Internet marketer, speaker and entrepreneur Vic Johnson had lost his home, his car, and was living below the poverty level, before he made a few small changes that altered his future forever. Now, he is living a jet-setting life, traveling internationally, and reaping the rewards he has sown. He caught up with Attitude Digest editor-in-chief Jocelyn Godfrey recently to share his thoughts on success and attitude.
AD: You are known for your Internet marketing savvy. How did you get into this field?
I recognized fairly early back in late 90s early 2000s that the Internet was going to be a major distribution channel. It hardly resembles what it was 10 or 11 years ago. I was at the time coming off of some pretty upside down times in my life. I didn’t have magazines calling me 10 or 11 years ago to do interviews. I had bill collectors calling me.
My family and I were evicted from our home in 1996. The judge gave us 48 hours to find another place to live. A year later, we lost the last automobile we had. For more than a year, I drove a borrowed automobile I got from a friend. I qualified in 1997 for the federal earned income tax credit because we earned so little money and qualified below the US poverty level for a family of five.
In the midst of all of that, I am undergoing some massive personal change. I looked around at my life and did not like what I saw and as I looked further I saw that I had created all of it. So I started on a plan to create a new life. That reintroduced me to personal development because I had been a student in my early 20s and had been very successful early in my life and had gotten away from those principles for some reason. In my late 20s, I gave away all the many personal development tapes I had– Denis Waitley, Zig Ziglar, Earl Knightingale. I guess I figured I knew it all. Then I went through a period of about 20 years when I made a lot of mistakes, living with some very bad principles that caused the situation that I found myself in in the mid 90s.
So when it came time to look at what I was going to do on the Internet, I had made somewhat of a comeback and had put my life somewhat back together. I had gone in a year from that $14,027 income to a six-figure income using some principles that Sam (Glenn) teaches, I know, and believes in. Just very basics success principles that I had learned from my mentors like Bob Proctor, Joe Marone, Denis Waitley, Knightingale. So as I began to look at what I was going to do on the Internet, the fact that my life had been so touched and changed by personal development, I decided that was an area I would specialize in.
Then as I looked at what was available and who was in that particular niche, there weren’t a lot of people. Most of the major players did not have an Internet presence. So I had the fortune, and I suppose the fact that I was looking for the opportunity and aware of and saw the opportunity, to be one of the early adopters in the personal development community. And then along the way people started asking me, because I started out as a marketer, you know. I wasn’t giving any teaching, training, or any of my material. I was simply marketing other people’s stuff. I was marketing stuff for Joe Marone, Brian Tracy, etc. That’s how I first achieved any success at all on the Internet.
I was very successful at building a list pretty quick. I understood that that was the key. Over the years, people would ask me for personal help or they would ask me how I turned my life around. Along the way I determined, well maybe I’ve got a message, maybe people can benefit from my experience and from my trials. Since goal setting has been a major challenge for me for more than 20 years, I decided that that was going to be an area where I would spend some extra time. So we started creating programs, selling programs, doing seminars, speaking at seminars. And in a very short period of time, we were very fortunate in 2005 or 2006 to do a television show, Goals to Go, and we were able to get exposure around the world with that show, and Success Magazine, and some other featured opportunities in goal setting.
AD: You have expressed that the only difference between where you are now and where you can be is belief. Can you elaborate on that?
Well, it really is. When I stop and think today, I’m sitting here right now as I’m speaking to you, it’s in the mid 70s, I’m looking out at the lake I live on, and the view I have today is very much different from the view I had 10 or 12 years ago when I was living in run down places and couldn’t pay the rent and those kind of things. I made a choice that I didn’t want to live like that and I made a choice that I actually wanted to live in a paradise like I live in today, that I wanted to do a lot of international travel and national travel as well and I wanted certain things. Those choices obviously came with some prices that I was prepared to pay. So it all started in the thoughts that I created as I began the new life that I was going to live.
And I had a choice. You know the masses; their choices are made on their circumstances. They wake up in the morning, their 15-year-old car won’t start, or they get out on the road and the tires they should have changed four months ago, one of them goes flat. They are living in a world where anything at all can turn them upside down because they are living on the edge.
So they look at those circumstances– and I know what it’s like, I was in those circumstances, and I used to let that influence my thinking. They look at those circumstances and that causes certain thoughts to be generated which generate feelings which generate actions which generate results. And then you look at the results, and guess what? You go right back into that cycle. It’s really a deadly circle, a cycle that you live in.
