What Makes You Tick?

How Successful People Do It—and What You Can Learn from Them

Michael J. Berland, Douglas E. Schoen

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780060878153
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061940415
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

In the most challenging economy of our lifetime, where should you turn for guidance?

To the stories of those who have made it—the leaders who battled adversity, forged their own paths,and succeeded . . . because they knew what made them tick.

As people everywhere confront the global economic crisis, "success" may seem elusive at best, impossible at worst. Yet history proves that a new generation of success stories will likely emerge from this era of financial chaos. And this new book prepares you to be one of those success stories by analyzing the inner qualities that have propelled the forward-thinking leaders of our time: drive, determination, and self-awareness.

As strategists for the internationally renowned consumer and political research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, Michael Berland and Douglas Schoen are experts in how successful people think . . . and how they win. Now they share what they've learned with firsthand accounts from some of the world's most successful people in nearly every field—including the founder of Starwood Resorts; a world-famous chef-restaurateur; the CEO of NBC Universal; a supermodel turned entrepreneur; the head of Estée Lauder; the commissioner of the National Hockey League; the president of Hearst Magazines; and the creator of CBS's 60 Minutes. Berland and Schoen have discovered that true success is about more than "winning." True success has an emotional quotient: it's about determining your innate strengths, deciding what you truly want, and striving tirelessly to achieve it.

Berland and Schoen describe the five archteypes of success: visionaries, natural-born leaders, do-gooders, independence seekers, and independents who follow their dreams. In this unprecedented collection of stories from some of the most successful people in fashion, sports, entertainment, and business, Schoen and Berland demonstrate that success isn't about changing who you are; rather, it's about figuring out what makes you tick—and leveraging that knowledge to your advantage. This book shows through compelling first-person storytelling that the most successful people understand their own natural abilities and how to use their best qualities to create a fulfilling life—and then tells you how to do the same.

Visionaries

CHAPTER 1

Mark Burnett

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, SURVIVOR

A pioneer in reality television, Mark Burnett is best known for creating the Emmy Award–winning reality show Survivor. In doing so, he revolutionized the “unscripted” drama series and introduced millions of people worldwide to an entirely new television genre.

Burnett is a former member of the British Army Parachute Regiment, with active service medals in both the Northern Ireland and Argentina conflicts. He began his television career by creating the trailblazing adventure series Eco-Challenge. He served as executive producer on nine Eco-Challenge events and programs, earning a Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Program Achievement for Eco-Challenge: Morocco.

Since Survivor, Burnett has also produced the popular reality shows The Apprentice, The Contender, and Rock Star: INXS for network television, and he partnered with Steven Spielberg to produce a filmmaking competition series called On the Lot. In 2004, Burnett was featured in Time magazine’s “Time 100 List” of the most influential people in the world and has been cited several times by Entertainment Weekly as one of the “Top 101 Most Powerful People in Entertainment.”

Mark Burnett is the quintessential visionary. When most producers were focused on discovering the next hit sitcom or drama, Burnett was building a reality television empire—and changing the American appetite for small-screen entertainment. Every task he sets his mind to has to be bigger and better than the last. And one key to Burnett’s immense success is his incredible work ethic: No job or task is beneath him if it means accomplishing his goals.

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“TO ME, SUCCESS PROVIDES THE GLORIOUS PRIVILEGE OF BECOMING INDEPENDENT.”

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I grew up in London. As a kid I was enamored of Rambo. My idea of adventure was being in the military, with bandoliers and bullets hanging over my chest. Becoming a Special Forces soldier was all I ever wanted to do at that time, so at the age of eighteen I joined the British Army Parachute Regiment.

I served in Ireland and in the Falklands. It was way scarier than I imagined. And in retrospect, as an older man, the fact that bureaucrats are sending young kids to do things that they probably wouldn’t do themselves is kind of annoying.

After the Falklands War, which was the first trench warfare in many decades, I didn’t see another war on the horizon. I also didn’t particularly want to go back to firing blank ammunition in training, and the idea of spending many more years waiting for another war began to wear thin.

Instead, I decided to seek out the American dream—but in order to make that happen, I needed money. I had heard there was work available in Central America for experienced foreign soldiers. I had a contact who was recruiting from California. Fresh off a stint in the British paratroopers, I felt that soldiering in Central America was the best use of my skill set at the time and the best way for me to save some money and give myself a start in America once I was done.

What I hadn’t counted on was how horrified my parents would be. I had just finally left the parachute regiment, and already I was planning to carry weapons again. They didn’t even know the truth; they thought I was going to do some bodyguard-type work in Los Angeles.

