essentially need
to surrender to the outcome.

24

M O T I V A T I O N

STEVE'S TIP
How do you know when your why is big enough?
Youll know that your desire is strong enough to
succeed if youre willing to pay the price and if
youre willing to sacrifice. When I talk to people
about motivation and success, I hear so many
excuses that I just tell people to number them. No.
1, I got called into work. No. 2, My car blew up.
No. 3, Im a little tired. No. 4, My wife wont let
me. No. 5, The kids are keeping me too busy. The
deal is that if your why is big enough then all those
excuses just dont matter. If you can think of all
these reasons that prevent you from accomplishing something that you say is important, then your
desire just isnt strong enough. In other words, you
dont want it enough. You have to do a gut check.
After your gut check, if you continue to find reasons
why you cant do something, then your why is just
not big enough.

The phrase burning desire actually comes from an ancient

military campaign. In 711 AD, the Muslim general Tariq ibn Ziyad
led his men to Gibraltar. As his army assembled for the coming battle,
Ziyad asked the men to look back at the ships that brought them across
the sea. Ziyad had ordered the ships to be set afire. When Ziyads men
saw those ships burning, they knew that retreat was impossible and
their only option was to fight and to win, which they did against the
odds. Thats the kind of desire you want to have because the road to
25

S H I F T

success is never an easy journey and youll need courage, grit and determination to achieve your dreams.
You can look at the risk of failure one of two ways. Some people
say, I think Id like to accomplish this goal, but I might fail at it so I
probably shouldnt try. I saw people in professional sports that were
like that too. But you will have a better chance of success if you treat
risks as opportunities rather than chances to fail. Thats the difference between somebody who is going to put it all out on the line and
somebody who is going to hold back and be a little bit timid because
he or she is afraid to fail.
Do you know the story of Edwin C. Barnes? He was born back
in 1877 in Wisconsin. He was certainly not born into the aristocracy.
Barnes wasnt a man of great means, and he wasnt a man of superior
intelligence. You might call him just a regular dude.
As Napoleon Hill wrote in his Depression-era classic, Think and
Grow Rich, Barnes had a big dream. He decided he wanted to become
a partner ofnot work for, but work withthe greatest inventor of
his time, Thomas Edison.
So Barnes boarded a train in Wisconsin and arrived at the Edisons
oces in East Orange, N.J., in 1905. He didnt have the money for a
train ticket so he rode what they called blind baggage. That means
Barnes was basically a hobo who rode a rickety old train car from
Wisconsin to New Jersey because it was the only way he could afford to
travel. When he arrived at Edisons oces, Barnes announced himself
and then asked Edison for a job.
Lets put this story in todays terms. This is equivalent to somebody
boarding a train in Wisconsin and traveling all the way to Seattle, then
showing up at the Microsoft campus and saying to Bill Gates, Hi, Bill.
Im here to be your new partner.
26

M O T I V A T I O N

Crazy, right? Well, thats what Barnes did, and the crazier thing
is that it worked. Not right away, of course. After Barnes introduced
himself, Edison looked at him and thought, Hmm, this is your average
tramp. After traveling from Wisconsin in a train car, Barnes looked
and even smelled the part. Still, Edison hired him right on the spot.
Not to work in the capacity that Barnes wanted. Edison didnt hire
this unusual job seeker as his partner. He hired him as a gopher. You
know, Barnes, I need you to clean the floor, Barnes, go get lunch for
everybody, and Hey Barnes, I need a coffee. That was the kind of job
Barnes had at Edisons oces.
However, Barnes didnt complain that he was stuck in a dead-end
job. He saw this position as a great opportunity. Barnes was not looking
for a job; he was looking for an opportunity. Theres a difference. Barnes
wanted to do something special in his life and he needed an opportunity to show Edison what he could do. That meant he would be on
time. He would work hard. He would be respectful in the workplace.
He would work when he was sick and he didnt feel like coming into
the oce. In short, Barnes was going to show Edison that he possessed
all of the traits it took to be successful.
For five years, Barnes swept the floor and got the lunches and
made the coffee. Think about what he didnt do. He didnt say, You
know what? I came here to work as a partner with Edison. Im not
sweeping the floor. Im going to go down the street, and Im going to
get a real sales job for a company that appreciates me. He also didnt
say, Thomas Edison is in the other room; the greatest inventor who
ever lived. What the heck am I doing here? This is a hare-brained idea,
and I should spank myself for even thinking this big. Im going back to
Wisconsin.

27

S H I F T

Instead, Barnes waited because he knew that opportunities come in

unexpected ways, from unusual angles and through side doors. He just
needed to be in the right position to take advantage when these opportunities came. Barnes got his chance when Edison invented the Ediphone,
a very crude, large and cumbersome precursor to the tape recorder.
Remember, this was 1905. We didnt have a thriving and bustling
technology-based economy. It wasnt even the roaring 20s yet. In 1905,
people were just looking to put some bread and food on the table, not to
buy a tape recorder. Most of them probably wouldnt even know what a
tape recorder was; forget about knowing what to do with one. So Edisons
salespeople said, This will never work. Were in a tough time and people
arent going to buy a bulky and expensive luxury object.
Edison disagreed. He thought the Ediphone was a good product
with a bright future. He was looking for someone to raise his hand and
become the leader of selling this product. Guess who raised his hand?
It was the floor sweeper; the guy who rode the rickety train thousands
of miles to get a chance and an opportunity to work with the greatest
inventor alive. The guy who had no business being there, Edwin Barnes
raised his hand. And so you know what Edison did? He gave Barnes a
chance.
Barnes told Edison, Not only will I sell the Ediphone, Ill sell it
more on a regional level but Ill blow it out of the water on a national
level. And thats exactly what Barnes did. Not long afterward, people
started saying, Invented by Edison, installed by Barnes. Barnes had
become partners with the greatest inventor of his time because he did
not quit. He did not give up on his dream. He hung in there until he
got his opportunity and when that opportunity finally came he made the
most of it.

28

M O T I V A T I O N

In later years, Edison said that he could not describe the look
on the face of Barnes when Barnes first walked into his oce all those
years ago, but Edison did say, I could see that the man was not going
to give up until he got what he came for.

THE LESSON
Thomas Edison made an investment in a human being. He took
a chance on a guy who looked like a bum, a guy who didnt have
anything except a will to succeed. However, Edwin Barnes is one
of the best examples of how you need to forget about failure and
give everything you have to your goals if youre going to succeed.
Barnes put his family and everything that was near and dear to him
on the line.All Edison and Barnes had in common was the will to
succeed and the wherewithal to take a chance, and together they
created one of the greatest partnerships in the history of business.

When I think of burning desire, I think of Edwin Barnes. If Barnes

desire was weak, he wouldnt have become Edisons partner. He would
have returned home to Wisconsin with his tail between his legs (if he
ever got on that train to New Jersey in the first place). A small fire gives
off a small amount of heat. Thats how it works in nature and thats
how it goes with desire as well. If your desire doesnt burn inside you, if
you cant feel its heat, it wont be strong enough to get you through the
learning curve of any new skill set. That is why we always revert back
to our passion center. You have to find out what your passion is. Forget
everything else. Forget about what its going to take to get there. Forget
29

S H I F T

about the money involved. Forget about all of that. It doesnt matter. You
have to start with whats going to be the root of your success, and thats
going to be what your passion is.
I believe that whatever you focus on the most in your mind,
whatever you concentrate on the most is going to grow the most, so you
need to put the focus on something you love, not harp on something
that bothers you. I harped on my throwing problem and thats why it
got worse. I woke up with it every day. I thought about it every minute.
I couldnt eat without thinking about it. I would wake up with it, and go
to bed with it. It was all I thought about, and look how horrible that got.
Your mindset works a little bit like peer pressure and how the
attitudes of the people around you affect your attitude. When people
hear the words peer pressure, they think, Oh my God, thats horrible,
that peer pressure stuff. And peer pressure can be a pretty negative thing
if youre around the wrong kind of people. But if youre around the right
kind of people, peer pressure is a great thing.
If youre around positive people in your life who are determined
to succeed and live according to core values, than peer pressure can be
a tremendously advantageous element in your life. It just depends on
whom youre around and the people you hang out with. Your friends are
important in determining your mindset. We start to meld into the type
of surroundings that were in, and if you dont like your surroundings,
then you may need to change them.
People who like to grumble about their jobs and really dont get
anywhere in their life have a tendency to flock together. And people
who are successful spend their time with other successful people because
they have the same things in common, they have the same things to talk
about, and they have the same goals. The same thing happens with what
we think about in our minds. If we have negative thoughts going in our
minds, those things are going to grow into a big form of negativity. If we
have positive thoughts and if we have good things that we think about,
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those are going to become big successes. One of the things I like to say is,
Dream big. Dream silly, man. Dream as big as you possibly can. Dream
about great things that happen.

STEVE'S TIP
We talk a lot about the power of the individual,
but your peers exert a great deal of influence on
you and your goals, so its important to surround
yourself with people who share the same dreams
and ambitions.

I want you to do a little exercise. Whatever your dream is, I want

you to imagine that goal or dream is in a box. Look at the box and say,
OK, I have a desire to do something and if I put my heart and mind
into it, I know its going to take me three-to-five years to conquer this
thing, but at the end of that time, I get whats in the box. When you
open up the box, is that dream everything that you wanted it to be? Is it
worth it? You have to ask yourself, What is your why? Because if your
why is big enough, the how-to doesnt matter.
Lets say that you start from point zero and it takes you five years.
You know what I call the stuff in the middle? All that sacrifice and
labor, and all the dedication and the long hours, and standing up to
the naysayers. Thats all minutiae. I had the same things happen to me.
Barnes went through the same thing when he was taking all those lunch
orders and sweeping all those floors. Its the small stuff and you shouldnt
sweat it. If your dream is big enough, and your passion is strong enough,
those obstacles dont mean a darned thing.

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One of my high school coaches told me not to sign with the

Dodgers because he thought I was never going to make it in the big
leagues. He said I was not developed enough yet. You have a full ride to
Arizona, he said. Why dont you just play it safe and see what happens
after college?
I was 511, close to 6 feet, but I weighed only 160 pounds, and I
didnt really grow until well into my senior year. This coach wasnt a bad
guy. He was just looking at it like, This kids not big enough. Theyre
going to break the bat in his hand if he goes out and faces these big
pitchers. He told me I was not ready, but he couldnt X-ray my chest.
He couldnt see the size of my heart and what I had burning inside.I
didnt listen to him and signed with the Dodgers, and three years and
two months after he told me that, I was wearing a Dodgers uniform and
playing in the World Series against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. That
coach didnt know how big my why was.
When I travel and speak to people around the country, I meet a lot
of people out there who feel a bit displaced and who are really unhappy
with their life situation. Sometimes we get mired in the muck of work
and feel like were just going by to get by and just kind of stumbling
through things. It happens sometimes. We get stuck in ruts and lose
track of our goals.
If that sounds like you, I want you to take a bold step in your life.
Ask yourself if you like your personal situation, and if youre not happy
and not living life to the fullest, you need to step out and make a change,
and go for something that makes you happy. Because life isnt worth
going through just to muddle through it. Get into that passion center.
Ask yourself what you really love to do. If you can answer that, then you
can find what you really want to do in your life.
Thats the first and most important step you can take on the road
to success. Because Ive got some news for you: its not going to be an
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easy ride. Success takes hard work. Youve got to be tough, and if youre
working from your passion center youll have the strength and the verve
to overcome the obstacles and adversity that will come your way.
Ive had to make some bold changes in my life before, but I did it.
Sometimes theres no reward unless you roll the dice, especially in todays
challenging economy, where you really need to take the initiative to get
ahead. Dont be timid about your future. Risk-takers are the people who
are successful in the world today.

THE LESSON
If your why is big enough, follow it anywhere. Im a strong believer
in college, I think its great, but if somebody tells me that his or her
desire is so big that he or she is willing to put it all on the line and
doesnt care what the ramifications are, and if I see that he or she has
a heart thats huge, I never say not to follow that desire wherever it
goes. As a matter of fact, I would tell him or her to follow it anywhere
because passion is the strongest thing in the world.You cant invent
it, you cant ball it up and you cant make it in the lab.Passion is the
most powerful resource you can ever have.

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CHAPTER 2

MAKE YOUR GAME

PLAN FOR SUCCESS

nce youve decided to change your mindset and begin the hard
work of achieving your goals, the first thing you need to do is
plant your flag. Make a game plan for success. Prioritize and
prepare. And then be open-minded to receive the good things that are
going to happen to you. You need to be ready to accept the responsibility of the success you achieve. Because you will achieve it.
Now you have your why and you are ready to start on the path
to success. One of the first roadblocks people see is that they lack the
power to achieve their goals. This is one of the biggest misconceptions
I hear when I talk to people. They dont realize the incredible power
that they already have.
Think about a housewife. We all know a housewife has one of the
most important jobs anyone can do, but we dont think of a housewife
as being as powerful as a general or a CEO. But consider everything
a housewife does during a single day. First thing in the morning, she
gets the house ready and makes breakfast for the kids. A kind word
from mom can affect how the kids interact with their teachers and it
can affect how they score on a test. Over time those kind words will
determine how those kids see themselves. She sets the tone for the day
and over time she sets the tone for her childrens future.
Your kids really do emulate you no matter what. Children love
their parents, and they do listen to what you say, although not always
in the way you think. Talk with your kids, but also let them hear you
talking with other people. When your children hear you talking to
another parent whom they may hold in high regard as well about the
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dangers of drugs and alcohol, your kids will listen. This is a great way to
communicate with your kids indirectly and often your message carries
more weight than a lecture.
But back to our housewife. Shes driving the kids to school in
her SUV. She commands a 5,000 pound vehicle at 50 mph. And then
maybe when she gets back home, she goes online to shop for groceries
or clothes. Now shes determining the household spending and interacting with hundreds of people on the most powerful wealth-generating tool in history. Powerless? Not even close. Being a mom might
be the most important job in America today because she builds the
character of the next generation. More than anyone else, moms build
our future as a society.

