Okay, let me put you out of your misery. But harken unto me, the secret may not be as profound as you had hoped. Like many great secrets, they’re sometimes unglamorous. And this secret, though in essence quite profound, it’s actually un-sexy and unglamorous when you first hear it. But if you look closer, and dig deeper, you’ll discover the profoundness of it.

Ready? Remember to keep an open mind. Success never comes to those with an “un-open” mind. It comes to those willing to learn and willing to accept new thoughts. New ways of thinking. So keep an open mind. Be willing to accept this grand secret of secrets, and your life will change.

But I digress, and I don’t want to keep you waiting any longer. Are you ready? (Did I ask that already?) Here goes…

The great secret of super-successful people is….. (drum roll please)… They think differently than everyone else does. Got that? Did you expect something else? That’s the secret of secrets if you will.

Successful people think differently.

Odd isn’t’ it. Let me illustrate with some examples to better explain what I mean.

Let’s start with one of my heroes, Richard Branson, the uber-entrepreneur. He dropped out of school at a young age, and he suffered from dyslexia. Conventional wisdom suggests he should have ended up as a manual worker somewhere. He decided that he was going to be successful and rich, conventional wisdom be damned! Today’s he’s one of the wealthiest people in the world.

He started the Virgin group against all the odds, and succeeded. When he decided to start a new airline the world thought he was mad. It was “impossible”, they told him. In fact BA tried to do everything in their power to stop the new renegade airline from succeeding. He didn’t let anything dampen his spirits.

Richard has conquered in so many areas (and failed in several as well) that there isn’t much left for him to conquer… except space! He’s formed a company called (get this) Virgin Galactic which will offer space tourism. I love it! I bet a thousand people told him he couldn’t get into space. But he will. Just give him another couple of years.

Another example (and I mention this one a lot with the youth students at Zen-Do) is Thomas Edison. One the greatest inventors of all time. it took him many years and 2,000 experiments until he finally invented a practical, long-lasting incandescent light bulb. He reportedly said “I now know 2000 ways not to make a light bulb”. If you think about it, the reason we have electric light the way it is today, is because of the way Thomas Edison thought.

Think of all the great people from history. From Julius Caesar to Ghandi to Nelson Mandella. Before they did their great deeds they thought them first.

Let me give you an example from my personal life. When I first started Zen-Do I started off with one student. Within a short few years I’ve built Zen-Do into the largest martial arts school, not only in the country, but in the whole Middle East and have received international recognition for it. I managed to achieve what other martial arts school owners haven’t achieved in 20 years.

I decided I was going to build Zen-Do into something extraordinary, I did not use limited thinking. I thought in an extraordinary way and achieved extraordinary results. It all starts with the way you think.

Now let’s do a bit of self-analysis together. When you see someone in a luxury car, or living in a huge mansion, what’s the first thing you think? Do you think “oh he’s lucky”, or something like “lucky b*****”, or “money isn’t everything” or some such thought? Well, if you do, you’ll never become wealthy (assuming that interests you). Or to rephrase, you’ll never become super-successful.

The correct thought you should have when you see the rich person is good for him. And if wealth is one of your goals, the next thing you should think is I wonder how he became wealthy? Followed by, I wonder if I can learn that and become wealthy the same way he did?

Get my point? Think differently. Success starts with your mind first, then everything else follows from there. In fact, there are several success secrets that follow from this one, like taking action, having determination, taking risk, being immune to criticism and others. But like I said, it’s starts with the mind. Once you think correctly you can change your whole life, maybe even change the world.

Let me stop here for a second and mention the Great Critic Within. If you are reading this and you’re thinking something like “yeah that’s all fine and good but my life/situation is different because _____”, let me stop you right here and tell you that you must stop thinking like that. Silence the GCW (Great Critic Within). If you let him/her lose they’ll cause all kinds of havoc in your life. We all have GCW’s – they never go away.

You’ve got to beat him up every once in a while and banish him to the darker dungeons of your mind. He’ll escape every once in a while and try to sway your thinking back to “normal”. He’s the one that causes “reality to set in”. Whenever he shows up I want you to beat the living cr**p out him and send him back. This will go on for the rest of your life, but as you get better at silencing him and beating him up, he’ll show up fewer and fewer times in your life – but he’ll never be gone entirely.

Let me give you another example. One of the many “jobs” I have is a marketing consultant. I love marketing and I love to teach other entrepreneurs how to do it properly. But you wanna know something interesting? I probably spend a quarter to a third of the time during a consulting session teaching my client how to think differently. I get a lot of “but this won’t work in my business or industry”, and my reply is “why not?”. They don’t really have a good answer. They’ve just been conditioned to think in a certain way and I’ve got to undo all the conditioning. Because if my consulting client doesn’t change the way he thinks, there is no way he can implement my suggestions, because they’re often radically different from what they are used to. By the way, that’s why I called my consultancy “Radical Marketing” and I call myself the Radical Entrepreneur.

So today’s lesson my dear friend is, think differently (and kill the GCW). Stay tuned for my next blog post. I’ll share some more secrets.

I’m of to Germany tonight for 3 weeks for my summer holiday. My wife and I are taking the kids to see their great-grandparents. We’re all so excited!

I’ll be in touch from Germany. Talk to you soon.

