Tremendous Tracey
Leadership and legacy are two things that have been foremost in the life of Dr. Tracey Jones. As the daughter of beloved public speaker Charlie Jones, Tracey has forged her own path. In this episode, John Solleder sits down for a lively talk with Tracey as she looks back at her formative years. We get a look at how she blazed her own path as an armed forces veteran, author and keynote speaker. Tune in and learn more about how to shape your own path as a leader.
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Tremendous Tracey
Dr. Tracey Jones, how are you?
I'm tremendous, John. How are you doing?
I’m doing great. Tracey, you've had such an amazing life. I have such tremendous respect for so many things you've done. Let's go through a couple of them so our audience gets to know you better. You were raised by one of the people who influenced and created this self-development movement, the great Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, your dad. Do you want to tell us a little bit about him?
He was tremendous. He was a person that loved life and he was down to earth and real because he came from a tough background, but he had this resiliency that was infectious. He was a salesman of unsurpassed excellence. He was larger than life. He had that star quality. Sometimes you see stars and when you get close to them, it’s like they have charisma but they're not nice people. He was the real deal. What drew you into his orbit was like basking in the warmth of the sun. He taught me growing up that it doesn't matter where you start, read, work hard and hang around with great people. You stay away from trash as friends and don't read trash. He combined work and fun together.
It was a weird upbringing. We were like little guinea pigs. He tried all these crazy parenting things on us like locking up all the TVs, taking them all away because we didn't need to watch that crap, which is very progressive. More parents should do that now. On our family vacations, he'd pack us all up in an RV of various sizes. As he got more successful, they got bigger but in the beginning, it was a Volkswagen popup camper with six of us, two adults and books driving from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania all the way down in Mexico City, Mexico doing his meetings all along the way and up.
Those were our vacations. It was different and it was a lot of fun but the greatest thing was as a young child, I got exposed to sit under the tutelage of people like Zig Ziglar, Ken Blanchard, Og Mandino and Jim Rohn. Just sitting there as a little girl in the front row watching these people touch people and show them that you can live a great life. That is probably the greatest thing that he could have exposed me to.
Needless to say, what a classroom that would be just to talk to any of those people.
They were down to earth and there was no pretentiousness because we get to go hang out with them because they were dad's friends. There was no, “Don't approach the table.” We're here and they'd see people. They'd hug them and they'd laugh and share thoughts with them. Dad would call, “Come eat dinner with us.” It was all authentic, fluid and beautiful.
That was a great experience. After that, you decided to go and serve your country. You went to the United States Air Force Academy. Tell us about that a little bit.
When you grow up with somebody that is a motivational speaker, you got to carve out your own niche. He would always tell me, “Tracey, you got to earn your stripes.” He wasn't military. He was a diehard patriot but what he meant was you can't live in my shadow. Every man and woman on this planet needs to go out and carve their own destiny. I was always very aware of this and I know this is weird but to a teenager mind, I thought, “Where can I go where I earn my worth based on who I am, not that I'm somebody's daughter?” I thought of the military because even if you’re Patton’s son, you have to start as a Second Lieutenant. There is no jumping ahead.
Leadership And Legacy: You can work for somebody else or you can work for yourself. But as long as you work for somebody else, you're always going to hit the wall wherever you go.
"That's the boss's son so now he's the Vice President at 22 with no experience." There was none of that. I went into the military and he also had gone down to Roswell, New Mexico. This is before there were aliens. The X-Files was down there and he went down and shared at a New Mexico Military Institute, which was an army junior college and high school. He came back one day and he laid their pamphlets on the table and he said, “Tracey, these kids are going to make something with their lives.” That's all I needed.
He would challenge me and I was like, that's why I was the guinea pig. I'm like, “I'll give it a shot. Why not?” I applied and got in there. I already had been at college, so I got my Associate of Arts there and they're like, “You graduated. What do you want to do next?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” They’re like, “We have West Point, which was an Army school or Annapolis.” I'm like, “I've heard of them.” They said, “The Air Force Academy is in Colorado Springs,” and I had fallen in love with the West. I should have been a cowgirl. Dad has always had us Western wear and gear. We were always out West in the Grand Canyon and Knott's Berry Farm. He was a cowboy. I’m like, “I want to stay out West.” That's how it happened.