THE LESSON
Everybody has an opportunity to have a huge effect on somebody
else. Some people might not think it, they may not understand the
incredible power that they can have on somebodys life, but they
absolutely have it.

You already have so much more power than you realize. One of
the things I like to do when I speak is have someone bring in a big
colorful wrapped boxlike a Christmas present with a big bowand
place it in the front of the room. I tell the people, You are such a great
audience that I wanted to bring you all a gift. Its in this box and when
were done today I want to give it to you.
And you know how we all get when we know were going to
receive a present. I dont care how old you are. You get excited. Oh,
man. Were going to get something! And because people like to receive
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gifts, they become a very attentive audience because now theyre going
to get a surprise at the end of my presentation.
What I tell them is that this gift has 99 percent of all the answers
to their problems. And then they really start thinking, Hmmm, the
answers to all my problems. What in the world could this be?
Then I open up that box and I bring out this gigantic mirror, the
biggest one that will fit in the box. And I tell the audience to look into
that giant mirror and they will see the answer to their problems. The
answer is right there, folks, I say. Just look into this and youll see it.
Its true. Everything you need to succeed in life, whether its
starting a business or advancing in your career or achieving a better
balance between work and family, is inside you. But to achieve your
goals, you need a game plan for success. Leadership is ultimately about
helping others succeed, but before you can take care of No. 2 and No.
3, you need to take care of No. 1.
When my kids were young, one thing I would impress upon them
is that if you dont accept responsibility, then you dont have freedom.
When my kids were old enough to have a car, I helped them with a
down payment, but they had a structured plan that they had to follow.
They had to help pay for their auto insurance.They had to take care of
the maintenance on the car (oil changes, inspections) and they had to
have a monthly payment. Thats how they found out what its like to
be an adult in this world. I didnt want to rob them of their freedom.
They might have thought that freedom was, Hey, I dont have a car
payment. No. Thats not what freedom is. Freedom is, I have a car
payment. How does that work?It works because Im not depending on
somebody else to do something.When you can do things for yourself,
thats real freedom.

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Dont be a parasite in this world. You become a free person by

doing things for yourself, and that means paying your own bills. Thats
part of being free. I wanted my kids to learn this lesson, and today Im
so fortunate that my kids are wonderful young adults who just thrive
on their independence. Im so grateful for this because I know theyre
free now.

THE LESSON
Dont give up your freedom. When you lay your problems at the
doorstep of somebody else, youve just given up your freedom.

I know what youre thinking. Success is for other people, those

who got into the fancy schools, or knew somebody to get ahead or
caught a lucky break. Well, think about General Colin Powell. Hes
one of the most impressive Americans I know. Powell was raised in the
South Bronx and attended public school there. He graduated with a
bachelors degree in geology from City College of New York in 1958
with a C average and worked at a baby furniture story. Does this sound
like the resume of a great general and statesman? After Powell finished
his second tour in Vietnam in 1971, he got his MBA at George Washington University. We all think a four-star general has to have been
an A student at West Point, but that is not always where its at. Heres
a guy who could have easily said, Hey, the whole worlds against me.
Im growing up as a black man in the South Bronx, the Civil Rights
Movement is not even here yet, and this is tough.
Powell could have been the poster child for someone who had
the deck stacked against him, someone born with two strikes, but

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he didnt act like that. Instead, he took responsibility for himself,

became his own man and accomplished great things for our county.

THE LESSON
Someone who might seem by any measure to be a normal,
average person can accomplish extraordinary things. If you accept
the responsibility that comes with freedom, then you have the
power to succeed, and all you have to do is find your passion center
and then follow a game plan for achievement.

When you take on a task, youve got to break it out into steps.
When your task is bigand all the best ones areyouve got to
make a plan to accomplish it. When an architect is erecting a house
or an oce building, he doesnt just go out there with some nails
and start hammering boards together. Hes got to think about the
structure. Hes got to develop a blueprint for how hes going to build
it. Hes got to devote a lot of time and energy to develop this great
task that hes going to do, so hes got to make it a big priority in his
life. Thats number one. Youve got to prioritize. Thats what I did
in my baseball career after I talked with my dad about my throwing
errors. I made fixing that the number one priority in my life. It
was the most important thing in the world to me. It was actually
more important than anything else that I could do, it was more
important than anything my family could do. At that time, it was
more important than anything in the world to me. Thats a number
one priority.

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You set your priorities by listing the things that are important to
you. Start with whats most important to you, and then ask yourself,
Whats my why again? It always comes back to whats in your gut
and whats in your heart.
.

STEVE'S TIP
Setting priorities before you begin working on
a project is essential. If something is important
to you, you have got to put it first in your life. For
example, because of my family history, one of my
top priorities is that Im going to stay in shape.
When I travel, its important to me to be near a gym.
And if theres no gym at the hotel and theres no
opportunity for me to work out there, Im going to
stay at a different hotel. Staying in shape keeps my
mind and my body working together. Thats why I
make sure to give myself an hour and a half every
day to go and work out, and for that time Im going
to put everything else on the side because being
healthy is so important to me.

Everything Ive ever succeeded at was because I made the goal

my number one priority. Remember, a goal is simply a dream with
a deadline attached to it. Back when I was in high school in West
Sacramento, I wanted a job at this restaurant so badly. It was a tiny
Italian restaurant built in the 1930s called the Club Pheasant. It was
one mile from my house and I was friendly with the family who
owned the restaurant, so I knew that they would be flexible with my
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work schedule because playing baseball was another priority of mine.

Professional baseball was still the No. 1 long-term goal. The problem
with the restaurant job was that I was 14 years old and you had to
be 16 to work there. Well, I just put it in my head when I was 14
years old that theres nothing else Im going to think about other than
that restaurant job. Im not going to think about another job. Im
not going to think about a different place to work. It was just such a
perfect job for me and I was going to get it no matter what anybody
said.
I went in that restaurant week after week after week, and I kept
asking them for a job. Finally one day they hired me. (Maybe they
just got tired of me asking.) That job set the tone for me all through
high school. I worked at this one job all through school. Three years
and eight months. The family worked with me to accommodate my
baseball schedule and it just couldnt have been a better situation.
Everything that I thought out and planned, it all worked out perfectly.
I made enough money at the restaurant so I could pay for my car, pay
for my insurance, and pay for my own clothes.
The Club Pheasant is still there today. Its a thriving familyowned business.Definitely make a stop there the next time youre in
West Sacramento. You wont be disappointed.

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THE LESSON
Being a professional baseball player was my ultimate goal,
but to accomplish your ultimate goal, you need to achieve a lot of
smaller goals first. My family was pretty poor so I had to have a job
to pay for things. So to get the restaurant job, I made it a priority,
I prepared a plan to get the job, I stayed enthusiastic about the
work, and I had an open mind to take advantage of the opportunity when it came. The method I applied when I was 14 years
old to get that job was the exact same method I used to achieve
success in baseball and business. One of the most amazing things
Ive ever read was what Helen Keller said when she was asked if
being blind was the worst thing that could happen to a person.
She replied, The only thing worse than being blind is having sight
but no vision. Situations might change. Principles dont. Those
principles I applied when I was 14 years old are the same ones
that guide me now in my career.

Even in this small example of a kid getting a job at an Italian restaurant, you can see how your mindset determines successwhat you
concentrate on and think about the most is going to grow the most.
It doesnt matter what it is. Whatever youre concentrating on and
thinking about the most will grow the most. Thats what a priority is.
The next step is that you have to prepare for your task. What does
that mean? The architect whos going to build that building, hes going
to have to learn about the land on which he wants to build. Hes going
to have to talk with topography experts and find out exactly what is
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underneath the ground. Hes going to have to find out if theres water
under there. Hes going to have to find out if there are any faults and
if the ground is solid. Hes going to have to do all of that preparation
before he goes in and actually starts building.
The same is true with how you prepare to achieve your long-term
goals. You cannot waiver one inch on preparation. Its the most critical
element of achieving success because if youre building this thing on
sand its going to crumble. If your plan is built on rock then the foundation will be so stable that it will get you through those shaky times.
Think about courageous sea explorers like Ferdinand Magellan
and Christopher Columbus. They didnt just get in their ships, raise
the sails and go wherever the wind blew them. Seafaring was dangerous
business in those days and those guys needed to be prepared. They
talked with astrologers so they would know how to guide their ships
by the stars, they met with cartographers to create navigation plans,
and they had to make sure they brought enough food for their long
journeys. Magellan and Columbus knew that the time you spend
preparing is directly proportional to the size of the task ahead of you.
The more ambitious your goal, the more you need to prepare.
Preparation is the part where you sacrifice, the part where you put
in the most effort. The preparation is what people are going to notice.
It is really the blood and guts of all your achievements.
The preparation phase is where you commit your time to your
goals, where you sacrifice and where you learn the most.For my career
in baseball, my true preparation took place when I was arriving early
to the ballpark and staying late in the Arizona Fall League. Arizona is
where major league clubs bring their top young players to elevate them
faster through more intense and intricate baseball training after the
regular minor league season is over.
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Let me tell you, the system works. I learned more about baseball
in a condensed period of time in the Arizona Instructional League than
I did anywhere else in my whole career and those lessons made me a
much better ballplayer.
The Dodgers brought me to Arizona in 1979 because I was just
learning a new position. Id never played second base in my life. I was
always an outfielder and a shortstop, but the team believed that Id be
a candidate to play second base, so they sent me down to the Arizona
Instructional League at the end of the summer.
I had no money. You hardly make any money in the Arizona
league, so you have to just do the best that you can. I got paid enough
money to live at a motel right on a highway, in one room with a little
refrigerator in it.The rate was $50 per week, maybe even less. I dont
remember exactly, but it wasnt a lot of money because I was sharing
the room with the cockroaches.
Every morning Id get up at about 6 a.m. I didnt have a car so I
would walk to the ballpark, which was about a two-mile hike.I would
get to the ballpark, and I would meet one of the coaches there. We had
to be dressed for practice by 9 a.m., so I would get there at about 7
a.m. to meet with the coaches and they would teach me intricate details
about hitting. In these early morning sessions, I was getting an edge on
other players. Because I was dedicated to getting better, I was picking
up things that other hitters didnt know and that helped me make it to
the major leagues.
I would start hitting in the batting cages from 7:30 until about
9 a.m., and I would learn more about hitting than I ever dreamed
possible.I would do this every day, and then afterward, I would change
into another uniform because we had to start the regular practice at 9
a.m. Wed have a break at about noon and I would eat my lunch. The
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Dodgers also had cereal in the morning for people who got there early,
so I was getting two meals a day at the ballpark.When youre trying to
live on a shoestring, two free meals at work are pretty cool.
So Id eat cereal, and Id eat whatever they served at lunch.Then
wed have the practice or a game that started at 1 p.m. That was over at
about 4:30 p.m. Then I would stay after practice and take ground balls
until it started getting dark.I would walk home, and there in my little
motel room I made myself a bologna sandwich and a glass of orange
juice for dinner. Every single night thats what I did.
The next day I would walk to the park and do the same thing all
over again. One day I had an abscessed tooth and I had to go to the
dentist. Somebody drove me to the dentists oce and dropped me
off on one of the occasional off-days we had during the season. It was
still really hot in Arizona because you got there in September after the
minor league season ended in August.
I saw the dentist and he said, OK, I can give you a root canal
because you have an abscessed tooth, which costs $420, or I can pull
out your tooth for $25.Well, I had no insurance and I didnt have any
money, so he had to pull out my tooth.
After I got the tooth pulled, I had this big gauze in my mouth
and I started walking back to my motel. It was really hot so I sat in the
shade for a little bit, and the next thing I knew I woke up at 9 oclock
at night. It was dark and I walked home, about a two mile walk on the
highway, on the side of the road, blood gushing from the big hole in
my mouth.
No money, no wheels, no girlfriend. People think that professional athletes have it made and that they all make a gazillion dollars.
They dont see the 99 percent of pro athletes who are in the minor

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leagues like that idiot walking along a highway holding bloody gauze
against his mouth.
Thats the kind of sacrifice you need to make when you prepare for
success. I became a much better baseball player in Arizona because I
had one-on-one attention, and I got the opportunity to put what I was
learning into practice. Every day I was there at 7 a.m.every single day
without exceptionfor an hour and a half of hitting. Well, thats a lot
of hitting. The blisters on my hands would bleed from all that hitting,
but I was willing to do what other people were not willing to do.Thats
why I made it.
There were a lot of players in the minor leagues who were more
talented that I was. They had more physical gifts, but I beat them
because I had more desire. I out-hearted them.
I succeeded as a professional baseball player because of those long
days I spent in the Arizona Instructional League. But remember, there
are no guarantees that youre going to make it. They could have easily
said, Sax, youre out of here, youre gone. I had already lost the opportunity to go to college on a scholarship when I signed a professional
contract. You have to be able to burn those bridges, put yourself on the
line, and be willing to accept whatever happens. Thats what preparing
for success is all about.
When Napoleon Hill was writing Think and Grow Rich, he found
that a very few people were actually living with a definite purpose in
their lives. Economic hardship was robbing people of their hopes and
dreams. Hill wrote, What a different story people would tell if only
they would adopt a definite purpose, and stand by that purpose until it
became an all consuming obsession for success.

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THE LESSON
Preparation is the critical point in your journey toward
success. The preparation phase is when you put that burning
desire in your heart to work. This is when you learn everything you
need to know to achieve your dream and create a plan for everything you need to do. There are no guarantees youll achieve your
goal, but if youve prepared fully and put your heart and soul into it,
youll be in the very best position to succeed.

