Taking the Leap of Faith

I grew up listening to Jim Rohn. My dad used to get the Nightingale Conant audio series Insights, so I grew up listening to Earl Nightingale, and Zig Ziglar, and Jim Rohn—who was my favorite. There's something about Jim that resonated with me. I memorized all of his material and loved the stories he told to bring his points to life. On the back of one of Jim’s programs, I saw that his business was based in Irving, Texas, so I wrote a letter to Jim inquiring about working for him. About a month later, Kyle Wilson, founder of Jim Rohn International, invited me to fly to Dallas and meet with the team. I jumped at the chance, bought a plane ticket, and when I came back home, I told my wife that I was putting my real estate license and thriving business on hold to work with Jim Rohn International.

 

I was 26 years old, and although I was making money in real estate and had 36 listings at the time, I'd rarely been out of the Northwest. I knew there was more to life, and I craved experience. It was time for me to experience more of the world.

 

Working at Jim Rohn International, we would travel to different cities across the US to talk to sales companies, do a 30 to 40-minute presentation, and then promote attending an event with Jim Rohn. On my second day, one of my coworkers got sick and could not do their presentation for a mortgage company in downtown Dallas, Texas. Everybody thought we should cancel, but instead, I said I'd do the talk. I didn't even know the talk yet, but I was so eager to impress everyone that I knew I had to learn it quickly. I spent that whole evening and night doing the talk over and over again in the warehouse where all of the boxes of Jim Rohn books and cassette series were stored. I slept for one hour that night on the couch in Kyle’s office.

 

I was scared and nervous to do the presentation the next morning, but I had total confidence in the material. I knew when the seminar was going to be and the cost because that was on the brochure. I also knew that if I forgot the talk, I knew Jim Rohn. I could teach them about Jim and I’d had his material ingrained in me for years. I showed up almost an hour early and sat in my car rehearsing the presentation in the parking lot. There were 10 people at the talk, and I had six sales! This was the start to an amazing four years of traveling the country and doing hundreds of presentations.