Gary's Guide to Life: How I Am Going to Achieve Phenomenal Success, and How You Can Do the Same

Introduction

Success. Say the word aloud.

Success

Now listen to the echo of the word in your mind’s ear. What does it sound like?

"Success"

Yes: "Success". Is there any more beautiful word in the English language?

Say the word aloud again. And again. Repeat at least fifty times.

Are you beginning to feel different? More confident? More optimistic? No? Don’t worry, we’re only just getting started, and these things take time.

If success is what you aspire to, then it is vital that you incorporate the word success into every aspect of your daily routine. Make it the first word you say in the morning upon waking, and the last word you say at night before going to bed. Say it in the shower, in the car, in the frozen food aisle of the supermarket, in the gym if you go to one. Say it in a loud, commanding voice – unless you’re in a library or a church, in which case you probably ought to keep your voice to a near whisper so as not to disturb those around you.

Why am I urging you to do adopt this habit? Because, in the words of renowned self-help expert Marshall Brewster, "If you want to achieve success, you must first tune your mind to the frequency of success."

And I think I’m on safe ground in assuming you want to achieve success. Otherwise, why would you have bought this book?

When you have managed to tune your mind to the frequency of success – as I have done – you’ll cease to be bothered by the question of whether success will come your way. The only question that will remain is when?

I still remember the exact moment when I stopped believing that I would probably achieve success, and started believing that I would definitely achieve it. The year was 2003, and the place was Los Angeles, California, where I was living with Kim, an American woman – now my ex-wife, then my fiancée. At that time, the two of us would idle away our evenings at bars, diners, cinemas, Lakers’ games, casinos, comedy clubs, house parties, and Mongolian barbecue joints. I won’t lie to you: my life in those days was meaningless and without direction. Success wasn’t exactly slipping away from me, but it wasn’t getting any closer, either. If you imagine success as a major international airport, I was like an aeroplane stuck in a holding pattern 30,000 feet above it.

Then, one night, everything changed. My bowling evening was cancelled at the last moment, and Kim was off auditioning for a part in a toothpaste commercial, so I found myself at a loose end. I scanned the local events section of the newspaper, came across a listing for a Marshall Brewster lecture taking place in South Pasadena that night at 8pm, and thought: why not? It struck me that Marshall’s lecture might, if I was lucky, give me some ideas I could use to help get myself out of the rut I was stuck in. I drove to the lecture venue. I had no clue what to expect, but when Marshall took to the podium, his presence was electric.

And his words changed my life.

Let me repeat that: Marshall’s words literally changed my life. There in that auditorium, Marshall succeeded in making me believe – and not just believe, but know – that I would one day be a great success.

From then on, everything was different. I was a changed man. My conviction that I would become a great success grew stronger with every passing day.

Now, twelve years later, it’s stronger than ever.

One of my aims in this book will be to instil the same sense of self-belief in you that Marshall has instilled in me. If my book does its job – and I have every confidence that it will – then, by the time you finish reading it, you will be well on your way to developing a success mindset. In addition, you will have all the tools you need to find your true self, forge successful relationships, flourish in your career, live in the Now, influence those around you, and become the master of your own destiny. In summary, you will be almost as well equipped for achieving success as I am.

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As I’m sure you’ll have picked up by now, I am an enthusiastic disciple of Marshall Brewster. Marshall is, without a doubt, the foremost personal-development authority of his generation. His most recent book, Ten Steps to Triumph: The Universal Guide to Achieving Perfection in Any and Every Realm of Life, has sold 1.8 million copies to date. He has revolutionised the study of human motivation and self-fulfilment. He has inspired legions of people to transform their humdrum lives.

Therefore it’s only natural that you should ask yourself the question: Why should I bother listening to the words of Marshall’s disciple when I could just as easily get my information from Marshall himself?

The short answer is that whereas I am from the UK, Marshall is American and his books are geared towards an American audience. If, by some fluke, you happen to be American, then I have to admit that Marshall really is the only guru you need. Please read his books, and if possible, attend his lectures when his touring schedule takes him to your part of the country. My book is primarily intended for a British readership. So if you are American and if you’ve still got the receipt for the book, then by all means go ahead and return it to the bookstore. I’ll understand.