Well the world class, they don’t look at their circumstances, regardless of whether good, bad, whatever; they look at where they want to go. And that’s what generates their thinking, that’s what drives their thinking, that’s what they’re focused on– where they want to go. And so it doesn’t matter what the particular challenge may be today. I tell people, you know I have more challenges today with money than I ever had when I didn’t have money; it’s amazing.
The very first choice you make is, who is in control of your thinking? Are you in control, or is your neighbor, or the media, or your boss, or the person at the water cooler? Who is in charge of your thinking? If you give that away, if you give charge away your particular thinking, then that’s where the power is. And so that’s a choice you make every single day, throughout the day.
I know Sam talks about this; he’s big attitude king. If the days going great and then you let yourself be sucked in to some negative thing that’s going on on the radio, or the television or that’s in the newspaper or whatever, and you let that affect you at all, guess what? You made a choice to give control of your thinking to someone else. That’s going to have an impact on you, and there is no way that you can avoid that. To think that you can sit and watch and listen or read, whatever, to stuff that, first of all has very very little or nothing to do with your life, your family’s life, your future or anything else, to think that you can sit there and be exposed to that and it not have an impact on you, you’re living in la-la land.
AD: You had mentioned that the economy has nothing to do with personal fortune.
Not at all. I was speaking in Houston a few weeks ago and I was telling the audience that I’m the poster child for the fact that the economy has zero, I mean has absolutely nothing to do with your personal economy… unless you allow it. It’s about looking beyond that, to where you want to go. Back in the mid 90s when I was upside down, I was struggling, making $14,000 in a whole year. The economy was in the middle of the largest expansion in the history of mankind. More millionaires and more billionaires were created in the mid 90s than at any other time in our history. And in that time, especially here in Florida where I’m living, there were new millionaires and billionaires everywhere. And here I am, I can’t make $14,027 a year. I couldn’t see opportunity.
It was there. I mean obviously other people saw it. So that’s one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is, flash forward to 2001, we just started a recession that was brought on as a result of the initial dot com bust. When big businesses on the Internet didn’t figure it out right the first time, they went out of business, there were bankruptcies everywhere, the stock market just tanked because of it, people lost millions and billions of dollars. I decided that that was the time. I wasn’t reading those reports by the way. I wasn’t listening to the media. I decided that that was the time to start an Internet business. And it created a six-figure income right in the first year, which is rare for any business, much less a business in an industry that’s supposed to be tanking.
So those two extremes demonstrate clearly for me that the only thing that has anything to do with my personal economy is my thinking. If I think there’s opportunity out there, I will see it. If I don’t think there’s opportunity out there, I will never see it, even if it’s put out in front of my nose, even if it’s all around me, I will walk by it every single time. You know, again, I know people will argue with that. They will give me all kinds of excuses and examples. But I could go to Detroit, Mich., today, which I’m told is pretty depressed because of what’s happening in the auto industry and all these other things, but I could go to Detroit and show people million and billion dollar opportunities, because I’d be looking for them. I would not go up there with the idea that there’s nothing up here because everyone’s losing their jobs or losing their businesses, so there’s no opportunities here. There are tons of opportunities, incredible opportunities, but you’ve got to be looking for them. If you’re not looking for them, you will never see them.
AD: During the transition between losing your home and car, did it take a while to change your thought process and did you ever doubt your ability? What kept you going?
Well everything is a process. John Maxwell talks about that. Life is a process. Change is a process. First of all, I didn’t get to that situation, being upside down, over night. It took years, many years, 20 plus years of wrong thinking, wrong behavior, wrong actions to get to that point in time. Now, the amazing and interesting thing was that it was just a matter of a few years to dig out and turn it all around. So I actually got out of it quicker than it took me to get into it.
Now, I could’ve gotten out a whole lot earlier had I not fought it and had I not looked elsewhere, because I was doing the classic thing. Here’s what happens. A person in this situation today who gets laid off or terminated or some other negative circumstance happens in their life and they are looking to give blame assign blame to the company, the economy or the person or whatever it was
You see, blame doesn’t solve anything. It’s not really important whose fault it was or anything, because the reality is if you hadn’t taken the job to begin with, if you had taken another job, then you wouldn’t be getting laid off today. That was a choice you made 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. What you have to do is you have to accept responsibility for where you are.
