I recently read “Now is Your Time to Win: You Can Bounce Back From Failure to Success in 30 Seconds!“ by Dave Dean and enjoyed it so much I wanted to share it with our blog readers. This simple and short book of 107 pages is truly an inspiring and life altering treasure. It is a hard book to find in book stores, but is available at ExecutiveBooks.com for only $7.46.

This is a special book to me because the author happened to share the same summer job that I had during college, selling educational books door-to-door. Dean takes us through the story of how he had found tremendous success early in his career, and then made a couple of poor investment decisions, got caught up with a bad business partner and lost everything that he had earned. Where the story really kicks in is when Dean decided to pull himself up by his bootstraps, stop wallowing in self-pity and start over. The first chapter, or principle as he calls them, is “Accept Your Situation”.

Let me share with you a few of the stories from the chapter. The first is the story of Colonel Harlan Sanders, yes that Colonel Sanders of KFC. When he was sixty-two years old, a new highway wiped out his restaurant business. He could have retired and spent the rest of his life in a beach chair, bewailing his bad luck. He didn’t. He accepted his situation exactly the way it was. The traffic was gone. The business was dead. He took inventory of what he had left and decided he had a pretty good recipe for fixing chicken.

Sanders took his recipe to a friend who had a restaurant in Salt Lake City. He convinced him to start selling fried chicken and that became his first franchise. In two years he had 600 franchises, and soon there were over 6,000 franchises in 54 countries. “That highway moving away from my place was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” Colonel Sanders mused. Here was a man who hadn’t spent much time worrying about circumstances he couldn’t control. He had accepted the situation and turned the negative circumstances into one of the greatest businesses successes of our time.

Another great story came from John Wooden, the former UCLA basketball who won 10 National Titles. “When I came to UCLA,” John shared, “basketball was not well thought of. Strict academic entrance standards prevented us from acquiring some of the best players. I was led to believe that UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion would be completed within 3 years, and instead it took 17.

I conducted practice during those years on the third floor of an old gym with the wrestlers and gymnasts practicing on the sidelines and at the other end of the floor people were working out on the trampolines. Besides these distractions, for seventeen years my managers and I had to sweep and mop the floor every day before practice because the dust would make it dangerous for the players.

“These conditions were rather difficult, and I let them bother me for quite a while. As a matter of fact, I was at the point of developing a persecution complex. Eventually, when I accepted them, I came to realize you have to do your best with the things you can control and not spin your wheels on things you cannot control. I changed my attitude, and we went on to win the first two of our national championships under those same conditions.”

Now it is these types of stories that help inspire and keep the reading interesting, but it is Dave Dean’s own experience that helps drive the point of accepting your situation to the heart. Dave knew all of the motivational and success principles that could get him back on course, but he understood that none of them would help unless he applied them.

In his words “It’s not what you know that helps you to win. It is what you do with what you know. I could tell others how to be successful, but I couldn’t break through the fog of self-pity that kept me from doing it myself. I just didn’t want to believe that the person who was really responsible for my problems was Dave Dean. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I had fouled up so royally. I wanted to blame others for the shape I was in, but I knew too well I was responsible for the choices I had made.”

“Another reason I found it extremely difficult to be honest about my situation was that I just didn’t know if I was willing to make the kind of commitment necessary to bail myself out of my problems. Finally, I recognized it was either sink or swim. I couldn’t continue treading water much longer.”

“I faced my situation squarely for the first time. I totally and completely accepted my situation exactly the way it was and decided to do something about it. That acceptance was the lifeline that put me back on course. The course was certain to be stormy, but at last the fog was gone and I could start moving. Accepting my situation freed me to commit myself to basic success principles I knew worked. This realization, this total acceptance of my situation and the commitment to doing whatever was necessary to bounce back from failure to success, had taken only thirty seconds.”

So, I ask you:

Is there a situation in your life that you have not fully accepted?
Is there a situation that if you fully accepted the responsibility to change that it would free you? That it would give you the power?

Most of us have at least one if not many times in our life when we are faced with a choice of whether or not we accept the blame for what has happened to us. I encourage you to dwell on this concept for awhile. You will see you have more control than you thought you did.

Please share your comment below.

Be Free!

Tom Weber
VP of Sales