LEADERSHIP LOGIC

BOB MCKINNON Director of Leadership EXIT Realty Corp International LEADERSHIP LOGIC < < <

A Milk Crate in the Trunk

Recently I had a fun flash-back conversation with a seasoned veteran like myself. We were talking about innovators which led us to sharing our personal influencers when we were younger. Some of those names you may not know, like J. Douglas Edwards, Earl Nightingale and Tommy Hopkins, but you may have heard of Zig Ziglar and Jim Rohn. We had fun sharing our common favorites.

I was living in Southern California in my early years and even then, traffic was a huge problem. You could spend half your day on the 405 or the 101 trying to get to your next appointment. Periodically I would pull over, open my trunk and get out another cassette pack of motivational tapes for the rest of the drive. Yes, that is what we had before mobile devices. We had 8-track and cassette tape players in our dashboards, and we could make the daily choice to listen to country music or Jim Rohn or…hmm?

My friend admitted that he had never gone to college, but felt he had a degree in life management skills from the thousands of hours he spent listening to those tapes, and I agreed. Those speakers would have events and would always stand in the back of the room and sell their books and tapes following their presentations. I was not so keen on the books back then, but I loved the tapes. So, to keep them organized in my trunk, I had a black milk crate full of tape boxes. I later discovered thousands of other people had the same silly system.

After WWII, the GI Bill started people on a quest for self-improvement like no other time. The very first was Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell, then Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, followed by How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale, See You at the Top by Zig Ziglar and the work just kept piling into a mountain of life-changing offerings. Two things I will say about this: First, these works are as fresh and valuable today as when they first came out; and second, I think a younger mind today would be impacted even more than we were back then. Timeless wisdom and principles are there for the mere asking.

Today I still read and listen to podcasts, but I do miss the depth and quality of these pioneering works. All these old works are available in their original form, just in new packaging. On one’s mobile device all these works combined would not come close to using all your memory space. No college? Some college? Side by side, I would put all the college courses you could take against reading and internalizing these masters. And I would put my money on and hire the latter.

I was refreshed by the laughter my friend and I shared while reminiscing about our milk crates full of tapes, but more than anything, I want to encourage you to take in these classics. Put them in your phone and sit on the crate at your kids’ soccer game, listening through your ear buds: a PhD in life at your fingertips. Don’t go alone. Take a young person who has never heard this with you. Your life – and theirs – will be enriched.

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