The other important thing about preparation is that it allows you

to remove the shackles of pressure from yourself. If youre reading this
book, you probably arent the kind of person who goes too easy on
yourself. But you might be the person who puts too much pressure on
yourself to complete the project or get the sale. If youve fully prepared
for the task at hand, then youve done everything you can to ensure
success. Dont worry about things you cant control.
The first thing is to think of your long-term plan for success as
a five-year plan. Its not going to happen tomorrow and its not going
to happen next week, so youve got to know that you have some time.
Keep your eye on your long-term goals. If youre beginning a new
career, you have to create at least a five-year plan to really succeed.
It takes about 10,000 hours of practice to be really successful at
anything.At 40 hours a week, that means about five years.
When youre taking on a new job or youre starting your own
business, you need to allow yourself a five-year plan to be successful.
I saw that in baseball. Most guys spend at least five years in the minor
leagues before they come up to the big leagues. The thing about pro
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sports that many people dont understand is that game day isnt dicult
for the players. The game is the easy part. The game is fun. All the
pressure, the time commitment, the sacrifice and the stress happen in
practice. During the game, youre on automatic. You cant be thinking
out there. You have to be on autopilot.

STEVE'S TIP
Whatever your long-term goal is, you must
create a business plan to achieve it. Look at your
goal like a factory. You have to go in and you have
to put in so many hours, and you have to learn
so much, and you have to make regular progress
toward your goal. Always look at the finish line on
the horizon, the end point where you want to get,
and then work backward. Where do I want to be in
the fifth year? At the end of my fifth year, do I want
to be right here? And then just keep going back
to the fourth year, the third year and so on. Once
you have your plan, youll want to check it quarterly,
the way you do with your finances. Youre like the
mole whos digging in the ground, and youre just
going and going and going and pretty soon you look
up and you see where you are, and then you dig
some more, and then you look up and see where
you are. You know that you have a long way to go
when you start out, and thats OK. You just do it
incrementally.

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Successful people are the ones who do the things most people
wont do. I found that in finance, I found it in sports, I find it in public
speaking.Its the stuff in the middle, between where you are now and
where your goal is, the price you have to pay, the work, the studying,
the time you put in, and the sacrifice. All those things in the middle
are what I call minutia because theyre really not a big deal. Theyre
absolutely conquerable. So theyre minutia. But people who dont do
those things in the middle, people who have better things to do than
study and prepare, those are the people who arent going make it.Thats
just the way it is. The ultimate focus needs to be on the prize instead
of the price.

STEVE'S TIP
Take the pressure off yourself and focus on what
you can accomplish today. Think about how you can
better yourself right now and tomorrow will take
care of itself.

The other part of removing the shackles of pressure is to recognize

that you cant control everything. Physically and mentally, you can only
do as much as you can with what God gave you. Thats ityou cant
do anything more than that. I hear a lot of people in sports talk about
giving 110 percent. Well, you cant do that. Because youre passionate
and your why is big, youre going to give it 100 percent. Theres no
110 percent because you can only give what you have and what youre
capable of. You can train a donkey but I can guarantee you its never
going to win the Kentucky Derby.

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If I give everything I possibly can100 percentthen I dont

worry about the numbers after that because its not in my hands. Thats
in Gods hands. I can only worry about what I can do. If its not good
enough, I am still completely happy with the result.
I can honestly say that Im happy because its not the outcome
that matters. Its the effort. If youve given your best effort and fully
committed yourself, thats all you can do. I told my kids the same thing
when they were in school. I said, I dont care what kind of grades you
get. All I care about is how you prepare and how you go after it because
in the end, youre only as good or great or as bad as what God gave
you.
Just dont ever cheat yourself. Thats one thing I can say in my
career. I never cheated myself. If you never cheat yourself, then you
just have to live with the results. If those results are not what you want,
then you need to find another goal.
In a practical sense you just cant control the outcome of
something beyond the effort you give. If youre giving 100 percent,
youre prepared, youre doing it with enthusiasm, you made your goal
your number one priority, and you did everything youre supposed to
do, then youve done your part. Your mindset should be, I cant really
control everything in my life. I can control how I prepare for it. I can
control my priority, and I can go at it with enthusiasm, so Ive got that
controlled. But ultimately, I cant really control the outcome. I can only
control what I can do.
Some people drive themselves crazy because their mindset wont
let them accept that they cant control everything. Trust me, you cant.
So dont worry about that part you cant control and take that pressure
off yourself because its not helping you.

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THE LESSON
Success is not going to happen overnight. You have to allow
yourself at least five years or 10,000 hours to become successful
at something new because theres always going to be a learning
curve. People who sacrifice the most and try the hardest are going
to get past that learning curve the fastest. Also, dont waste time
worrying about things you cant control. If youve prioritized, youve
prepared and youre working with enthusiasm, then youve done
everything in your control to be in the best position for success.
Accept that you can control those things in your power, but you
cant control outcomes.

I tell people all the time to accept that there are things outside their
control and remove the shackles of pressure from themselves. All you can
control is what you have in front of you, and what you have to do. All
you can control is the task is before you. Thats it. You cant control all
the other things that happen in the world. You cant control what people
might think or what they might say. Focus your energy on those things
you can control. I tried to do this in baseball and Ive kept thinking about
this throughout my career in business and public speaking.
I dont necessarily put a lot of importance on numbers. In a general
sense, I have an idea of where I want to wind up as far as numbers go,
but quite often when we do that, were lowering the bar for ourselves
or were holding ourselves back. Were minimizing what we could do.
Youve heard the saying, Dont make your minimum your maximum.
I really believe that.
If you go out and just do the best you can do, and you can look
in the mirror and say, I gave 100 percent effort to this task, then the
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numbers are going to be what they are. And lots of times theyre going to
be better than you thought theyd be. So let that pressure go and accept
that you cant control everything. Youll find that it becomes easier to
control the things you can.
Once youve prioritized and prepared, you dont just have a dream
anymore, you have a purpose. Youve made this purpose a priority in
your life and youve done the preparation so now you know what its
going to take to achieve this purpose. Now you need to stand by that
purpose until it becomes an all-consuming obsession for success. Thats
right, I said, Obsession. For a lot of people that word has a negative
connotation, but its a lot like peer pressure. Theres a good kind of peer
pressure and a bad kind of peer pressure. The same is true of obsessions.
Think about all the people in the world. Everyone youve ever
known or read about. Now think about the really, really, really successful
people. They are a little bit different than other people. I believe that the
people who are really, really successful in their lives are obsessed with
achieving success. And if you want to be successful in any endeavor in
your life, you have to be obsessed with it.
When some people hear the word obsession, they instinctively
recoil from it because it sounds extreme and in todays politically correct
world anything extreme is a horrible thing. Believe me, theres nothing
wrong with obsession. If youre a successful person, there are going to be
times in your life where youre obsessed with something, but ironically
its because of that obsession that later on you will achieve the balance
that we all are looking for in our lives. We want to have time with our
families. We want to have time for work. We want to have time for
vacation. We want to have personal time. And sometimes we have to
be obsessed with something to create a life in which we have time for all
those other important things.
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STEVE'S TIP
Make sure you are getting the right advice from
the right people. I believe personal-development
books are outstanding sources of advice. Try to
read something from a personal-development
book every dayeven if only for a half-hour. These
books will help you stay focused on your goals and
create positive actions every day.

I talk a lot about how success happens over timewhich it does

but you still need to have a sense of urgency about your goals. Try this
game with me. Lets say you have your goal in your mind, and now I
want you to imagine its the Old West and you need to choose your
mode of transportation to get to your goal. There are three different
ways that you can travel.
The first way is to ride Eeyore, the donkey from Winnie the Pooh.
Well, you know that wont work. Youre not going to get anywhere
very fast riding Eeyore, and I dont know if youre going to get very far.
Im not so sure I would want to ride Eeyore anyway because he was a
complainer a very negative little donkey.
The second way is to ride a field pony. You can ride a field pony
and you could probably get to your destination on one. But it might
take you an awful long time to get there, because field ponies arent very
fast, they just kind of just tread along.
The third way you could go is to ride on the Pony Express. From
1860-1861, the Pony Express was the fastest mail service ever seen in
the West, delivering mail from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento, Ca.,
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in ten days with an almost flawless record despite regularly traveling

through dangerous Indian territory. Only one piece of mail was ever
lost on the Pony Express, and the only thing that could beat its speed
was the transcontinental telegram. Thats how you want to be traveling
toward your goals: on the Pony Express. Fearless, fast and dependable.

STEVE'S TIP
When Im hiring people, I look for leaders. Im
trying to find leaders with whom I want to work.
I want to find leaders who are willing to do what
it takes to be successful, who have their own priorities as far as what they want to do and how fast
they want to get there. If somebody looks ready for
the Pony Express, thats the person I want to ride
with. Remember that a companys best resource
is not its technology, its marketing or its flagship
product. A companys most important resource
is its personnel, the human element of the whole
enterprise. Its the spirit and ingenuity of their
workforce!

Thats why Im such a huge fan of Donald Trump. You can point
out many successful people in the world today, but Trump is the standard
bearer. He easily could have stayed in Brooklyn and sold brownstones
with his father Fred, but he wanted to conquer Manhattan. In his No.
1 national bestseller Trump: The Art Of The Deal, Trump writes about
the importance of creating ambitious goals for yourself: I like thinking
big. I always have. To me its very simple: if youre going to be thinking
anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small because
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most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of

winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.
As a member of the New York Yankees, Ive met Trump several
times at Yankee Stadium and I have heard him give a keynote speech
many more times. But when you peel back all of his impressive accomplishments, the thing I admire most about Trump is that he likes to
have fun. In Trump: The Art Of The Deal, he writes, I dont kid myself.
Life is very fragile, and success doesnt change that. If anything, success
makes it more fragile. Anything can change, without warning, and that
is why I try not to take any of whats happened too seriously. Money
was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The
real excitement is playing the game. Trump personified!
You want to create high expectations for yourself. Successful
people consistently raise the bar of whats expected of them, they raise
what they ask of themselves. Thats an important outlook to have if
you want to grow in your business and as a person. Challenge yourself.
Look at someone like the swimmer Michael Phelps. You talk about a
guy who is always raising the bar. He breaks the world record and then
hes out there training hard because he wants to break it again. He
wants to break his own record! Thats how you challenge yourself. Find
out the best you can possibly do at something, and the next time, try
to do it even better.
You must demand and expect the best from yourself. I dont
understand why people try to negotiate the price of success. I dont get
that. Why do we accept mediocrity, from ourselves or others? Whatever
it takes to be successful, thats the price you have to pay, not a dime or
an hour of practice less.
You always hear that practice makes perfect, but thats not entirely
true. Practice doesnt make perfect, but perfect practice makes perfect.
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Practice is one of the most overlooked tools that we can use in any
endeavor. You know which skills you need to succeed in your field,
so why not practice them so you can be at your very best. It seems
so simple, but many of us neglect practice, especially as we get older.
Thats a mistake. No matter how successful and accomplished you are
in your field, you can always improve. Theres always something you
can get better at. So get out there and practice.
The key to practicing something is to not just go through the
motions. You need to have perfect practice to really improve. If youre
out there and youre doing your thing, and youre practicing, but not
really doing it correctly, youre going to do more harm than good.
Youre going to ingrain your bad habits. Youre going to be practicing
and instilling the wrong way of doing things.
Everybody who is a professionalno matter what theyre doing
they know what is right and what is wrong. They know that if they
have a test, for example, and its an open-book test, that there are two
ways that you can take that open-book test. You could just go right to
the test and take it, or you can actually print out the material, study it,
and spend the three or four hours getting to know the subject matter,
become confident that you understand it, and then take the test. We
all know that theres a right way and a wrong way to do everything.
Its just a matter of committing yourself to doing things the right way
every day. Thats the mindset for success.
When I was playing baseball, I got over my throwing problem
because I knew the correct way to field and throw a ball so I was able to
practice it every day. If I was not doing that practice correctly, if I was
what they call ol-ing the ball, where you field it off to the side with
one hand like a matador instead of fielding the ball in the center of
your body with two hands, I wouldnt have gotten better. You know the
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right and wrong way to do things. So you have to make sure that youre
practicing correctly. Its so important. When you practice correctly,
it instills good habits and it breeds confidence because you know if
youre doing it right in practice, youll carry it on through the game,
the meeting, or the sales call.

STEVE'S TIP
When I have a major speech or sales meeting
that I must prepare for, I always tell myself the
following: You might talk better, sell better or look
better than me, but you CANNOT outwork me, you
CANNOT silence my spirit, you CANNOT control my
will and you CANNOT stop me from learning. You
can make money or you can make excuses but you
CANNOT make both.

Practice isnt just for activities like baseball. Lets talk about
parenting. Say youre supposed to take your kid to school and you
wake up late, you dont even make their lunch, you drop them off at
school, and your son missed 20 minutes of his first period and he gets a
tardy notice. Pretty soon the teacher will be calling you up and saying,
Hey, your kids been tardy all the time. Whats the problem? Well,
the problem is that youre not practicing your parenting skills very well.
As a parent, as a leader and as a team member, you need to be
an example, and you have to practice correctly. If you dont practice
correctly, its going to have a ripple effect. Youre not going to be as good
as you want to be, and it will affect the people around you in a negative
way. So you need to practice, and you need to practice correctly.
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THE LESSON
Perfect practice means putting in the extra time to make sure
you are working to the best of your abilities. Success and struggle
go together like calories and donuts. Anytime somebody has done
something really successful, they worked hard. There are a lot of
people who are interested in a lot of things, but the people who find
success are the ones who are committed, not just interested. If
you make a commitment and youre willing to pay the price, youll
find the rewards will make the struggle worth it.

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CHAPTER 3

C R E AT I N G T H E
SUCCESSFUL
AT T I T U D E

ets go to a football game together. The stadium is full and the

cheerleaders are waving their pom-poms and the players are on
the field. You and I are up in the stands with some hot dogs. Now
look down and tell me what you see, OK?
We have the interior linemen. Theyre all about 65, 66. They
weigh about 300 pounds. They all look alike. What about the wide
receivers? Lets see. Well, theyre all tall. Theyre about 62 to 65.
They run like the wind, and they can jump like crazy, and theyve got
great hands to catch the football. What about the running backs? Well,
theyre about 61 or 62. They weigh around 230 pounds, and theyve
got great starting ability to go left and right, and file forward. The
quarterbacks are tall, lanky guys who can see down the field and throw
the ball far. Linebackers might be the best athletes out there because
theyre a mixture of everything. Theyre fast. Theyre agile. Theyre big.
So whats the difference? When were sitting up here looking
down at the game, all these guys are the same. They all look the same.
They all run the same. They do everything the same. So what makes
the difference between a Walter Payton or a Peyton Manning and an
unknown also-ran? What makes one guy an all-star, and another guy
just another guy? Its what they have in their ribcage. Your heart and
your passion make the difference, bud. They make all the difference in
the world.

