The Pitbull of Personal Development
Larry Winget doesn’t do
platitudes or parables… he tells it as he sees it and he’s become a hugely successful author and TV star as a result. The delivery may be blunt, even caustic but the message is heartfelt: we are all responsible for our own lives.
By Marie-Louise Cook.
Just months before the new millennium, a forty-something American businessman told his family he was leaving and wasn’t sure when he would return and then he travelled from Oklahoma into the Arizona wilderness. For 21 days and 21 nights, the forces raging in his life fought for dominance. Would he, Larry Winget, successful motivational speaker, continue to stand on stage in front of audiences, peddling a ‘be positive and your life will be fine’ line that paid well but which he had come to despise or would he risk it all and finally say what he really believed to be true?
‘I went through a sort of
mid-life crisis and got fed up with everything and hated myself and hated every word that came out of my mouth and hated the people I spoke for,’ recalls Winget, speaking from Paradise Valley, Arizona where he now lives. ‘I was this suited motivational guy who always had to have a positive attitude. My message was “Rah-rah, positive attitude makes a big difference, feel good about yourself, and keep your eye on the goal…” - all of that ridiculous, stupid stuff that all motivational speakers say. I never really believed it - I was just never into the rose-coloured glasses thing - but it was very popular to say that at the time. In my personal life, I wasn’t like that. I was a “take responsibility” guy. I have always believed life is your own damn fault. You’re the idiot who made the mistakes… deal with it and move on. But I sold out. I did what it took to make a living.’
Living the lie eventually became too tiring. ‘I had to juggle those two personalities. That took a lot of energy.’ And the more successful he had become giving those ‘rah-rah’ presentations, the more it encroached on every aspect of his life. ‘I was at the point where everybody owned me, except for me. I didn’t own my life, any of it. I would step on stage, and the people who hired me were in charge of my life. I would come home, and my manager and staff were in charge of my life. When they all went home, [my wife] Rose Mary would come home, and then she was in charge of my life.’
He decided he had to have time to think. ‘I needed to break away from everyone: from my wife and kids, from my staff and manager and all those people. I had to come to grips with what I needed to do.’
That he emerged from the wilderness (okay, Sedona) wearing not a business suit and tie but cowboy boots, black shirt and jeans and sporting an earring might give a clue as to which of those battling forces inside him won.
‘In Sedona I got very quiet and decided what was really important to me in life was authenticity and I just said that I was not going to prostitute myself any longer by saying anything other than what I truly believed. I wasn’t going to be a sell-out any longer. I was going to do what I wanted to do and if it paid well, that was fine and if it didn’t I could always go back into the telecommunications business and sell telephones. I was really at that point. I didn’t care. I was going to make myself happy. I was going to go on stage and be authentic whether anybody liked it or not.’
What he thought was that people needed to be woken up to the fact they were ultimately responsible for their lives.
He began telling it as he saw it and people loved it. ‘When I did that, I felt better about who I was and the response from audiences was overwhelming.’
If his appearance doesn’t already mark him out as a very different kind of personal development speaker (the post-Sedona Johnny Cash look has been replaced with designer cowboy shirts and jeans but the cowboy boots and earrings remain), then the titles of his massively popular books should make it completely clear that Winget is unique in the industry: Shut Up, Stop Whining And Get A Life: A Kick-Butt Approach To A Better Life (John Wiley & Sons, 2004); It’s Called Work For A Reason! Your Success Is Your Own Damn Fault (Gotham Books, 2007); and You’re Broke Because You Want To Be: How To Stop Getting By And Start Getting Ahead (Gotham Books, 2008). For anyone still in the dark, his trademarked monikers, ‘The Pitbull of Personal Development’ and ‘The World’s Only Irritational Speaker’ should shed light where it’s needed: this is a man who takes no prisoners.
For example, while many in the self-help industry have gloried in The Secret DVD and book and maybe even indulged in a little bandwagon jumping, Winget is definitely not one of them. Rest assured there will not be a The Big Secret Behind The Secret by Larry Winget appearing at a bookshop near you. Ever.
‘I think that The Secret is the biggest load of crap that’s ever been put on paper. I really do. The whole philosophy of The Secret says what you think about comes about… I don’t believe that. I think it’s a half-truth and I think it’s a problem that we’re telling people you can think yourself to success. Wishful thinking is not a wealth strategy. Hope is not a success strategy. I think instead of what you think about comes about, it’s what you think about and get off your ass and do something about that comes about. I think it takes action and what The Secret never covers is putting your beliefs into action. You can’t sit on your couch with a six-pack of Diet Coke® in one hand and a box of cookies - y’all call them “biscuits” there - and say, “I think I’m thin.” That’s not going to work.