I've been on all the campuses of all the academies and by far the Air Force Academy is the most beautiful.
My husband went to Annapolis so he swears it’s charming, but I grew up in the space era watching the launch. I always want to be an astronaut. I went to Epcot and saw Spaceship Earth. This is the world of the future. When I saw the Air Force Academy, I was like, “This is the place for me.”
I'm very familiar with it. You were in the Air Force and then you served. You were in Afghanistan.
The First Gulf War. This was before Afghanistan. I got commissioned in 1988 and worked on fighter jets, F-15s and F-16s. I went to the First Gulf War and the Bosnian War. I did twelve years. I didn't plan on staying in that long but it was such a wonderful experience, living all over the world, the Middle East and Europe. At the twelve-year point, I got out in the year 2000. As I said, I'm a guinea pig so I’m like, “Let's try something completely different.” I moved to Austin, Texas and got into the booming semiconductor industry and lived there for five years as a project manager. That was cool. That was a lot of fun.
Dad gets sick and eventually passes away. Before he passes away, he made some decisions in terms of the business that he had spent his lifetime building. Share a little bit about what happened with that story.
For those of you out there that are in any family business or second or third generation and you’re like, “We're not sure what's going to happen.” I want to give a word of peace to you, neither did we. There was no real succession planning. My father set up a trust with nothing in it other than no debt and a vehicle to make money. There was property in it. He appointed me and two of his friends as trustees but other than that, the business was something he had done and it wasn't obvious. I had talked on and off throughout my life and his life about coming back, but it wasn't the right timing. We were very similar and it wouldn't have been the right time for it because of how he approached things and how I would approach things. He's a sales guy and I'm operations.
Anybody that's been in any manufacturing where sales promise this. We were where the rubber meets the road and the sales guys are promising the world. There's that beautiful tension. I came back and we'll talk about it when we get to one of your principles, but I kept waiting for him to ask me if I was coming back and he never asked me. Finally, two days before he passed, I said, "Dad, I'm going to come back.” I left home at seventeen years old. I knew he was big but I didn't know how big he was. All I knew was although I wasn't part of it as he was growing the business, I respected so much what he had done.
I was in defense contracting in DC at that time and St. Louis and I said, “I'm going to come back home. I'm going to take a year. I'm going to make sure that everything that he has built is taken care of,” because there wasn't anybody to come in and pick it up. We had the trust but that was it. I came back and I want to make sure that what he has spent his whole life doing, because it was such a beautiful thing, either we find a way to keep it going. I find somebody to take the reins to the next generation or I put a beautiful bow on it and say, “That was fabulous.” Here we are twelve years later and by the grace of God, I'm still trekking along with the Tremendous legacy and it's been fun.
As I said, I left home at seventeen. I knew of him but I didn't know that much about him. As much as I love and respect my dad, when you're growing up with somebody, you're like Jesus at the temple. They're like, “Isn't that little Joseph's son? Who's going to listen to him?” A prophet was never appreciated in his land or by his own family. The great joy has been getting to know him. I look forward to an eternity of spending it with him and sharing the things that I got to pick up and run with.
It was a tremendous foundation, no doubt. I'm experiencing a little bit of that on my end even with my own kids. They have no idea what dad does for a living. They are like, “He sells something and he's in multilevel. He writes some books once in a while.” They don’t know who goes to him for advice.
For your readers out there, take time and ask your parents what they do and listen to them. My dad was a genius. I knew he was kooky and fun but he was a genius and I missed him so much. I get to find it now because we have books. I kicked myself and God redeems everything. I know where he is and I'm going to get to see him again. We're all knuckleheads growing up. For the readers out there, if you're blessed enough to still have your parents around, find out what they do. You might be pretty impressed.
Leave Nothing to Chance: 15 Principles for Success and the Stories that Inspired Them
Your dad passes away. You have this business that you know nothing about at that point. Certainly, all this great military training and everything else. You had been all over the world. All of a sudden you come back to Pennsylvania and run a business that you don't have an interest in at that point like, “It's dad's legacy. I can wrap this up,” but all of a sudden you realize the value. I was a customer of your father. That's how I knew your father. A lot of us in the network marketing world all knew Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, maybe not even personally but we all were customers of the company because he’s giving great value with so many great titles and authors. We all knew the company and were all buying products from it on a regular basis. I guess you figured out pretty quick like, “This is much more than just a business. This has some real social value and business value to a lot of people.”
