the Soviet empire was still intact. Even getting a student visa was a minor feat. The annual expense for tuition, room and board of $22,000 at Bentley University in Waltham, near Boston, Massachusetts, amounted to a staggering ten years worth of combined annual salaries of my parents.
In May of 1993, I graduated from Bentley – eleventh in my class of 868 students. My parents flew over to see me graduate, and it was one of the happiest and proudest days in my life. Not long before then I had been just a kid from the Soviet bloc who stepped off an Aeroflot jet with 37 borrowed dollars in his pocket. And there I was now – a summa cum laude graduate with a marketing degree. I was possibly the first from my country to ever get a US college education in business.
I returned to my country and began work as a sales manager at a food wholesale company. I turned a sales department of four into a team of sixty. It turned out I was not only good at sales but at sales management, as well. I began to teach and train salespeople in that company. That went well, too. But being a sales manager did not really seem to be my true calling. Ever since the days when I was trained to sell books door to door, I have been fascinated by men and women who stand on the stage and address huge crowds of people, motivating them to achieve their goals, make positive changes in their lives, or teach them simply how to feel better about themselves. I was inspired by several leaders of the Southwestern book company, especially Dan Moore and Tom McAuliffe. Other early influences were speakers and authors like Brian Tracy, Anthony Robbins, also the late Zig Ziglar, Charlie Jones and Stephen Covey.
After a while I went into the speaking and training business and built a successful training company in my homeland. We reached early success locally within a few years and continued on that course. My interests changed – the focus on selling shifted more to leadership topics, later to personal effectiveness, psychology and spirituality. But one theme that has constantly remained in my attention and interest is the topic of the book that you are holding in your hands.
It is the topic of having a vision of your life and being able to transform that into specific measurable goals. It is the topic of deciding firmly upon these goals, creating viable plans and taking action. It is the topic of making important things happen, while creating a life of balance, satisfaction and happiness.
I have realized many of my dreams and succeeded where I wanted to succeed. This is not said to boast, but rather to inspire and encourage. I have also failed, sometimes miserably. Oddly enough, the failures and hardships have been the most educational.
What kind of book is this?
The best metaphor to describe this book is a cozy conversation by a fireplace that lasts for several long evenings. There are three parts in this imaginary conversation of ours. First, there is a model or a logical sequence of ideas, which is laid out chapter by chapter. A roadmap, if you will.
Then, there are a whole lot of questions that I’ll be asking you. I am sure that thinking about them or, even better, answering them yourself in writing will improve your experience with this book greatly. In a way, these questions are the most important part of the book, because they address directly what is most important to you: your life, the quality of your life, the problems that must be solved and wishes and dreams that are waiting to be fulfilled.
I have included several stories and examples from my own life. They’ll help you understand better where I am coming from with my ideas and reasoning. I want you to be able to draw parallels and get a better understanding of yourself through them. Hopefully, through them, what I suggest will make better sense to you so that you can use these ideas in your own life to get results. Of course it isn’t all me me me; I also include stories about the people I’ve had the privilege to meet or work with.
One disclaimer: This book will not try to impress you with complex academic knowledge or heart-wrenching motivational quotes. There are more than enough books that do just that. I want this book to be as simple and understandable as my seminars (and as people say I am, as well). But this book is not meant to be a seminar or a replacement for one. It is a conversation between you and me. A conversation that hopefully prompts you to make at least one positive change in your life, a change that you would have never done otherwise or would have done much later.
PV
April 2013, Tallinn
CHAPTER ONE
What do you really want?
Pop music philosophy
Everyone knows the Rolling Stones’ lyrics, You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need. I believe that. I also believe that you can get what you want most of the time. If you really, truly want it.
There’s the other great living philosopher, the British singer Joe Jackson, who, on his album, Steppin’ Out, sung, You can’t get what you want, ‘til you know what you want. I believe that, too.
We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what we want. Men talk about cars. Gosh, I’d sure like to have that new 42-cylinder Audi with the dual phenopagators. We talk with our spouses about what kind of house we’d like to have. Onehundred-and-fifty square meters in the city with enough money left over to fix up grandma’s place in the countryside. What kind of vacation we’d like to have. Seaside in summer and Thailand in winter. What kind of work we’d like to have. President of the company by age 35; retire to Spain. What kind of kids we’d like to have. Top of their classes in the very best schools.
We spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about what we want. And yet I claim that this often does not give sufficient clarity and certainty.
So what do you really want? It appears to be a simple question. It’s similar to asking someone, “How’s it going?” There are the usual and expected answers like “just fine” and “good.” The only thing that we can conclude with a high degree of certainty is that the person responding is not suffering from a serious physical or psychological ailment. I am using the phrase “high degree of certainty,” because people are also pretty good at hiding their pain. I’m just fine, thank you very much...
But how would you answer the question: “What do you really want?” First, it would be necessary to better understand the question itself. What do you mean by that? What do I want from life? Do you mean what I imagine to be perfect? From work or in my personal life? Materially or emotionally?
It would be simple to avoid the question or turn it into a joke. To answer the question sincerely might require admitting you don’t know or you’re not sure. When people think about the question a little bit, they tend to answer that they’d like to really relax or find more time for themselves or to spend more time with their friends and family.
When I first started to play with this question and think deeper about it in the context of my work, I got rather mixed reactions. I made it the central question of one of my seminars. I had it on a poster on the wall and in the workbooks in great big letters. What do YOU really want?
Many people took the question seriously and made significant personal discoveries. Others did not appreciate this much, though. Even my friend and colleague, Urmas, was somewhat concerned. He felt that this question might easily insult some of our clients. He argued that the successful people who come to our seminars and invite us to work with their teams certainly knew what they wanted. And he wasn’t alone. Some clients actually did take offense, and it took some effort from my colleagues to smooth things over.
Of course I wasn’t aiming to insult anyone. Perhaps part of the problem was that I simplified the question too much.
