Monday, February 13, 2006

Average Sucks! - Success

Average Sucks! - Success: "Average Sucks!


The very first 'motivational speaker' I heard as an adult was a gentleman named Mort Utley. I experienced his speech in May of 1989 in Nashville, Tennessee, at the end of a week of Sales School with the Southwestern Company. I was 19 years old and had just finished my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, and Mr. Utley's speech was the final component of my formal training to sell educational books door-to-door for the summer. I was absolutely coming out of my skin with an indescribable combination of intense excitement and great fear. Mort Utley's speech made one of the most 'un-motivational' statements I had ever heard. He said:
'Most people do not get what they want out of Life.'
How depressing, I thought. This guy gets paid large amounts of money to 'motivate' people and he comes on stage and says that most people do not get what they want out of Life. Thanks for the tip, Mister genius - I suppose next you'll tell me that people from France all speak French. No kidding most people don't get what they want out of Life, I thought - WHY DO YOU THINK I AM LISTENING TO YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!?!
I didn't want to be most people, and my guess is that you don't either. If you want to be most people - broke, unhealthy, and with too little time to actually enjoy your Life - then I doubt you would be receiving this newsletter in the first place. However, throughout these installments you will have some of the things you might believe are 'just the way the world is' challenged very directly, and this is the first one. We spend so much of our lives wanting to fit in and be normal that we often unconsciously find ourselves striving to be like most people. In other words, we are actually trying to be average.
In America at the beginning of 2003, "

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