You hit the nail on the head. My dad used to say this to me, “Tracey, you can work for somebody else or you can work for yourself. As long as you work for somebody else, you're always going to hit the wall where you go, ‘This is it? There's so much more I could be doing,’ but it's not your company so you can only take it so far. I was in like five different industries living all over the world and I'm like, “Dad, this is it.” A year later I'm like, “It's the same poop different day.” You're working for somebody else's dream.
The other thing is I'm an engineer by nature. I'm very analytical. I was very dichotomous. I always thought, “There are the sales network marketing people and there are the facts process people. There, the two shall meet.” I assume that they couldn't be blended. That’s where I finally thought, “You know what? I was so burnt out for years of working for the wonderful and huge defense of the country, changing the world through technology and our national security.” These are great things. I was burnt out from bad leadership, just not having my heart and things. I’m wondering, when I meet my Maker, am I going to say, “I built $4 million of chip-making.” I felt so unfulfilled. I came back home and was like, “This is my only option.” It was a beautiful thing to see it and go, “Now I get to do stuff that really has eternal value.”
That was twelve years already. We met probably about a few years ago. You had published our book, Moving Up 2020 in 2019 and we started working on retooling it in 2018. That's when we started to talk on a regular basis and became friends. I'm happy from a personal standpoint that you decided to go this course and continue your dad's legacy with the business. I know a lot of other people are as well. You've blessed a lot of people with not only his legacy but your own because you've created your own in our industry of direct selling or network marketing or multi-level or whatever you want to call it, self-development at the end of the day. Many other people use self-development books.
Let's talk about that a little bit because our book, Leave Nothing to Chance got a life of its own. It's interesting. You put these things together, as you well know from all the books you've authored that we'll talk about in a moment as well. In that book, when you first read our script, which one of the principles grabbed you?
The first thing that grabbed me, and for those of you that haven't read the book, is the story of John and Foster. You got to trust somebody and you got to know there's a value congruence there. I didn't know nearly as much about Foster, but to understand where your convictions and values were. I was like, “Respect to my peeps.” It was wonderful. That's the first part of it. There are two that go hand in hand and for different reasons. The first one to me was principle two, listen to your reason. It's the heart of the matter. One of the reasons when I finally realized why my father never asked me to come to take over the business was he knew that it had to be my decision.
On his deathbed, if a father asked a child, “Would you come back and run the business?” They're going to say yes, even if they don't feel it. He didn't tell me that because he knew my heart had to be in it. When I came to him two days before he immigrated to heaven and I said, “I'm going to come back,” he squeezed my hand and he whispered because he couldn't talk anymore. He said, “I know you'll take it to places I never could have gone.” That was it. That was the whole hand-off. One of those things was he knew that running your own show is great, but you're dealing with people and its life on Earth.
There are always going to be problems. He knew that as I got into all the intricacies of running an existing second-generation family business or in a field that I was unfamiliar with, he knew there'd be days where I'd question it. As long as he knew it was my decision to come back and do this, I would always go, “I may want to quit but I'm not going to quit,” because I made this commitment. My heart is in it. For anybody out there, when you go all-in into something, you're unstoppable. You're so single-minded on purpose and mindset, and it takes time. As I said in the beginning, I did it because I was very fiercely loyal to my father's reputation and brand. I did it more to put a hedge of protection around it, but then I realized, it's more than that.
I have to be completely all-in with this personal development industry or I can't do it. Once your heart’s in it, you're unstoppable. You don't care about noes. You wake up and you hit the ground running in the morning. You wake up in the middle of the night because you get some great ideas because you're all-in. If you don't see value in it, it won't last. If you're doing this because your friend told you, “You need another means of income. You need to do this.” You pivot with purpose not at pain because when you pivot on purpose, that's when it sticks. That's my number one thing.
The second one is as important, principle nine, showing love for others. The Bible clearly says, “Love the Lord with all your heart, mind and soul, and then love others.” You're in a field where you're recruiting people to promote a product you're selling. When you realize that you love people, you love giving them freedom, and you love restoring health to them, you're not selling them anything. It's that you care about them. It's like the gospel, you can't but help to tell them about it. With personal development, even with publishing, John, even talking to you, when I hear some people's messages like yours, I love it so much. I look and see, “This message needs to get out to other people.”
