The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life
By John Assaraf, Murray Smith
Product Description
A key team member behind The Secret and his business partner offer the specific tools and mental strategies to help readers leap ahead in any career or business venture and achieve major financial success.
In this visionary work, New York Times bestselling author John Assaraf and business guru Murray Smith reinvent the business book for the twenty-first century. Two of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, they combine forces to bring their special insights and techniques together in a revolutionary guide for success in the modern business environment.
Assaraf and Smith know how to minimize risk and maximize success, and The Answer provides a framework for sharing their wisdom, experience, and skills with the millions of people who want to accomplish their own dreams in life. Using cutting-edge research into brain science and quantum physics, they show how readers can actually rewire their brains for success and create the kind of extraordinary lives they want. By teaching readers how to attract and use newly discovered “uncommon” senses to achieve business success, the authors demonstrate the beliefs, habits, thoughts, and actions that they have used to build eighteen multimillion-dollar companies.
Any reader who follows this step-by-step process to build his or her career will experience an enormous life transformation and reach an exceptional level of living.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #183 in Books
- Published on: 2008-05-20
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This book is a masterpiece! I couldn’t stop reading it. It is by far the best book I have ever read on how to use the law of attraction and the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience to quantum leap the growth of any business. It is now required reading for all my staff and students.” –Jack Canfield, co-author of The Success Principles and co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series
“The Answer is absolutely a must read for anyone interested in a new and much higher level of prosperity. John and Murray have helped me more than triple my business income and they can do the same for you. I highly recommend it.”–Dharma Singh Khalsa, MD, America’s #1 Brain Longevity Specialist
“A brilliant formula for growing any business and living an extraordinary life – entrepreneurial wisdom embodied in a proactive, balanced approach to living. A must read!”–Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness
“Everyone wants the answers to life’s probing questions, particularly of business, financial freedom and how to make your life a masterpiece. My friends John and Murray have made their lives masterpieces and share from deep profound insight how you can make yours the same or even better.” — Mark Victor Hansen, co-creator, #1 New York Times bestselling series Chicken Soup for the Soul ®, co-author, Cracking the Millionaire Code and The One Minute Millionaire
“If you really want to attract and make things happen faster in your business and life, read The Answer now! John Assaraf and Murray Smith will put you on the road to riches as fast as anyone I know. Read it and give a copy to your best friend.” — Bob Proctor, of The Secret and author of You Were Born Rich
“This book does not hold anything back. It’s got it all. How to THINK like someone who should be wealthy and then how to back it up with killer growth strategies backed by step-by-step plans for super growth. A must read for any CEO serious about amassing a fortune.” — Chet Holmes, bestselling author of The Ultimate Sales Machine
“There are great books on the unlimited power of our minds to co-create the circumstances of our dreams. There are even more books on business development and the management of those dreams. What makes The Answer so remarkable is that finally both dimensions have been wonderfully explained and integrated into what is destined to be the ‘how to’ book of the century. Read and win!” — Ian Percy, author Infinite Possibilities – Make Your Life a Masterpiece.
“This book is the first AND ONLY one I’ve seen that teaches you how to harness all three of the laws of attraction; gestation AND action together, to make extraordinary things start happening in your business right away! John and Murray have packaged a lifetime of highly result-certain expertise into this content-rich book. If you business isn’t living up to your vision, this is the one book and philosophy of predictable, unstoppable growth that you need to read, learn…and do!” –Jay Abraham, Marketing Guru
“The Answer is inspiring. It motivates you to go after the grandest version of the greatest life and business you ever envisioned for yourself with the knowledge that it is absolutely possible. The Answer gives you the tools to change your life. This is one of the most exciting books I have ever read.”– Suzanne Somers
“The Answer is a pragmatic and easy to use formula for building a solid entrepreneurial business. Read it, and most importantly, take action upon it!”– James Arthur Ray, author of Harmonic Wealth®, The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want and The Science of Success
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Inside the Box: John’s Story
One Tuesday morning in May 2000, my son Keenan and I opened a cardboard box that had been sealed for five years, and what we found inside changed my life forever.
I had no idea this was going to happen; in fact, I didn’t know exactly what we were going to see when we opened that box. It had been five years, after all, and in those years we’d moved around quite a bit and seen a lot of change.