At the airport, as I was leaving, my mother looked into my eyes and said, “Don’t you think you’ve put us through enough?” She made me promise before boarding the plane: “No carrying guns.” As an only child, I had major guilt. But there was no way to avoid the issue, so, reluctantly, I promised her. I got on that plane to California with a one-way ticket, $600, and no idea what I would do when I got there.

I had no advanced formal education. No family wealth to fall back on. No business connections. No marketable skills. For the first time in many years, I felt a nervous, sick feeling in my stomach.

When I got to L.A., I called the only person I knew there—an English guy named Nick I’d known since I was ten. He had a chauffeur-type job, and almost immediately he managed to hook me up with a nanny job in Beverly Hills.

I didn’t really think about the humor in that—a commando one day, a nanny the next. I just knew I needed a job, and that nanny job solved the problem. That’s one thing about my personality: I live in the now, and I’m always looking for solutions to problems. I’m focused on prioritizing, and my priority at that moment was finding somewhere to live, food, and money. Driving someone’s kids to school and vacuuming the living room carpet certainly wasn’t glamorous, but it was a start. I’ve since noticed that people who truly want to make it don’t consider any task beneath them; they just do whatever it takes. The first job I ever performed in America was unloading a dishwasher—and it was the first one I’d ever seen. At home, my mother was our dishwasher!

I learned a lot in that nanny job. I learned about American culture and the American way of life. I also learned that despite their lavish lifestyle, their education, and their big bank account, the people I worked for weren’t that much different from me. My logic and intelligence was absolutely on a par with theirs. I also learned that Americans in general are very open-minded people who are willing to give you a break. Americans lack cynicism.

Americans are results-based; they’re open to giving people a chance. If you were at a party and half the guests were Americans and half British, and somebody said, “Oh, my God, there’s a seventeen-foot purple giraffe in the front yard,” the Brits wouldn’t bother to get off their asses; their cynical nature requires them not to believe any outrageous claim for fear of looking stupid. Most Americans, on the other hand, would rush to look out the window—but they’d also quickly realize it was a joke, and they’d laugh heartily at themselves.

The moral of that story is that on the day a purple giraffe finally appears out in the yard, only the Americans will see it! They will not miss any opportunity. I’m an American citizen now. I always look out the window for the purple giraffe.

What I took away from the nanny experience, and from spending time around such wealthy people for the first time in my life, was simple: “Work for yourself. Start a small, low-capital business and become independent.” So I started selling T-shirts on Venice Beach and eventually expanded into having five outlets.

By 1991, I’d finally achieved some level of success in America. Less than a decade after arriving, I had a home, a car, and a growing business. I no longer woke up dreading that I was on the verge of ruin. Life felt good. But then came one of the worst setbacks ever: I discovered that my mother was dying of cancer. Probably as a search for meaning, I started going to Tony Robbins’s seminars to analyze and reevaluate my life plans. “Stop working for a living and start designing a life,” he said. “You need to write down what you really want.” What I really wanted was adventure—which goes right back to why I joined the parachute regiment in the first place. And I also wanted to be wealthy.

The universe works in mysterious ways, and it was around this time that an article in the Los Angeles Times caught my eye. It was about a French adventure competition called the Raid Gauloises. The Raid was held in a different exotic country every year. That year, the location was Costa Rica.

The races were grueling. They lasted up to two weeks and covered several hundred miles. The goal was for each team to race three hundred miles nonstop, over mountains, down rivers, and through jungles so snake-infested that the teams carried their own supply of antivenin. They also carried all their own food, water, and gear. They were so driven to reach the finish line that the winner slept just one hour per night. It reminded me so much of my parachute regiment days—only without the weapons—that it seemed the perfect competition to indulge the adventurous, hardship-loving side of me.

But could it also be a way to make money?

The concept of expedition racing wasn’t new to me. I had read articles about similar races being held through the glaciers and fjords of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The French race grew out of that concept. But reading the Times that morning, I suddenly became consumed with an idea: I should launch an expedition-length race of my own in the United States.

Around this time, Outside magazine was also doing quite well. Clearly, Americans were becoming more interested in the outdoors. I did some research and found that sales of tents and sleeping bags and backpacks had skyrocketed. And I read a study that said the 1990s would be about three dominant themes: the ecology, extreme sports, and self-actualization through challenge. In my mind, no other format combined all three like expedition racing.

I purchased the rights to the French race and decided my race would be called the Eco-Challenge. I had it all mapped out in my head. I envisioned a rigorous Eco-Challenge expedition race, with a stunning television show beamed into homes shortly thereafter. That goal became the driving force in my life.

Part of my strategy for launching Eco-Challenge was to take part in the French Raid Gauloises. Participating in that race, I figured, would give me a better understanding of what future Eco-Challenge contestants would be going through, and it would help me become a better race producer.

