Author Archives: Larry

Following Your Passion for Success

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Do some people have all the luck, or do they really know how to get what they want from an early age? If America is truly the land of opportunity, then why can’t everybody land his or her dream job? Why do so many people often wind up working thankless, unrewarding, dead-end jobs?

Most well-established young men and women land their dream jobs because they focus their energy toward manifesting their job success at an early age. Over the past several weeks, I have been extremely fortunate to be able to study and be mentored by business and motivational expert, Michael E. Gerber. During our discussions, Michael has often reminded me that successful people tend to only focus on “one thing” and strive to become the best by utilizing their gifts and strengths, whereas most people often tend to spread themselves too thin by trying to dabble in too many things at one time without any real focus. Michael refers to this lesson as understanding “your primary aim”.

In his book, The E-Myth Revisited, Michael instructs his readers to ask themselves, “What is your primary aim? What do you value most? What kind of life do you want? What do you want your life to look like? Who do you wish to be? Once you answer these questions then make it happen! Begin living that life. Create your life intentionally!”

I have often believed that one’s ability to find a job that truly sparks and inspires one’s passion is the single greatest road to success. As I have spoken about in lectures and live appearances, there should be at least one of three reasons why you should consider pursuing an ideal job:

1. Quality of Life – Find a job that allows you to live in a location where you can thrive. Identify a job that lets you live the life you want surrounded by the people who support and admire you.

Recently I moved back to the Midwest from California because I always felt like I resonated better in that environment. I have been enjoying the calm here as well as the pace again and it feels like home.

2. Challenge – Pursue a job or career where the work will challenge you and help you grow from the experience. Therefore, you either want to choose a job that will serve as a stepping stone toward getting you even closer to your ultimate primary aim, or take one where there is a strong educational advantage that will allow you to continue to grow and experience your life’s passion.

If you have been following the previous articles here on my blog, then you already know that I left a 22-year career in the music industry to pursue my true passion. I have written my first book, Growing Success: A Young Adult’s Guide to Achieving Personal and Financial Success, which is designed to give young adults (ages 16 to 25) the needed educational concepts and tools to be successful in all areas of their lives.  I wrote this book because I wanted to help young adults in high schools and colleges understand how to cultivate solid financial habits as well as concrete personal goals and planning from a young age. Educating and helping others is a huge passion of mine, and I am now in better alignment with my primary aim.

3. Financial Reward – I intentionally listed this pursuit last. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for finding a career path that rewards you for all your hard work and efforts, but I just don’t believe that money should be the sole driving force for why you choose to pursue a job or career. Money should be viewed as opportunity, your financial means for continuing to pursue your passions. I honestly believe that if you follow your true passion, the money will definitely follow.

I was once told by my former boss, friend and business mentor, Vinnie Freda that the main reason why he offered me my very first job in the music industry two weeks after I graduated from Indiana University was because I never asked him “how much the job paid”. The only thing I cared about was that I wanted to work in the music industry and I would do whatever it took to get it. That motivation is what led me to a successful 22-year career with the world’s largest record company.

To quote the great Bob Dylan, “Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.”

Don’t be like most people who spend their entire lives asking themselves, “What will I be when I grow up?”  Take control of your destiny now and start building that dream job and/or career today. In turn, you’ll also be growing your success.

Back To The Future: My Successful Health Transformation

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It is hard to believe that it has been a year since I made the decision to adopt a Paleo lifestyle. For those of you who are unaware of Paleo, it is short for paleolithic diet—also referred to as the caveman or hunter-gatherer diet. It is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals.

The Paleolithic era ended with the development of agriculture. As you can imagine, there is now a great debate between physiologists and nutritionists as to which is healthier: Paleo or the traditional four food groups.

This blog is not intended to convince you either way. My bigger lesson here is to explain how your perceived health may ultimately impact your overall success.  After all, how you look is definitely a direct reflection of how you feel—a mirror to your soul, if you will.

Sometime in your life you may have heard the expression, “You can’t always judge a book by its cover.” I want to tell you that this expression, as far as first impressions go, is false. In fact, 9 out of 10 times you most certainly will judge others based upon your first impression because humans are wired to respond to them. This is why your mother, father or teachers often told you, “It is always important to make a good first impression.” A great book I recommend reading with regard to first impressions is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. According to Gladwell, “Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience … they are also unconscious.”

Last October 2011, I was at my heaviest weight (253 lbs.). I felt miserable. After walking the last five miles of the Long Beach Half Marathon, I had had enough. I realized that my obesity was really just a symptom of something bigger; I wasn’t happy. I needed to make a change, but I wasn’t sure how to do it at that moment, other than knowing that something needed to change.

I called my good friend and mentor, trainer/nutritionist Annie Mello, founder of FitChicLA and then I did one of the hardest things imaginable: I had to admit that I had a problem. Annie agreed to train and work with me, but she needed to know I was serious. She started to talk to me about a new book (at the time) by Robb Wolf called The Paleo Solution which discussed the physiological reasons why people tend to struggle with their weight.

Annie mentioned to me that she and her husband Chris had recently “gone Paleo” and had had amazing results. When I asked her what made this diet different from the others, Annie told me, “When choosing to live a Paleo lifestyle, you will not only look and feel great on the outside, but you will also maintain a healthy metabolism inside while reducing inflammation in the body. This nutritious lifestyle aids in supporting amazing body composition, energy levels, quality of sleep, and overall mood. It also helps you eliminate food cravings without becoming obsessed with calories. Instead, you can look at food as fuel to feed your body. With Paleo, you can truly feel the best you can and should feel while being your best!”

In addition to the Paleo diet, Annie began training me in CrossFit, which is very complimentary with Paleo, and I continued to see my desired results.