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THE LESSON
I dont care if it is a football field, a baseball diamond or a
basketball court. I dont care if its an office building. I dont care if
its the best truck driver in town or the best barbecue man in town.
Whatever it is, heart and passion are going to separate someone
whos successful and an all-star in their field from someone whos
just another guy or just another woman. There is no question in
my mind about that. Thats what the edge is. Thats what makes
the difference.

Heres another example of how much heart matters. You know

the difference between a guy that hits .260 in the big leagues and the
guy whos going to the Hall of Fame and hitting .300?
Its one big hit a week. Think about this. There are 26 weeks in
a baseball season. Lets say your batting average is based on about 500
at-bats. Thats 26 hits. Thats one hit a week that makes the difference
between a guy who is going to the Hall of Fame and a guy who was an
also-ran.
If you start at the beginning of the baseball season, opening day,
and you take the best team in baseball, the team thats going to win the
World Series and you take the worst team, the one thats going to finish
in the cellar, I can tell you one thing right now: each of those teams
is going to win 54 games, and each of those teams is going to lose 54
games. The World Series champion and the cellar-dweller. Theyre both
going to win 54 and lose 54.

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So whats the difference? Its those other 54 games. And its

going to come down to little, tiny things that will make the difference
between wins and losses. The smallest things can make the difference
in a baseball game. And when you play with heart you do those tiny,
little things. You give me somebody who has talent, and you give me
a guy who has less talent but more heart, the guy with more heart is
going to win every single time. Look at it this way: not everybody can
run for two 40-yard touchdowns in a game. Even the guy who did it
cant do it the next game. We all have ups and downs, but nobody ever
had a slump in hustling.
Thats why the guy with heart always wins in the end, because you
dont have slumps in hustling. That supersedes any boundaries.Hustle
shows just how much you want something. If you always go at things
with intensity and hustle, then youre going to be able to ride through
some tough times.
There are times where we all make mistakes in whatever were
doing, but if we work with a lot of hustle and a lot of intensity, we can
override some of our shortcomings just by going out and getting it
done with passion and intensity.
Edwin Barnes was like that when he went to see Thomas Edison.
There was nothing remarkable about Barnes except for what was in his
heart. Take a guy like Pete Rose. If you put Pete Rose in a tryout camp
today, he might not even get drafted because he couldnt run; he had
average power, no throwing arm, and average fielding skills. He could
hit, but he wasnt blessed with great speed. Seriously, todays scouts
might have passed on Rose,but hes someone who might be one of the
10 greatest players who ever played, all because of what was in his heart
If you ever saw Pete Rose play baseball, there was no mistaking
how much passion and heart he had for the game. Heres something to
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think about: your heart and passion show in how you do your job just
as clearly as it did when Pete Rose played baseball. If I watch a person
work day in and day out at their job, I can pretty much tell you what
kind of person they are on the inside by watching them work. I can see
the way that they approach their job or approach their business. I can
see their interaction with other people. I can see the self-respect that
they carry in themselves by the way that they approach their vocation.
I can see the way they handle stress. I can see the way that they attack
their job and their passion. I can see what they do in between spurts of
working, like how they handle their downtime at work.I can just see
all these different elements that create a fabric of what kind of a person
they are. So I can watch a person work for a day and get a good idea of
what kind of person they are.Im sure you can too. Its the same thing
as being able to tell that Pete Rose hustled on the ball field.
When I watch successful people work, I see that they all have
confidence, they all create structure in their lives, and they all have
integrity. Those are the things I watch for because if someone possesses
those traits I know he or she is destined to succeed.

THE LESSON
Success isnt just about how you perform at the big meeting
or the sales call. You achieve success through the little things you
do every day. Its the tedious little things you must do with passion
every day that are going to make the difference, the same way Pete
Rose got his 4,256 hits, one at a time.

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Once you have your goal, and you know your why, youll find
that your heart will be engaged in everything you do. Now you need to
apply that passion to the task at hand. That means being 100 percent
committed to achieving your goal and to those daily tasks that through
your preparation you know you need to complete to get there.
Sometimes when Im doing one of my speeches, Ill set up a small
table in front of the audience and Ill put a light on this table. And Ill
invite some lady from the audience up. I hold her hand, I pull out the
chair for her, and I sit her at the table. It looks like were on a little date
and everybodys watching.
I tell her that weve got to pretend were a couple and were out
on a date. She says OK. So were role-playing. So I start by saying, Its
just so great to be with you and Im just so in love with you, and were
thinking about our future, and do you want to live at the beach, or do
you want to live in the city? And what should we name our children?
Oh my God, weve got all these wonderful things to think about. The
crowd starts laughing and getting into it because everybody responds
to a love story.
Then I drop this on her. I say, You know what? Honey, Im just
so excited about our life together. Im telling you right now that I can
commit to you 99 percent of the time. What do you think? You hear
some rumbling from the crowd, and the womanno matter how
many times Ive done thisalways says, No, Im not doing that.
Now the woman goes back to her chair and everybody gives her
a nice round of applause. Then I say, Folks, would anybody buy this
bag of worms? Would anybody go along with this shyster whos only
going to be committed to this lady 99 percent of the time? Everybody
says, No way! Then I ask, So why do you make that same deal with
yourself in your other endeavors in your life?
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THE LESSON
Youre either committed or youre not. Theres not a gray
area. Its a yes-or-no answer to a very simple question. Yet there
are so many people in this world who are 99 percent committed
or maybe less than that. Nobody is going to buy that. You wouldnt
accept that from someone else, so why would you make that same
deal with yourself?

If youre in a position right now in your job and you do not like it
and youre not getting it done at work, and youre just hanging in there,
working just long enough so that you dont get fired, then why are you
making that same deal with yourself?
If you want to do something different in your life, you need to get
up and change it. You need to change the way youre doing things. You
need to change the way youre thinking. You need to change the way
youre going about your business. You need to change your mindset in
life. You have got to change it because 99 percent is not going to cut it.
Success is all about being committed to your goals and the task at
hand. Now, some people are bothered when they see someone who has
an intense commitment to his or her goal. When youve committed to
your goal 100 percent, people are going to question you. Sometimes
people see someone committed to a goal and say, Whoa! Youre hyper.
The one that really gets me is when somebody tells me, Why dont you
just relax? That drives me up a wall. I know how to relax. And its
always the most negative people who say this. Sometimes I talk about
this in my speeches. I ask people if they are excited and happy, and
when I see those negative people and they tell me, with a long face and

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a less-than-enthusiastic mumble, Yes, Im happy. I say, Well, you

better tell your face, because Im not seeing it.
The best way to distinguish between interest and commitment,
between someone who would like to succeed but isnt willing to put
in the necessary work and someone who will do whatever it takes to
accomplish his or her dreams is to think about having a backbone
instead of a wishbone. You need to have a backbone, not a wishbone to
succeed. Success takes strength and a wishbone just isnt going to cut it.
So once youve committed your heart 100 percent to your goal,
the final part of creating an attitude for success is patience. Remember
that achieving success is a small series of steps; its not a giant leap. If
theres one thing you need to remember, its that there is no such thing
as overnight success. In fact, people who demonstrate patience are
more likely to succeed than those people who want it all five minutes
ago. Those people looking for the quick fix have wishbones and you
know that you need a backbone to succeed in life.

STEVE'S TIP
Keep your eye on the horizon. You have to be
focused on the end point. Getting too involved in
your day-to-day problems and hiccups is not going
to be advantageous. There are going be times when
you dont want to do this, but if your mind is focused
on your long-term goal, youll be able to keep those
daily ups and downs in perspective.

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A T T I T U D E

The link between patience that is, the ability to delay instant
gratification in order to achieve more in the long-term and success was
proved in a decades-long Stanford University study. In his renowned
book Dont Eat the MarshmallowYet! author Joachim De Posada
outlined this 30-year year study of human behavior. The psychologists at Stanford wanted to discover the mental processes that make
some people delay instant gratification. In other words, they wanted to
identify self-control.
In the test, the scientist took a kid into a roomthe kids were
about 4 to 6 years oldand said, Sit right here and, by the way, heres
a marshmallow that Im going to put in front of you.
Then the kid hears the rules. The scientist says, Listen, I will be
back in 15 minutes. You can eat this marshmallow if you want, but
if you wait fifteen minutes until I come back, Im going to give you
another marshmallow so youll have two marshmallows.
Then the scientist leaves the room and watches what the kids do
on video. Ive seen these videos and they are heartbreaking and funny
at the same time. Some of the kids took the marshmallow and smelled
it and licked it. One of the kids was brilliant; he made a little hole in
the marshmallow and sucked out the middle of it, and then propped
it back up on the table to look like the whole marshmallow was still
there. Can you imagine when youre 5 years old trying not to eat a
marshmallow that was right in front of you?
What the study found over 30 years was fascinating. By a huge
margin, the kids who resisted eating the marshmallow were far more
successful later in life than the kids who ate the marshmallow. If they
had the self-control at 5 years old to hold off eating one marshmallow
so they could get two, they could also delay gratification so they could

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study hard to do well in school and work hard to advance in their

career.
This study tells us a couple things. Most importantly, it shows
us that what you do early in your kids life is so important. This study
tested kids between the ages of 4 and 6 and already the roots of their
future life were firmly planted.
What else do we learn from this study? People who are patient
achieve lasting success. Sure, all these kids had to do was wait 15
minutes, but to a kid a 15-minute wait is like three or four adult hours.
I just love that study, because it shows how much of human behavior
is so obvious. You can slice and dice it and come up with all these great
scientific words and descriptions, but human behavior is not that hard
to figure out. If you want to be successful, you have to learn self-control
and how to delay gratification.
For a kid its a marshmallow, but for you it could be the many
distractions that get in the way of achieving your goal. If theres one
thing our 21st century world is good at creating, its distractions that
keep our minds off our goals.

THE LESSON
You need heart and passion to succeed, but you also need discipline
and self-control in applying that passion. When you can do that,
youll find youll have all the marshmallows you could ever want.

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GET OVER YOURSELF

HUMILIT Y, RESPONSIBILIT Y AND
INTEGRIT Y WILL CARRY THE DAY

n August of 1981, when I was 21, I got called up to the big leagues
as a Los Angeles Dodger. I played around 20 games, enough to
know that I could play at this level. The Dodgers were getting ready
to go to the World Series that year and our manager Tommy Lasorda
brought me into his oce and said, Look, Ive got to play the veteran
guy. When I got called up, the Dodgers regular second baseman
Davey Lopes had been hurt. Now Davey was healthy and Tommy
said he needed to play Davey to get him ready for the post-season
because we were already going to the playoffs.
But I will tell you that if Im the manager next year, youre
going to be the second baseman, Tommy said. I give you my word.
Thats just about the best thing a young ballplayer could hear, so
for the rest of the season I was just going to shut up and do my thing.
So its now a couple games before the end of the season, and Tommy
was starting to play Davey to get him ready for the playoffs. But then
Davey got himself kicked out of the game for something, so I had to
go in the game and replace him. This was in the Houston Astrodome
late in September 1981, and the Astros pitcher, Don Sutton, was
going for his 56th career shutout. It would have been a record. He
already had 55, and he was beating us 4-0.
I had just got called into the game, and I was the last guy up,
and I had two strikes on me. I remember a couple things so clearly
from that night. Number one, the Astrodome was sold out, and
60,000 people were chanting along with that big Astrodome scoreboard flashing, Strike him out! Strike him out! Strike him out! And
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I was down in the count: one ball, and two strikes. Suddenly Don
Sutton threw me a fastball and all I did was just react. I just turned
and threw the head of the bat and, man, I hit a line-drive bullet out
of the park for a homerun.
I couldnt act like I was overjoyed because we were losing the
game. I wanted to jump up out of the Astrodome I was so happy,
but I just rounded the bases, all business, and went back into the
dugout. Then Sutton got the next batter out, and that was the end of
the game.
So Im in the dugout taking my gloves off and getting ready to
walk up through the underpass of the stadium to the clubhouse with
the rest of my teammates. Before I could even get out of the dugout,
somebody tapped me on the shoulder and I looked over. Don Sutton
was sitting right next to me. And he had the baseball that I just hit a
homerun off of him with. He came up to me and he said, Im going
to tell you something. Ive seen a lot of young players come up and I
want to tell you that I think youre going to have a huge career, and
I want to congratulate you for hitting this homerun off me. And Im
going to sign this baseball and give it to you.
And Don Sutton did that for me. It was amazing. I had just
hit a homerun off the guy and yet there he was finding the ball and
signing it for me. It was as graceful an act of sportsmanship and professionalism on the part of Don Sutton as Id ever witnessed before or
since, and for a young rookie just learning my way in baseball, Sutton
showed me how to act in the game.

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THE LESSON
Don Sutton showed me how to play baseball with class. Theres
a professional way to do things in every field, and doing things the
professional, old-fashioned way is the coolest thing you can do. Don
showed me how a leader shows respect and admiration for others,
and to this day I take his example to everything I do in my life.

