Ignite the Secret

19 Lessons for Business and Life

Charles Horton

• Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781612548753
• eBook ISBN: 9781612549132
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

An entrepreneur shares powerful strategies for confronting challenges, acting decisively, and achieving everything you've ever dreamed of. Entrepreneur and motivational speaker Charles Horton takes vital lessons he has learned in business and life—as well as from firewalking, walking on glass, mingling with lions, and building multiple businesses—and applies them to the challenges of personal and professional life with remarkable success. Now, his trailblazing approach can be yours. Ignite the Secret will inspire you to...

• See opportunities, not obstacles
• Triumph over self-doubt
• Focus on your goals
• Create your own reality
• Shift your perspective
• Stoke your internal fire
• Overcome any challenge
• Accomplish your dreams

The hardest part of changing your life is knowing how to start. Ignite the Secret empowers you to take that first step—and all the steps that follow. Praise for Ignite the Secret "You rarely come upon a piece of writing that is the complete package drawing you in with every lesson, vivid personal story and simple wisdom you can use in your own life right away." —Monica Steiner, Aging Evolution "Whether or not you ever choose to do a firewalk, these nineteen lessons can transform your life as if you had." —Dave Albin, Former Anthony Robbins Companies Fire Captain

Lesson No. 1

Take Action

When I teach firewalking, I joke, “You don’t need to be great to start, but you need to start to be great.” Firewalking—just like achieving any goal in life—is all about putting one foot in front of the other. You have to cross that bed of coals. Thinking and talking about it leads nowhere.

The first step in a new direction is going to be the hardest. Some say you should set your intentions, plan things out, do a little self-exploration, and so forth before taking any action. But any true entrepreneur knows action comes first. Spend too much time in your head and you’ll never get to where you want to be.

The only measure of success is whether you take action on your ideas.

Take Three Steps to Success

How many times have you seen or heard about someone who had a great idea or a business they never followed through on? Did that person achieve his or her dreams with the idea alone? No.

Successful people take action. They’ve achieved success through a series of steps that lead to their ultimate goal. It’s not enough just to think about your dream. You’ve got to act on it.

If you’re reading this book, you know that it’s time.

There are three important steps to achieve anything in your life, from an enlightening firewalk to a successful job or business venture to a fulfilling relationship. I will come back to these three steps again and again throughout the lessons and strategies revealed in this book.

The first step is awareness. You must be aware of where you are—both externally and internally aware.

The second step is willingness. To reach your goals, especially the long-term ones, you must be and stay committed. Only through ongoing willingness to commit can you achieve your lifelong dreams.

And the third step—perhaps the most important, and the one I want to discuss in this Lesson No. 1—is action. Massive and consistent action.

Your success is linked to the positive action you take. It’s more than just planning and envisioning your success. You can’t be successful if you simply sit around and talk. You need to do something. As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to take action.

I’ve been in the personal development industry for decades, and I’ve seen thousands of people go to the seminars and get all pumped up. But then they walk out those doors and back into their own world, and their lives don’t change at all. They don’t act on what they’ve learned.

You can’t get what you want if you refuse to step out of your neat little bubble and do the dirty work.

I’m constantly taking steps toward achieving my goals. Many times, of course, I take steps that don’t work. But then I take more steps until I find a way to make it work. Even if things don’t work out, I keep trying. I keep taking action.

If you stop or stand still, that’s when failure happens.

This is how I run my life, and it’s also how I run my companies. I take action to surround myself with a smart and enthusiastic team. We are constantly changing what we do, doing new things, and trying to market ourselves in unique ways. We encourage our employees to figure out new ways to work and to market, and we test these ideas and check the results. Then we implement what works best. We keep moving forward.

I’m on my sixth venture right now.

When I start companies, I try to be the catalyst. I help get things going, nurture my employees to succeed and deliver, delegate various aspects of the company to my trusted team, and then go find something else that needs doing. I’m someone who wants to keep constantly moving on to new businesses, new ambitions, new dreams. Constant action is at the core of my success, both in business and in life.

If you think about it, you can’t finish the race, or, in fact, even start the race, if you don’t enter the race.

Speaking of races, how many times have you heard a friend say, “I have a goal. I want to lose ten pounds. I want to enter a 5K run.” A few months go by, and then a few years, but no 5K happens and those ten pounds are joined by ten more. How many of your friends actually achieve the goals they’re talking about? Sure, some have, but many never do, because they don’t take action.

