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Inside the Box: John's Story
One Tuesday morning in May 2000, my son Keenan and I opened a cardboard box that had been sealed for five years, and what we found inside changed my life forever.
I had no idea this was going to happen; in fact, I didn't know exactly what we were going to see when we opened that box. It had been five years, after all, and in those years we'd moved around quite a bit and seen a lot of change.
I began my career in business twenty years earlier, going to work as a real estate agent fresh out of high school. My dreams of professional basketball were long gone, and I had no idea what to do with my life. Real estate was the only thing I could think of that would keep me from working at a grocery store, and so, on June 20, 1980, this nineteen-year-old kid took his real estate exam and became a licensed Realtor. Within a few months, seminars and workshops on goal-setting were teaching me about some odd-sounding personal growth techniques they called visualization and affirmations.
I had been aware of the value of such practices, long before they had formal names. In my teens, I wanted more than anything to become a successful basketball star. In fact, I wanted to succeed in that career so badly that I constantly imagined myself winning championship games, sinking that winning shot as the clock ran out, running that movie in my head before I ever stepped onto the court. I literally went to sleep at night with a basketball next to me under the covers. And until I was injured, I was an impact player.
Now, however, winning on the court was no longer the issue. Now it was all about winning in business.
I started observing what the top achievers in my office were doing, watching them like a hawk, listening to them talk on the phone, even sitting in on meetings with them, just to hear exactly what they said and how they said it. I started reading voraciously, absorbing everything I could get my hands on that might give me clues as to how to become successful in my new career. I listened to audiotapes and attended live programs -- and one of these was taught by a man whom I came to know as a friend, mentor, and business partner. His name is Bob Proctor.
In the early sixties, Bob had moved from his native Toronto to Chicago to work with a man named Earl Nightingale, who had launched the personal development industry a decade earlier. Nightingale's famous audio recording The Strangest Secret was the first recording in history outside of popular music to sell a million copies. Earl Nightingale, in turn, had learned his philosophy from Napoleon Hill, the author of what is probably the most well-known book in all of success literature, Think and Grow Rich.
From Napoleon Hill to Earl Nightingale to Bob Proctor, one theme ran through all their teachings: The secret to our success lies in controlling our thoughts. The only limitations on our accomplishments, these teachers were telling me, are those we place upon ourselves by our own self-limiting thoughts. What they said made complete sense to me; I didn't know how or why it worked, but to me the truth of it seemed selfevident.
Soon I was taking this business of writing down my goals very seriously. (In fact, I still have a copy of my carefully written-out goals from the summer of 1982.) I started writing affirmations and vivid word pictures of the kind of success I wanted to have, feeding my unconscious mind with new images of my goals, playing out new movies in my mind, movies of my triumphs as a serial entrepreneur.
That year, my first year in real estate, I earned about $30,000. Not bad for age twenty, I thought. My second year, my earnings totaled $150,000. This goal setting, visualizing, affirmation repeating thing was working!
After that second year, I decided to take some time off to take stock and expand my horizons. I gathered my earnings and set off to travel around the world. My trip ended up lasting more than a year, as I circled the globe learning about other cultures and worldviews and expanding my sense of what was possible. In late 1984, I returned to Toronto and went back to work at my real estate office...but it was clear I wouldn't last there long. I was hungry to know more, to do more, and to be more.
A few years later, in late 1986, Walter Schneider and Frank Polzler, the two guys who owned the rights to the giant Realtor RE/MAX for eastern Canada, approached me with the news that the RE/MAX subfranchising rights for the state of Indiana had become available. (Today, Walter and Frank are the most successful subfranchisors in the world.) They knew I was itching to grow, and they had decided to offer me a partnership if I would move to Indiana to build the business there.
"John," they said, "would you like to move to Indiana?"
I said, "Absolutely! How soon do I leave?" and then added, "Where's that, again?" I hadn't even heard the "Indiana" part. I'd just heard "Would you like to move?" and I knew they were offering me an opportunity I couldn't possibly turn down.