And that probably was the biggest moment of my life. I didn’t want to do that, by the way. Nobody does. That’s what I thought for a long time, and most people do. In my case, I had a watershed moment when my daughter, and I only have one, she’s the apple of my eye, she was turning 13, which you know is a major transition for a young lady, especially if it’s your only daughter. Here on her 13th birthday, this is supposed to be this magical time, I was so broke that I couldn’t even afford a stupid birthday present. And that night I went to bed and cried myself to sleep.
It was a watershed moment because I woke up the next day and looked at my life and said “You know, there ain’t nobody to blame for this but you; you got yourself into it.” Now, as I thought that through, I realized, “Okay, now if you created this mess, if you’re the one who’s solely responsible for this mess, then you can also be the one to create the recovery from it.” And that was such a powerful thought to me.
Actually, that was probably the greatest feeling I have ever had of power because I was totally in control of my life, whereas before that there were so many influences and factors and things that you look at. Whether you chose to accept it or not, you are totally in control of your life. You’re in control of your life even when you give that control over to someone else, whether you advocate it or by default, someone else has it. But you can take totally responsibility for your circumstance and when you do that is such a great moment of freedom. And it was just an eye opening, water shed moment and from that point, after I accepted responsibility.
Oh sure did I have doubts. I still do sometimes when I’m trying to do something I’ve never done before. I know Sam has done many many thousands of speaking engagements–I would still be surprised if Sam didn’t sometimes say that sometimes when he goes out there there’s that little bit of doubt if he’s going to be good enough, if he’s going to be able to deliver. I have it every single time and I’ve spoken thousands of times and I still get that little bit of doubt there, you know, can I pull this off, do I know my stuff well enough, is this going to be a crowd that I can connect with, all those kind of thoughts.
So, you don’t ever get rid of that, you just master it. You get to a point where you start coaching yourself, “You know I can master this, I’ve done it before, I’ve done this a thousand times, I know how to, I’m a professional, and on and on and on.”
But, you know what I did is, when I got those times when the doubt would get there, was I’d have to go get real real close to some of my dreams because that’s what kept me alive was the dream and the desire. Napoleon Hilton, Think and Grow Rich, the very first chapter is about desire. He says that all achievements begin with desire. So if all achievements begin with desire then in my opinion, that’s probably one of the top two or three important factors. So as your going along, when things don’t look like you hoped for them to look, go get close to what it is your working for.
Why are you putting yourself through all this change, which no one wants to do, which is painful, can make you raw if you look deep enough? What are you doing it for? What is it you want out of it? Go get close to it and that will remind you and it will re-invigorate you, it will recharge you. You’ll recommit to your goal or to your dream or to your desire.
You know, there came a time that I had worked on myself so much that I had reached the point on the inside. James Allen, in the book As a Man Thinketh, says that everything begins on the inside. He says you cannot travel within and stand still without. So what that means is that, it’s impossible for you to grow on the inside and not manifest it on the outside.
But, what happens is, we don’t see it, there is a law of gender, Bob Proctor teaches it, the law of gender says that everything has a gestation period. You know when you go to grow a seed of corn, it takes 90 days to get a crop, human beings the gestation period is 9 months, you know dreams and goals have a gestation period too. So you go and you make this change on the inside, you’re not always going to see it manifest it on the outside. But you will see it.
So what happened was, I was driving down the road one day, in this bombed-out, borrowed car that I had, that burned more oil than it did gas. And just a smile and a sense of satisfaction came over me because I knew–you know there’s a place there where you know, it’s you, it’s you at your core–and I knew right there that it was just a matter of time. I knew that the change was underway, that I’d already made the move on the inside. The change was already present. That first part of the job was completed, on the inside.
And I knew it was going to happen. It’s so eerie sometimes when I think about that because I was so confident. I mean, it was like, if anyone else looking at my circumstance and looking at me had known what I was thinking, they probably would have locked me up.
AD: But you knew that you were full and it was ready to unfold and come out of you)
Absolutely, that’s right.
AD: What do you tell people who are paralyzed to get started, they believe this and they want to set goals, but they don’t know what to do first? They have these dreams, these goals, they can touch them but they don’t know what to do next.
Well there’s two things. First of all, you’ve got make sure that the desire for it is what Napoleon Hill called, “white hot.” You can want something, you can have a desire for something, but if the desire is not “white hot”… That’s a word we don’t use a lot, it’s not common in our vocabulary today. When he wrote Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, many many people in America were employed in factories where they had these huge forges and furnaces, and so you dealt with fire. Fire had different colors. When it’s white, that is the hottest heat that the fire puts off. And so he was trying to convey the message that your desire has to be that hottest heat, that white hot of the fire.