I began my career in business twenty years earlier, going to work as a real estate agent fresh out of high school. My dreams of professional basketball were long gone, and I had no idea what to do with my life. Real estate was the only thing I could think of that would keep me from working at a grocery store, and so, on June 20, 1980, this nineteen-year-old kid took his real estate exam and became a licensed Realtor. Within a few months, seminars and workshops on goal-setting were teaching me about some odd-sounding personal growth techniques they called visualization and affirmations.
I had been aware of the value of such practices, long before they had formal names. In my teens, I wanted more than anything to become a successful basketball star. In fact, I wanted to succeed in that career so badly that I constantly imagined myself winning championship games, sinking that winning shot as the clock ran out, running that movie in my head before I ever stepped onto the court. I literally went to sleep at night with a basketball next to me under the covers. And until I was injured, I was an impact player.
Now, however, winning on the court was no longer the issue. Now it was all about winning in business.
I started observing what the top achievers in my office were doing, watching them like a hawk, listening to them talk on the phone, even sitting in on meetings with them, just to hear exactly what they said and how they said it. I started reading voraciously, absorbing everything I could get my hands on that might give me clues as to how to become successful in my new career. I listened to audiotapes and attended live programs — and one of these was taught by a man whom I came to know as a friend, mentor, and business partner. His name is Bob Proctor.
In the early sixties, Bob had moved from his native Toronto to Chicago to work with a man named Earl Nightingale, who had launched the personal development industry a decade earlier. Nightingale’s famous audio recording The Strangest Secret was the first recording in history outside of popular music to sell a million copies. Earl Nightingale, in turn, had learned his philosophy from Napoleon Hill, the author of what is probably the most well-known book in all of success literature, Think and Grow Rich.
From Napoleon Hill to Earl Nightingale to Bob Proctor, one theme ran through all their teachings: The secret to our success lies in controlling our thoughts. The only limitations on our accomplishments, these teachers were telling me, are those we place upon ourselves by our own self-limiting thoughts. What they said made complete sense to me; I didn’t know how or why it worked, but to me the truth of it seemed selfevident.
Soon I was taking this business of writing down my goals very seriously. (In fact, I still have a copy of my carefully written-out goals from the summer of 1982.) I started writing affirmations and vivid word pictures of the kind of success I wanted to have, feeding my unconscious mind with new images of my goals, playing out new movies in my mind, movies of my triumphs as a serial entrepreneur.
That year, my first year in real estate, I earned about $30,000. Not bad for age twenty, I thought. My second year, my earnings totaled $150,000. This goal setting, visualizing, affirmation repeating thing was working!
After that second year, I decided to take some time off to take stock and expand my horizons. I gathered my earnings and set off to travel around the world. My trip ended up lasting more than a year, as I circled the globe learning about other cultures and worldviews and expanding my sense of what was possible. In late 1984, I returned to Toronto and went back to work at my real estate office…but it was clear I wouldn’t last there long. I was hungry to know more, to do more, and to be more.
A few years later, in late 1986, Walter Schneider and Frank Polzler, the two guys who owned the rights to the giant Realtor RE/MAX for eastern Canada, approached me with the news that the RE/MAX subfranchising rights for the state of Indiana had become available. (Today, Walter and Frank are the most successful subfranchisors in the world.) They knew I was itching to grow, and they had decided to offer me a partnership if I would move to Indiana to build the business there.
“John,” they said, “would you like to move to Indiana?”
I said, “Absolutely! How soon do I leave?” and then added, “Where’s that, again?” I hadn’t even heard the “Indiana” part. I’d just heard “Would you like to move?” and I knew they were offering me an opportunity I couldn’t possibly turn down.
My first week in Indiana, a reporter from the Indianapolis Business Journal came to ask about our plans. “In five years,” I told him, “we’ll be the biggest real estate company in Indiana — in fact, we will sell a billion dollars in real estate.”
He scribbled all this down and then offhandedly asked, “So, have you talked with — ” and he rattled off the names of the major owners of the largest real estate company in the area.
“Um, why?” I hedged.
He grinned. “I guess you probably already know this, but their firm has been here for about eighty years, and they control seventy percent of the real estate market in these parts.”
