Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.
That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die;
do not outlive yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw, playwright
I went from 207 pounds down to 156 and a 34-inch waistline.
As I mentioned in the Introduction, my first six of the 13 Rules focus on how you PREPARE—the things you do before you ever get in front of anybody who’s counting on you for something, like a customer, for example. Preparation is critical to your success.
No matter how many times a seasoned high-altitude mountain climber attacks a mountain peak like, say, Mt. Everest, the process always begins the same way—with preparation. Not one step is taken up that mountain until all preparations are thoroughly checked out. This means a detailed going over of all planning and equipment to make sure the strategy is sound and that everything works. Climbers spend weeks and months getting used to the climate in the area before ever venturing up the mountain. There are many stories of failed and tragic expeditions up high mountains because the planning wasn’t right or the equipment didn’t perform properly.
In life, failing to prepare is where most people fall short of the mark, especially on the job. They don’t think they need to prepare because they’ve done something so many times they believe they can practically do it in their sleep. Or they think that it really doesn’t make any difference. They let their egos get in the way of good judgment. Don’t be one of these statistics. Get on the right track with thorough preparation before you start your day. By the time you walk in the front door of your office or place of work you should be primed and ready to “hit the bricks running.” If you don’t latch onto this basic idea about the importance of preparation YOU ARE DOOMED. Period.
We don’t climb anything until we know what we’re doing and with what. Nothing happens in our day until everything is checked out first. If you’re not prepared, you might as well stay home. Your performance will always reflect how well prepared you are. It’s true in sports, in how you make investments—even in your personal life with family, where it really counts big and, of course, obviously where you work. It’s true about everything in life. If you’re counting on luck to get you through, remember this: Luck is for losers. Winners play it smart and plan ahead.
Deciding where to begin with My 13 Rules was actually quite easy. When you review the list of rules in the Introduction, it’s pretty obvious that nothing positive is going to happen, even with the best of intentions, if you’re not up to the task—and that means being as fit as you can be. That’s why I’m talking about my first rule, Make a healthy choice, right up front. Without a healthy mind, a healthy spirit, and a healthy body, you are not as complete a person as you could be. Mental, emotional, and physical stability are the three pieces to the puzzle of maintaining your good health.
Your Good Health—Life’s Starting Point
To me, good health is not about a race to become smarter or stronger than the next guy or gal. It’s not about being healthier than someone else. The contest I’m talking about is only between you and yourself. God didn’t make us all the same. Each one of us is unique. We weren’t all blessed with the same good health any more than we have the same gift of smarts. But that’s okay. I’m talking about making the most of what you do have! That’s the only yardstick you need. Ask yourself, “Am I all that I can be?” If you answered, “No,” you’ve got the right book in your hands.
If you don’t think you’re a particularly healthy person, I could spend hours talking to you about people I know who are not (and never have been) in good health. Yet, somehow, through sheer grit and determination, they were bound to succeed and live as complete and healthy lives as they possibly could. While they may not have been in the best of health, they all decided they would control what attitude they would wear when they woke up each morning to start their day. That might not be easy for many, but it is the secret to living a full and successful life. Let me share examples of two very special people who figured that out and succeeded in life in spite of severe health obstacles.
A case in point is Lance Armstrong, the winner of a record seven consecutive Tour de France races that recognize the world’s greatest cyclist. If you would’ve seen him three years before he won the first of those seven races, you wouldn’t have given him a chance in hell of surviving what he faced back then. Lance was stricken with a cancer that spread to his lungs, abdomen, and brain. His outlook was not good. He was given less than a 40 percent chance of survival following surgery and therapy. But survive he did! Following his illness, his astounding rise to dominance as the world’s greatest cyclist was almost unbelievable. But his victories on a bicycle were nothing compared to his triumph over death. He has since gone on to champion the cause for treatment and support for those afflicted with cancer. He is a model of determination, fitness, and survival—all marks of a true champion.
