Finding Mentors – A Billionaire’s Secret
“I was lucky to have the right heroes. Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out to be. The qualities of the one you admire are the traits that you, with a little practice, can make your own, and that, if practiced, will become habit-forming.”
– Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett’s 7 Secrets for Living a Happy and Simple Life
Part of success is mindset – and those who are successful at overcoming challenges or excelling make great mentors. They understand the power of your mindset. A mentor can be someone you know personally (or seek out and become friends with), people you read about, or those no longer living.
I like meeting people I admire – most of them are completely within reach. It’s surprising how easy it is to meet people if you are persistent – it’s something I’ve done all of my life.
I’ve met the Dalai Lama and the president of the United States, plus many people you may not know about who’ve done great things and overcome huge obstacles.
Where can I find great mentors?
One way to find mentors is through organizations. I’ve belonged to real estate associations, political associations, and other groups. Some are a waste of your time, but others like one I’m involved in is the Granite Education Foundation. This organization have been very helpful and extremely rewarding for me. Find organizations that are doing good work in your community and you’ll likely find mentors who you can learn from.
One way I find people to follow is I read newspapers, magazines (like Fortune, Forbes, Time Magazine, Newsweek) and see who is being talked about. Then I seek those people out. It’s not hard to get to know people. One way that can work – is to keep asking for an audience until you get a response.
Once I decided I wanted to meet the Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds and I did it through sheer persistence. Ray didn’t make his fortune until he was 55 years old. He started by studying the success of a small burger joint in Southern California and later bought it and franchised it around the world. He made several billion dollars.
He started out flipping hamburgers and 40 years later he was the CEO of the company. How did he do it? I wanted to talk to him, find out more. So I devised a method and I persisted. I called his office asking to meet him until one day he gave in. He gave me 20 mins. but when we got talking I was there for two hours. We became friends and he gave me great advice that helped in a huge way to build my own fortune.
Another one of my heroes was the billionaire Aristotle Onasis. The story goes that he wanted to meet a famous Argentinian businessman. He only made 25 cents an hour and had little hope of ever meeting the man.
His plan was to stand by the man’s gate every day, not saying a word. After standing in the same place for several weeks, this important man that he wanted to meet finally couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. He confronted Aristotle and said who are you and what do you want? And from that initial meeting, Aristotle learned a great deal that helped his success.
Another person I want to meet now is Nando Parrado. I am planning to travel to South America to meet him. He was one of the few survivors of a deadly plane crash in the Andes mountains. He spent 72 days in freezing temperatures then climbed over 17,000 foot ice capped mountains and led a rescue party to the other survivors. It just about killed him but he lived and wrote the book about his experiences in, “Miracle in the Andes.”
I always have a list of people I want to meet. What do I want to learn from these men and others like them? I want to know their thoughts – what’s inside of their heads. How they survived and thrived through difficulties. Some disclose it in their books but not all do. I want to know how their experiences affect their lives now. How it affects their thinking.
So one of my secrets to passion in life is to make a list of who you want to meet and why you want to meet them.
Taking A Long Term View in Tough Economic Times
“It is hard to maintain vitality when you are always hungry”.
– Aristotle Onassis
A question that people ask is how to follow passion for living when you are barely making a living. When things are difficult and you’re hanging on just to survive. Now the economy around the world is in turmoil. You could argue that it’s just about impossible to find passion in life, especially if you were already struggling. It’s true that it’s much more difficult to live in the present or have passion for life if you’re worried about basic human needs.
One way I approach difficulties is through mindset. I look at situations relatively. There are families in our country who are in tough situations right now. For example: a husband and wife with two kids, no savings, who are behind on their rent payments. Then the husband loses his job and they wonder how they will make it.