But if you are from Britain or perhaps the Commonwealth, you won’t find it quite as easy to benefit from Marshall’s wisdom, for a number of reasons. First, you are very unlikely to have the opportunity to attend a Marshall Brewster event. Although Marshall’s schedule of workshops and speaking engagements takes him all over the United States, from Sacramento to Louisville to Atlantic City, he never ventures across the pond (I understand he has a thing about flying). So unless you can afford a plane ticket to America, and a hotel, and other sundry expenditure, you are out of luck.

You could, of course, buy his books, which, needless to say, are masterpieces. But be forewarned: they are 100 per cent American. This is inevitably going to be a barrier for many British readers. For example, when faced with Marshall’s colourful analogies – with their copious references to freeways, curly fries, realtors, monkey wrenches, station wagons, John Ritter, toaster ovens, the San Fernando Valley, Scotch tape, wide receivers, flag duty, the Scopes Monkey Trial, Aunt Jemima syrup, field goals, Grey Poupon, pitchers’ mounds, Ma Bell, the NRA, affixing one’s John Hancock, star 69 and crawfish – these readers are unlikely to have any idea what he’s talking about.

And it’s not just the American references that are the problem. It’s also the American tone of Marshall’s books. Let me give you an illustration of this. I once lent a copy of Marshall’s book Ten Steps to Triumph to my underachieving younger brother Vincent and urged him to read it. Imagine my disappointment when, returning the book to me several days later, he said, apologetically, I couldn’t get into it. It was just a bit too… American. When pressed to explain what he meant, Vincent pointed to a particular passage early in the book. The passage runs as follows:

And now, buckaroos, I come to the most important point of all. Remember the voice of your third-grade teacher? It’s the voice that told you constantly to sit up straight, be quiet, wait for your turn, don’t cause trouble – and you know what? The voice is still there, only now it’s lodged firmly in your own head, and it’s telling you to curtail all your most cherished hopes and dreams so that you don’t rock the social boat too much in pursuing them. That voice is a holdover from the past, and it needs to be told to PIPE DOWN! In the remainder of this chapter, you’re going to learn how to saddle up your proverbial horse, stick your spurs in, and leave a cloud of dust in your wake as you gallop right out of range of your unsatisfactory life-situation, eventually arriving at a land where you can lasso your dreams. And the voice? Don’t worry: the clattering of hooves will drown it out. YEE-HAW! Hold on tight, partners, ’cause it’s gonna be a THRILL-RIDE!!!

Stirring stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. But I couldn’t deny that Vincent had a point. Marshall’s prose was very American. Because I’d had the experience of living in America, and being with Kim and all that, I was too accustomed to the American vibe to find the style jarring. For Vincent, though, it was definitely an obstacle. And it occurred to me that many British readers would feel the same way.

There is a gap in the market for a decent self-help book aimed at a British readership. That’s what I believe, anyway, and I am optimistic that I’ll find a publisher who agrees with me. If you’re holding this book in your hands, then it means I’ve succeeded. If you’re not, then it means – well, not that I’ve failed, but simply that I haven’t succeeded yet. Just be patient. Hopefully you won’t have to wait too much longer for the book to hit the shelves.

If I had to supply you with one final reason for reading my book, it would be this: as exhilarating as it is to listen to Marshall Brewster, or to any other celebrated figure whose fame and fortune gives their words an unimpeachable authority (for instance, the American casino magnate and business tycoon Donald Trump, whose rags-to-riches story should inspire us all), the effect can sometimes be quite dazzling, like having a bright light shone in one’s eyes. It’s easy to be intimidated by someone of this stature, easy to think, He succeeded because of his greatness, but I’m just a normal person. How could I ever follow in his footsteps? I can promise that this won’t be the effect of reading my book. The fact is, I am someone very much like you – a humble traveller on the road to success. I may be further down that road than you are, and I may be moving forward at a greater speed, and I may have a far more powerful sense of self-belief, but the fact remains that my greatest success still lies in the future, not in the past or present.