It's not about, “If I sign this many authors and I make this much money, I can live on it.” It's about our love for getting wonderful transformational messages out to humanity. I'd say the two of them is knowing your focus and then you got to have love. Even if you have your focus, it's a tough world out there. There are some mean people and nasty people along the way that you're going to meet. Not to mention the crack you get from being in certain industries and people second-guessing and judging you. Without love, it gets pretty hard.
You go back to Paul's words to the Corinthians. That's the most important thing. Sometimes it's hard in business. There are days, people and circumstances. Let's talk about that a little bit more. You grew up around books. Go back in time. What was the first book that grabbed the young Tracey and said, “Let me read this. Let me mark it up because it's that valuable.” What was the first one?
We always read up. There are a couple of books that I clearly remember reading. My dad was always like, “You need to read biographies or personal development,” even as a kid. He did let us touch some fiction and I'm going to hit on one of those books. One thing I loved was Hinds’ Feet on High Places which is very Pilgrim's Progress-ish. All about little much afraid. It's a metaphor about going through life and the bad things that can happen but we have our heavenly father. That was a beautiful parable that as a young child and a young Christian let me know that in life, you're going to go through certain hurdles. There are going to be bad things that will happen, but it's all part of the course and you are protected.
Leadership And Legacy: It's not just pie in the sky to write your PhD. You have to actually go out and study something.
That was important for me and why I was very non-risk averse. Why I would go to war? I’m the first volunteer for anything because I'm like, “We only have one life and if this life gets extinguished and it does for all of us, then we transition over to eternal life and perfect bodies. I get to be the astronaut I always wanted to be.” That was one of them. Pilgrim's Progress was pivotal. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. I was always like, “Even if I feel like having a bad attitude, I was made in God's image. How can I be down?” That was a big one.
The other one was Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics. I read that as a kid. It was pivotal. For those of you who don't know him, he was a cosmetic surgeon for 40 years. He finally realized that you can't fix people from the outside in. You can only fix people from the inside out, which now would be pure heresy. It taught me, “It's all about in here.” My other favorite author as a kid was C.S. Lewis. He still is. I read The Space Trilogy, the first one was Out of the Silent Planet, which was profound for me because it had such religious symbolism in it.
What it taught me for those of you who read it is the Silent Planet is Earth and the whole rest of the heavens, there was only begotten Son. There's only one planet that fell and we're living on it. I thought that was so cool that we have God that created the whole universe. We know what happened in our space. We know it's temporary. We read Revelation 20, 21, to 22, and we know how this is going to end. That was also cool to help me realize that.
You have to understand the nature of a fallen man because otherwise you go through life and you can't wrap your head around some of the things that go on. You can't truly love people because the only way we're capable of doing that is through Christ. Those were the books early on. A lot of parables, allegories and deeply religious theological themes about God and Christ laying down in his life for us. No matter what we were going through, we always had Him around us and advocating for us. That was pretty big as a child coming up.
Lewis had a big impact on me too. The appeal to me for that matter because the first book I read on self-development was Dr. Peale. Ironically, I was in the hospital in New York about twelve blocks from the Crystal Collegiate Marble Church. That was the name of his church and we went one Sunday and we got to hear him preach. He was an old man then and I'll never forget this. One of the things he has in that book is if you think you have problems, go stand outside the local funeral home or nursing home.
You put it in perspective and work backward from there. Whatever problem you have, as long as you're upright, you're probably going to solve it. We have a lot in common as far as that. Louis’ statement about the fact that we read to know we're not alone. For everything you do and I do for a living, and we try to get people to read. All leaders are readers. Let's talk about that a little bit. You made a decision a few years ago after all this fast education life experience. With a business to run every single day, to go back to school and get another degree in leadership. Let's talk about that a little bit. Where did you do that? Tell us a little bit about it.
In 2015, I made the decision to go back and earn my PhD in leadership through Lancaster Bible College. I had been on the board of Lancaster Bible College since I came back home in 2009 and Lancaster, Pennsylvania is where my parents met. My father was born in Alabama. My mom's from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lancaster was always a beautiful space because that's where my parents met each other and where my older brothers and sisters were born. I was on the board and I knew they were rolling out a PhD program. One of the things I had always wanted since I was a little girl was a PhD.
