Create Your Own Destiny

Being in charge of your life means that you recognize your needs and fulfill them. Once you are clear as to what you really need, as opposed to what you want, set the universal wheels in motion by using the Creative Law.

More than anything else the Creative Law is a device for getting yourself to take responsibility for filling your own needs and to trust that you can create your own destiny. We all have the power to create, and we are doing it all the time. What are you creating in your life? Stories of some well-known Self Creators are below.

Donna Dubinsky – The Godmother of Palm

Cathy Hughes – How We Got Started

Dr. Ben Carson – From "Dummy" to Brain Surgeon

Alicia Keys – I Won't Play the Sex Card

Steven Spielberg – I Ignore My Critics – I Control My Destiny

Donna Dubinsky – The Godmother of Palm

"Silicon Valley may have a big high-tech reputation, but in many ways it's a small town. I'd heard of Jeff Hawkins and Palm Computing through a friend who knew someone applying for a VP of engineering job there. But he was reluctant to pursue the position since Palm was still without a CEO and he didn't want to take a job without knowing who his boss would be. But the company and the CEO job interested me, so I asked Bruce Dunlevie, who was on Palm's board, to introduce me to Jeff. I got the job, and my friend's friend didn't.

The PalmPilot was born out of frustration. At first almost all we did at Palm Computing was sell handwriting-recognition software. But we got tired of seeing our great software run on others' so-so handheld computers. We'd tell them what we thought they could do to improve, but they wouldn't accept our little company's influence. Bruce Dunlevie got sick of Jeff and me complaining about our partners' lack of innovation and vision and said, 'You know, if you guys know what to do, why don't you go do it?' The next day Jeff shows up with a little cardboard and wooden model he'd glued together in his garage. That model became the PalmPilot.

But the eureka moment came when we showed the docking cradle and explained that our little device could connect to a PC with the touch of a button. Nobody had done that before. It seems basic now, but no one had made the logical leap that this organizer was a PC accessory, not a stand-alone PC.

I was excited to go out and sell it, even though bigger companies with deeper pockets than ours had already spent about $1 billion developing PDAs like Apple's Newtons, which didn't do well, in part because they were too complicated and expensive. When I set out to sell the idea to investors, I wasn't concerned about that history. But I guess I should have been, because the idea wasn't very salable. Basically, people had an enormous amount of skepticism at that point, and they just didn't buy it. Plus the timing was very bad. The Internet had just taken off, and people were very excited about that, not devices like ours.

It became very clear very quickly that we weren't going to get any VC backing. So we actually didn't spend that much time on it. We spent about a year trying to work with potential corporate investors and had better luck there. But each time we'd get into a negotiation with one of the big companies, we would face a morass of issues. Some had divisions that were feuding with other divisions. Some just had a very different vision of the future of handheld computing and PDAs, while others wanted certain rights and privileges that we just weren't willing to give up. For example, we worked with Compaq for a year trying to get funding from them. The idea was that they'd have a Compaq-labeled version, and we'd have a Palm-labeled version. We'd somehow coexist in the market. A lot of the discussion was about that coexistence. But we were very wary of being too dependent on a partner. We didn't want to lose control over our future. They wanted a clause that said we couldn't launch ours if they decided not to launch theirs. In effect, we would have been at their mercy. Still, that deal was absolutely tempting since we needed the money. Temptation aside, you just can't be starry-eyed and go into a deal and say, 'Oh, it'll all work out.' If the motivations are not aligned, then it won't work.

Ultimately we found the right partner in U.S. Robotics. At the time, they were the leading modem supplier. They looked like a potential supplier to us as well as a potential partner. So we approached them about an investment, and they came back and proposed an acquisition that made more sense for us. Up to that point everyone else wanted to integrate our technology into their product vision, essentially disassembling us and our product. But USR saw us as a new business that could run independently within their company. We were acquired by USR in 1995 for about $44 million.