‘There are people saying “Just believe you’re going to be rich and you’re going to be rich.” No, you’ve got to go work to be rich. They just leave the action part out and it’s a sad place in our society when we’ve let people convince us you can become inactive and only think your way to success. It’s ridiculous and it’s a stupid notion.’
Personal accountability is paramount in Winget’s credo, and people who choose to wallow in their victim status and offer whiny excuses are abhorrent to him. (He says they make him want to vomit.) He believes his message (the accountability bit not the vomiting part) is actually very coachable. ‘I think my material could be coached very easily. I am very straightforward. I have one simple theme that runs through all of my books, and that is personal accountability. It’s very easy to coach someone to always go back to personal accountability because when you are coaching them and they offer excuses the only thing you have to remind them is that they made those choices. It’s their decisions that took them to where they are. It’s their words, thoughts and actions that made them.
‘I think we need a harsh approach to self-help. I think we’ve left the “self” out of “self-help”. We let people by with too much. We need to let people understand that they created their life, their thoughts, their words, their actions, they’re the ones who made the mess they’re in and they have to be held accountable for it. When people start taking responsibility for their lives, that’s when things get better, but not until then. They need to take responsibility. They need to look in the mirror and say, “This is all my fault. I did this. No one did this to me.”
‘I think that people are tired of the sweet, motivational hold-your-hand approach. People can easily see that what I say is true whether it’s comfortable or not. My goal has never been to make anybody comfortable. My goal is to always make people uncomfortable. I think positive change comes from being uncomfortable in your life. I don’t say anything that’s not obvious. I don’t say anything that is not true. The fact that I don’t have a lot of tact in the way I say it bothers some people but it’s hard to argue with my message.’
He’s recently taken a pop at yet another personal development industry favourite – that of only doing jobs/work that you love, feel passionate or excited about. Forget that stuff. Passion, love, excitement… they’re the enemies, according to Winget.
‘It’s an unpopular thing to say, I can tell you. I know people who are very passionate about what they do and they are passionately incompetent. It takes more than passion to be successful in your job. It takes hard work and excellence. Besides that, you are not paid ever for passion. There is no reward for passion, there’s only reward for excellence. You get paid a lot because you’re good at it. It takes more than passion to be good at it. I really can see that loving what you do is really a bonus. There are people who don’t love what they do. I stand on stage now and say, “I hate what I do for a living.” It’s interesting to say that and watch the audience go, “What?” But it’s true: I hate what I do for a living. They think what I mean is that I hate standing on stage and giving a speech but no, I love my speech…. But I spend maybe 75 to 100 hours a year on stage and have to travel between 250 and 300 days a year to make those 100 hours happen. I love every minute of the 100 hours. I hate every minute of the 250 to 300 days.
I hate the travel. The key is I love what I do enough that I’ll put up with it.
‘I think if people realistically looked at their job they would understand that they love their job 10% of the time and they hate their job 90% of the time. The key is you’ve got to love the 10% enough to put up with the 90%.
‘Back to the passion thing: when you’re passionate about something, you don’t always make the best decisions. You make decisions from your heart because you love it. Sometimes that’s not the place to make a good business decision from. There are people who keep businesses alive to the point that they drive themselves into bankruptcy because they put too much of their own life in it and they sacrifice their families, their health and everything else in order to keep their company alive when their company should be buried. So I think that passion can blur good decisions from time to time.
‘Follow your passion and the money will follow is just a ridiculous notion. I gave a speech the other day and the President of the company came up to me when it was all over and said, “You’re so lucky to have discovered your passion.”
“Yes, I am,” I said. “But where you’re confused is you thought my speech was my passion.”
“Well, of course.”
“I’m not passionate about that. I’m telling people to be successful, take responsibility for their own lives, and I make them laugh a little bit. I’m not passionate about that.”
‘He was just appalled.
‘I said, “How can you be passionate about something like that? Let me tell you what I’m passionate about: I’m passionate about sitting on my back patio watching the sun go down with a good Scotch in one hand, a good cigar in the other hand, talking to my wife, listening to great music and patting my dog on the head. That is where my passion lies. The rest is a job. You can’t be passionate about a job… you have to be passionate about your family and what you love, not a job.” I think it’s sad that people get so passionate about their jobs to the point where they’ve confused what’s really important in life. When you die, your tombstone will not say, “He was a great boss.” If it does, what a sad life you’ve lived!’
‘I have no problem with people enjoying what they do. I think you are better at what you do when you enjoy it. But as far as spending so much time at work…. That’s also a problem. I don’t trust a guy that takes 12 hours to get the job done. I think if you can’t figure how to be rich in about four hours a day, you’re doing something wrong. The problem is when people go to work, they don’t really work. They go to work and they play while they are at work and then they go home and try to play and end up having to drag their work home. If you went to work on your job and really worked every minute you were there, you could get it all done so you could leave and go home and really enjoy the rest of your life.’