He said that when it is, you are almost unstoppable. There is only one thing you need at that point, and that is faith. You put faith together with white-hot desire, and nothing, absolutely nothing can stop you.
So, you know the first thing you have to do is you have to create that desire. To want something is great and good and starts with that desire, but it has to be a desire that is so strong that its not going to fold easily; it’s not going to wilt in the face of certainly some obstacles to come.
So the stronger you want it, the stronger the desire the more powerful you are, the more unstoppable you are. So that’s the first thing.
Second thing is, you’ve got to go back to science class, which I think I skipped, but somehow I came across Newton’s Law of Motion later. And Newton published his Law of Motion that says, “A body at rest tends to remain at rest, a body in motion tends to stay in motion.” So the idea is, as long as I’m at rest, I’ m over on the couch with the remote control; the chances are pretty good that I’m going to stay there.
But if I can get in some kind of action, if I can take one step, even if it’s a baby step, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to stay in motion. So even though Newton wrote that law, the law of physics, it applies to all matter and it certainly applies to us.
Take any kind of action–it doesn’t have to be some kind of giant, big step. Don’t try to take the first big step, just take a step.
I’ll give people this example. All my life I talked about wanting to travel the world. Since I was a child, a small child, I remember reading in encyclopedias and seeing in early television shows and whatever, all these different places in the world that I wanted to go. And so here I am, in my 40s and I’ve never been outside of, well I think I’ve been to the Bahamas or Mexico, but I had never been really to Europe or anywhere beyond. And I stopped and thought, well you know, you don’t even have a passport. You don’t even have a passport, so even if the opportunity came, for you to travel, you don’t have a passport, wouldn’t be ready.
So I said, you know what, that’s a step (a step of faith, right?) it’s a step. It’s something I’ve got to do. So I went ahead and applied for a passport.
And first of all, it was a whole lot easier process, a whole lot less painful of a process than I had imagined it’d be. It took a few minutes at the post office or at the clerk’s office, and I was done. What’s amazing is within 90 days of getting that passport, I had planned a trip to Italy.
And it wasn’t like I had planned the trip to Italy and got the passport. I got the passport and magically the opportunity to go to Italy appeared. And it may have been there and I may have blown it off had I not had a passport.
You don’t have to have all the steps figured out ahead of time; in fact, you’ll never have it figured out. If it’s a very big goal and it’s the first time you’ve ever done it, you’ll never have it figured out. I’m a thinker, I want to sit there and think it all out and try to figure out what al the possibilities are and what all the obstacles might be.
The reality is you’re never going to know everything. And if you wait until you know everything, you’re never going to do it. I mean stop and think of anything we have. If Michael Dell had known how he was going to put his empire together and everything he had to do, we wouldn’t have PCs from Dell. We wouldn’t have an operating system from Microsoft, if Gates had known everything he’d have to do to get that operating system to market. None of the great things we have, none of the great achievements have been done by people who knew how they were going to do it. All they knew is what they wanted to do and why they wanted to do it.
In fact, in the great book, The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz says, “It’s not important to know how you’re going to do it. What’s important is to know why.” It’s always important to know why. It doesn’t matter if you know how.
That book was written 60 ago. He uses in the book an example; he says there is a group in England and in France today who had the idea to connect their countries by an underwater tunnel. They didn’t know how they were going to do it but they wanted to do it, and they had a big enough why, and now we have a tunnel. A
nd I’ve always been amazed at that particular example he used, because when he wrote it, that was true. They didn’t know how they were going to do it. They had no idea, but they wanted to do it.
If you only ever try to do what you know how to do, you’re never going to be satisfied with the life that you live.
AD: What do you tell somebody who wants to start a business but who has no original ideas to capitalize on? You talked about going to Detroit, for example, and being able to come up with ideas. Where do we find those ideas?
Well, first off, I’ve never had an original thought in my life. I am a classic copycat. I am the ultimate monkey see, monkey do. It is actually a very old principal and its called the “Greek Formula for Success,” and it is very simply finding someone who is doing what you want to do and then study in intimate detail, everything they’ve done to get where they are or to become successful, and then duplicate exactly the steps they took.
So I would probably find some examples of some previously depressed areas, go else where in the US or in Europe and look and go back historically and say, okay, what type of businesses do people start that today are booming because they took advantage of that situation?