Now lets compare the class of a player like Don Sutton with
the narcissism we see in baseball today. The big slugger comes up to
bat in his extra-baggy uniform and the 17 pounds of body armor that
hes wearing so he doesnt get hit by the pitch. The reason he wears
that baggy uniform, by the way, is that it would be impossible for a
snug-fitting uniform to hold that much muscularity. It just would be
beyond comprehension. Thats why he must wear the baggy uniform.
And believe me, if he could sag the pants, he would. You can see him
step into the box and slightly dig in. The slugger hits the homerun, and
freezes in his glorious follow-through. First of all, he wants everybody
to see the statuesque manner in which he stands there and watches
the ball go out of the ballpark. He cannot put his arms down from his
follow-through because he is just as enamored of the flight of the ball
as everybody else in the stands. So he just stands there with this statuelike pose in his follow-through as he watches the ball fly out of the
ballpark, and kisses himself up and down those powerful arms. Then
you see him snap back to reality and realize that he must perform the
daunting task of running around the bases.
So the slugger slow-trots to first. Before he gets to first base
though, he has to let the first-base coach congratulate him with a stupendous high-five. So they do the high-five. Then the slugger slows
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himself back to a trot, the better which to let everybody glorify him.
He hits first base, and then goes to second base. By this time he has
pointed up to the Lord three or four times to make sure the Lords
watching as well. And then when he comes to third base, he low-fives
the third-base coach because he wants to mix things up a little bit.
Then he comes home, and points to the sky a couple more times. Got
to make sure the Lords still watching. And then he turns around to
doff his cap to the fans and disappears into the dugout to a rousing
standing ovation. That should do it, right? Nope. He waits to hear that
chantOne more time! One more time!and he comes back out.
Takes off the cap again. Blows more kisses. Pirouettes back into the
dugout, only to be seen again when he has to come out and take his
position on defense. This whole thing takes seven or eight minutes. It
should take 20 seconds.
All I can think when I watch this is, Man, imagine if someone
tried that on Nolan Ryan. My gosh, one time I tried to bunt on Nolan
Ryan. Holy cow! You didnt try to bunt on Nolan Ryan. And if you hit
a homerun off him, boy, watch out. Today, if you throw inside, they
want to toss you out of the game. The umpire will warn both benches.
You, and you, youre warned! No throwing inside? Are you kidding
me? Thats part of the game! If you took away throwing inside from
Bob Gibson, if you took away throwing inside from Don Drysdale,
these guys would have been .500 pitchers! They lived on intimidation.
Thats how you separate the weak from the strong in baseball. If you can
intimidate those people, if you can get in their head, theyre going to
have a real hard time hitting the ball hard. Now today you cant do that.
The umpires wont let guys pitch that way, the way youre supposed to
pitch. Thats why players today hit 50 homeruns, and thats why their
batting averages are as high as they are. You cant intimidate anybody

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anymore. Its not politically correct. You might hurt the nurturing
aspect of their psyche if you intimidate them.

STEVE'S TIP
You know were in trouble when even baseball
is getting politically correct. Oh no, the pitcher
might intimidate somebody. Does that mean they
will need counseling? As a society, were getting
away from our traditional bedrock values. Its
important for you to adhere to these time-tested
values because they will make you stand apart and
people will respect you more. Im not saying that
all change is bad, because sometimes change is
really good. However, when it comes to professionalism and leadership, those values are fixed and
permanent. They dont vary according to fashion or
the times.

Dont even get me started on soccer. I watched the World Cup

and you see the same posturing and self-aggrandizement you do in
baseball, but they add an international flair to the proceedings. Lets
say someone is trying to kick the ball and they accidentally nick one
of the opposing players. You can see it clearly on TV, he barely touches
the guy, but, man, that guy goes down in a heap, holding his leg and
screaming bloody murder. I mean, wheres the ambulance? Then 15
seconds go by, he doesnt get the call and that same guythe one
screaming like someone who broke his leg in three placesjust pops
up and hes fine. He starts running around again. Are you kidding me?
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If theres ever a fight in one of these sports, I want those soccer

guys. Thats the guy I want to be matched up against in the fight. After
the game is over, it looks like a sniper took half these teams out, all these
guys just laid out everywhere on their backs. I saw one guy just sitting
on his knees, slumped back with his head in his hands, openly sobbing.
I mean, he was sobbing, crying like a child. Then a guy from the other
team comes up, brushes back the locks from his face, looks up, holds the
other players face in his handsthis is a grown man doing this!and
kisses his tear-soaked face, trying to give him some solace. Some comfort
so he can get through the night because he just lost a soccer game.
Hey, there was a 50 percent probability when you stepped on the
field that you were going to lose. We all know that somebodys going
to win, and somebodys going to lose. You play your hardest, you give
it your all, and when its over, you accept the result. You dont cry. You
dont fall on the field like youve been shot. Sometimes I cant believe
what were seeing in sports today. It can hurt to lose, but you dont
make a spectacle out of yourself. If youve got feelings you need to get
out, thats what the locker room is for.

STEVE'S TIP
Humility is not taking yourself too seriously, but
taking what you do very seriously.

These examples show why sports have deteriorated as much as

they have. And unfortunately this is not only a problem in professional sports. This is a human behavioral trait that just happens to be
conspicuous in sports. But its everywhere. Im sure you see the same

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kind of behavior in your field of work. The liberal permissive attitude

that we see in the world today is making our society come apart at the
seams, and I think its a huge contributor to our current problems, not
only in the United States, but everywhere around the world.
The irony is that were marginalizing ourselves through this selfglorification. When were constantly blowing our own horns, we fail
to show respect and admiration for others and their accomplishments.
What we see in sports is a microcosm of where we are in society today.
We have got to make sure that we dont lower the bar and jeopardize all
those great things that weve created over our history as a nation.
The number one thing lost is class. When you lose your humility
and your respect for the game and your opponents, you destroy the value
of the game, which was the very reason we played it in the first place. Yes,
take what you do seriously, but dont take yourself too seriously. That to
me is the essence of humility. Theres a greater purpose to why were here
in the world, and its to help other people. When you make something all
about you, then there really isnt much value to it.

STEVE'S TIP
Theres a link between the way you carry yourselves and the way you do things. If you see someone
slouched down, and wearing an untucked shirt and
maybe baggy jeans and just looking dumpy, thats
not someone who inspires a lot of confidence. If
you are a leader and committed to your goals, its
important to dress the part.

Remember chivalry? That code of honor and manners that true

gentlemen and ladies once held themselves to? I sometimes worry that

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too many people have forgotten what chivalry means and their obligation to act with chivalry in their lives. Fortunately, we get reminders
from time to time that chivalry is not completely gone. One time about
10 years ago when I was still working in financial services, I was in Las
Vegas for a business meeting and my son was with me. He was 13 years
old at the time. A lady came into the meeting a few minutes late, and
my son got up, walked to an empty seat at the table and pulled her
chair out for her. I didnt ask him to, but he knew the right thing to do
in that situation. The best way to keep chivalry alive is to act in that
manner yourself. People will notice, and they will respect you for it.
Im not just a nostalgic old-timer claiming that things were better
in my day. I know a lot of great athletes today who still play the game
with a lot of class. As a matter of fact, most athletes today dont display
this kind of boorish behavior weve been talking about. But enough of
them do and these selfish attitudes permeate throughout our society. I
see Little League games. I see pickup basketball games and intramurals,
and I see how these young kids respond to what they see on TV. Our
children are looking to us to learn how to behave, which is why its so
important to take responsibility for our actions.
In 1994, I wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal about
how permissive attitudes in society were negatively affecting our kids.
What really got me to write that column is when I went to a school
to talk to some eighth and ninth graders. I was just shocked to hear
some of these kids language and what they would say to a teacher.
I would really say that part of it was the teachers fault, because the
teacher permitted this attitude in the classroom. Thats where you
have to draw boundaries and you have to put up fences for kids.
Trust me, those kids want someone to make that distinction in their
life because when kids grow up with no responsibilities and with no
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guidelines, they dont have any confidence. When kids grow up with
guidelines and responsibilities and fences in their lives, then they
grow up with a lot of confidence because they know that someone
cares about them. That makes a big difference in life and kids who
dont have the discipline in their lives know they are getting the short
end of the stick.
So this visit to the school was what persuaded me to write the
piece. Hearing the language and seeing the disrespect in that classroom
helped me realize what we were losing through our lower standards,
our shirking the responsibility of disciplining our children, and our
refusal to teach our children right from wrong. I stopped one kid in
his tracks. I said, Listen, what youre doing here is terribly wrong. I
told him that he didnt respect himself, and he certainly didnt respect
his class or his teacher. And I told him that he was wrong. The kid
looked shocked. I dont think he had ever been told he was wrong
in his life.
The message of my column really resonated with people. In fact,
I received a letter praising the column from the White House. The
reason the column had this effect is because we all realize that as a
society were losing our moral compass. A lot of times what people
do is they try to blame the school, or they try to blame the economy,
or they try to blame this or that. But it really starts at home. It starts
with us and how we accept our responsibilities as parents. The last
thing I expected was to get a letter from the White House, which said
that the President and the First Lady had read my column and that
they really liked what I had said. But I just felt compelled to write it
because I had such strong feelings after I went to that school. I was
stunned by the disrespectful attitude and actions of the students there
and how they could freely cuss in front of their schoolteacher.
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There is a huge breakdown here. Theres been a terrible change

of attitude that I saw from the time I was a student in the classroom
until now. And I dont like one bit where it was going. You need to
respect people who are your teachers. You respect people who are
trying to help you and your parents and your elders. When I saw
the lowering standards in our schools, I was compelled to write that
column, and Im glad The Wall Street Journal printed it.
All of you with kids know that to be a good parent you need to
have a lot of patience. Its real easy to say yes to your kid. Its easy just
to give in. But I truly believe that you have to be a parent to your kids
first and foremost, especially when theyre young. Youll have time to
be their friend later.
Ill give you an instance. My daughter was wearing clothes to
school that didnt conform to her schools dress code. Nothing really
bad at all. Maybe she had a shirt that had a spaghetti strap on it over
the shoulder that the school didnt allow. Her school had a pretty
strict dress code and she was expected to follow it. So I kept telling
her, Hey, we can go over to Ralph Lauren, we can go to Macys,
or Nordstrom, wherever you want. Well get you some more clothes
that are cool, but that would conform to your dress code at school.
She wouldnt have any of it. So for about two or three weeks I kept
after her. Then one morning I just walked into her room when she
was just waking up. All she heard was this whoosh! sound. That was
the sound of me taking her clothes off the hanger in her closet in one
fell swoop, going right downstairs, outside to the garbage can and
throwing those clothes in.
You know how important clothes are to a young girl. They mean
everything. And boy, there was fire coming out of her ears. I said, You
know what? Right now you dont like me very much, but I have to be
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your parent. I have to be your parent and cant be your friend right
now, but when youre a grownup, you and I are going to be really
tight.
I was exactly right. My daughter and I are really, really close,
and one of the main reasons is because when she was growing up I
put up fences. There were guidelines, and she knew deep down how
much I loved her because I wasnt willing to sacrifice what I knew was
right for her. Even though it was hurting me to do it, I couldnt bend
because it wasnt right for her. Thats why patience is so important for
parents.

THE LESSON
When youre a parent, there are times when you cannot be a friend.
There are going to be times when its going to be hard and youre
going to have to be the mean parent. And if youre in a two-parent
family, then youre going to be leveraged against the other parent
because the other parent doesnt make me do this, but you do. But
you know whats right, and you have to stand behind it. You have to
do what you think is right. You have to be steadfast in those beliefs
and know that to say, Yes, OK is the easy way out. You know in your
heart whats right, and you have to stick by your convictions. Thats
true for anything that youre doing: at work, in your personal life,
everything else. You have to stick by your personal core beliefs.

In addition to patience, you also need a sense of personal responsibility. What accepting responsibility means is not saying youre a
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victim of your circumstances, but rather using those circumstances to

help you become the person you want to be. I sometimes think about a
story I heard about these twin brothers. Their dad was a murderer, and
he wound up in prison. One of the boys ended up just like his dad and
he was asked, Why did you follow your father into a life of crime and
violence? And he said, My dad beat my mother. He beat my brother
and me, and he never showed me any affection and he was horrible, so
thats why I turned out like this.
But his twin brother didnt follow the same path. Instead the brother
became a successful businessman, he married a lovely woman and they
raised a family together. And he was asked, Your father led a life of crime
and violence, why did you lead such a good life? And he said, My dad
beat my mother. He beat my brother and me, and he never showed me
any affection and he was horrible, so thats why I turned out like this.
So this guy obviously took the same things that happened to his
brother, which turned his brother into the same kind of person as his
father, and he turned it into something positive. He was able to look at
that and say, Hey, thats not going to be me. Im not going to be like
that.
Thats something Ive done in my family, too. My dad was not an
affectionate father. He just wasnt a touchy-feely type of a person. Thats
not what he was about. So I was just the opposite with my kids. I loved
and respected my dad more than I could ever tell you, but I wanted to
be affectionate with my children. I still hug and kiss my 22-year-old son
in front of his friends. I dont mind. And my son doesnt mind, either.

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THE LESSON
Were given a choice in life. We can take our experiences from our
life, and we can use them whatever way that we want to. You can
certainly choose to be a victim like the first brother. Or you could
do what the other brother did and say, You know what? Thats the
example I had, and its exactly why Im not going to be that way. Im
going to take my experiences and Im going to turn them for the
better. You have the ability to take your experiences and do what you
want with them. Its your choice.

This idea of taking responsibility for your actions and showing

backbone and resolve in the face of obstacles is the theme of one of my
favorite poems.
In Place of a Curse

By John Ciardi (1916-1986)

At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected,

I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who,
having been slugged no harder than anyone else,
never got up again, neither to fight back,
nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.
They who are wholly broken, and they in whom mercy is understanding,
I shall embrace at once and lead to pillows in heaven.
But they who are the meek by trade, baiting the best of their betters with extortions
of a mock-helplessness,
I shall take last to love, and never wholly.
Let them all in Heaven - I abolish Hell but let it be read over them as they enter:
Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing
gave nothing, and could never receive enough.
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The final element of personal responsibility is integrity. You possess

nothing in life more valuable than your own good name. Fortunately our
good name is something we can control. We all know how important
having a good name is in business. Especially now in our wired age, your
reputation is the most important thing you have. So what is your reputation? Its the accumulation of all those little actions you make every
single day, which is why its so important to make sure you are building
something positive every day. Thats the way we create and sustain success
in our lives. Here are a couple stories to illustrate what I mean.