Passionate or not, he gets paid $35,000 (just over £17,000) an hour to speak to clients that have included 400 of America’s Fortune 500 companies.
‘I didn’t set out in this business to be a failure. I set out to be the most popular guy in the business. It’s been very much a calculated approach in the way I have gone after the market to do this. I was going to stick with it no matter what. I think people pay for authenticity and this is authentically who I am. It’s not an act. I don’t believe people pay a whole lot of attention to what you have to say. I am convinced they don’t listen to what you have to say. I do think they always listen to hear if you believe what you have to say. When they listen to me, they hear that authenticity. I think people are willing to pay a premium for that.’
That he delivers his abrasive message with wit is a major plus.
So too is Winget’s honesty about his mistakes. ‘I readily admit it. All of my books have admitted all of my stupid mistakes. I’ve always said I was the poster child for stupidity. It’s really been the key to my success: I’ve done everything wrong. My approach is I put it all out there, I tell them everything that’s going on, I tell how much money I make, I don’t hide from it, I’m not embarrassed by it, I tell them all the ways I’ve screwed up my marriage, my life, my business and that way they go: “Gee, he’s a real guy. He’s as stupid as we are. He just learns from his mistakes.” That’s what I tell people: “I’m a real guy.” That’s what I think they like. The difference between most people and me is that when I do something wrong, I go “I don’t want to do that again” so I learn from the mistake and then I try not to repeat the behaviour.’
Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes he made was with the telecommunications business
he set up more than 20 years
ago after a sales training career with telecommunications giant AT&T. His company sold telephone systems to businesses and expanded rapidly. His wife joined him as did other staff. But he became complacent. ‘I just stopped paying attention and got interested in doing some other things and kind of got rich and successful and kind of lazy at the same time and trusted some other people to run the company and they ran it into the ground and it went bankrupt. So that is how I lost that company.’
Although he and his wife had to sell nearly all their possessions to pay their creditors, they were allowed to keep their home.
‘I told my wife, “We’ve already lost everything. I suggest you get
a job and figure out a way to pay the bills because I’m going to go and be a professional speaker. All I have ever wanted anyway is an audience.”
‘She said, “You know nothing about being a speaker.”
‘I said, “No I don’t but I’m going to figure it out.”
‘A couple of months into that, when I was really struggling trying to figure out what it was like to be a professional speaker, I knew that I knew how to do sales training so I just got out the telephone directory and started at the ‘A’s and went straight through to the ‘Z’s and called every business in the telephone directory saying, “Do you have any salespeople?” I would train them for $50 an hour. I became very successful very quickly as a speaker. I found that people thought I was very funny. Then I discovered that people pay you more to make them laugh than they do to teach them how to sell. Along the way, I became a sort of motivational all round personal development guy and business speaker but was also known as being very funny.
‘It didn’t take me long to go from $50 an hour to $500 an hour to $1500 to $2500 to $3500. In a matter of a few short months my business was growing very quickly because I was willing to do whatever it took. Most people aren’t willing to do whatever it takes. I’ve always been willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want. I’m real clear about what I want in life, I know exactly what I want my life to look like, I throw away everything that doesn’t move me in that direction, and I only do the things that do move me
in that direction.
‘I went about it in a very smart way but I also worked harder than most
people. I did work a lot of extra hours and did humiliating things to make sure I had the money to do what I wanted to do. I trimmed trees and mowed yards for people and did things most people wouldn’t do and I was willing to reach my goals. I was
not satisfied. I had been a rich guy and I didn’t like being broke so to go
from rich to broke was a humiliating experience for me.
I had already been humiliated and wasn’t afraid to get a little dirty to become successful again so I was willing to do whatever it took, regardless of what it took.’
As you might expect with someone who bucks every trend, Winget has defied what the experts say is necessary to get ahead in public speaking. They say, adapt your material to suit the needs of each audience. He says, no way. He delivers the same one hour speech to everyone. Period. The suggestion that he should tailor his content to meet the needs of each audience has him spluttering with righteous indignation.
‘That’s the most ridiculous statement that is ever made in our industry. It really is. First of all, if you customise every message it would mean every speech you give is a new speech. You can never be amazing if every speech is a new speech. I have an amazing speech that has taken me 20 years to craft, to get the timing perfect and it has universal appeal so I don’t have to customise it for everyone and I’m never asked to because the speech is so good and the message is so universal, people can immediately see how it applies to them.’ His speech contains 18 universal principles of success that he distilled from the 4,000 books he read and the 10,000 of audio and video programmes he listened to. ‘You don’t have to spoon feed an audience. They’re not stupid. They know you are expert or not. And I’m an expert at universal principles. I expect them to be smart enough to personalise it on their own. I don’t have to customise it for them.