I ended up racing three times in the Raid Gauloises, in Oman, Madagascar, and Borneo. It was much harder, actually, than anything I had done in the army. It was brutal, but I did very well in my second outing: My team became the first American team ever to complete the Raid Gauloises.

To defray my costs of competing, I secured sponsors—and those sponsors needed TV exposure. So for this second race in Madagascar, I managed to convince KCAL Channel 9 in Los Angeles to send a reporter to produce a one-hour special on the race, and specifically on our team. I also convinced the Raid organizers to provide me with free copies of all the footage their ten camera crews shot of the race, and in return I’d get the race publicized on American television. The other side of this deal was that I convinced KCAL to produce a one-hour show with all the footage.

It was a win-win for everyone: The Raid was happy to have gotten exposure in America, and KCAL was happy to end up with a one-hour special that would have cost more than $1 million to produce if they’d shot it themselves. I had achieved my major goal of satisfying my sponsors, but the best part of the entire deal was that KCAL would get to air this show only once; then the show became my property to distribute. I went on to sell it to ESPN, and the show got fairly good ratings. This is where I really began to learn how to be bold and creative in putting together a national television deal.

I first heard the idea that would become Survivor in 1995, while I was at Fox television in Los Angeles pitching Eco-Challenge. The Fox executive hearing the Eco pitch told me about this game show concept where a bunch of people were starving on a desert island. They competed for luxuries such as food and pillows. Meanwhile, a host living on a luxury yacht offshore eliminated them from the contest one by one.

The brains behind the show’s concept was a brilliant producer from England named Charlie Parsons. But the Fox exec believed that it would take someone with previous experience producing large-scale adventure-reality TV in a remote setting to pull it off. She believed Eco-Challenge qualified me.

I made it my goal to meet Charlie and show him Eco-Challenge. We hit it off immediately, and I ended up buying the North American rights to the show in 1998. I had a gut feeling that I could make this great concept even greater. In the months following our meeting, I thought about the island game show often, but in my mind I saw it less as a game show and more as a drama. When I traveled for business, I would look about the plane at my fellow passengers and imagine us crash-landing on an island. Where would I fit into our new society? Who would lead? Who would follow? Who would find the ordeal too hard and quit?

I wanted my Survivor to be bigger, more dramatic, and more epic than any nonfiction television ever seen.

The important thing to know is that one thing that was really beneficial to me was my naïveté. I had no clue back then about the television industry. If I had known what I know now, I might never have attempted it. Looking back, I realize it should have been impossible.

Even when I closed the deal with CBS, I wasn’t certain that I could actually pull it off. I had a belief that somehow it would work out, but I wasn’t certain. I think the important thing to remember is this: Those who need certainty don’t do anything, because nothing is ever certain. Somehow, my dogmatic, persevering nature, coupled with the naïveté of just believing it would all work out, made it work out.

The challenges and adventures of Eco-Challenge had taught me to rely on my gut, but it was Survivor that made me put that skill to use every day. I had a gut feeling all along that Survivor was going to be a big hit. I felt this so strongly that when I pitched the show to Leslie Moonves at CBS, I began by handing him a mock issue of Newsweek with Survivor on the cover. I wanted him to know I truly believed Survivor would be that huge. And when the show became a hit, both Time and Newsweek actually did end up putting Survivor on their covers!

One of my favorite poems is by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. It’s called “Epistle to a Young Friend.” Here’s a verse that has always driven me:

To catch dame Fortune’s golden smile,

Assiduous wait upon her;

And gather gear [wealth] by ev’ry wile

That’s justified by honour;

Not for to hide it in a hedge,

Nor for a train attendant;

But for the glorious privilege

Of being independent.

It’s from the 1700s, but it is equally relevant today. Think of what it says: If you want to become wealthy, you really have to work at it—assiduously. But the motive shouldn’t be to hoard it. The motive should be independence.

To me, success provides the glorious privilege of becoming independent.

CHAPTER 2

Tamara Mellon

FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, JIMMY CHOO

Designer-shoe mogul Tamara Mellon was born with a bent for both fashion and business. Her mother, Ann Yeardye, was a former Chanel model; her father, Tom Yeardye, was a successful entrepreneur and co-founder of the Vidal Sassoon hair care company.

Mellon began her career with a short stint in public relations and retail sales before transitioning to the editorial side of the fashion business. In 1990, she became accessories editor at Britis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Visionaries
• Natural-Born Leaders
• Do-Gooders
• Independence Seekers
• Independents Who Follow Their Dreams
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Searchable Terms
• About the Authors
• Other Books by Douglas E. Schoen
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher