Finding Paul Meyer

It was 25 years ago and I was working at a pretty tough gig. I was having a brief career as a corporate manager and I'd been lured to take over an outpost where I was just the meat in the sandwich between redneck unions and equally redneck senior management, both of them busy settling old scores.

The company had a two-pronged strategy to help managers in my situation. One prong was a well-stocked office bar which was flung wide at 5pm each day. And the other was an inhouse 'corporate development' guy whose job was to travel the branches, inspire the sales reps to hurl themselves back into the fray each day, and counsel the managers after a session at the bar had calmed them down a bit.

When this guy showed up in my office and starting raving about some guy called Paul Meyer who was coming to speak in our little city, I wasn't too interested. I was already pretty cynical about the corporate world and as far as I could see this Meyer guy was going to try and put lipstick on the pig.

Well I found myself with a few hundred people in a plush convention centre room with a puzzling but palpable air of excitement. A speaker got up to push some motivational materials, and my worst suspicions were confirmed. I was going to have to buy my way out of this room and go home with an armful of glossy but useless rubbish.

Then there was a kind of lull in proceedings and this little guy ambled up the aisle from the back of the room. I thought at first he was going to tell us about the hospitality arrangements. When he started to speak his voice was soft and halting and he had this country Texan accent that was almost hillbilly.

30 minutes later I was giving Paul Meyer a standing ovation, along with the rest of the room. My life began to change from that moment.

I'd like to be able to tell you what he said, but I wore out the tape of his address. Devoid of hype, he made more sense on the subject of how to manage your life than anybody I'd ever encountered.

Turns out Paul founded a company called Success Motivation Institute, which had racked up around $3billion in sales by the time he died in 2009. I wound up doing one of their courses and it laid the foundation for most of the lessons I'm going to talk about in this blog.

Now, I'm not here to sell you anything, and anyway it's been a couple of decades since I did that course and SMI's under new management these days so I have no idea how good or affordable their material is. But you'll find some fragments of Paul on YouTube and if you poke around the Web you'll find more of his work. I think you'll find it interesting.