‘Really, life is not as hard as most of these guys in the personal development make it. Right now, I get paid a lot of money to make fun of all those people when I take to the stage. I pretty much trash everything that’s been said by all the idiots that are saying it. The people that write the business books and the motivational speakers, they are just saying things that don’t make sense. Some of the best customer service speakers in the world, if you call their office, they never call you back. They don’t walk their talk. People who are telling you how to get rich: I know those guys and most of them have no money. I’ve seen the kind of cars they drive and where they live. I just ask for authenticity. I want you to be able to back up what you say.’
He never tires of presenting. ‘You know, I really don’t. I like my speech. Every once in a while, I’ll get tired of a story and I’ll drop it and stick a new story in. Sometimes people will pay me enough money to show up and do a whole day or two days worth of material. I can do that easily. But 90% of my work is the same one hour speech.’
And companies invite him back, even knowing they will receive the same speech. ‘I’m real clear about what I’m going to do so I don’t get a lot of complaints. If they decide to use me two years in a row, they know I’m going to do the same material. If they specifically say “We’re going to bring you back next year and so we’d like all new stuff”, I can do that but really I’m not a guy that you would want probably two years in a row. You’d want to put a little time in between my appearances. There are enough people out there hiring speakers that I can keep a full calendar and not have to repeat audiences very often.’
Having put so much effort into honing his speech, Winget is understandably protective of the content. ‘I was in the UK and the warm-up act did about five minutes of my material and I walked out on stage and just called him a hack in front of the whole audience and really dressed him down.
‘He said, “You embarrassed me.”
‘I said, “You’re a thief. You stole my material in front of me which also says you’re not only a thief but you’re stupid.”’
It’s that ability to confront people and draw their attention to their mistakes that has made his reality television series Big Spender such a success in America. He’s filmed two series and is waiting to hear about the third. In each episode, Winget ambushes chronic over-spenders (who have all volunteered to be on the show, incidentally) and forces them to face the consequences of their behaviour. Usually, that involves going into their homes and seeing them try to justify spending thousands and thousands of dollars on designer goodies while hiding from the ugly reality that they are in deep debt. They watch taped interviews of their friends and family discussing their out of control spending habits and then Winget provides them with a no-excuses budget to help them claw their way out of the holes they’ve dug. He then revisits them a few weeks later to find out how they are adapting to their new lives.
The TV deal followed the release of his first published book. Winget had already self-published 20 books which he sold every time he spoke in public. ‘From 1990 until 2004, I wrote and self-published because I had a built-in audience. I speak to between a quarter and a half million people a year face to face. I never needed a publisher. I could write a book, have it printed myself, put it at the back of the room and people would buy it which is a great thing to do if you’re in the speaking industry.
‘In early 2004, a publisher approached me through a friend of mine and said they wanted to publish one of my books and I said, “I don’t think I need you. I’m doing quite well. I’ll sell more books this year than you would if you printed it” and the publisher said, “Yep, but we can get you in bookstores.” So they appealed to my ego by saying that. Self-published books don’t really get in bookstores.
‘I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” They paid me almost no money to write the book, I wrote Shut Up, Stop Whining And Get A Life. I never use a ghost writer. I write every single word that goes on the page. I don’t trust anybody else with my words. The book came out in September 2004 and immediately went into the Wall Street Journal best-seller list. I have a built in fan-base and I had been letting them know for a good long while that I was going to release a book through a publisher. The book went to Number One. The instant that happened is when an agent called me and hooked me up with a great big publisher and I started making real money to write books.’
He’s already started working on his fourth book, People Are Idiots And I Can Prove It: How Our Actions Contradict Our Words and Wants and is busy recording another television programme. So, now that he’s conquered the world of publishing and television, what’s next?
‘I love doing TV and there will be a lot more of me on TV. I’m becoming a lot more recognisable: I have a look and style that is easy to spot. I’ve been told my voice is very recognisable so I’m starting to do some voice-overs and television commercials and that’s a fun thing for me. You’ll probably see a book every 12-18 months and a lot more TV stuff and maybe a syndicated radio show. That would be great for me because it would get me off the road.
‘I’ve made a lot of money and making money is fun for me but after nearly 20 years of being on the road I’m tired and I want to spend more time at home. So my personal goals are to spend more time with my family and friends and be a little more selfish.’
Further Information
To find out more about Larry Winget, visit his website:
www.larrywinget.com
If Larry Winget has motivated you and you want to become a Coaching Academy Licensed Trainer and run your own highly profitable workshops don’t miss the forthcoming training event in June. Places are extremely limited so
visit www.the-coaching-academy.com/licensedtrainer to register now or call Victoria Kirchoff on 01797 227997. |
