I’ve been re-reading a marvellous book for the first time in many years. It’s called The Magic of Thinking Big by Dr David J Schwartz. It’s a title that I’m sure many will be familiar with, especially those who have ever had anything to do with the Amway business.
I was an Amway distributor in the UK heyday of the 1990’s. Although I didn’t make my fortune with it, due entirely to my inability to get over myself based on an attitude immaturity at the time, I did take from it the seeds of what I had learnt when I was in the IT business and the time came to take the plunge to go contracting, and then again later when I decided to get out of IT altogether.
The Magic of Thinking Big was a prescribed text in the Amway distributor group that I was part of, and quite rightly so. I firmly believe that anyone who has anything that they would identify in themselves as aspiration, whether in a career within a company or to run their own business,or who has the audacity to want to succeed in any field of endeavour, should read it at least once in their life, along with the classic How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
In chapter two, Dr Schartz tackles what it is that holds people back from expressing themselves and realising their potential. Mainly he identifies getting over, past, and rid of what he calls excusitis, or succumbing to the reasons and justifications that we give ourselves for not doing something we know we would really like to do in terms of advancement or achievement in something that would be worthwhile to us.
One of the forms of excusitis he highlights is age, how we tell ourselves or others that we can’t or couldn’t do something because of age. Too old or too young, it doesn’t matter as the result is the same. Absolutely nothing.
And as I read this, I suddenly found a reason to pat myself on the back and offer warm congratulations, because when I decided that I was going to be a podiatrist, my time of life was never a factor in the decision process.
At the time I started university I was 45. That was around 18 months after I’d had the conversation with the podiatrist who was doing my wife’s nail surgery, which gave me the idea and first flickering of the desire to go into the profession.
And yet it never occurred to me that being already middle-aged would be an impediment or a reason to do something like that, and yet for many it would have been the main reason not to make the attempt.
Granted, there were many other reasons why I might have baulked at the idea. Losing income for a number of years while I went back into the education system was a big one. I had a wife and young son, the responsibilities of maintaining the mortgage and other credit overheads and all the other things that come to most people by the time they reach that kind of age. We wouldn’t be able to afford many of the things that we’d been able to do and have in the past until well after I qualified and started work.
Another was the fact that I could have failed the course and not qualified at all, maybe third year (I did have to repeat parts of my second year, and that was a massive blow at the time), and be faced with having spent all that time, five years including the access course to be able to apply to the university in the first place. To be left with nothing at the end of all that time and effort would have been devastating in every conceivable way.
But none of those things happened. It was hard, my goodness it was, and if as a family we’d known how hard the reality was going to be I think we would still have done it because the overall benefits hugely outweigh the negatives. Whatever reasons there might have been to shy away from doing it, using my age as an excuse was never one of them.
Now I am a working podiatrist, with a mobile chiropody business around the Kingswinford, Dudley and Stourbridge area, I also work in a couple of clinics and I am absolutely certain that I made the right choice. I really hope that Dr Schwartz would have been very proud of me as a result.
