Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2016; the references to Tony Robbins’s $1 billion empire, his status as a multimillionaire and a recent interview all refer to that year.
There is a common misconception that most millionaires are rich because the generations before them were wealthy families. While that’s true in cases like the Rockefellers, it would be even truer to say that, today, the millionaires on the Forbes list who come from rich families are a tiny minority. The rest come from middle-class families, and even from families that at some point struggled to get by.
In Tony Robbins’s case, saying he had a very hard life would be an understatement: in his book Awaken the Giant Within he tells how, even at Thanksgiving, the neighbours gave his family food so they could have a decent dinner.
These days, many people prefer to console themselves by saying they can’t succeed in life or achieve great things because they grew up poor or don’t have a well-placed family. Robbins says it was precisely all those obstacles and all that hardship that drove him to become a best-selling author, a multimillionaire and a coach who has advised Bill Clinton, investment fund managers and athletes of the calibre of Serena Williams.
(See: Tony Robbins: the simple secret to wealth)
In a recent interview, Robbins said that if he hadn’t suffered so much, he wouldn’t have been hungry for success, nor would he have been able to understand other people’s suffering. That experience, he explained, awakened in him the desire to understand people and help bring about change, the way he had done.
People end up feeling sorry for themselves, when we should be using bad situations and life’s setbacks as a springboard to success.
As he put it, for those who don’t give up, our worst challenges, our worst problems and our worst failures give us lessons and perspective.
Robbins’s success didn’t come from going to university. For him, there’s a huge difference between schooling and education, between studying and acquiring useful knowledge.
In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins recounted how, before the age of 25, he had already read more than 700 books on the psychology of the human brain, on what makes us happy and, above all, on everything to do with our ability to succeed: not from the standpoint of cosmic energy, but from our own grey matter.
Working harder will bring you more success in life: that’s another of Robbins’s premises.
He tells how, to master public speaking faster, he would speak in public up to four times a day, so that within a few months he had clocked up more hours than speakers who had been doing it for years.
The secret of any entrepreneur’s life, he says, lies in adding more value and doing more than anyone else in the market is doing.
Everyone experiences fear at some point. It paralyses some people, while others consider it crucial to face those fears and get rid of them.
It isn’t about not feeling fear, but about acting in spite of it. The more you face your fears, Robbins says, the stronger you become and the fewer fears you have left.
(See: The best money and business advice Tony Robbins got at 24)
When it comes to handling failure, Robbins maintains that nobody has achieved massive success without big failures, because the only people who have never failed at anything are precisely those who have never done anything. And when failure does come, you have to take it as a lesson.
Tony Robbins’s three key tips for entrepreneurs
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Don’t start a business unless it’s your life and your passion, and something you would do even if nobody were paying you.
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Find a way to understand your customers better than they know themselves.
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Do more for those people than any other business is doing. Add more value. If you do this, you’ll have unconditionally loyal customers.
See also: The 6 areas of your life you need to master to control your destiny, according to Tony Robbins
Featured image: Sandi Grimnes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