In this book, I will not only give you the ground rules for attaining success, but will also illustrate them using examples from my own life. If you pay close attention to what I’m going to teach you, and put into practice what you’ve learned, then, before you know it, success will be within your grasp – every bit as much as it is within mine.

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One of the most exciting things about the writing process is the sheer sense of possibility it affords. At this moment, I am sitting at my computer with a plateful of supermarket chicken korma resting in my lap, typing out this Introduction between mouthfuls. Seven chapters lie ahead of me. I have made some notes, but they’re not very extensive, so basically the rest of the book is a blank canvas.

Yes indeed. A blank canvas, just waiting to be filled.

What makes the task feel more manageable is the fact that my evenings are (apart from Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I go bowling) completely free nowadays, giving me ample opportunity to write. Ever since splitting from my long-term partner Sandra a year ago, I’ve been living on my own and have had a lot more time to devote to the pursuit of my personal goals, at least on weekday evenings. The weekend is a slightly different story, because that’s when I get to spend time with our four-year-old son, Jack. But all things considered, I couldn’t ask for better conditions under which to work on this book – unlike the last time I tried to write it, when I was still living with Sandra and Jack. In those days I had so many distractions that making any headway at all was a major challenge.

There’s something else that encourages me and spurs me on. It’s the thought of how my own life will change when the book is finished and my efforts are crowned with success of dizzying proportions. Set against the background of that success, the little challenges I face on a daily basis can be seen clearly for what they are: short-term inconveniences.

Does it worry me that I am having some trouble paying my rent at the moment? Not at all, because I know that success will eliminate my cash flow problems once and for all. Am I discouraged by the fact that my job at the haulage firm is uninteresting and a career dead end? Not in the least, because I know that a life of perfect freedom awaits me.

Everybody wants success, and it’s easy to see why. The life of the successful person is a life free of worry, free of strife, free of all the difficulties, large and small, that trouble the average non-successful individual on a regular basis. Everybody wants success because the prospect of success is the prospect of a magnificent new life. I consider it a privilege to be your guide on the journey that you will be taking to this enviable destination.

Gary Speedwell

June 2015

Chapter 1: The Road to Success

Perseverance

Not everybody can be an overnight success. And frankly, the type of success that can be achieved overnight is rarely worth having. When I was a teenager, I once accompanied my friend Tim Parsons to a party that featured a succession of drinking games. Tim, a person no one had down as a big drinker, astonished the other partygoers by winning every one of these games hands down. By mid-morning the next day, everybody knew about Tim. He was a bona fide overnight success. But he wasn’t able to enjoy his local-celebrity status, because he’d been rushed to hospital at 4am with acute alcohol poisoning, had his stomach pumped and been placed on an intravenous drip. By the time he recovered fully, he was yesterday’s news. So what was the point?

The truth is, any success worth having is bound to take time. In your quest to reach the top, you can’t expect instant results – just as you can’t walk into a casino, feed some money into the fruit machine, pull the lever, and expect a big payoff just like that. The most successful gamblers are those found at the casino night after night, reliably stationed at their fruit machines, secure in the knowledge that even if they have to pull the lever thousands of times, eventually the jackpot will be theirs.

What I’m saying is that if you’re interested in attaining success, the one quality you’ll need in abundance is perseverance. Perseverance is something we all possess to a certain degree, so I know you have it in you. But the truly successful among us have an amount that can’t be measured. (By this I mean, of course, that it’s too big to be measured, not that there is no actual way of measuring it – though, to be honest, there isn’t.)

Without perseverance, how will you weather those difficult patches in which everything seems to be going against you? How will you cope when your forward momentum is stalled by those who, whether due to naivety or jealousy or plain evil, seem determined to stand in your way? An individual who is destined for success, as I am, never allows such setbacks to make him feel discouraged, at least not for more than five or ten minutes. To adapt the words of the pop singer Chumbawamba: If they get knocked down, they pick themselves up again – there is virtually nothing that is capable of keeping them down!