There were times where I almost flunked out of school because I didn't see the value in it. I'm a better student now. As I came back, I noticed a lot of people in the audience had PhDs. I thought, “If I'm going to be a subject matter expert, I should earn the terminal degree.” I did. I went back and started in 2015. The other thing was I had been back in the business for about six years and I was confused as to what I was supposed to be doing. I didn't feel like I was getting any traction. I thought, “I’m going to take this time and I'm going to go back to school.”
I did the same thing back from 2004 to 2006 when I got my MBA. That's when the tech was booming and then it sunk. It would boom and it would sink. During one of the sinking times, I'm like, “I’m going back to school.” I thought, “I don't know where to go in the future but I do know right now that I'm going to invest in my learning and I want the PhD.” I want that credibility. I want to put the mental grit. I want to go through the process. I earned it. I'm back in 2019 in leadership and got to dive in and study something that was deeply interesting to me, which is followership.
It's interesting too because certainly with the military background and the father that you had and the mother that you had, the upbringing that you had, you were around leadership constantly. Sometimes it may be forced but at the end of the day, you were around leadership and it's interesting. Give me one of those Saul of Tarsus moments where you probably study and go, “I lived that already. I'm now learning about it but I actually lived it.” Give me one of those.
I'm about three years into it and I'm studying it and I love it. I loved hearing the theory behind leadership because the theory is built on grounded research. It's not just pie in the sky. To write your PhD, you have to go out and study something. You can't talk about it and say, “This person said this.” Opinions don't matter in dissertations. Everything must be cited and grounded. Before I even started, one of the things that I realized and it hit me like a ton of bricks was there is a world of difference between being a leader and engaging in leadership. For those of you out there who are maybe like, “How could you not know that?”
I was used to running my own ship, but that's not what leadership is about. I had my stuff squared away and I was conscientious. I was a good leader but I didn't understand the process of leadership, which is not about my skillset but honing in on who are the best people that I need. If I'm captain of the ship, I have to make sure that I recruit, train, correct and rebuke the people to be on the team. That was pivotal for me. I finally get it because every time I would hear about leadership, I would put it in my lens about how I would process it. It doesn't matter. I am one, a leader and we all have to be at least a leader of our own selves. We're all leaders but leadership is you're on the ship of a ton of leaders.
You've got all these other people. You have to act as cohesive organizational citizenship where it's no longer about any one person but about this collective. It hit me. I felt bad for a little because I thought, “How stupid and how wrong have I been?” I did the best I could and we are all works in progress. It was different. When you realize that, anybody out there growing their business, you can't grow your business without growing your people. Otherwise, you'll be an awesome army of one and that's not what you're in this for. None of us is meant to do it on our own. For leadership, it was about getting incredibly intentional about who are the right characters, personalities and traits that I need to bring in because you can teach anybody anything. It got me focused on who brings out my greatness as a leader and which followers gel with how Tracey is as a leader. I got much more intentional about that.
You've written now a number of books. How many books have you written in total? You got me beat. I'm not going to catch you not in this lifetime. I think I've said everything I had to say. Now I got one more I'm working on. Let's talk about your latest book Spark, which we've used as part of our book club. You did a great seven-week course with some of our leaders in our business which we appreciate very much. Some of my people are independently now working with you as part of your book club. Tell us about Spark a little bit.
Knowing people like Ken Blanchard and Henry Cloud, all my favorite authors, they took their dissertation studies and wrote books on them. Ken Blanchard was all the situational leadership and stuff like that. In the back of my mind, I knew you would have this very heavy academically robust thing that I have this book, but you tease that out into being relatable and generalizable to your generic layman because what's the point of knowledge if you and I can understand it and apply it. I think it was Einstein that said, “If you can't explain it to a four-year-old, you don't understand it well enough.”