Put your best foot forward, and take that leap. When you take action, great things are going to happen.

Balance Action with Analysis

About fifteen years ago, when I was already in the check guarantee business, somebody came to me and said, “You should enter into the short-term loan business. People need the money.”

I thought it was a good idea. So I started a store and tried it out. When I ran into the man who’d advised me to start in the business, he was still talking about it and analyzing every possible outcome. He had done nothing. Meanwhile, five years later, I had twenty stores going very successfully!

And still my friend failed to take action. He decided it was too late into the evolution of the business model to get started. Well, it wasn’t too late. I continued to grow to more than seventy stores. I call his approach “paralysis through analysis.” As an entrepreneur, I take action sometimes with almost no thought at all, while my friend analyzes things too much. He debates the possibilities but seldom takes that leap.

I tell this story all the time to explain what happens when you fail to take action. In my opinion, this friend just studied the idea too much. That’s his nature. It’s also not a good idea to enter into something or start a company blindly. I’ve acted too fast several times and cost myself a lot of money.

I once decided to sell and finance computers through FastBucks, my chain of short-term loan stores. At the time, I had surrounded myself with “yes-men.” I did not have a staff that would stand up to me or offer advice that counterbalanced my own ideas. So I jumped right in and started the process of selling computers, with no ability to track and control the sales or inventory. I lost millions.

Another time I decided to get into the used-car business. Acting too quickly and lacking good advice once again, I hired a thief to run the business. I didn’t have the necessary controls in place. I lost millions.

So, taking action is good, but balancing your weaknesses is good, too. That’s why my friend who analyzes everything is now my executive vice president at FastBucks. Together we make a great team.

Creating a good team is important (as I will explain further in Lesson No. 4). You need to take action, but you also need to do the homework. Surround yourself with a team that balances action with analysis, to ensure you don’t misstep. Let them analyze, and you can be the one who drives and pushes people to achieve. Listen to their insights and information, and then decide how to act. But whatever idea you decide to act on, just do it.

Hard work involves a series of actions like this. It’s more than just planning. You have to act.

Every successful person I know has developed a routine of taking successful action. There is no secret. It’s not magical thinking. The truth is, successful people have specific habits that they carry out each day in order to be successful. The most important habit is taking action. You’ve got to use it—or lose it.

I once hired a new district manager for FastBucks, and he was bringing in big numbers over everyone else. He was running 25 or 30 percent more in revenues over the previous year, and yet when he came in with an idea that he wanted to try, I cut him down. I said, “We’ve already done this four times in this company, and it has not worked!”

He was very respectful in the meeting. He didn’t resist me or say anything negative. But when he took me aside later to talk about all of his prior and current successes, he said, “You know, there are things that people have said not to try here, so I haven’t tried them. But this time I would like to try it myself, because I think I can make it work.”

I thought about his logic, and finally I said, “Go for it! Do it your way and let’s see your results.” After all, his approach was like mine: Just try something, and see what works. He had convinced me that he could do it. He wanted to keep up his habit of taking action. He did, and his idea was a success.

Just thinking about taking action won’t get you very far in life.

Taking action is how you begin down the path of success.

Personal Practice: Taking Action

What actions would you take to achieve your goals if you had no fear?

What things will you take action on in the next six months?

Lesson No. 2

Manage the Details

In my seminars, I sometimes lead an exercise where the participants walk barefoot on broken glass. Walking on broken glass is very different from firewalking. In firewalking, the first step is the hardest one, and the rest come easily and quickly.

In glass-walking, you must walk very slowly and with absolute mindfulness, paying close attention to every shift of your foot. If you stay on top of the glass, you’re going to be fine. You can avoid the big shards, so they likely won’t be the ones to cut you. But if you’re not careful, the little ones might.

Glass is the perfect way to illustrate that it’s the small stuff that gets you. By walking on broken glass, I’ve learned to pay attention to those teeny-tiny little shards. As the saying goes, The devil is in the details.

Do Sweat the Small Stuff

There’s another old saying you’ve probably heard: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Like a lot of false words and quotes, taking this to heart has caused the destruction of many. Not sweating the small stuff is fine when it comes to an approach to managing stress. But if you don’t manage the details of your life, you’ll find yourself surrounded by a lot more stress.