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Keeping Passion Alive In Stressful Situations
Lately I’ve been challenged with a situation that I’m sure you can relate to – how to maintain passion when things go wrong – or appear to go wrong. Last week I started to get chest pains, and I went to see my doctor. He told me my chest pains were caused by one of three things:
1. I have a heart problem
2. I have cancer
3. It’s acid reflux
I live a healthy lifestyle, my cholesterol is low, my blood pressure is low and I eat right. This increases the odds tremendously that rather than a heart problem or cancer, I’ll be diagnosed with the much preferable acid reflux. Still, my concern challenges my ability to live in the moment.
The key is learning how to live in the moment. “Live in the moment. So I talk to myself and say: I must visit the past and the future in short segments, but live in the now.”
The real key to living in the moment is your internal dialog – how you talk to yourself. I tell myself things like, there’s nothing I can do right now. I can’t speed up this process. I recognize that worry doesn’t help. In a few days I’ll know my diagnosis. In the meantime, I’m living in the moment and redirecting myself when I stray.
My next post is going to talk about ways that have helped me living in the moment – regardless of the stresses of life around me.
A Journey Takes Unexpected Turns
Passion, like life, is about journeys not arriving. Kimberly and I have been planning a trip to Europe for a year. This was a goal of ours. You see the brain craves the new, the unfamiliar. Living in the moment also stimulates the mind. Of course it’s easy to live in the moment when you’re in Paris.
Another way is to experience something familiar through someone else’s eyes. We took our good friends Frantoise and Stein Eriksen (who is now in his eighties and has a Wikipedia page) with us. We’d been to some of the places before, but they came alive again when we showed them. Our brain loves new experiences.
Everywhere we went I asked people what there passion level was. We visited a farm of a cheese maker in Switzerland. We stayed at the Palace Hotel in Gstaad Switzerland which had unbelievable scenery and impeccable service. I got to introduce the Eriksen’s to an Australian tennis champ. We were in Germany for Octoberfest (I’ll put up some video of the trip).
The most exhilarating part of the journey though started with a train ride that had some curve balls. Getting on the train and going from Zurich to Croatia there was no one was there to greet us. We had a tough time finding a cab to make it to the ship. We finally found a cab and arrived an hour late. Luckily, they waited for us.
Once we got onto the ship we realized it was not like the spacious hotel with great service. It was tight quarters. The bathroom was so small you could hardly change your mind, let alone change a shirt in it. The shower was a spout hooked up to the bathroom sink. You turned it on and sprayed yourself, along with the rest of the room.
The week long ship ride was full of adventure. There were people from all different nationalities speaking different languages. We stopped on islands of all sizes. We bicycled 30-40 kilometers. One island was so small that license plates weren’t necessary – everyone knew everyone else. With only a few hundred people, there were maybe 25 cars.
Then there were high winds – so high that the buses couldn’t run because they might blow over. So rented an expensive taxi, and headed back to make our flight home – which we barely made.
While we loved the more predictable parts of the trip, our real passion was in the unexpected – the missed rides, the cramped ship, the collage of cultures, and even the storm.
Do you fears prevent you from traveling (literally or figuratively) because you’re afraid to try something new? Sometimes people are so comfortable it scares them to do something different. Yet when they go ahead they look back that is what stands out, it’s what they talk about.
Mixing things up, trying the new, seeing something through another’s eyes, being open to adventure. This is how you create passion.
Where Did all My Passion for Life Go?
“Passion can be an elusive pursuit. As people age they have glimpses of passion here and there and then they lose it and they don’t know why.”
Have you every wondered how you get passion and how you keep it? In my book “How to Ignite your Passion for Living” I make the point that, from my experience, as people age, passion has to be kind of set up – or jerry-rigged. To jerry-rigg – is to put something together in an unusual, better or temporary way. The key to jerry-rigging passion is to set difficult objectives and work towards them.
From about age 25 every year your brain produces less and less dopamine and serotonin – the hormones that help you feel good. A child’s body is awash in these hormones. As we age we need to create these hormones. You have to stimulate them. You do this with eating right foods, exercising, and most importantly, setting goals and going after them.
Traveling can be a great way to jerry-rigg some passion. In my next post I’ll talk about a trip to Europe and how some unexpected turns made us love the journey even better.