Throughout the past year, and those closest to me with tell you, I have strictly avoided bread, wheat, pasta, corn, rice, legumes, potatoes, soda, cheese, and desserts (that was a hard one!), but the results were amazing and obvious to me and my family and friends.

Since I committed to all three disciplines, I have experienced a tremendous transformation externally and internally. Not only have I lost 56 lbs. and now weigh 197 lbs.! But my doctor also took me off of my cholesterol medicine after 16 years!  I feel amazing!

As for my running, since that Long Beach Half Marathon where I walked to the finish line, my race times have reflected all of my hard work:

  • November 22nd – Malibu half: 2:38:13
  • December 5th – Las Vegas half: 2:34:55
  • February 6th – Surf City half: 2:11:34
  • May 20th – Pasadena half: 2:11:26
  • Sept 2nd – Disneyland half: 1:58:58
  • Sept 9th – Chicago half: 1:57:46

As for those important impressions I discussed earlier, an ex-girlfriend recently asked me, “Why didn’t you look this good when we were dating?” I told her, “Honestly, I didn’t feel this good!”

There are many options for achieving successful health. The important thing is to choose one, commit to it, and follow through to get your desired results.

Be healthy, my friends, so you too can keep growing your success.

Are You Broke Or Broken? Obstacles For Success

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I often ask myself: for a country that prides itself on its technological and educational advancements, why are so many people in such personal and financial turmoil?

I have to imagine that if you are a young adult between the ages of 16 and 25, life must seem a little uncertain and scary to you right now. Just think, you are the first generation to grow up in the 21st century – the advent of a new technological era that actually allows you to carry out the majority of your consumer-related transactions from your SmartPhone, computer or tablet device from virtually anywhere in the world.

Yet, despite all of the major advancements and perceived conveniences created by these new technologies, many of your generation have either personally experienced or know someone close to you whose parents have either lost their jobs (due to downsizing or outsourcing), could not afford to send you or your friends to college due to unforeseen financial hardship, or, even worse, had to lose their homes or apartments due to unprecedented bank foreclosures.

I believe the underlying reason why so many adults between the ages of 40 and 60 are in such economic chaos is because they suffer from what I call financial obesity: one’s obsessive and self-sabotaging need to constantly overspend and remain financially unhealthy. Like over-eaters, the financially obese allow fear to prevent them from achieving their personal and financial success they desire. They simply cannot get out of their own way. They are not broke; they are broken!

One of my favorite quotes is by motivational speaker, Les Brown, who says, “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

If you are someone who feels broken, you are not alone. Most well-established men and women by their own desire and determination have managed to overcome their own prior childhood struggles and self-defeating fears because they chose to shift their unhealthy attitudes and learned perspectives as they manifested their desired outcomes.

As I discuss in my new book, Demystifying Success: Success Tools and Secrets They Don’t Teach You in High School, the first thing I would suggest is that you honestly acknowledge the poor or unfounded information that you received from your parents, teachers, friends, and others in your past. They probably meant well, but they were most likely either projecting or inadvertently passing forward generational misinformation that they received at an early age as well.

Secondly, you need to self-reflect and assess how your parents, teachers, friends and most importantly, your own early life experiences have impacted your own “learned” negative fears and emotions. Unless you learn to how manage these challenges early on, they will become even more habit-forming as you get older.

The good news is the effects of your early programming are reversible if you choose to remove those negative obstacles by managing your fears and taking the necessary action steps to accomplish your goals and fix your long-term outlook for success.

Motivational speaker and salesman Zig Ziglar was absolutely correct when he said, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”

 

 

 

You Don’t Have To Be a Superstar to Be Successful

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In my opinion, I think too many people today are hung up on their definition for success, rather than simply feeling or accepting success on their own terms.

Think about it: the media is constantly bombarding us with stories of what they deem to be success: money, high-powered careers, cars, clothes. I think there is a big misconception between fame and success because I personally know a lot of people that are successful that are not famous, and I am sure we can all name a few famous people that are not successful.  So let me share an obvious revelation with all of you: you don’t need to hit home runs to be successful. Base hits are just as valuable for the win.

I recently had the pleasure of reading Mark Cuban’s book, How To Win At The Sport of Business and I was happy to see that I am not alone when it comes to practical definitions for success. According to Mark, “One’s efforts should really be measured by their ability to set goals and achieve results, not simply by the amount of hours one works in a single day.” I completely agree. Choosing to be a workaholic and, even worse, wasting precious time that you can never get back without even achieving results is ludicrous.

“People who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.” – Michael E. Gerber (author of The E-Myth Revisited)

Successful people like Mark Cuban and Michael Gerber may make success look easy, but I can assure you, both gentlemen are constantly reading and searching for new ways to expand their knowledge in order to do things better and “smoke” their competition in a way that properly utilizes their precious time.

In his book, Mark talks about how one goes about winning a segment of his or her business and finding one’s edge. He not only writes of where one’s edge comes from,  but the steps it takes to get there.

The important takeaways for me from Mark’s book are:

  • study your business
  • understand what it will take to differentiate yourself from your competition when dealing with clients
  • and, most importantly, your willingness to do what it takes to get results

To continue to replicate your success, you need to understand “why” you are succeeding in the first place and then continue to build on that success.

“If you aren’t happy with where you are, simplify your life and go out and try as many things as it takes to find what you may be destined to be.” – Mark Cuban

My personal philosophy for success is simple: “Do what you love every day of your life while surrounding yourself with positive people that love and support you.”

Successful people get to choose the life they want to live by surrounding themselves with positive people that love and support them, while at the same time getting up every morning to pursue a passion they love.

Hey, that sounds like a pretty cool definition to me.