Story #1: During World War II, Butch OHare was a fighter pilot on an
aircraft carrier in the Pacific. On a mission with his squadron one day,
he saw he was low on fuelsomeone must have forgotten to fill his fuel
tankand his leader told him to return to the ship.
On his way back, Butch saw a squadron of Japanese Zeros ready to
attack the defenseless U.S. fleet (the fighter planes were all on the mission).
So by himself, Butch attacked the Japanese squadron. He dove into the
formation and fired until he ran out of ammunition and even then Butch
kept diving, hoping to clip a wing and make the Japanese planes unfit to
fly. Finally, the Japanese squadron left the area and Butchs badly shot up
plane returned to the carrier.
Butch told the men on the ship what happened, but it wasnt until
they watched the film of the battleAmerican planes were equipped with
cameras to record terrain and enemy maneuversthat Butchs incredible
heroism was revealed. He was awarded the Medal of Honor, and his name
became known to travelers around the world in 1947 when Chicagos
OHare Airport was named in honor of American hero Butch OHare.

Story #2: In Chicago in the 1920s, there was a lawyer named Easy Eddie.
He was the lawyer for the gangster Al Capone and he kept Capone out of

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jail during Capones tenure as the crime boss of Chicago. Yes, Eddie was
a really, really good lawyer.
Life was pretty sweet for Easy Eddie. He was the trusted lawyer and
accountant to Capone and he was very well compensated for keeping the
secret books and keeping the boss out of the big house. In fact, Eddies
house was so big it took up an entire Chicago block.
Eddie had a son whom he loved very much. Eddie gave his son
everything he could: the most stylish clothes, the nicest car and a good
education, and he tried to teach his son right from wrong. But there was
one thing Eddie couldnt give his sonhe couldnt pass on a good name.
So Eddie decided he couldnt be Capones lawyer anymore and agreed
to testify against his boss, even though he knew it meant Capone would
have him killed. Sure enough, within a year of testifying against Capone
in the income tax case that put the crime boss behind bars for good,
Eddie was gunned down in a hail of bullets on a lonely Chicago street.
Now I know what youre thinking: what do these stories have in
common? Butch OHare was Easy Eddies son.

THE LESSON
A parent with integrity sets a great example for his or her children, but if you
are not living and acting morally in your own life, you wont be any help to
your children when they are trying to find their way in their lives. Nothing in
this world is worth trading your integrity and the example that you can show
somebody for. I mean absolutely nothing in the world is worth it, not even
close. I dont care how big your house is or how fast your car goes. Were
going to be here a short time, and the things that you can give to people that
have nothing to do with money are far more rewarding than anything you
can give them in a box wrapped up with a bow. You have to be true to yourself
and listen to that voice inside you because we all have it. The most important
thing in work and in life is to never, ever compromise your principles.

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One of my favorite hobbies is studying Civil War history, and I

am always amazed at the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln and how much
we still can learn from him today. The Civil War was the most challenging time our country ever faced, and in such a turbulent time, Lincoln
faced plenty of criticism for his decisions, however, he never wavered
from his principles. After signing the Emancipation Proclamation,
Lincoln said, I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration
that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have
lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and
that friend shall be down inside me.
When you stay true to your principles, youll never lose your most
important friend of all: yourself.

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CHAPTER 5

TRUE LEADERS
HELP OTHERS
ACHIEVE

91

t the beginning of this book I told you about my throwing

problem during my second year in the majors and how my
dad helped me face down the monster of self-doubt that was

overtaking my life by admitting that he also had a throwing problem

when he was in high school.
Years later, I was talking about this conversation with my mom
and she said, I have to tell you, your dad never had a throwing
problem in his life. Well, my jaw just dropped. I thought, Wait a
minute. That conversation changed my life. That conversation saved
my baseball career and helped me achieve my goals as a player. You
mean, he really didnt have that problem? It was like the ground I
was walking on suddenly had disappeared. Then I realized that my
dad had told me exactly what I needed to hear without any concern
for himself and his own self-image.
Thats what true leaders do. You can always tell who the good
leaders are: they are the ones with the arrows in their back because
they take the hits for everybody else. I believe that wholeheartedly.
Leaders also know that its not so much what they say, or even what
they do, that will matter most. Instead, the important thing is how
a leader makes people feel. Leaders know that sometimes people are
going to forget what they say. Sometimes people are going to forget
even the successes that a leader accomplishes. But when people look
at a leader, they will never forget the way that leader made them feel.
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A C H I E V E

And thats what my dad had done for me. I never forgot the way that
he made me feel when he told me that. And I think thats true everywhere else, too. You never forget how a good leader made you feel.
If youre going to be a successful leader, you need to lead with a
servants heart. That means taking the arrows when necessary to help
the entire team, and taking responsibility when things go wrong.
There could be an instance in an oce where something
happenslets say the company loses an important accountand
for the morale and the good of the oce, the leader will step up
and take responsibility for the problem. Instead of letting something
negative filter out through an oce, the leader will just corral the
whole situation and put it on his or her desk. The leader takes responsibility for a problem so that a bad situation doesnt create even more
problems as people try to assign blame.
Lots of times leaders will take the blame for things that really
arent their fault. Sometimes leaders will spread the accolades, maybe
even when theyre not 100 percent true. For example, I remember
playing in New York, where those newspaper guys love to stir up
trouble in a locker room. I dont get mad at them, thats what they
get paid to do and its something you have to deal with playing in
New York.
Heres an example of how it works. Lets say theres a fly ball
down the right-field line. The right fielder Jesse Barfield, the first
baseman Don Mattingly and I are all converging on the baseball.
And maybe nobody catches it and the ball drops, and the next thing
you know the other team gets a base hit, and the Yankees lose the ball
game.

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So the sportswriter will come up to me after the game and say,

Looking at that play, I just talked to Jesse and Don, and they didnt
say it, but they kind of questioned whether maybe you should have
caught that ball. And you know what I would say? I would say, That
was not their ball. That was my ball. I should have caught that ball.
In truth, that ball was anybodys, but in a situation like that,
the true leader takes responsibility. When I say, Theres no question
about it, I should have had that ball, it shuts everything down. There
is no argument, no controversy. It defuses the situation. Now its over.
Everybody makes mistakes. Nobody is perfect so, again, cut off the
shackles of pressure. Im going to make mistakes, youre going to
make mistakes. The important thing isnt the mistakes you make, its
what you do to fix them and learn from them that matters most.
Now if I were to say to that sportswriter, You know, off the
record, that was Mattinglys ball, then wed have a situation that
would fester. Once you go down that route, theres no escape. Whether
its the fly ball down the line or maybe its the FedEx package that
didnt get out on time or the sales call that didnt go well, its OK to be
the big person and step up and say, Hey, that was me. Thats what
leadership is about. Thats what leaders do.

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A C H I E V E

THE LESSON
You are the slave of what you say and the master of what you
dont say. That dictum doesnt mean never say anything. It
means that you should be aware of the power of your words.
There will be lots of times when you can make that beneficial to
you. When I say, That was my ball, my fault, I want people to
know that Im taking responsibility for what happened. Its similar
to those conversations I would have with my friends and family
when my kids were in earshot. I would talk to some of my friends
and family about a certain subject, maybe it was drugs, maybe it
was smoking, maybe it was drinking alcohol. And I would talk to
my friends and family about the downfalls and how bad it was.
Instead of preaching that message to my kids, I would talk about
it with my friends and relatives so that my kids could hear it indirectly. I know they could hear it and it was going in their heads
without me having to lecture them.

Another trait all effective leaders share is that they are gracious.
Being gracious is probably one of the single best things that a leader
can do because a leader is ultimately only as good as the people he
or she leads. A true leader is thankful that he or she is working with
such a great group of people. The leader is grateful for being put into
a position to be able to leadthat people hold him or her in high
enough esteem to ask his or her opinions. Being in a position where
people look up to you is something you should appreciate, and being
gracious is a huge part of being an effective leader.

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How does a leader show gratitude? Its very simple. Lets say
that youre at an event and youre making a public speech about the
workplace and youre talking about the people on your team. Youre
talking about the way these people move you. Youre talking about
how these people make you a better leader, and that they are people
who are great to work with, people whom you still learn from even
though youre the leader. A good leader isnt the one saying, Yes, I
am the almighty leader. I am just the greatest. Just like a good leader
on a ballclub doesnt pose for the crowd after hitting a homerun. The
business leader gives credit to his team and says that without them as
great teammates, leading would be a much tougher job. You just give
it back to the other person. You give it back, and just are gracious for
being in that leadership position. Believe me, that gratitude is going
to go a long way.
One of the most gracious leaders Ive ever known was Dodgers
manager Tommy Lasorda. If he had to review your performance in a
game and tell you some things that maybe you didnt want to hear,
he certainly wouldnt do it in a packed locker room full of your colleagues. He would take you in his oce and rip you a new one, but
before you left his oce you shook hands and it was good.
He did everything in a way that was respectful. He wouldnt
talk about you in the newspapers, he wouldnt talk about you in
the locker room, and he wouldnt embarrass you in front of your
teammates. He would take you in his oce and do what he had to
do, and then everything was good afterward. Thats what leaders do,
and I have a lot of gratitude toward him for doing that.
The reason Tommy is in the Hall of Fame is because of the
human element of what he brought to the game, the fact that he
could transcend all boundaries, that he spoke different languages. He
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created and maintained a cohesive unit of 25 people who were from

different countries and different walks of life.
The one thing that Tommy showed me was that peopleno
matter where theyre fromreally do have a lot of the same goals,
and on the inside were pretty much all the same. We want to better
ourselves, and we want better things for our lives and better things
for our families. Tommy was very involved with his players and their
families. He really brought a personal, family touch to a business
that was very regimented.
For example, lets say that youre a major league ballplayer and
youre going to go out to get something to eat. One unwritten rule
for teams is that if you go to an establishment to eat and the manager
and coaches are there already, you have to leave. The reason is that
if something happened at the restaurantlets say a fight broke out
and we were only innocent bystandersit would be a thousand
times worse if management and players were there together. Well,
Tommy threw that rule out the window. Instead, he would take us
out to eat. Thats the kind of person he was. He was a very hands-on,
family-type of person. What he brought to the team was a sense that
we were a family unit and we had the strength and cohesion of that
unit. Thats why his players played so hard for him, because they
respected him.

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THE LESSON
A big part of leadership is doing small positive things for people that
start to add up into something pretty significant. When Im working
with somebody in business, I try to give them some direction or
give them an example of how they can make their business better.
Thats why I love working in the business that Im in because I can
put the focus on other people. When you help people develop new
skills, when you start to help people out, youre really creating
the next generation of leaders. Thats what I really like. Showing
somebody how to do something correctly, showing somebody how
to carry themselves in a certain way, showing somebody how to
resolve a problem in a way that somebody else will benefit from.
Those are simple things that make a big difference in peoples
lives, and Tommy Lasorda understood that well.

It all starts with the people that you lead. Everybody that youre
working with, everybody youre associated with, they all have different
ways of doing things. Not right ways and wrong ways, just different
ways. Theres no question about it. Each person is going to be specific
and unique with his or her own way of doing stuff.
Some people are going to need to be coddled. Some people are
going to need to be kicked in the hind-end. And some people, you
need to just get the heck out of their way. Just open the door and say,
Go! and let them do their thing.
What that means is that a leader should not treat every person
exactly the same. In fact, nobody should be treated exactly the same,

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because everybodys different. A good leader recognizes this and

motivates each person a little bit differently.
Do the rules apply the same in the workplace? Absolutely. Thats
not what Im talking about. The rules apply the same for everybody.
But the way you handle people, its all different. Ive seen leaders use
different motivation techniques depending on the personality of the
team member, and they have gotten great results because they knew
the individuals on their team and how to get the best work from them.
Thats what leaders are supposed to do.
You need to know what makes people tick. With every team
member, ask yourself, How do I get the most out of this person?
There are all these different ways to motivate different people and a
successful leader will know what every team member needs. Its OK to
motivate people in different ways. In fact, I think its essential and the
people on your team will recognize that as well. The important thing is
that the same rules apply to everyone equally.
Once you know how to motivate your team, its important to
be excited for other peoples accomplishments. Sure, people will get
excited about making moneymoney is always something that spurs
production. Hey, I just got a bonus or a raise for this! is something
every worker likes to say.
But you know whats really going to get to somebody? Its when
you show your gratitude toward them and you praise them in front of
other people. When you let people know how great it is to work with
them, I guarantee you in the long run, that praise is worth more to them
than the money they just got as a bonus. When you tell somebody how
much you appreciate them, thats going to go further, way further than
any bonus theyre going to receive.

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STEVE'S TIP
I really believe that if you build the person,
youre going to build the leader. You cant just install
somebody in a position to take the reins or to be an
example to the rest of the team until you build the
person first. It starts from the inside-out. You have
to build up the person. Youre going to build up their
self-esteem, and youre going to build up their confidence. Thats what leadership is about. Its about
self esteem and confidence, and showing the way
for others.

When you start your day, you should think, Somebodys going
to benefit from me today. Thats the essence of leadership, the essence
of what were taking about. You are a successful leader when you help
other people achieve their goals. Thats leading with a servants heart. And
thats why I say, Somebodys going to benefit from me today, because
Im going to put it out there. Im going to put out the positive energy.
Im going to put out the leadership and I am going to make whatever
situation we have in front of us better. People have solutionsthere are
a lot of solutions out there. What we need to do is jettison the complaints
and look for the solutions
Leadership is somebody who, first of all, puts others before themselves; somebody who is willing to take arrows, when they dont deserve
them. I also believe that leaders are the people who arent looking for
the accolades. Instead, they spread out those accolades for other people
instead of taking them all for themselves.
Leadership is an act of gratitude for others. True leaders are the
ones that exemplify it, live it, and believe it. They dont just talk about
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leading for others. They live it every single day. Its not a script they
have to follow. Its a conscience and a feeling theyre following in being
a leader. Its about not having a society that changes them. Its about
changing their surroundings and changing society for the better by being
a good leader. Thats what leadership is about.
There is another element of leading by example that we sometimes
overlook: our role as a leader to our children. The most important part
of parenting is setting an example for your kids. If I was somebody who
was out all night partying, or if my kids saw me smoking, or using bad
language, then theyre going to take part in those activities. Theyre going
to think thats OK. Theyre not going to know the difference between me
doing something as an adult and them doing it as a child. So I try to be
a good example for my kids; thats the best way to lead. In fact, I think
its the only way.
Believe me, Im far from perfect. But the thing is that nobody is
perfect. Nobody is going to be a perfect example all the time. You try to
do the best you can. The main thing people have to do is set examples
by their own behavior and actions. Not only for your kids, but I think
its important for leaders to set a good example in the workplace. People
who are leaders have got to lead by example. If they dont, no one will
follow them. Lip service is something Ive never admired.