My first week in Indiana, a reporter from the Indianapolis Business Journal came to ask about our plans. "In five years," I told him, "we'll be the biggest real estate company in Indiana -- in fact, we will sell a billion dollars in real estate."
He scribbled all this down and then offhandedly asked, "So, have you talked with -- " and he rattled off the names of the major owners of the largest real estate company in the area.
"Um, why?" I hedged.
He grinned. "I guess you probably already know this, but their firm has been here for about eighty years, and they control seventy percent of the real estate market in these parts."
I had no idea. I'd never even heard of the guys he was talking about. I knew nothing about Indiana real estate -- and in fact, I knew nothing about how to run my own business, let alone how to build it to generate such massive sales. Let alone how to do it in the face of dominant, well-entrenched competition.
The reporter laughed. It was pretty clear that I'd stuck my foot so far down my mouth I might never get it out. Sure enough, a few days later, there was my picture in the paper, along with a story on me with the headline, "A Billion in Sales Within Five Years." I was the laughingstock of the town.
That is, until five years later -- when my company generated $1.2 billion in sales for the year.
This visualization and affirmations thing was really working. It was still a mystery to me exactly why or how it worked, but who cared -- it worked!
In 1995, I started making what my mentors had called vision boards, cutting out pictures that represented the goals and dreams I aspired to achieve and pasting them onto bulletin boards; the idea was to create everyday reminders of my life's direction. I didn't yet grasp the full power of this exercise, but that would soon change.
By that time, I had run that RE/MAX region for a decade, growing it to over seventy-five offices and one thousand salespeople. I had also grown restless again; it was time to search for new and larger opportunities. I hired and trained a replacement, packed up my possessions and put them in storage, left Indiana, and moved back to Canada.
Over the next few years my family and I moved around, while I looked for the next big opportunity. I invested in a few companies and consulted for a few more, while we kept moving and looking. In late 1998, a friend named Len McCurdy invited me to come down to San Francisco to look at something his son Kevin and Kevin's friend Howard had developed.
"This program is amazing," Len told me. "It lets you do a virtual tour of a car or hotel property on the Internet, without any downloads or plug-ins. You've got to see it."
I admired Len and knew that working with him would provide me with an amazing opportunity to learn and grow. His last company had been worth a fortune before Len sold it to IBM. I flew to San Francisco and it didn't take much imagination to appreciate that this online application Kevin and Howard had developed would have fantastic applications in real estate, car sales, hotel room advertising, all sorts of areas. Len invited me to join him as senior vice president of sales and marketing for the new company, a position I accepted without hesitation. And then he said something that took me by surprise:
"Hey, why don't we take this thing public? And why not do it by this fall?"
He wanted to do an IPO -- in nine months. Even in those heady dot-com-boom days, that was a pretty outrageous goal. But Len knew a lot about how to achieve extraordinary goals; he had read the same books and studied with some of the same people I had, and he knew that we are constrained only by the limitations we place upon our own thoughts.
I took a deep breath, and said, "Sure, let's do it!" We moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles, and I spent the next year or so flying back and forth between L.A. and San Francisco. My colleagues and I launched our new company in the beginning of 1999; nine months later we placed a successful IPO on NASDAQ, followed by a merger of equals with another company that left our new venture with a market valuation of $2.5 billion.
This whirlwind adventure had three results. It offered me the most vivid proof of the power of our thoughts that I had ever seen. It left me with the financial wherewithal to retire. And it found me once again wanting to move on and search for new horizons. It wasn't at all clear what those horizons would be, but there was absolutely no doubt as to where I wanted to live while I chased them: San Diego.
Living in San Diego had been a dream of mine for nearly twenty years. Way back in 1982, while traveling around the world, I had stopped over in San Diego and told myself, "Someday, when I can afford to live wherever I want, I'm going to live here."
