3 True Life Stories

Here are the 3 quick true stories I told you about last week. They may give you a bit of insight.

Story #1: Years ago, I was working a booth at a business show, showing off my books and tapes. About 500 people came through that booth over two days. About 400 took catalogs furtively and scurried off hastily, lest I grab them and sell them something. About 99 made small purchases. One guy handed over his credit card and said, “Ship me one of everything you’ve got.” I didn’t know him from Adam’s housecat.

But a few weeks later, I was watching a national TV program, and there he was being interviewed. Seems he was one of the most successful chiropractors in America, retiring from having built 3 $1 million a year practices, one right after the other, and now was head of a consulting firm with 600 clients each paying about $3,000 a month for his advice. That’s $1.8 million a month for those of you short on fingers and toes.

Story #2: Many years ago, a kid (too young to drive) walked a few miles from his house to a riding stable and pestered the owner for a job, and got hired to clean saddles and scrub buckets and mostly do the real grubby stuff nobody else wanted to do after school for $20 a week. The kids used the $20 to buy a used set of Earl Nightingale self-improvement tapes. The kid was Dan Kennedy.

Story #3: A guy at a garage sale found a set of my tapes (at the time) and bought them for $5.00. The fellow selling them told the buyer he guessed they were all right, but they hadn’t done anything for him. In fact, he’d just shut down his business, was selling off all his stuff, and moving to another city to take a job at a relative’s company.

He said, “The free enterprise system just didn’t work for little guys anymore.” He said, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that’s all there is to it. The guy that bought my tapes for $5.00 listened to them, used them, worked with them, and started his own business. When he wrote to me two years later to tell me of making over $200,000 that year in his business, he said, “Funny thing. I was concerned about it at the time, but now I understand – you see, the business I started is exactly the same kind of business that guy I bought your tapes from got out of.”

Now let me finish this long-winded, gas-baggy diatribe with one psychic prediction: some people reading this will say to themselves, “Does Travis think I fell off a turnip truck yesterday? Heck, I can see through this as clear as day. This is just a clever ploy to separate me from my coins the next time he gets around me or mails me some literature. I’m not going to fall for it, no sir. I’m keeping my coins.” Some other folks will get it. It’s all kind of fun to watch.