Another example that comes to mind is the late Steve Jobs, CEO of the consumer electronics giant, Apple, who battled pancreatic cancer for more than seven years before finally succumbing to the disease. During this time, and in spite of this painful form of cancer, Apple designed and launched some of its most successful and imaginative products under Jobs’s innovative and inspiring leadership. It is a testament to his courage, his work ethic, and his love of the company he founded. There are many more individuals I could go on and on about.
These real winners in life never took the easy path, even when faced with poor health. Instead of looking for pity, they accepted their situations and then made the courageous decision to be everything they could possibly be in this life before checking out. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of their achieving what they set out to do. When faced with a challenge to their health, they all said, “Bring it on.” And because they did, we now have inspiring examples of what each of us has the potential to be—regardless of what health obstacles are thrown in our path.
To get into the right frame of mind mentally and emotionally to take on life, start by taking care of yourself physically. For most of us the problem is not a condition, a disease, or illness—it’s neglect!
Listen up! Listen to your body—it’s trying to tell you something!
A Mirror Always Tells the Truth
The key to being as healthy as you can be is, in a word, discipline. That brings us to the biggest culprits of why many people aren’t healthy (and don’t look healthy)—diet and exercise. Nothing makes an overweight person feel more uncomfortable and guilty than these two subjects. The vast majority of people don’t like talking about them, and it shows. I KNOW. I WAS ONE OF THEM.
During the early years of my sales career success, I admit to being a workaholic. I was there night and day making calls, closing deals, and preparing for the next day. I think remembering my days as a kid with nothing was the biggest reason I would stop at nothing to make as much money as I could. As a result, I had very little time for myself and my family. I spent most of it in a chair, on the phone, or with customers. I never exercised. I never took the time for that. I was “too busy” to be healthy. I ate the wrong kinds of food, and I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. What a combination—no exercise, fatty foods, and cigarettes. And I looked the part. But I was making money and lots of it. I was getting recognition all over the country for what I was achieving in sales. Still, when I got home at night and looked in the mirror, the truth of my identity was all too clear—a fat-bellied salesman who ignored his own good health for money. Something would have to change. Even though I was making plenty of money, deep down inside I didn’t like myself.
When I was in my forties, I met a man who had a major impact on my life. It was Jack LaLanne, the renowned health and fitness pioneer. We were both receiving Golden Plate awards and national recognition in our respective fields from the prestigious American Academy of Achievement. Mine was for sales, and Jack’s was for preaching the gospel of physical fitness. Jack was all muscle. I was all polyunsaturated fat. He said to me after the banquet, “Joe, I admire your philosophy. And I like what I see—from the neck up. But, frankly, I can’t stand what I see from the neck down.” He looked with disdain at my larded belly. “You’re the world’s greatest salesman,” he continued, “but here’s a sale I’ll bet you can’t close successfully.” He then challenged me to lose all that weight and keep it off. He even told me how to do it, by eating sensibly: more fruits and vegetables and less starches. He also put me on a fitness program of three simple daily exercises (sit-ups, push-ups, and bicycle kicks). He told me, “Do it slowly, but stick to it.” I’ll never forget how I finally got started. All it took was one glance in the mirror. BOOM. I was going to make my body obey my mind no matter how hungry I was or how much my muscles ached until I succeeded. It was tough at times, but I stuck to my guns. My mind was in total control of my body. That was the key. How did I do? Just look at the photo at the beginning of this chapter. As the old saying goes, “One picture is worth a thousand words.”
A year later, I sent Jack a letter telling him he had lost the bet. I went from 207 pounds down to 156 with a flat and hard belly and a 34-inch waistline. I got a letter back from Jack with a new challenge. “But can you keep it off?” A year later he lost that bet too. And I’ve been under 160 pounds ever since. Thanks for the push, Jack. You got me off the couch.
Now I’m challenging all of you to do the same thing. I tell everybody I see, “If I can do it, anyone can!” And that means YOU can too. MAKE YOUR BODY OBEY YOUR MIND. You’re the captain of your ship. Don’t be the Titanic. Don’t let any icebergs get in the way of your good health and take you down. GET HEALTHY AGAIN AND STAY HEALTHY! I’m also throwing you a life preserver in life’s stormy seas—My 13 Rules. Grab onto them and never let go. Stay the course and you’ll reach your destination safely.