We had an incredible debut year. We sold about 400,000 units, which was more than we could have hoped for. Keeping up with early demand wasn't easy, but we managed. Soon I started seeing our product in people's hands while they sat at airport terminals and at cafes. We were everywhere.

In 1997, 3Com bought USR and became our new bosses. From the start, I went to 3Com's CEO of the time, Eric Benhamou, and said, 'Listen, just put us off to the side and let us be independent.' We were really not on his radar at the time since we were so small. So he agreed. In the year that followed we tried to persuade 3Com management to spin out Palm and make it a truly independent business. But our success was making it harder for them to let us go.

It wasn't a good fit with 3Com from the beginning. We were under tremendous pressure to deliver results 3Com needed for its business. Every time we'd lower a price, we'd get nasty calls from corporate saying, 'You know, you can't lower your prices. You're going to hurt the gross margins.' It was true, but we needed to keep pricing comparable to that of our competitors. Plus 3Com was a company in trouble. They would do a quarterly expense forecast and ask for a 10% across-the-board expense cut. We'd say, 'But wait, we're growing and we're profitable. We're not the ones to cut.' They'd say, 'Hey, fair's fair. Everybody's gotta be onboard here.'

When 3Com finally decided it was not going to spin us out, I told Eric, 'Okay, well, then I have to leave because I don't believe that staying at 3Com is the way to make the Palm the most successful that it can be. Therefore I can't stay, and neither can Jeff.' So I quit for the both of us, even though Jeff wasn't in the room. Jeff was a little upset that I'd spoken for him, but he quickly agreed that it was the right thing to do. I took three days off, and then Jeff and I got together and said, 'Okay, what next?' And we started creating Handspring. I set about doing the corporate things, like financing, finding office space, and negotiating with 3Com to license the Palm operating system to us. Jeff went to work on our next product.

Starting up the second time around was much easier. As it happens, I'd scheduled lunch with Bruce Dunlevie before I'd quit 3Com. He showed up at lunch with a check for $3 million. Then I went to Costco and bought Intuit's QuickBooks to set us up with accounting. Another friend, Guy Kawasaki, whom I knew from my days at Apple [he is now managing director of the business incubator Garage Technology Ventures], let us borrow space in his office, and then I rented three desks: one for me, one for Jeff, and a third just in case we hired someone else. I also bought a refrigerator. One of my favorite stories is when we'd done the first Palm, I had one of those little two-cubic-foot refrigerators. This time I bought a bigger one because I was feeling much more optimistic about our future.

We were primed, but we didn't yet have a product. Where we'd been the most innovative at Palm was on the high end. It hadn't shipped yet, but we'd pretty much finished the design of the Palm V and the Palm VII. We decided to focus on the low end and innovate and differentiate there. We wanted something low cost, familiar, but still new. Jeff made a list of the things he wanted our new device to do, and it became clear that expandability was essential, but there was not a suitable expansion architecture at the time. Then he quickly outlined what became the Springboard expansion architecture. That enabled us to create a product that could become a phone, an MP3 player, a digital camera, and almost anything consumers might want.

We'd quit in July, and by October we'd hired the first engineers. It took us just 12 months from hiring the first engineers to the shipment of the first Handspring Visors. It's true that in a sense we'd become a PalmPilot clone company. We did have the expansion slot, but we remained a relatively familiar product. We wanted to do that. The big strategy at Handspring was to start with something known, something with low risk, something we could execute well too, and we did. Within 12 months we were back in the market with a differentiated product and captured 28% of the market. It was really one of the first alternatives to a PalmPilot.

When we left, Palm hadn't innovated that much on the low end of their product line. So when we started Handspring, we designed the Visor specifically with a low-end entry-price point that would be compelling to consumers. At the time the Palm VII was selling for about $450, while our Visor sold for $149. Palm owned the high end, and we didn't set out to compete for that space — at least not initially. Around the same time, we started on our Communicator strategy, embodied by the Treo, which combines the functionality of an organizer with a built-in phone, web browser, and e-mail capability. Our line of organizers, meanwhile, was supposed to feed our new business.

The Treo began shipping earlier this year, not the easiest time to launch a new product. But we're confident that it's the right product at the right time. The idea for the Treo originally began with the Visorphone, a plug-in module for the old Visor. It launched in September 2000 and sold for $299. It may not have been very commercially successful, but it was extraordinarily successful from a learning perspective. Rather than just say we failed, we tried to understand what people liked and didn't like about the product. The Visor as a phone and communication device proved limited. People loved the functionality and they loved the utility, but they didn't like it as a plug-in module. It was clear to us that we were onto something. We said, 'Here's a direction, here's a trend.' We just absolutely believed that the future of handheld computing would be communications as much as computing. The Treo was our response to that realization. Sure, it was a departure from what we may have set out to do originally, but it was the right thing to do.

You have to be nimble. I doubt there's any entrepreneur who's succeeded on his original business plan. Situations change, the dynamic changes, the competitive environment changes, the technologies change. You have to be able to adapt.

You also have to be able to stop things. One of the disciplines I'm most proud of at Handspring is that we kill projects. That is so hard to do when people have invested their time and effort. And they're good projects. But you have to decide, Hey, when we started, it made a lot of sense. Today, for whatever reason, it doesn't. We can't keep doing it just because it's got momentum.

To keep your edge, you also have to get everyone who works for you invested and involved. Luckily, building a culture like that is very natural to us. Everything we do is always challenging and asking questions and probing things and trying to understand what the best course of action is. We don't pretend to know that, so we know the wider we cast a net in terms of getting that data, the more successful we'll be.

Doing that was easier when we started out as a 28-person company, but we're still doing it with 400 employees. We do lots of management by walking around. I do these things called Dine With Donna, where I get groups of employees together — sort of a group of a dozen or so — and get wonderful information about what the real issues are and what's going on in the company. I also have lunch in the cafe almost every day. It sounds like a stupid little thing, but to me it's one of the most incredibly important things I do. I could go off and have big honcho business lunches, but I sit out in our cafe because I can be with different employees and be accessible. That philosophy of easy access permeates the entire company."

To read more about Donna visit: http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2001/june/qanda.html Her new company is called Numenta, Inc. www.numenta.com Dubinsky was CEO of Palm and Handspring, and is CEO of Numenta.

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Cathy Hughes – How We Got Started

Hughes founded Radio One in 1980 and grew it into the seventh-largest U.S. radio network, No. 1 in the African-American market. Here's the story of how she went from sleeping on the floor of her office to running a company with $303 million in revenue.

I worked at the Howard University radio station, where I invented the Quiet Storm format. It was the forerunner of what is now called Adult Contemporary—mood music, romantic love songs, ballads—and it became the No. 1 urban format in the history of black radio. I tried to get Howard University to license it, and they refused. So I decided to leave.

I took advantage of the FCC's Distress Sell Policy, in which the FCC discounted the price on radio stations in financial trouble by one-third and sold them to either a woman or a minority. All of a sudden, WOL in Washington, D.C., was placed in the distressed-sell category. I had a $100,000 inheritance from my father that I had not touched, and I raised another $100,000. Then I went to VC firms. Syndicated Communications became my lead investor, with $5,000. They took me to Chemical Bank of New York, after we had made numerous presentations to numerous banks. Banks were really leery of making broadcast loans back then. You had very limited hard assets—the value of the station was goodwill. Male bankers all told us no. But a woman banker in her first week on the job at Chemical—a Puerto Rican woman—gave us a $1 million loan.

So in 1980, with $1.5 million, I went into business. Three months later was the great interest rate hike. In 1981 interest went up into the mid-20s. And I was 2.5% over prime. Some months my interest rate was as high as 27%. It was devastating for business. The economy was so bad that no one wanted to buy ads.