Now, in the beginning of 2000, my family and I rented a house on the bluffs of San Diego and started house hunting. By April we had closed on an amazing property and I sent for our stuff, which had been languishing in storage back in Indiana for years.
A few weeks later, all my furniture arrived, along with dozens of cartons.
Which is how it happened that I was sitting in the study of my new home, early one beautiful Tuesday morning in May, surrounded by still-sealed boxes, catching up on my email. My six-year-old son, Keenan, sat on a carton near the door of the room, swinging his legs and banging them against the box. I said, "Honey, I'm trying to get something done here, do you mind not banging your legs like that? It's kind of distracting."
"What's in the box, Dad?" he said, as he continued banging his legs.
I peered at the Magic Marker scrawl on the box. "Those are my vision boards, from Indiana, remember Indiana?" Keenan had been a toddler when I had packed those boxes away.
"What's a vision board?"
I explained, as simply as I could, that this was something I made out of pictures of things I wanted to acquire or achieve in my business or in my life.
"Why do you do that?"
I was tempted to say "Just because," so we could close the conversation and I could get back to my email, but one glance at Keenan, who was obviously having a great time just hanging out in this exciting new home, made me change my mind.
As a kid, I'd promised myself that when I was old enough (and, hopefully, mature enough) to have kids of my own, I would never say "Just because." So I slit open the packing tape, opened the carton, and pulled out the first vision board. There was a picture of that Mercedes I'd wanted back then, which had since been purchased, driven, enjoyed, and sold. There was an image of a nice wristwatch, and next to it, a pair of alligator shoes. I gazed at the pictures for a moment, reminiscing, and then pulled out the second board -- and we were staring at a picture of a huge, stunning, gorgeous house.
My first thought was, "Hey, how did this get in here?" Somehow, a real estate brochure must have fallen into the box when we were getting ready to move.... But no, how was that possible? The box had been sealed for years! I stared at the house in the picture. This was no brochure. The picture was glued to the board; it was part of the board.
And I started to cry.
There, on my vision board, was a picture I'd clipped five years earlier from an old copy of Dream Homes magazine. It was a unique house on six acres, with 188 windows, 320 orange trees, 2 lemon trees, and a slew of other special features. There was no mistaking it. It was a picture of the house that the two of us were sitting in at that very moment. Not like it. It was this house.
When I'd cut it out of that magazine, I hadn't even known where it was located or how much it cost. It was just a picture in a magazine.
My mind raced. What were the odds of my ending up buying that actual house? How would you even begin to calculate those odds?
And all at once, I knew what I was going to do with my life.
If you have seen the movie The Secret, you have heard me describe this scene. What we did not have the chance to describe in The Secret is what happened next. This event was a pivot point in my life, an epiphany that has driven everything in my life since then, and it had everything to do with the genesis of the book you hold in your hands. For twenty years I'd been engaged in the careful, consistent practice of affirmations, vivid goal setting, visualization, and meditation, and I had seen plenty of proof that it all worked. But I had never really known why it worked, nor, in truth, had I ever really cared. Now I had to know.
In 2000, I had just "retired," and had no business on the table at the moment, no immediate prospects for one, nor any pressing need to start one. I was in the incredibly fortunate position that we expect every reader of this book aspires to be in: a position of complete financial freedom. I didn't have to work.
So this became my work. That burning need to know how my house got inside that cardboard box became my full-time occupation.
I began by making a list of the top scientists in every field that seemed related to this quest, and then set out to read everything they had written. Soon I was flying around the country to hear them speak, and even calling them on the phone to talk with them. Over the following months and years, I communicated with some of the best and brightest minds in quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy, and a host of related fields. What they told me blew my mind. It explained how I'd built one successful company after another -- and it explained how we had ended up living in the dream home that lived inside that cardboard box.
In the next few chapters, we want to take you inside that box, too, and share with you some of the amazing things these scientists have shown us.
Copyright © 2008 by Ria Ventures, LLC, and Murray Smith