Now I know that some people have medical conditions that make weight control difficult, but let’s be honest: most people are overweight because they choose to be. They choose to eat cholesterol-filled fast foods. They choose sitting on the sofa instead of doing sit-ups. They refuse to commit to change. Any excuse for inactivity will do. Some of them are so fat, they can hardly bend over to tie their shoelaces. Their great companions sitting on the sofa with them are LAZINESS and SELF-PITY. It’s pathetic.
According to research conducted by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Duke University, by the year 2030, 42 percent of Americans will be obese! Are you in that crowd? ONCE UPON A TIME, I WAS! I can tell you right now, you’re gonna have one helluva time getting on board with Girard’s 13 Rules if you are. The people who are healthy and fit are not lucky. They choose to care about their health and their appearance. They want to feel good about themselves, so they do something about it and stick to their routines every day. They’re disciplined. They conquer adversity whenever it rears its ugly head. People aren’t born that way; they choose to be that way.
One of the most successful television personalities of all time is Oprah Winfrey. For years she has battled weight control due to a thyroid condition. But through her ups and downs, her busy schedule never kept her from trying relentlessly to take off the pounds and keep them off. Oprah has always felt an obligation to be a good example for others even when the willpower wasn’t there. It is particularly difficult for her because of her medical condition. But that doesn’t keep her from going the extra mile. Even with occasional setbacks, she is a winner and a model of determination because she never gives up. That’s who you want to be! Don’t you? THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! I DID!
It’s been said that a person’s health can be judged by which they take two-at-a-time—pills or stairs. If you should be taking two stairs at a time but don’t, you will soon be taking two pills at a time, as sure as night follows day. Get control of your health now before it gets control of you. If you don’t, you will find recapturing it will be one of the most difficult things you will ever do in your life. And it gets more difficult with each passing day. No matter what your condition or circumstance, talk to your doctor about getting on a physical fitness program that’s tailor-made for you. You’ll not only look better. You’ll feel better about yourself. And that’s where positive mindsets are born. More about that in our next chapter. Whatever you do, don’t give up before you even get started.
Control Your Habits—Before They Control Your Career
Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned that I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. It was a nasty habit that I was glad to escape from once I realized what it was doing to my overall health. I think if I could have drawn a chart with two lines on it—one representing the growth of my sales success and one representing the state of my health during those years—you would have seen two lines going in opposite directions as they crossed in the middle forming the letter “X.” Now I don’t want you to get the idea that you have to ignore your health in order to be a success in life. In fact, just the opposite is true. But I had to learn that the hard way, as I have so many things in my life. Fortunately for me, I was able to recognize and do something about both my eating and smoking habits before they took hold of me forever.
During my sales career, practically everyone I knew at work smoked. We weren’t the most health conscious society when it came to food content either. That’s the way things were back then. That’s not the case today. We know a lot about what cigarettes and food with bad cholesterol levels can do to you. A well-known television news anchor’s life was cut short because of lung cancer brought on by heavy cigarette smoking. Had he known better, I’m sure Peter Jennings would have made some better decisions about his health. There’s no excuse for those choices today! NONE! So why do we do it?
I believe that when you’re doing well at something, it’s quite normal to want to continue doing that, and maybe more of it, even if it means sacrificing common sense. Why? Because it’s a routine that works. That’s my story right there. I kept doing what I was doing because it worked. The more I did of something, the more money I seemed to be making. The problem was, I was ignoring the basic attention my body needed. So I paid the price. All I did was cough all day long in my chair. Cigarettes were killing me, and I didn’t even know it. Besides, I had no time for that. I had to focus on making the next call—closing the next deal—grabbing the next buck before someone else tried to take it from me. Except for the ties we wore, the business of retail selling might as well have been a contest between wild animals in the jungle fighting over a piece of raw meat. I always felt I was in a game of survival of the fittest. Except fittest, in this case, didn’t apply to Joe Girard’s health. That took a backseat. I became a prisoner of my own success.