I lost my marriage because of the company. Up until then I had never borrowed a dime. I was always the one that the other kids would come to borrow a quarter. I sold lemonade and cookies, so I always had cash flow. So when my husband said, "We'll never pay this back, this is a tunnel with no light at the end, let's just walk," I couldn't do that to my lenders. I had $1.5 million of other people's money; I would not have been able to live with myself.

I tried to reason with him, and I tried to talk to my lenders about a payment plan. They said, The only way you'll ever repay this $1.5 million is for the radio station to be successful. And so he moved to California, and we got a divorce.

I lost everything. I stood in my window one day as they repossessed my car. In 1982 I ended up living in the radio station, sleeping in a sleeping bag for 18 months. I didn't take a salary. During this time my son was in his first year of college, and what little resources I did have were concentrated on keeping him there. I was literally washing up in the bathroom for the radio station. I cooked on a hot plate. It was crazy, because some days I might forget a personal item, and the staff would be embarrassed. The receptionist would say, "You left your bra in the ladies' room."

After six months of living like this, my mother was disgusted that I wouldn't just throw in the towel. But when you spend the majority of your time at a job, it really does become your life. People are always saying that you've got to separate. I've never been able to do that. My job is my life. My job is my family. If I was going to be there until midnight, why not just sleep there and not travel? It saves gas money. My mother took pity on me and sent me $5,000, and I purchased a portable bathroom. It had a shower.

I developed a habit that used to drive a lot of my lenders and creditors crazy, but I recommend it to young entrepreneurs. If I owed you $10,000 and didn't have but $3,000, I'd send you the $3,000 that month with a note saying, 'I don't have the other $7,000.' I made partial payments on every one of my bills each and every month. It built up my credibility with lenders. I also tell new entrepreneurs, Don't hide from the phone calls and the letters. The minute I knew that one of my lenders or one of my creditors was on the phone, I immediately stopped what I was doing and went and had a discussion with the person.

The way out of it was to build up the audience and to get better at selling ads. All my advertising clients were what they call "retail." I didn't have any of the big clients. My strategy for selling retail ads was that every Saturday morning I'd take $100 and hit ten businesses, and I would spend $10 at each business. It's a lot easier to get a small entrepreneur to talk to you when you just finished ringing his cash register than when you try to take something out of his cash register. With that $10 I would buy something for my staff. So on Monday morning it was almost like Santa Claus at the station, because they would all come into my office to see what I had bought.

My listeners trusted me, so I was really able to deliver. Once I started getting big customers, it was much harder to show you were delivering, but I would do it. How does Cadillac know I sold 100 cars for them? When the only black dealership in D.C. advertised with me, I would sponsor clinics for women, to show them how to change a flat tire or change oil. And sometimes 200 women would show up, and the dealership would know I sent them. I did this with all sorts of my advertisers. The more I gave back, the more my company would receive in return. And it worked great.

It's so embarrassing, but the moment I started making money I called up my accountant, and I cursed him out. I was in a bad mood, so I called him and said, "Listen, as much trouble as I've had, you've sent over this financial statement without the brackets." I was accustomed to seeing brackets, showing a loss, on every report. He laughed and said he knew this was going to happen. There was no loss, because the $3,732 was a profit. I asked if he was sure, and he said he was. I sat there at my desk for a moment and then called him back and apologized.

I kept waiting for the loss to come back. I didn't realize that I had turned the corner until we went public in 1999. At the time, I was the only African-American woman to head a publicly traded corporation. I remember the USA Today headline: Radio One, IPO Is Gold. The stock just skyrocketed.

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,681499,00.html

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Dr. Ben Carson – From "Dummy" to Brain Surgeon

The little boy lived in Detroit with his brother and his mother, who had married at thirteen but had since divorced. His name was Ben, but the other kids in his fifth grade class called him "The Dummy."