Anyway, every year we have a “Big Bang” event. This year we had ours in the Banyan Tree Desert Resort (which is a really stunning place). We had a Bahraini NLP specialist who gave us a very interesting seminar/presentation. It was really interesting (except for the constant hugging, which was a bit weird). I want to share some highlights that I thought were interesting. Here goes:

• Most people when they lie they gesture with their left hand. That’s because lying is a creative right-brain activity. The right brain controls the left part of the body, and the left brain controls the right part.
• NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Basically, it is the “study of success”. NLP proponents claim to be able to cure phobias and other problems in a very short period of time, as apposed to psychiatrists and psychologists who might take months to years to solve problems. NLP is also used by some of the top salespeople around the world.
• 75% of illnesses can be solved by proper breathing. This means deep breathing and not just shallow chest breathing, which, most people do.
• By the time a child turn 6 years old he’s heard the word “NO!” 148,000 times!
• 90% of prisoners were told by their parents that they’d end up in jail. How’s that for self-fullfilling prophecies?
• There is no relation between a person’s GPA (grade point average) and their success in life. How pertinent! See my last blog post on this topic.
• Today, in the US 40% of kids are on medication!!
• By the age of 12, a child has seen 12,000 murders in the media. I really wonder how they measure these things, but I’m sure it must be either true or very close to the truth.
• 75% of our programming from parents, peers, the media, school etc. is negative!
• 10 minutes of deep relaxation is equivalent to 10 minutes of sleep. Yes! I finally found a way to sacrifice even more sleep so I can work more! Yippee!
• The conscious mind processes only 7 (+ or – 2) pieces of information at one time. The subconscious mind can process 2 billion pieces of info at one time!
• When asked a question, if someone turns their eye right (your right) – either top or middle- it means that they are remembering something. If they turn their eye towards the left – again top or middle – it means they are constructing an image or words in their mind. So if you ask a question about their past for example, and they look to the left, it means they are “creating” a story and most likely lying! Apparently, the FBI are really good at detecting lies this way.
• One of the principles of NLP is never to judge people.
• In NLP, there’s no failure, only feedback. It reminds me of something I always teach the younger Zen-Do students. A failure is something you do, not something you are. You’re supposed to make mistakes.
• Children are born with PP (Pure Potential), and any potential that they lose is due to socialisation/indoctrination from their environment.

I’ve been contemplating taking an NLP course for some time now. And I think yesterday’s seminar has persuaded me to finally attend one. Overall, I would certainly recommend it. I would love to hear feedback from anyone who’s done an NLP course.

Okay, the headline to this blog post is misleading – education is not overrated. But I do think formal education is overrated – way overrated.

I’m a fanatic student of human development and success, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that success (whatever it means to you) is based on you and only you – not certificates and pieces of paper hanging on the wall. These are merely tools to help you get where you want to go. Don’t ever think that they are more than that, they’re just tools.

I’ve seen so many people who have issues or complexes because of their “lack of education”. They’ve put themselves in a loser’s mindset. This was probably caused by their parents or peers.

Look, there are tons and tons of examples of people who were successful who never had university degrees. Want proof? How about $508.2 billion worth of proof? I’m talking about the Forbes 400, the richest 400 people in the world, who have total net worth of $1.54 trillion, yes TRILLION. Fully one third of those guys do not have university degrees. Did you get that? You don’t even need a degree to become a billionaire, let alone a millionaire.

In fact, those Forbes 400 members who did not have degrees were on average $140 million richer than their educated peers, interesting huh?

Let me use myself as an example (I’m not in the Forbes 400 ) I’m one of those highly educated people. I’m educated to masters degree level, and last time I checked, I had 19 initials after my name. I probably have more certificates than a certificate salesman. But to be honest I consider myself a self-educated person. Most of my real knowledge came from books I read after I finished univeristy.

The way I see it, who the heck gave some sort of college or academy the right to decide whether I’m educated? A university course just consists of a lecturer summarising a couple of books. Often times this lecturer is so far removed from the real world he should not be teaching at all. You might as well save yourself the $20,000 per year and just buy the books and read them yourself. Who the heck certified the certifier?

Let me go back to the Forbes 400 members who don’t have degrees. The way I see it, every one of those people is extremely educated. Ain’t no illiterate gonna become a billionaire. But they are self-educated. They probably have more knowledge than 2 or 3 university professors combined, but they realised they don’t need the pieces of paper on the wall to prove it to anyone. They just got on with it. Get my point?

So does that mean one should not get a university degree? No, that’s not what I’m saying. If you feel you really want it, get it. Or if you want to work in a certain profession, like a doctor, engineer or lawyer, then by law you must have it. But don’t ever think that it’s the key to success and happiness in life. There are a lot of frustrated and broke PhD’s out there.

If my kids were to tell me when they’re older that they don’t want to go to university, I’d be okay with it. I would prefer it if they went, but knowing what I know, and having discovered some of life’s success secrets, I’d leave the decision up to them. But I would make sure they understood the consequences of not going. I would also explain the fun and excitement they would miss out on, as the university days are really fun. It’s where some of your best friendships are formed.

Life, my friend, is a marathon, not a sprint. In a 42 km marathon, whether you’re the guy in front or in the back makes little difference over the long term. Same thing with a degree, if you have one it does give you a slight advantage in the beginning, but the rest is up to your efforts. What you get out of your life is directly proportional to what you put into it.

In life you should use as many tools as possible to become successful, and a university degree is a tool you could use, nothing more, nothing less. But in order to become successful (again, you have to define success for yourself) you must educate yourself all the time. Read, read read! The best books are the ones written by successful people in their field, not those written by academics. They’re usually dry and boring.

Let me end this blog with a few more Einstein quotes:

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”

“Most teachers waste their time by asking questions which are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning has for its purpose to discover what the pupil knows or is capable of knowing.”

That’s all for today. Look forward to seeing your comments.