But it didn’t stop there. Once I achieved the top sales spot in the world, there was no one else left to beat—except, of course, myself. My only challenge was to beat my previous year’s sales record. And I did that on a number of occasions. Once I became number one, I never looked back ever again. I remained the number-one salesperson in the world for the rest of my career. There was a lot to celebrate. And I did. I rewarded myself with frequent trips to Las Vegas for my wife and me. And that’s where I met the devil; I discovered gambling.
At first it was small-time. A few hundred bucks here and there. Pretty soon it became thousands. Eventually I had a personal marker (in the gambling world, that’s like a line of credit) in certain hotel casinos that I simply signed my name to. Although I was not a big-time gambler with a disease or anything like that, I know I had run up gambling debts of at least $11,000 on occasion. My problem was, I didn’t see it as gambling. I saw it as enjoying my success. I liked the action; I liked the recognition I would often get; I liked being in the limelight of Las Vegas. Life was “good.” But this, too, was ruining my health. The track was fast, but I didn’t want to get off. Once I came to my senses (and it didn’t take long to realize I was “giving away” my hard-earned money), I jumped off that train to nowhere. I didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of people like PGA golfer John Daly (read John’s book, John Daly: My Life In and Out of the Rough), whose promising career has been plagued with distracting personal problems including losing tens of millions of dollars gambling. That’s not where I wanted to be.
My wife and I still enjoy going to Vegas. The difference is, we’re in total control of what we do—common sense rules—and it’s a lot more fun that way.
Here’s the lesson: One of the most difficult things to do once you’ve reached the top of the mountain is to be careful you don’t “dance” too much up there. You might slip and come crashing down to the bottom. What you’ll see on the way down, in a few seconds as you plunge to your demise, is just a blurry picture of the path you worked so hard to climb up for months and years—soon to be snuffed out in a moment of bad judgment. Gone—just like that—game over. We’ve all seen and heard about this kind of thing happening too often to star athletes and movie idols. I’ll be talking more about that later in Rule #4, Work when you work. Take a tip from Joe Girard: You don’t have to drink the whole bottle in order to enjoy the wine.
Somewhere along the way, I must have developed a nagging awareness for knowing when something I was doing wasn’t quite right. I’m convinced my mother and The Man Upstairs had a hand in this. Whatever it was, in spite of my success, I didn’t like how I looked, how I felt, or how I was living my life. I didn’t like the direction my life was headed in—self-destruction. I was at an important crossroads in my life, and I knew it.
Thanks in part to Jack LaLanne, who got me started on the right track, I soon made several changes to my life. I decided to “cash in my chips” on the life I had been living and “trade up” for a life of health, happiness, and prosperity for myself and my family, as well as developing a more compassionate awareness of others.
My 13 Rules have their roots in my story about that walk through life on the road to an awareness and fulfillment I knew all too little about when I first got started.
Quitters Never Win—Stay the Course
Have you ever noticed how much physical fitness equipment is sold around the beginning of each new year? It’s mindboggling. We all know why—everyone’s making New Year’s resolutions to make improvements in their physical appearance and eating habits. They all want to make a change for the better. We’ve all seen the ads that run during the college football bowl games on TV at that time of year—Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, etc. Everyone’s pumped up to make a change, right? Wrong. After a few weeks of “pumping iron” and getting used to eating the “right” kind of food, one by one they fall off the wagon and slip right back into their old habits. The statistics are not good for success stories here. While everyone starts out the same way with the right intentions, only the strong-willed seem to survive to experience noticeable change. By the time the summer rolls around, that stair-stepper or treadmill machine is either in a garage sale or waiting at the curb for trash pick-up. Why? What happened? What’s missing?
