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Thoughts on the late Eric Hoffer and thoughts on success and failure.

Transcription

Success is an inside job.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Tonight, I wanted to discuss with you a little chapter out of this book. And if it looks like I have lipstick on, I don’t I’ve had to put some chapstick on my lips because they’re chapped from being out in the elements today. And so I hope it doesn’t distract too much from my presentation, my bright red chapped lips.

I also want to thank a lot of the people I got to hang out with today. I got to meet some viewers that view and listen to the show. Just love to say hi to David, and who’s a local person and also to Jack, old friend, and really happy you guys join me here.

This is one I think you guys will get a kick out of if you haven’t seen this book, or heard of Eric Hoffer before, this guy is very interesting to read.

For one thing he had an amazing life.

He was a blue collar worker, and then he would go home at night and write these incredible books and articles and things of this sort. Here’s about the author Eric Hoffer was self educated, he worked in restaurants and as a migrant field worker and gold prospector.

After Pearl Harbor, he worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco for 25 years, the author of more than 10 books, including, The Passionate State of Mind, The Ordeal of Change, and The Temper of Our Time.

Eric Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, Presidential Medal of Freedom 83, that would have been Reagan that gave it to him. So that’s pretty interesting. I never heard that.

I wanted to read a quote out of this because it plays back into business. And so often,most of the issues I’ve found that we really get caught up in for long periods of time as business owners, as executives as the people running the show, right?

We get caught up in this situation where we’re not thinking clearly on something, and it oftentimes comes back to this very same point over and over.

And that’s, we’re not realizing that the responsibility is right here it that the solution is going to come from up here, not from your thoughts and from your brain and from you calculating everything out. But that little inner voice that kind of shows you the right way ago, you know that that intuition that we all have, that leads us in the right direction, right. And this is what this is all about.

Oftentimes, you can always feel this way, when you’re feeling like it’s their fault, it’s their fault, it’s their fault that this isn’t happening, or that this horrible thing is happening, that it’s always somebody else’s fault.

Which very may right may be true. In a lot of cases, there could be a whole lot of blocks and obstacles in your way.

But you need to pull back from that and say, okay, that may be true, there may be all these obstacles and all these people may have these issues, but what am I going to do about it.

You got to have it come back onto you.

So I want to read you this this quick quote from the true believer. It says there’s a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state around us. Hence, it is that people with a sense of fulfillment, think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

And you can see a lot of this stuff plays back and forth. And politics was a lot a lot of what about what this guy talks about, but I want you to think about it more in terms of yourself in your business.

This is a this is a key point right here.

“The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists, even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health, and so on.

If anything, ale a man says the roe, so that he does not perform as functions if he has a pain in his bowels even he forthwith sets about reforming the world.

Right and know what’s wrong. We want to change the world instead of changing us instead of paying attention to what our issues are. Pay attention to what we did to create, the situation that we’re in good or bad, it is understandable.

But those who fail should inclined to blame the world for their failure.

The remarkable things that the successful two however much they pride themselves, on their foresight for to, to thrift and other sterling qualities are at bottom, convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances.

The self confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute, they are never sure that they know all the ingredients, which go into the making of their success, the outside world seems to think them a perk up the outside world seems to them a per curiously balanced mechanism.

And so long as it takes in their favor, they’re afraid to tinker with it.

Thus, the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it to spring from the same conviction. And the one can be as vehement as the other.”

So it doesn’t matter whether you’re stuck, and you just don’t want anything to change, or whether you need things to change, because things are so horrible. You are basing your concept of success on outside circumstances.

And what you have to do is be able to pull back away from the emotion and notice things for how they are and take things in a direction where you want it to be taken.

Damn the consequences, quite frankly, I mean, move forward in a in the proper right direction. And don’t worry about what how everyone else right reacts and how it how everything else falls apart around you. You got to do what you’ve got to do.

You do it for the right reasons, you don’t do it to hurt anybody. But you got to have enough inner knowing, in a sense, to know where you need to go next.

Hopefully that makes sense and isn’t too deep.

It’s a great little book, this guy talks in a way that doesn’t really say his opinion, he just kind of says this is how it seems people act. It’s a it’s kind of similar in modern day to maybe a Jordan Peterson or especially a lot of his early stuff, where it really didn’t take a side. It just kind of said, Well, this is how I see people doing things.

So it’s an interesting, very interesting take not saying I agree with everything, or disagree with any of it. But great thoughts on the nature of mass movements.

But when you’re talking mass movements, you’re also talking about individuals and how they react to things. So great book.

If you want another good book, go check out my book 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

We’re talking about these concepts all the time. So come on back.

Again, subscribe if you’re on YouTube. Subscribe if you’re listening on a podcast, and we’ll be back tomorrow night with another sterling example of either a principle a strategy or a tactic that you can use to explode your business.

You have a great night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.