How Successful People Win by Ben Stein

Author:Ben Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2006-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Seek Out Those Who Know How to Get It Done

The youth of America get out of school knowing why Giotto is the direct antecedent of Picasso, or they used to, but once they’re out in the real world, they have no idea how to get the things they want out of life—financially, creatively, romantically, or any other way. The cowboy, whose education has been spent accomplishing things and getting things done, has a far better foundation for getting his heart’s desire than the student who got an A for her senior thesis on why the League of Nations failed. The successful in this world, those who bet on themselves and win, have had to learn on their own just how to move from square A to square B and on to the winning position. They didn’t get those secrets of activity and inner mobility in school.

You’ve been obliged all your life to learn how to criticize—how to apply “Why not?” to your own life. Now you’ll have to forget that school for failure and learn “How to,” just as the winners of the world have. And you’ll have to learn it from these very people. Brace yourself and dive off that lofty plane where intellectuals explain why everything is impossible. Get into the soup where plumbers learn how to fix boilers, farmers learn how to plant corn, financial vice presidents learn how to float bond issues, politicians know how to get along with the people who can make their careers, and decorators learn how to dress like winners. Take all you can from their knowledge and their realization that it can be done. Let their success validate your reality.

A man I’ll call Bob Schiller, one of the major players in the worldwide grain market who operates out of Duluth, Minnesota, explained to me the necessary corollary of this refusal to acknowledge negative thinking. “If you meet somebody who knows how to get up the greasy pyramid, and that person is willing to show you how it’s done, stay very close to that same person.”

Schiller’s point is well taken. There are so few people who will encourage you and tell you that your dreams are possible that when you find one, you should and must listen to him and cleave to him. If, on top of that, the positive thinker knows how to get it done, he is the person of your dreams.

“When I started out in grain,” Schiller said, “I was an economist for Cargill. I’d just gotten out of the University of Minnesota and I thought I knew all there was to know about grain. But after a year or two, I realized that I was just a clerk writing numbers on pieces of graph paper for $190 a week. If I disappeared the next day, no one would even notice for a month.

“The guys who really counted were the traders, those boys down on the floor of the exchange who wheeled and dealed with the real money—not the abstractions I worked with—10,000 bushels at a clip.

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