THE LESSON
Youll know youre a true leader when you get excited for other peoples
successes. In business, we all look at numbers. We have to. Numbers are
what allow us to make our payrolls and feed our families and stay in business
and grow. However, you have to care about your people even more than your
numbers. If people know you truly care about them, they will follow you, your
production will increase, and your numbers will be better than ever.

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OVERCOMING
O B S TA C L E S

eve come a long way so far. Weve identified our why, weve
created a game plan for success, we made a commitment to
humility and integrity, and weve learned that the best way
to lead is to help others succeed. Now Ive got some good news and
some bad news for you. The bad news is that youre still going to face
obstacles every day, but the good news is that you can use these obstacles
to strengthen your commitment to your long-term goals. As I always say,
adversity has a way of introducing you to yourself. And trust me, if youre
following your plan for long-term success, youre going to have some
unforeseen adversity and obstacles come your way.
Have you ever heard of the C.A.V.E. people? Nonot those guys
who wore animal skins and carried big clubs and dragged their wives by
the hair. I mean the Citizens Against Virtually Everything. Those people
who just dont want to hear about anything new. It cant work, they
say. Dont bother us, they say. Were happy being miserable, they say.
Lets take the example of a new product or a new idea on the scene
today. Remember that everything new goes through three different
stages. The first stage is that people are going to say its absolutely impossible. Youll hear the C.A.V.E. people say, Its not going to happen. In
the second stage the idea or new product is violently opposed, usually
by those same C.A.V.E. people. And in the third stage the new product
or idea is accepted as self-evident and those same C.A.V.E. people will
forget they had ever opposed it.
When was the last time you used your microwave oven. I bet it was
pretty recently. Well, the first microwave oven was built in the spring of
1947. It was 6 feet tall and weighed almost 750 pounds. It cost between
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$2,000 and $3,000. The first home model was introduced in 1952 and
cost $1,295. People just didnt buy microwave ovens; they were almost
offended by them. They exclaimed, Thatll never work! and Im not
going to be poisoned by those rays zapping my food. In 1967 Tappan
brought out the first countertop microwave oven and now you never see
a kitchen without one. The same thing happened with cell phones and
home computers. Can you imagine your life without those things today?
I know I cant.
This cycle is not a new phenomenon either. Remember Copernicus
from your high school science class? Born in Poland in 1473, Nicolas
Copernicus was a brilliant man. He was a mathematician, a physician,
a classical scholar, a translator, an artist, a cleric, a jurist, a governor, a
military leader, a diplomat and an economist. Pretty busy guy, right? We
remember him as an astronomer because Copernicus realized that the
Earth revolved around the sun. He believed in a heliocentric cosmology,
meaning that the sun is at the center of the universe and everything
revolves around sun.
Back then, people thought this was crazy. They thought that this
guy was an absolute nut. Everybody knew that the Earth was at the center
of the universe, and the sun revolved around the earth. How could the
sun be at the center if were living on the Earth? Well, Copernicus was
brash enough to say thats not the case, folks. He told those C.A.V.E.
people, I know it feels like the Earth is the immoveable center of everything, but thats not how it works.
What happened to Copernicus is the same thing that happened to
microwave ovens, cell phones and computers 500 years later. If an idea or
product doesnt fit the status quo of how people view the world, they will
zealously oppose it. When you follow your dream in life, you are going
to encounter resistance as well. You are going to hear people say, Thats
impossible. They might even actively oppose you. When this happens,
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you need to remember that you have a dream that is important to you
and stick by that dream and listen to what your heart is telling you. In
our society, weve seen ideas, products and services that have been sent
through the wringer before they were accepted. Those are the three stages
that every new idea goes through. People are going to say its impossible,
and then theyre going to be opposed to the idea because they dont want
to accept it, and then pretty soon they have to accept it. Finally the idea
becomes part of the new status quo. Remember that there are always
going to be naysayers out there, and you just have to stick to your guns.
When something new comes out, people are going to be uncomfortable with it. When you get them outside of their comfort zone, people
tend to get a bit rued. Thats only normal. But one thing that happens
in business, when you believe in something like Copernicus did, theres
going to come a certain time where youre going to feel very uncomfortable about what youre doing, especially if you are working with a totally
new idea or something that has never been tested.
You just have to be steadfast and go through that uncomfortable
period and know that it may be a while, but that you really do owe it to
yourself to go out and try to explore these new ideas. Innovation is what
makes this country so unbelievably great. I see it in business today. These
innovators come up with these incredible ideas and people look at them
kind of crossways and say, How do you think youre going to do that?
If your idea is strong enough to change peoples lives, then theres
going to be strong opposition to it. Thats probably the most uncomfortable time because youre going to hear it from your friends and family
that it will never work. And then pretty soon you get some traction and
things start to become self-evident. Then everything else falls into place
and people will forget they ever opposed you in the first place. In fact,
theyll convince themselves that they always, always believed in you, right
from the very beginning.
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THE LESSON
No matter how good your idea or goals are, youre going to have an
uncomfortable period when people challenge you. You really cant
avoid this and you just have to paw through it. When youre on the
road to achieving success, people are going to doubt you. Theyre
going to say you cant do it, and too many people listen to those
doubters and let them get in their heads. Well, let me tell you once
and for all, Dont listen to the naysayers. You hear a lot of people
talk about how they want to be successful. There are a lot of people
who tell me that they have a goal and a plan, yet there are far fewer
people who actually do it, follow through with it and make sure
it happens. The reason more people dont succeed is that most
people are only wishing for success. Theyre wishing for things to
happen. You need more than wishes to succeed. You need to expect
success and implement those successes into your everyday plans
and future goals. In other words, its time to harvest your accomplishments and put them into action.

Wishing wont get you past the C.A.V.E. people. You need
something a lot stronger and sturdier than a wish. Its fine to wish for
something, but you have to have a backbone not a wishbone. Youve
got to be tough. Part of being successful is being tough because youre
going to be loaded down with naysayers.

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STEVE'S TIP
Tune out the negative people in your life. Its a
tough lesson to learn, but the truth is that a small
number of people who are close to you dont want
you to succeed. Most of the time, the naysayers are
the ones who are broke.

One of my favorite stories about people who overcame the

naysayers is the story of Wilma Rudolph. Wilma was born in Clarkesville, Tenn., in 1940 as one of 22 children. Thats right, 22 children.
Wilma was born prematurely and she caught polio as young child,
which made her vulnerable to pneumonia and scarlet fever. She
recovered from the illness, but she wore a brace on her left leg, which
had caused her leg to grow crooked. Doctors thought she might never
walk correctly again.
But Wilmas parents cared enough to take her from Clarksville to
Nashville for physical therapy. A specialist in Nashville recommended
massage treatment, so Wilmas mother would rub her leg numerous
times every day. Wilma said later that when she was 5 years old, she
spent most of her time trying to figure out how to get out of her brace
and run with the other kids. Wilma finally did get out of that brace
when she was 12 and she was able to run like all the other kids. Well,
not exactly like the other kids. Wilma ran like the wind. She played
basketball and ran track in high school, where she caught the attention
of a Tennessee State track coach.
When Wilma was only 16, she earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic
team at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, and took home
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a bronze medal as a member of 4 x 100 relay team. That was only

a preview of what Wilma would accomplish. At the 1960 Olympics
in Rome, Wilma won three gold medals and set an Olympic medal
in the 200-meter dash. After the Olympics, she was known as the
fastest woman in the world. Why? Because she never quit. She never
stopped. She never believed what people told her.

THE LESSON
People underestimate or wont take into account the element of
passion in a human being. If you have something that you believe
in, if youre with a company or in a business position where you
have a good forum from which to exhibit your skills and you have
passion for what youre doing and you have a game plan to go
with it, I really believe that you cannot be detoured. You cannot be
stopped. You wont be denied if you have those three things: a track
to run on, a game plan and a lot of passion. How can you beat that?

I cant tell you how many times Ive heard from the C.A.V.E.
people in my life. Back when I was playing with the Dodgers, I was
building a big house on the West Coast. I had lived my entire life in
California, and the Dodgers never thought I would leave. But when it
came time to renew my contract, the negotiations just werent going as
well as I thought they should, and the situation wasnt right for me. So
what did I do? I did a pretty bold thing. I left the place where I played
for 11 years and went to the New York Yankees.
It was a big change for me and my family, but at the end of the
day I knew the Dodgers situation wasnt right. So whatd I do? I moved
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across the country and changed my situation. In life, you know when
a situation isnt right. You can feel it in your heart. Say youre at your
job and your boss is bearing down on the back of your neck, and hes
telling you to take a lunch when he wants you to take it, and you just
know this situation isnt right. You feel it in your bones. Well, you can
change it. You have that power. Its up to you.
Whenever Im in a tough situationand I know how hard it is to
walk away from something youre familiar with and go off into the great
unknownI think about something Frederick Douglass said. Do you
remember learning about Frederick Douglass in school? He was born
into slavery, from which he escaped as a young man, then he became an
abolitionist and a great orator and he advised Abraham Lincoln when
Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. (Douglass was actually
a little taller than the 64 President.) Douglass even wrote one of the
most famous autobiographies in American literature. When they open
a Hall of Fame of Overcoming Obstacles, Douglass will get his own
wing.
One of the things that Douglass said holds us back is that people
are willing to put up with situations they dont like. They just put up
with it. And you know what? Its not going to stop until you say, Im
done with this. Its not going to stop until you put up a stand and
say, Im not doing this anymore. Im going another direction. A bad
situation is not going to change unless you make it change.
Douglass said, Find out just what many people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and
wrong which will be imposed upon them. And these will continue
until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The
limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
oppress.
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Thats the best way Ive ever heard it put. The limits of tyrants
are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. What
it means is that people are going to keep doing it to you, and as long
as you keep doing what youre doing youre going to keep getting what
youre gettinguntil you say, No mas!
Ive had to make some bold changes in my life, but I made them.
After my career in baseball, I worked in financial services, but at a
certain point I had to get out. I wasnt comfortable with where the
industry was going and it didnt feel like the right place for me anymore.
So I made another huge change and now Im happier in my work than
ever before. I believe that most of the time people get exactly what they
want, but you cant get what you want if you dont go after it.
I cant tell you how many times people would tell me that I was
crazy. The C.A.V.E. people always say, What do you think youre
doing? I mean, do you know what the odds are for this? And heres the
thing, for average people, I believe those odds are probably correct. But
if youre going to succeed you have to look at yourself as not average.
Think about that: you are not average. You are someone who has
committed to a game plan for success, youve planted positive things
every day, youve acted with integrity and youve devoted yourself to
helping others. Theres nothing average about you at all, so you start
looking at yourself as different from everybody else.
You also need to realize that everybody is going to go through
hell in one instance or another, and you just have to drive through it.
Nobodys going be exempt from tough times. We all have gone through
hell at different times in our lives, and when you are there, you cannot
stop and take a break. Youve just got to keep on driving. Youve got to
keep on driving till you get through hell.

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It might be a long drive, but you have got to power through it.
There will be times in your life where things are just really not very
good, things are the pits. Thats happened to me in my life. I went
through it when I got divorced. I went through it when I had my
throwing problem. I knew that there were going to be periods of my
life where it just wasnt going to be good, it wasnt going to be fun.
So you know what I did? I looked at the thing, and I said, OK,
this is not going to be fun for the awhile, but I can approach this in a
couple of different ways. I can say, Poor me, Im a victim and I can
just cower down to it and sulk around everybody and tell everybody
how bad life is, or you know what I can do? I can bite it right back in
the face, and thats what I did.
I choose to be positive. I choose to not be miserable and to
try to make the best of whatever I can and get through this thing.
Thats what Ive always done during dicult times in my life, just
kept driving through hell.
How important is it to believe in yourself and not the averages?
Let me tell you about my friend John Saca. John is one of my very
dear friends. Hes a big-time developer in California. About seven
years ago I was with John and his wife, Darcy, at a clothes store. John
and I get our clothes at the same store. I said to Darcy, Why is John
so thin? Boy, he looks really thin. Then John interrupted and said,
You know, Ive been having these night sweats quite a bit lately. Ive
been working a lot. Its summertime. I think thats what it is.
I said, Man, you need to go get a checkup. So he went and
got a checkup, and he called me about two days later and he said, I
want to meet you for lunch. So we went out for lunch and John said,
Oh, I want to tell you something. Ive been diagnosed with Stage
IV-B non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
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I dont know how much you know about lymphoma, but IV-B
generally means youre going to die. IV-B is like the worst of the
worst that you can get. John had a tumor in his chest. He had one
in his spleen. He had one in his lung. He had it all over him. This
guy was gone. And there he was consoling me at lunchtime, because
I was pretty broken up about this. He was the one facing this terrible
disease and he was consoling me. He told me, This is going to be a
nine-month inconvenience for me. Im going to be sick and then Im
going to be well. And deep down in my heart I was thinking, No,
youre not.
Today John has completely eradicated the cancer. Free of
treatment. He has had a clear checkup for seven years now. He
has completely beat it. And hes thriving. Hes got two little girls, a
beautiful wife and he is very happily married.
John got well because he believed it. And what I love about him
is that he had a cocky smirk on his face when he told me about it at
that lunch. He was so confident telling me how he was going to get
better. He said, Hey, this is a nine-month inconvenience. I said
John, youre Stage IV-B. He said, I dont care. Ill beat this. You
watch. I start my chemo and my radiation, and I will beat this. Its
going to be a nine-month inconvenience.
And he did. He did it.