Deeply worried, their mother ordered Ben and his brother to write two book reports for her to read every week. Thus, they began regular visits to the Detroit Public Library.

One day Ben's science teacher held up a shiny, black rock and asked the class if anyone knew what it was. No one responded. Ben raised his hand. He would remember the moment all his life. "Everyone turned around and looked, and they started poking at each other and laughing because they knew I was going to say something really stupid."

But amid the titters, Ben stood, correctly identified the rock, and told the class how it had been formed. His fellow students were flabbergasted. And Ben liked what he felt. "It was at that moment," he'd recall later, "that I realized I wasn't stupid." He knew the answer because he had been reading books. So he asked himself, "Aren't I tired of being a dummy? What if I read books in all of my subjects?"

By the middle of the sixth grade, Ben had risen to the top of his class. He did well again in high school, then attended and graduated from both Yale University and the University of Michigan Medical School.

At age thirty three, he was named director of Pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And it was he, Dr. Benjamin Carson, who in 1987 led the team that performed the world's first successful separation of Siamese twins joined at the back of the head. He also pioneered a number of other surgical procedures.

By the way, what young Ben did not know was that his mother — because of her limited third grade education — was not able to read those book reports that she had assigned to her two sons. ⁱ

Today, Dr. Carson is Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore. He is world-renowned for leading a medical team that separated West German conjoined twins in 1987, as well as leading a team of South African doctors in the first successful separation of vertically conjoined twins in 1997. He has refined techniques for a radical brain surgery that stops intractable seizures.

Dr. Carson holds numerous honors and awards, including more than 20 honorary doctorate degrees. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Kellogg Company, honored by the Horatio Alger Society, as well as a fellow of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University.

Dr. Carson is an author of three books: Gifted Hands, Think Big and The Big Picture. He travels globally to share his knowledge and philosophy with the hope of inspiring people of all ages and educational backgrounds to be – and do – their best!

Now who among you wants to be like Ben Carson? He would be the first to say you can. You can live your dreams… if you do what Dr. Carson did: Value learning. Take advantage of personal development. Do the smart thing. I know you can. I hope you do too! You can begin today by following the principles in Self Creation: 10 Powerful Principles for Changing Your Life. Get your copy today.

ⁱThe Confidence Course; Anderson, Walter

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Alicia Keys – I Won't Play the Sex Card

Alicia Keys album was pink slipped by Columbia Records because "The record sounds like one big demo." She said "I was crushed!"

She was just 15 when she signed with the studio at Columbia. What they suggested was so far away from her vision it was distressing. They suggested that she repackage herself with a sexy image but she refused.

After a year and a half there was still nothing to show for her efforts in the studio. By this time, she was 17 but it still was not coming together. Alicia said "I knew I could do it, I just had to get the right situation." So she built her own studio in her apartment and began to move towards her vision. "Let's just do what we know and what we feel," she told herself. Within a few months she had written 4 tracks. "It gave me my confidence back," she exclaimed. But company bigwigs considered the album a dud.

Unhappy with what they wanted her to do she asked to be released from her contract. She was 18 years old. She told them "this is what I do." It took a lot to get out of there with the songs but she was willing to write new songs to get out of there.

Arista Records started courting her immediately. They gave her to the legendary Clive Davis and he said "this is the real deal." She inked a deal in June of 1999 after they pledged their support.

Alicia, raised by her single mother, was from hip hop and hells kitchen so found it was a part of her. In the fall of 1999 she gave Arista Records a track about a long agonizing relationship breakup.

When Clive Davis left Arista Records he convinced her to follow him. He was committed to making her a star. They devised a guerilla marketing program and she went anywhere to play the song "Fallin." The song born from her breakup with a boyfriend eventually got her an appearance on the Oprah show. Subsequently when it was released it debuted at number one!

She performed at the Grammys even though she had the flu, and she won 5 Grammys that night. To date Fallin has sold more than 10 million copies.