We absolutely should pay attention to the small things. Sure, we don’t have to sweat constantly over them, but small issues must be attended to before they spiral out of control and become big issues.

Manage the details—or they could be your downfall.

I learned this lesson once in an exhilarating way on an adventure in Africa, when I spent some time among lions. I have been on about forty safaris now, logging 150 hours of searching for and viewing African big game. Of course, I always want to go further with things I benefit from or enjoy. So I decided to volunteer at a lion farm, where I got to work with and learn from about ninety lions.

The person who managed the lion farm showed us how we should approach lions of all ages. Eager to immerse myself in the experience, I didn’t sweat what I considered the “small stuff” in this presentation. I went ahead and tried to bottle-feed a six-month-old cub, ignoring a seemingly minor detail: the three other larger, hungrier cubs who all wanted the milk, too.

As I fed the smallest lion cub, the other cubs circled around me, eyes focused on the bottle. The small cub noticed, and was going to ensure she got it all. She squirmed and lashed out, and in the process mauled my arms pretty good.

After washing up and tending to my bleeding arms, I pulled myself together and went back to the kitchen. My friend was there waiting for me, holding a newly filled bottle. I was still in pain and now a bit shocked: I’d thought I was done, but now I had to go among the lions all over again.

Not wanting to cause more damage to myself, this time I paid attention to the details of my surroundings. I scooped up the small cub, taking her to a private enclosure to feed her. Then I chose to sit in an area that necessitated her standing on all fours, rather than lean against me, to maintain her balance.

Success! I was no longer a scratching post for these big kittens.

The lesson: Sweat the small stuff (feeding milk to an overgrown kitten), or it could quickly turn into big stuff (feeding yourself to the lions). It’s true in life, and it’s true in business. One overlooked detail can get you killed—or at the very least, mauled—in the marketplace as in the jungle.

When seeking the path of success in your personal and professional life, leave no stone unturned. Keep your eyes wide open for details large and small.

Don’t Overlook the Details

While driving, have you ever had a small detail—a soft tire, an expired inspection sticker, an overlooked speed limit sign—lead to a problem on the road or even a ticket? I know plenty of people who have. They didn’t pay attention to the details, and those details came back to haunt them, impacting their mobility and their pocketbook.

I’ve seen a lot of successful people miss details that have impacted their business or even their direction in life. Overlooking the following four details in particular can spell disaster in any business situation and in quite a few personal ones.

Detail No. 1: Get in your peak state.

In order to be successful, first you need to be “in state”—you have to be at your emotional peak, entirely focused on the situation at hand. You must be excited. You must be ready. You must be willing. You must be motivated. And you must believe in yourself, your abilities, and your objective.

I was doing the glass-walk seminar one time for a group of unemployed financial professionals, and right at the start I asked whether the attendees really, truly wanted a job. After a few confused looks, most of them answered yes, of course they did. But it’s not enough to simply say that you want a new job (or a new business, a new client, or whatever the case may be). You must be enthused and motivated by the job, and you have to believe the job is yours.

If you go into an interview and you’re feeling down and miserable, that will come through to your interviewers. If you’re starting a business but you just don’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Disclaimer
• Foreword: “If I Can Firewalk, What Else Can I Do?” by Dave Albin
• Introduction: Igniting the Secret
• Lesson No. 1: Take Action
• Lesson No. 2: Manage the Details
• Lesson No. 3: Find Out What Is Possible
• Lesson No. 4: Surround Yourself with Success
• Lesson No. 5: Stay Focused
• Lesson No. 6: Choose Your Emotions
• Lesson No. 7: Be Yourself
• Lesson No. 8: Overcome Adversity
• Lesson No. 9: Know What You Want
• Lesson No. 10: Focus on the Positive
• Lesson No. 11: Never Give Up
• Lesson No. 12: Create Your Own Reality
• Lesson No. 13: Conquer Fear
• Lesson No. 14: Let It Be Easy
• Lesson No. 15: Pay Attention to Your Subconscious
• Lesson No. 16: Under-Promise and Over-Deliver
• Lesson No. 17: Reward Loyalty
• Lesson No. 18: Envision the Outcome
• Lesson No. 19: Step Forward
• Conclusion: Mastering the Lessons
• Acknowledgments
• Afterword: Joe White
• About the Author
• Back Cover