For a living example of perseverance, consider Eddie the Eagle Edwards, the holder of Britain’s national ski-jumping record to this day. Eddie was not born a great ski jumper. In many respects he was an ordinary person, just like you. But what made him exceptional was his perseverance. Although his early efforts didn’t succeed in bringing him international recognition, he was determined to carry on practising and improving until he had secured his place in the history of his sport.

Time after time, he squeezed himself into an unflattering skin-tight suit, placed his bottle-bottom glasses on his nose, got up on that big ramp, accelerated to breakneck speeds and shot through the air like some magnificent osprey or kestrel. At no time was he put off by the prospect of veering off the ramp and fracturing several ribs, breaking one or all of his legs, or puncturing a lung. Those possibilities, and the terrible inconvenience they would bring, barely registered with him. Why? Because his mind was focused only on success. And so he pressed on. Eventually, he achieved one of the most coveted honours in sport: selection for the Olympic Games! I once met Eddie, actually, when I was out bowling in Milton Keynes. Nice guy, although as a bowler he was pretty rubbish.

Cinema is full of inspiring examples of individuals determined to succeed whatever the odds. You will probably have seen the film The Terminator, and perhaps one or more of its sequels: Terminator 2, 3, 4 or 5. The Terminators change in each story, but they have one thing in common – it’s even stated in the films: they never ever give up. They pursue their goals with steely determination, never wavering even when the obstacles they face seem insurmountable. Naturally your goals will be different to those of a Terminator, be it a T-600, T-800, or even the T-1000 – all of whom, it must be said, were intent mainly on the destruction of the human race – but if you’re serious about success, then you need to display the same single-mindedness as that of a liquid-metal mimetic polyalloy nanomorph on a mission to track down and eliminate the leader of the human resistance.

The story I take most inspiration from is that of Marshall Brewster himself. Many people are unaware that in the early stages of his career as a self-help author, Marshall had difficulty gaining recognition. To anyone who has read Marshall’s pioneering and brilliant books, or attended his inspirational talks, this will no doubt seem incomprehensible. But the fact is, in those early days, the world simply wasn’t ready for him. I’ve faced similar problems for years when it comes to the world’s relationship to me, so I can empathise powerfully with what Marshall must have felt at that time.

Marshall’s first book, Infallible You: The Art and Science of Going Straight to the Top, was published in 1993. Initially, sales of this ground-breaking work were disappointing. A lot of the blame for this must be laid at the door of the mainstream newspapers, which uniformly failed to review the book. Also, in the early nineties the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and Amazon.com was an obscure business operating out of a garden shed, so for a new author to get into the public consciousness was more difficult than it is nowadays. There were various other factors at work, too numerous and intricate to explore here. Most of all, as I’ve mentioned above, the public needed time to come to terms with ideas as novel and profound as Marshall’s.

Did Marshall get discouraged when his initial book sales didn’t meet expectations? Not at all. He continued to tour his home state, continued to give informal talks, continued to impart his unique wisdom to anyone who would listen. And then – suddenly and without warning – Marshall’s perseverance paid off. His book started to sell not in tens or even hundreds, but in the thousands and tens of thousands. His diary filled up with after-dinner speaking gigs and chat show appearances. He contributed to leading lifestyle magazines. In short, he achieved the success he richly deserved.

Coincidentally, this all happened right after the famous American pop singer Joey Memphis made front-page news across the country by severely injuring himself in a car crash in which alcohol and drugs played no small part. Given the fact (widely reported in the American tabloids) that Marshall’s book was found in the glove compartment of Joey’s car after the crash, and given Joey’s well-publicised addiction problems, one can’t help but wonder: did Marshall throw up his hands in despair when he learned that his book had, by complete accident, got swept up in the sordid Joey Memphis media frenzy? Did he quake with worry at the prospect that this bad publicity would kill off his book once and for all?

We’ll never know for sure, but my instinct tells me that Marshall didn’t worry even for a moment. He knew that a short bout