I had no idea. I’d never even heard of the guys he was talking about. I knew nothing about Indiana real estate — and in fact, I knew nothing about how to run my own business, let alone how to build it to generate such massive sales. Let alone how to do it in the face of dominant, well-entrenched competition.
The reporter laughed. It was pretty clear that I’d stuck my foot so far down my mouth I might never get it out. Sure enough, a few days later, there was my picture in the paper, along with a story on me with the headline, “A Billion in Sales Within Five Years.” I was the laughingstock of the town.
That is, until five years later — when my company generated $1.2 billion in sales for the year.
This visualization and affirmations thing was really working. It was still a mystery to me exactly why or how it worked, but who cared — it worked!
In 1995, I started making what my mentors had called vision boards, cutting out pictures that represented the goals and dreams I aspired to achieve and pasting them onto bulletin boards; the idea was to create everyday reminders of my life’s direction. I didn’t yet grasp the full power of this exercise, but that would soon change.
By that time, I had run that RE/MAX region for a decade, growing it to over seventy-five offices and one thousand salespeople. I had also grown restless again; it was time to search for new and larger opportunities. I hired and trained a replacement, packed up my possessions and put them in storage, left Indiana, and moved back to Canada.
Over the next few years my family and I moved around, while I looked for the next big opportunity. I invested in a few companies and consulted for a few more, while we kept moving and looking. In late 1998, a friend named Len McCurdy invited me to come down to San Francisco to look at something his son Kevin and Kevin’s friend Howard had developed.
“This program is amazing,” Len told me. “It lets you do a virtual tour of a car or hotel property on the Internet, without any downloads or plug-ins. You’ve got to see it.”
I admired Len and knew that working with him would provide me with an amazing opportunity to learn and grow. His last company had been worth a fortune before Len sold it to IBM. I flew to San Francisco and it didn’t take much imagination to appreciate that this online application Kevin and Howard had developed would have fantastic applications in real estate, car sales, hotel room advertising, all sorts of areas. Len invited me to join him as senior vice president of sales and marketing for the new company, a position I accepted without hesitation. And then he said something that took me by surprise:
“Hey, why don’t we take this thing public? And why not do it by this fall?”
He wanted to do an IPO — in nine months. Even in those heady dot-com-boom days, that was a pretty outrageous goal. But Len knew a lot about how to achieve extraordinary goals; he had read the same books and studied with some of the same people I had, and he knew that we are constrained only by the limitations we place upon our own thoughts.
I took a deep breath, and said, “Sure, let’s do it!” We moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles, and I spent the next year or so flying back and forth between L.A. and San Francisco. My colleagues and I launched our new company in the beginning of 1999; nine months later we placed a successful IPO on NASDAQ, followed by a merger of equals with another company that left our new venture with a market valuation of $2.5 billion.
This whirlwind adventure had three results. It offered me the most vivid proof of the power of our thoughts that I had ever seen. It left me with the financial wherewithal to retire. And it found me once again wanting to move on and search for new horizons. It wasn’t at all clear what those horizons would be, but there was absolutely no doubt as to where I wanted to live while I chased them: San Diego.
Living in San Diego had been a dream of mine for nearly twenty years. Way back in 1982, while traveling around the world, I had stopped over in San Diego and told myself, “Someday, when I can afford to live wherever I want, I’m going to live here.”
Now, in the beginning of 2000, my family and I rented a house on the bluffs of San Diego and started house hunting. By April we had closed on an amazing property and I sent for our stuff, which had been languishing in storage back in…
Customer Reviews
The answer is phenomenal!
I just finished the book last week while on vacation and I strongly feel that the information that it provided will help me to grow my business and to get to the “next level”. John and Murray are inspirational in both their business and personal lives.
This book, like The Secret itself, requires action and commitment on the part of the reader to achieve the full benefits that is has to offer.
Great Information
This book has a great deal of interesting information. I really enjoyed the chapter “The Universe Inside Your Brain.” I am also a student of the original Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill, however it sometimes frustrates me with how outdated some of the belief systems are. If you want a book that is fresh, full of interesting things about how your brain works, as well as easy to follow—I highly suggest you read this book.
Great book
This book was worth both the money and time spent. I found it both thought provoking and practical.
arpijikii
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