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THE LESSON
The bottom line is that if John didnt have the mindset he did, he
might very well not be here right now. Thats about as blunt as I can
put it. Do I believe that his mindset saved his life? Theres no doubt
about it. Not a question about it. What if he cowed down to this and
said, You know what? Its over. Im Stage IV-B, Im done? He could
have gone on Google and researched it and found out that maybe 2
percent of the people actually beat it when theyre stage IV-B, but
he didnt do that. John told me that this terrible disease was just a
nine-month inconvenience. Why was he consoling me? He was the
sick one. His attitude was astonishing. You hear great things about
how people conquer certain things, but you just cant imagine the
strength of the mind until you see it in action.

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CHOOSE SUCCESS
(MISERY IS OPTIONAL)

ve never met a pessimist who was successful. Thats kind of a

broad stroke butyou know what?I never have. Ive never met
somebody who always looked at the not-so-bright side or looked
at the glass as half-empty or plotted to do bad things that became successful. Ive never met anyone who didnt have a big dream or didnt
challenge himself or herself and became successful.
Ive never met somebody who was a burden to others who was
successful. I never met someone who didnt have a conscience who was
successful. The successful people Ive known were all positive people
and they werent just out for themselves. They understood that success
is about helping others.
Does success just mean that a person has a lot of money? A successful person is somebody who is happy with himself or herself. Its
somebody who has built great personal relationships that have nothing
to do with their work; somebody who has real strong family ties.
Success is not just what you do in your vocation, but it includes all
these other things that make a well-rounded person. And when you
have all those things, you are a success by any definition and youll find
that money usually follows.
Theres a Cherokee legend about an old Indian talking to his
grandson. The old Indian says there is a terrible fight going on inside
him between two wolves. One wolf is bad. His spirit is ruled by anger,
jealousy, hatred and greed. This wolf stalks people, wrecks villages and
does terrible things. The other wolf is good. He is full of joy, love,
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peace, kindness and hope. This wolf leads the other wolves in the pack
and takes care of them. The grandfather tells his grandson that the same
fight between those two wolves is going on inside the boy and inside
every other person in the world. The young Cherokee boy is thoughtful
for a minute, then asks his grandfather, Which wolf will win?
His grandfather says, The one you feed.

THE LESSON
What you choose to focus your energy on is what is going to grow
in your life. Thats why weve talked so much about your mindset,
making priorities, passion and creating something positive every
day. Its not that complicated. You choose what grows inside you by
what you feed it. So choose wisely.

I can tell you that there are a lot of people who control dynasties
and have a ton of money that I wouldnt trade places with for anything.
They dont appear to be real happy people. And thats not what Im
talking about when we say someone is successful. Sometimes when
we see people who have a lot of things materially, its really just a big
faade. Ive seen other people who have a ton of money, but youd
never know it. They dont try to showcase it. But I can tell you that
these people are extremely successful and they certainly have a lot of
money, probably a lot more money than the people who are so intent on
showing you how much they have. These are the really successful people.
They already know how much theyve achievedthey know because
they know how hard they worked for itso they dont feel the need
to show it off. These people are successful in every other part of their
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life as well. Theyve certainly achieved monetary success. Theyve got

personal success. Family success. Personal growth. A lot of good, solid
relationships in their life. Family. Friends. Theyve found success spiritually. There are many, many different ways of being well-rounded and
successful. When you have all these important areas of your life working
together in balance, I think thats what makes someone truly successful.
What prevents some people from achieving success is that too
often they just accept mediocrity. Their mindset is the problem. These
people dont focus on the goal of long-term success. Maybe these people
are lazy or maybe they dont have ambition, hopes and dreams. Maybe
theyre not willing to pay the price that success demands. There are as
many common denominators in unsuccessful people as there are in
people who are successful. The biggest trait unsuccessful people share is
that they accept mediocrity. If you accept mediocrity, then youll never
be happy with your situation at work and in life because youre not
asking enough of yourself and others.
Success all starts with your mindset. Like we talked about at the
beginning of this book, success starts with the positive things you build
every day. With these positive acts, you keep putting pennies in the
bank of success. Its all up to you. Misery is only an option. What you
choose to think of the most will grow the most, so dont choose misery,
because it will only grow. Im not going to get up in the morning and
say, Oh gosh, Ive got to go to work today. You know, if you feel that
way, like youre dreading what you have to do every day, change it. If
you dont like the way our countrys going and if you want to have an
opinion about the way our country is run, go out and vote. If you want
to do something different in your life, why dont you do something
about it? Go and take a look in the mirror. Right there youll find 99
percent of all your answers. Youre looking right at the answer. Its you.
So do something about it. People get mostly what they want. So if
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theres something you want to change in your life, make a bold step
and do it. Dont wait for life to come to you.

STEVE'S TIP
Ive got a secret about creating something
positive every day. Its pretty easy to do. A lot of people
choose misery because they think thats the easy
way and they get lots of sympathy and attention, but
if you have a laugh or you start to smile your body
releases a certain kind of endorphin that actually
makes you feel good. It lowers your blood pressure
too. Its much healthier for you to laugh, smile and
be positive than be miserable. Thats why happy
people tend to live longer than unhappy people. If
you want to be miserable, you have every opportunity to do it, but it takes about the same amount of
effort to be miserable as it does to be positive and
cheerful. It takes about the same amount of energy
to do either one. You just choose what side you want
to go to. You pick your mindset.

Personally, I will never choose to be miserable because being a

positive person creates so much energy and adds so much joy to your
life. A professional singer on average makes a mistake in a live performance at least twice per song, but the singer has the ability to turn
a stumble into a pirouette. Positive momentum allows you to turn a
negative into a positive in the same way that a poet turns a phrase.

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Im not advising you to be mindlessly happy all the time like a

Muppet. Youre going to have ups and downs in business and in life.
The path to success is not vertical. It doesnt go straight up. Youre
going to have some down times when obstacles and adversity trip you
up. Thats what Shift: Change Your Mindset and You Change Your World
is all about. Its about staying focused on your long-term goals and
creating something positive every day, because in the short term youre
going to have times when things are dicult and you need that positive
momentum youve created to carry you through.
I think a trap people can fall into is that they get too emotional
on their way to success. What would be a big advantage for people is to
try to not become so emotionally attached. And its a fine line to walk
because what we do in our lives is what we love and that is certainly
going to breed a lot of emotion. Theres no question about that. But
whats important is that you can at times put a mathematical type of
attitude into your business, or put a mathematical way of thinking into
achieving your goals. Youre going to be better off this way because that
rational mindset will keep you from getting bitten by the emotional
bug too much.
People who are overly dramatic, people who have all this drama
in their lives, theyre really just looking for attention. In the same way
that we dont lose our minds over every little uptick and dip in the
stock market, you need to stay balanced in your life as you work toward
achieving your goals. One of the best examples of how people get too
dramatic with their lives is the use of the word awesome.
The Battle of Manassas or the Battle of the Wilderness in the
Civil War, those were probably pretty awesome things. When the
space shuttle takes off, thats a pretty awesome sight. But if someone
in your oce is wearing a new suit, and somebody says, Man, that
suit is awesome, well, that suit is not awesome. Its just a nice suit.
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The speech that Abraham Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg, that was

awesome. When Martin Luther King said, I have a dream, that was
awesome. But getting a new car with leather seats is not awesome. Its
just a nice car.

THE LESSON
Dont mistake sensationalism for enthusiasm. Too many times
people over-dramatize things. Youve got to eliminate the drama
and accentuate the positive so that when theres a little downturn or
setback, you dont overact. You need to have perspective so that every
little mishap isnt the end of the world and every minor achievement
isnt the greatest thing ever. Not everything is OMG!

Now, Im not saying you wont have emotional highs as you follow
your game plan to success. You will and they are exhilarating. It can be
a great ride for you, and sometimes these emotional highs can be really
important to give you a burst of energy and help you blast through
stressful times. But, if you look at the big picture, you cant just ride a
wave forever. If youre riding a high, there is going to be a time when
you have to come down. Thats just the way life is.
If you smooth out those highs and lows, youll have a little bit of
an easier ride in life. Sure, there will be times and periods and pockets
in your life where being on that emotional high is so important. For
me, the playoffs and the World Series, thats a finite amount of time.
Its a short time in your life where, man, its really important to just be
in an all-time high. Thats what it did for me. It was great.
When it was over, I can remember being in the locker room after
we beat the Oakland As in 1988. I sat down, I took my uniform off and
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I put it in a bag for posterity. I wanted to keep it. Everything was going
on around me in the next room. I could hear the champagne popping,
screams and cameras and just a gush of people, but if I had a pillow I
could have gone to sleep in a chair in that room.
Thats how mentally exhausted I was. Of course, about two or
three days after the game I got the flu real bad, and I was sick for about
a week. Everybody on my team did too. It wasnt because somebody
caught a bug somewhere. It was because you let your senses down, your
defenses down and finally it was all over, and when you finally let your
defenses down, youre going to get sick.

THE LESSON
Its good to have that emotional high for some periods of time.
The emotional high got me and my teammates through the World
Series, but theres always going to be a price to pay somewhere
else. Use the emotional highs when you have to, but you need
balance to sustain you on the road to long-term success.

Lets say that a waitress is going through a restaurant. Shes got

her pot of coffee and shes going over and shes asking people, Would
you like coffee? Weve seen this happen a hundred times at our favorite
diner. Shell go from table to table, and shell say Coffee? And theyll
say, No. Shell go to the next table. Coffee? No. Coffee? No.
Coffee? No. Coffee? Yes. Ah, somebody said, Yes. So she pours
them the coffee.
But the waitress did not get upset at the six people she asked before
that person said yes to the coffeethe six people who said, No, I dont
want the coffee. She didnt get upset that they said no to her. She didnt
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get emotional. She was just going about her job. Just because they said
no to the coffee, they werent saying no to her. They were saying no to the
coffee. So she doesnt get upset about it.
Now let me give you another example. Lets say that youre a real
estate agent, and youre going to make the sale for a house. And a buyer
comes up to you and he is just loaded with excitement. Oh my gosh!
Its the most perfect house! Its a four-bedroom! Weve got two kids.
Its absolutely perfect! Its in a great school district! This is absolutely
perfectand we would love to buy this house from anybody but you.
Now if somebody says that, OK, then youve got a problem. But 99.99
percent of the time, when somebody says, No, theyre saying it to the
coffee, not you. If you think like that waitress, youll realize how silly it
is to get worked up over a No, and youll be able to stay positive until
somebody says, Yes. Because they will.
If you follow these steps for lasting success, I know you will achieve
your goals, because when you have a dream, a game plan, drive, a positive
attitude and a focus on serving others not yourself, youll always win. Just
wake up every day and say, This is it, somebody is going to benefit from
me today. What you give to others will come back to you tenfold. Stick
to your principles and similar people will find you.
Remember, you already have every basic element to do something
really, really great in your life. The only limitations we have are the ones
we create for ourselves. We live in a country that allows us to do so many
great things and to be innovative and free-thinking. The sky is the limit.
Never underestimate the power and will of the human spirit.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Sax had a successful baseball career with the Los Angeles
Dodgers, the New York Yankees, the Chicago White Sox, and the
Oakland Athletics. He won two World Series rings, was the 1982
National League Rookie of the Year, and made five all-star teams. In
2001, realizing that he had accomplished his professional baseball aspiration; he rededicated his talents to helping individuals and families to
manage their finances as Vice President of Investments for the Royal
Bank of Canada. Steve holds a high position with ACN, the worlds
largest direct seller of telecom and home services. He is an active motivational speaker on the topics of leadership, motivation, team building
and personal development. Steve has two children, Lauren and John.
To learn more about Steve and for booking inquiries, please visit:

www.stevesaxspeaks.com
To learn more about ACN, please visit:

www.stephenlsax.acnrep.com

127

How can you use

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POSITIVITY

SAX

HARNESS THE POWER OF

A terrific and motivating read. Steve is a true winner.

DONALD TRUMP

Steve Sax has had both the highs and lows that can result in great substance

Change Your World, reflects the wisdom he has gained through his experiences.

Its a terrific and motivating readand Steve is a true winner.

NEWSFLASH

There is no such thing as overnight

success. Those millionaires in a

minute stories are a blip on the radar. True sustainable successat work
or at homeis a habit, as natural and unstoppable as inertia. It all starts
with that person staring back at you in the mirror! Everyone has the tools

MINDSET

DONALD TRUMP

CHANGE YOUR

and multiple achievements. His book, SHIFT: Change Your Mindset and You

within to impart positive change. Ultimately, success is a choice, a deliberate and methodical choice made every single day. It all starts with a SHIFT
in the way you view your world.
In SHIFT: Change Your Mindset and You Change Your World, MLB star
Steve Sax shares six critical elements that will lead to long lasting prosperity in your personal and professional lives: motivation, empowerment,
attitude, humility, leadership, and perseverance. This book is an essential
set, and essentially your life, from someone who has been there.

Steve Sax had a successful baseball career with the Los Angeles
Dodgers, the New York Yankees, the Chicago White Sox, and the Oakland
Athletics. He won two World Series rings, was the 1982 National League
he had accomplished his professional baseball aspiration; he rededicated
his talents to helping individuals and families to manage their finances as
Vice President of Investments for the Royal Bank of Canada. Steve holds
a high position with ACN, the worlds largest direct seller of telecom
and home services. He is an active motivational speaker on the topics of

WORLD

Rookie of the Year, and made five all-star teams. In 2001, realizing that

CHANGE YOUR

blueprint for success that spells out the action steps to change your mind-

CHANGE YOUR

M I N D S E T

and you

CHANGE YOUR

W O R L D

leadership, motivation, team building and personal development. Steve

has two children, Lauren and John.

STEVE SAX