So then I’d go up there and I’d model that situation. You see, modeling is the shortest way to success. You don’t have to come up with an original idea. You don’t even really have to have the knowledge, because it’s already been done for you. All you have to do is have the ability to discipline yourself to duplicate it and the discipline to not be too big of an ego to want to tweak it too much or whatever. The closer you can stay to the model, the greater your chances for success in most cases.
So I’m not going to go to Detroit looking to do anything original. I’m just going to go to Detroit looking for places that have opportunities.
I’ll give you an example. About an hour before our call, a guy who has remodeled our house here for the past couple of years has a a commercial property for sale and he wanted me to take a look at it. He wants to sell it to me. So we went over and looked at it, and I’m looking at the possibilities. It’s an old residence in a commercially-zoned area, and it has a pretty nice sized lot.
And I said, “Okay, now take me for a ride down here.” We go riding down the street about a mile and a half and he’s pointing out some things: there’s a mini warehouse development and he said they were tearing it down because the new road was coming through there.
So, I said, “Are they any other mini warehouses out here in this area?”
And he says, “No.”
So they’re tearing down the only existing mini warehouse. So now, immediately, the thought to me is, maybe, if there’s a demand for mini warehouses, then what we can do with this property is a new mini warehouse.
That’s not an original idea. It’s an existing idea, just one I copied. I have no idea whether or not that works out, but it’s not me having to spend tons of hours trying to come up with an idea when the opportunities are there, especially when I can model something that’s already been done before.
AD: I’d imagine that comes from being in a good place, being able to be full and see what’s around you.
Sure, you have to be open to it. You have to first of all believe that there are opportunities there. There’s a certain mindset that says–just like with me in the mid 90s, my mind set was in lack. And because I was living in lack, I couldn’t see any opportunity. It had always been there. In fact, years later as I begin to take advantage of opportunities that have made a lot of money for me, I realized those opportunities have always been there. I could have done what I’m doing 10 years ago. I could’ve done it 20 years ago. Maybe not on the Internet, but I still could’ve done it.
AD: How do you feel that attitude plays into that?
Well, to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, you know, it’s not everything, it’s the only thing. That’s it. So much of what you do is controlled by the attitude you’ve taken toward it and that’s probably why Sam can turn someone’s life around so quickly, because that’s all he does is just go and change someone’s attitude. There’s no other single factor in success that you can isolate out.
You cant say intelligence, because I know plenty of dumb people that are wealthy. You can’t say physical appearance because I point out to people that I live five hours from West Palm Beach, Florida–65,000 millionaires in that county, the highest concentration of millionaires in the world in one area–and there are some of the ugliest, rich people I’ve seen in my life.
So when you look at all the factors of success, it always comes down to just a handful of things that anyone and everyone has control over, and that is desire and belief–and belief is connected to attitude.
Occasionally you’ll see, someone who’s become successful with a bad attitude, but not normally. And it’s almost always true that those with the bad attitudes don’t ever keep it. It’s just a handful of things, and attitude is one of those things. You’ve got to have control over that, and you’ve got to believe that it’s a factor.
AD: So what do you do to stay positive or to stay motivated?
Well for sure one of things I do more than anything is to avoid the negative. What’s interesting is I went for about five years without television, number one because the cable company said I couldn’t keep cable because I wouldn’t pay my bill. But then after I had the money to turn it back on, I just kept it off.
I cancelled newspaper subscriptions, again because I didn’t have the money, but then when I had the money, I just never renewed them.
I really do believe that whatever you put in is what you get out. And so, one of the biggest things I do is avoid negative influences, and that includes people, by the way; they are some of the biggest negative influencers.
And the second thing, every day the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do before I have drifted off to sleep is to have a period of gratitude. Gratitude is one of the most powerful forces, and that does so much for my attitude, especially when things aren’t going well or when I’ve got a circumstance and it could very easily make me negative. I have to really discipline myself to stop and just enter a little period of gratitude.
Now it’s almost like the universe or the Creator or whatever says, “Well Vic’s happy with what he has so I’m going to give him some more.”
And the opposite is true that, “Well Vic’s not happy with what he’s got, so I’m not going to give him anymore.” So, I don’t know how it works but I know one of the biggest things. As I’ve done that, I’ve been blessed more and more.
Tags: Attitude Digest, change, Positive Attitude, Vic Johnson