Her next song spoke to women everywhere. Alicia said she saw a commercial that said "I'm worth it" and it moved her to write the song after watching it.

By remaining true to herself and not using her looks but her talent to provide the music, she was able to reach the heights of success. How about you? What do you do when your ethics and values are compromised? Do you give in, or do you stick to your guns and remain true to your purpose?

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Steven Spielberg – I Ignore My Critics – I Control My Destiny

What do you want to be when you grow up? This question has been asked since the beginning of time. Some of us can't come up with an answer until late in life. Others, like Steven Spielberg, know very early in life exactly what they wish to do for a living. So, it was with great interest that I watched his biography on the A&E channel recently and made note of the many accomplishments that paved the way to the legend we know today.

The thing that struck me while watching his biography was how often he took the leap of faith to achieve his dreams. The consequent failures, successes, and his great ability to ignore his critics displayed a commitment to controlling his destiny. He saw his goals clearly and went after them.

• Steven Spielberg started the movie Jaws without a cast, without a script and without a shark. The shark was being built when filming began. The $4½ million budget mushroomed to $10 million. Production eventually reached 55 days over schedule.
  • Jaws became the first movie to make $100 million – he was 28 years old. Though this was a great accomplishment he was passed over for the Oscar
• While writing the script for his next movie Close Encounters, he got a telegram that he was fired. The studio then withheld the funds so Steven paid for the movie himself. Thus he was both writer and producer of the film.
  • The critics panned the movie, but it earned $270 million and Steven received his first Oscar nomination.
  • Even so, disillusioned with the script, he redirected the movie 2 years later and distributed it as a "Director's Cut." Today director's cut of movies are standard fare.
• Then he did a movie called 1941 – it bombed and the critics said "Steven is creatively bankrupt and financially irresponsible."
• His next movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark (a Spielberg / George Lucas collaboration). This time he worked faster and cheaper than he had ever done.
  • The movie grossed $363 million – he lost the Oscar again
• Steven then drew on his feelings of loneliness as a child (when his parents divorced) to create a movie called ET with a small budget of $10 million.
  • It brought him his 3^rd Oscar nomination – he lost again
• Next he co-wrote Ghost Story and also created the movie Poltergeist. Six weeks after the release Vic Morrow and two children died during filming of the movie Twilight Zone. Though Steven was only a co-producer of the film, he was named in the civil suits by the families.
• The Color Purple was next and it was a commercial success garnering eleven Academy Award nominations. None were for him.
• In 1987 at the age of 40 he received the Irving Thalberg Award.
• Then he created and filmed the second Indiana Jones movie.
• Jurassic Park came next and again he made history with the innovative work
• In 1993 he created Schindler's List a movie about the German who saved 1,000 Jews during World War II. It violated all the laws and rules of Hollywood.
  • The length and the subject matter broke the rules on what worked, no Americans were in the movie, and it was filmed in black and white.
  • It grossed $321 million and garnered twelve Oscar nominations. This time Steven was nominated for the Oscar as well. He had said the movie wouldn't make money. This one he did for himself.
  • Steven won three Oscars that night.
• His next movie, Amistad, was a commercial disappointment.
• He followed it up with Saving Private Ryan and won his second Academy Award for Best Director.
• His mini-series Band of Brothers earned 6 Emmy awards.
• After that he released AI another innovative movie
• Minority Report was next and it was #1 and a box office smash. He followed that up with Catch Me if You Can
• He later received the Lifetime Achievement Award and was blessed to have both of his parents in attendance to witness this high achievement.
• Amazingly, after all of these accomplishments, he quietly finished his Bachelor's Degree at the same school he had dropped out of, and graduated. His net worth is estimated at $2 billion.

How about you? What's holding you back? Do you allow critics to stand in the way of your achievements? Let nothing and no-one discourage you on the way to your own self creation. Get your copy of Self Creation today.

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