The Reason You're Stuck Has Nothing To Do With Your Circumstances

you have to be willing to give up something good in order to get something great.

I was in the automobile business back in the early 80s.

And when I went into the dealership, I was the number one salesman for Ford and Lincoln Mercury in the East Coast.

So I went to the dealership and I said, you know, I'm the number one salesman.

I want a better demo.

Because back then, if you were a salesman, you got a nice car to drive.

And I said to the manager, I said, listen, I'm the number one salesman here and I'm driving a used car, a 1979 Monte Carlo.

I want a new car.

You know, I want like a nice new Mercury.

I'm not asking for a Lincoln, although I sold Lincoln Mercury.

I just want a nice new Mercury.

I don't want this old 79 Malibu.

And the manager said, well, we can't do it at this time.

You know, we don't have enough cars on the floor plan.

One excuse after the other.

And I said, no, none of that is true.

You can give me a car.

Matter of fact, you can give me your car if you wanted to.

I'm the number one salesman.

I'm making you a ton of money.

Give me your demo.

I go, and you take my 79 Monte Carlo.

Oh, no, can't do that.

I quit.

I didn't know what I was going to do.

I quit.

I went home.

In that industry, everybody kind of knows everybody.

And the gossip and rumor mill goes around pretty quick.

About a week later, I get a phone call from Joe Sullivan, who owned Sullivan Neponset Lincoln Mercury in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

And he says, Kevin, I heard that you quit the dealership.

I said, yeah, I sure did.

He said, you want a job here? I said, what type of demo would I get? You know, what type of car would you give me to drive? He says, any car on the lot.

But I'm not offering you a sales job.

What are you offering me? I want you to be the finance manager.

And I'm thinking, I don't know anything about finance manager.

I've never been a finance manager.

He said, can you think you can handle it? I goes, of course I can handle it.

I guess I'm an expert in that.

I knew nothing about finance.

So he says, come on in next week.

You can start.

I said, we need to negotiate our deal.

So I said, let's come in first and let's negotiate the deal.

So I went in, he showed me the office.

They didn't have a finance manager.

The office was basically cobwebs.

So I said, if I go in here and make you money on finance, I want 12% commission of all the money I make you.

Right now you're making zero.

So anything I make you is extra found money.

You could pay me 50% and you'd still be way ahead of the game, but I'm only asking for 12.

Now, by the way, the industry standard back then was like three, 3% for a finance guy.

So he said, absolutely, I'll give you 12.

I want you to sign right here, the deal.

So he signs the deal.

I call up my other buddy in finance.

I go, you need to give me a crash course this week on how to be a finance manager, which he did.

So I went in there and I cleaned up the office and every customer that came in, I said, look, you can go to your bank or credit union, but you should finance the car here.

It's easier, it's more convenient, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, every single person who came in financed the car with us, pretty much without exception.

This guy, Joe Sullivan, made a fortune, but guess who also made a fortune? I made three times as much money in that first month, in that new opportunity, than I did at the other one.

So when one door closes, another door will open.

I learned that you need to create a void.

in order for something new to come in.

That's why in order for new growth in a forest to happen, there has to be a forest fire.

And you need forest fires to wipe out the foliage and wipe out all the undergrowth so that new fresh growth can occur.

That happens in life and I learned that very early.

that it's okay if there's a disaster, if something collapses, if something fails, because you need to kind of put the old out first before something new comes in.

There was a saying I read in Napoleon Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich, which is, in every adversity is the seed of a greater benefit.

And when I go back and read other works, such as by John D. Rockefeller, and even if you go back to the 1800s, there's a great book called The Art of Money Getting by P.T. Barnum.

They talk about adversity is your greatest gift.

Because in it is always a treasure.

All you have to do is find it.

And John D. Rockefeller said every home run he hit in business came because of, quote, adversity.

He found the treasure.

And anytime something, quote, bad happened, he said he knew that there was a treasure in it.

People forget that when the government broke up Standard Oil— Everybody laughed and said, they finally got John D.

They broke up Standard Oil.

But what they didn't realize is after the breakup, because of the stock that he had with all the other companies, his net worth tripled.

Yeah, they really got him.

They really got him.

But he understood that.

So did Henry Ford.

Everybody understood in every adversity is a greater benefit.

All you have to do is find that treasure.

So in my life, I never—and this is very early on.

People have a hard time grasping this or actually believing it.

But I never looked at something as adversity.

Other people would say, oh, that's a disaster.

I go, no, it's not.

This is a gift I just got from the universe.

How are you dealing with that adversity? I'm not dealing with adversity.

I'm dealing with being presented with a gift.

So when other people looked at something as adversity, I looked at it always as a gift.

So I never, I never could, I can't, one thing I can't do is write a book on how to overcome adversity because I could honestly say I haven't had any.

All I've had is the universe give me wonderful, wonderful gifts after gift after gift for which there was treasures inside them.

If you look in the book of Job, Job had everything.

He was super wealthy, had this great family, had friends, everything.

And then everything was taken away, lost.

It boils all over his body.

Everything was destroyed.

And what did he say? The scripture says, he said, what I feared most has come upon me.

What we think about, we get.

What he feared the most came upon him.

And then when he surrendered to God and said, hey, it's okay, I still will worship you.

That's when everything came back and he got a hundredfold of what he had in the past.

When he surrendered, when he didn't have an attachment to any particular outcome and still maintained that relationship, and in his particular case, his relationship with the Almighty, which means he felt good.