Gift of succeeding for Christmas

We noticed a pattern in our book sales around this time of year back in the 1980s: Sales of the Succeeding book went up.
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“Oh, people are using it as a Christmas gift.”
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I wrote the book for my first son Dan (and later, his two younger brothers). He was entering high school where they start to put stuff in your “permanent record.”
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I had made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot about how the world works and doesn’t. Also, the grown-ups who are supposed to teach this stuff—teachers, college professors, Hollywood—lie. They leave out the bad stuff. And plain lie about other things.
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When you think about it, what would they know about succeeding? Your K-12 teachers have succeeded in getting one teaching job and staying long enough to get tenure. You wanna do that? They can tell you how they did it. Generally, go to college and get a degree and a teaching certificate.
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You wanna be a college teacher? I went to West Point and Harvard Business School where they have no grad school teaching assistants. But my sons had grad student instructors. You wanna do that? They can teach you how to become a low-paid student teacher. They do not know how to succeed in any other field.
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But what it you want to be rich and famous? They do not know how to tell you that. But, they will say or imply that they do.
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So read books on how to be rich and famous by rich and famous authors. My wife and I are pretty affluent and I have been mildly famous. So does that mean if you want to be richer and famouser you should read richer or famouser people’s books?
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Probably wouldn’t hurt, but—BEING rich and famous does NOT mean you can explain HOW you did it. Actually, it does not even mean you KNOW how you did it. I may be able to explain how I and others did it better than they can. I may understand better how they did it than THEY do.
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Then there is the issue of should you WANT to be rich and famous? Not really. Both look much better than they are when you observe them from afar using the perspective of a poor nobody.
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I explain all that in the book. But also, what your goals OUGHT to be. I also tell you how to get rich and famous in SOME fields. I do not now how to do it in ALL fields. Mainly, I tell you the real world version including the bad stuff. You have to KISS ASS in a lot of career paths. I will not tell you how to do that. I will tell you how to find fields where that is NOT needed, like self employment, commissioned sales, be head of a profit center, self-distribution.
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Anyway, that is the basic idea. At the web pages for my Succeeding book, you can see the table of contents, reader success stories, You Tubes, and more. Merry Christmas.
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