In a word, what’s missing is commitment. Another way of putting it is, that “healthy person” they were trying to become wasn’t worth the effort needed to get there, plain and simple. The willpower to change just wasn’t there. It had nothing to do with understanding the benefits of good health or the risks of bad health. People just have a way of justifying decisions even if they’re not in their best interest. I know that sounds odd, but it’s true. Since they hadn’t had their first heart attack—yet—and since they couldn’t “see” the fat in their body and what it was doing to them, this whole idea of getting in shape and being healthy was something they could do “down the road.” It didn’t apply to them. That’s how doing nothing about good health is rationalized in people’s minds. Can you believe it? It’s true. Isn’t it?
What you’ve just witnessed is the birth of commitment’s ugly cousin in the opposite corner: laziness, the easy way out, anything to avoid taxing yourself physically. Inactivity rules. The truth is that is not the easy way—it’s the devil in disguise.
You’d think only someone with both eyes closed would make this choice if he or she knew what they were doing to themselves. Wouldn’t you? Amazingly, there are plenty of people like that out there. And I know where they all are. They’re all making appointments at the same places—the emergency rooms of our hospitals. Conservative estimates suggest that obesity-related problems already account for at least 9 percent of the nation’s yearly health spending, or $150 billion annually. Because of their gluttonous stupidity, they’re now clogging up hospitals everywhere (as well as their arteries) and stealing beds from people who really need the attention. Now they want mercy and attention. It’s so pathetic, it’s hard to feel sorry for them. You’re not one of them, are you?
What don’t they understand about what I just said? They’re killing themselves and yet they choose to ignore the repeated warnings about obesity and smoking! People like that have to actually see death staring them in the face before they believe, and then it’s a whole new ballgame. By then, it’s often too late. How many times has a doctor had to utter these words? “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, but you have untreatable lung cancer.” Still want to “Light up a Lucky”? A physical fitness program seems like a breeze now, doesn’t it? What has to happen to get you off your butt and moving? Do you have to be told by a doctor that your arteries are filled with cheese and sugar first? Use common sense!
Still think you can’t do it? You’d be absolutely amazed at the hidden reserves your body has just waiting to be unleashed in a good physical fitness program. You have no idea how much speed and endurance you could generate if you were being chased by a tiger or grizzly bear in an open field and were running toward the safety of a small enclosed shed just ahead. How long do you think you could hang suspended from an exercise bar with one arm? Thirty seconds? A minute? I’ll bet you could easily break your record if you were hanging from a tree branch with one arm and letting go meant falling to your death over a gorge. Adrenaline is an amazing thing. When it kicks in, it’s the fuel of survival. Pain disappears rather suddenly when it comes to matters of life and death. That’s the mindset you need to get yourself in shape.
Still think you can’t do a few sit-ups or push-ups? Still think smoking is a cool idea? Still think what you eat is right for your body? We’re talking about your health here! C’mon! If you can’t do it on your own, then get help. Look, I’m not asking you to do anything stupid. Check with your doctor before you do anything. BUT DO IT NOW! Don’t let procrastination take you down. There may not be as many tomorrows as you think. And yesterday is a cancelled check.
Making the Change—Wanting It Bad Enough
Have you ever heard of someone losing something because they wanted it too much? It’s an interesting question. I know I’ve been disappointed whenever I lost a sale. But the reason I lost it was not because I wanted it so much. There was almost always a very clear reason, including something I did that could have been done a little bit better. Now let me ask you the same question with a slightly different twist: Have you ever heard of somebody getting something because they wanted it bad enough? Now the answer is a resounding “YES!” I’m living proof of that. What are you living proof of?
How badly do you want to be in the best health of your life?
How badly do you want your family to have the very best life has to offer?
How badly do you want to be a success in life?
How badly do you want to say to yourself in your old age from a rocking chair, “Yes, I gave life everything I had. I was the very best I could have been”?
If you want any of these things as badly as Joe Girard did, you’ll do something about it. GET IN SHAPE! Time is the enemy of all of us. We have only a limited amount of it. As you’ll hear me say more than once in this book, “If I can do it, anyone can!” Make the change now!