Part of it was after my dissertation, I thought, “This was the crux of Spark.” My dissertation was on self-efficacy, which is motivation. It’s like lightning in a bottle. Why are some people incredibly resilient and other people are incredibly deflated? Some people are like an orchid. They're very beautiful and cool but the minute you look at them wrong, or you put them in the wrong space, they just die and they're gone. Other people are like dandelions, where you have a seed and all it gets is heat and carbon dioxide, and yet it grows. Why are some people dandelions and other people orchids? That's what I studied. Out of that came the book Spark, which was the 5 Essentials to Ignite the Greatness Within because resiliency, adaptive capacity, your ability to regenerate comes from an intrinsic spark.
Something has to light off in you where you're like, “That stank but I shall live to fight another day.” I came up with the five tenets, which is the singularity. It is why I loved purpose number two because it's got to be your singular focus. What is your best and highest purpose to be on this Earth? Persistence, and you talk a lot about persistence in your book. That's what I have to bring to the table. I have to bring my vision and my grit. Nobody can do the work for me. My father couldn't tell me, “Tracey, I want you to take the company to do this with it.” That's not my purpose. That's his purpose for me. He's in heaven so nobody can do the work for me.
This is what we bring and this is what I found in my doctoral study, but then you need the externals. There are two sides to every coin and A stands for advocates. You're my advocate, John. The people in your group are my advocate. You need your champions. You need the people that are getting on your podcast that are having you on their podcast, your advocates that want your success more than you do. Resources, the tools, the branding, the website, the product knowledge. You got to have the tools to execute the vision and the knowledge, which is what we're talking about. You don't know what you don't know. Every day you're going to be faced with new things and all the answers to everything that we need to figure out are out there. You just got to find it. That was the crux of Spark as a result of my PhD.
Leadership And Legacy: You can't grow your business without growing your people, because otherwise you'll just be a really awesome army of one.
Let's talk about something along these same lines. You've worked with a lot of people in a lot of different walks of life. I've spent most of my career in two areas, network marketing and a little bit in sports. You've touched different industries and occupations. Would you agree with me on the following statement and if so, elaborate. All leaders in any of those walks of life, be it military, network marketing, sales, the high-tech world that you were in for a while, and a lot of people in the ministry, all leaders in all of those different industries and world are readers.
One thousand percent and here's why. My dad said, “You're going to be the same person five years from now that you are today, except for two things. The people you meet and the books you read.” Mental plasticity. The mind is the greatest gift that we have. We have the mind of Christ. You must keep developing that. We exercise our bodies and our muscles. I love sports. I love working out but you got to exercise the mind too. If you're not constantly learning, at the speed of business that's going on right now, with all the different technologies, all the different regulations, and all the different interlocking of society, you are going to be so far behind. You won't even know what hit you. This is similar to the speed of sound right now.
You need to know how to make decisions based on the speed of sound, and the fact that everybody lives in a fishbowl. That's part of it, you have to keep up. The other thing too is the art of regeneration means that every day I should be unlearning something I thought I knew and relearning something new. If you're in leadership, people are like, “You have to be the smartest person in the room.” I'm like, “You should be the most hungry to be learning and modeling that for other people.” I always surround myself with people that are smarter in certain ways than me, tactical, maybe technical.
If you are a leader, you better be developing your strategy and your future vision. That comes from reading, blogs, trade journals, listening to the podcast, calling up other leaders and saying, “What would you recommend?” All this comes from learning because we don't know what we don't know. Deming has my favorite quote. He says, “Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.” You will be left in the dust and then some, and you won't even know what hit you. We have people who rely on us for our livelihood. If you want to just let the pandemic slap into you like, “I didn't see that coming,” you should've seen that coming.
Part of being knowledgeable is you're always looking for contingency planning. You're always thinking about, “What about the future of this?” You're always thinking about different things like, “If I lose this stream of revenue,” and that takes thought and learning. It's just not intuitively obvious. I couldn't agree more, and your people need to respect you as a thought leader in your field. What do we call people? They're the subject matter experts, not the most charismatic but to be me. That's one of my PhD. I want to be the one that people turn to and say, “Tracey, what do you think about this?” I can go, “Let me tell you.” I couldn't do that if I would not have amassed the knowledge.
If I stopped at your house right now, what is Tracey Jones reading? I know you're always reading something. What are you reading?
This book, Unoffendable by Brant Hansen, especially with what's going on in the world, which it has always been going on in the world. We've always been awful to one another. It's just more visible now. I'm reading Who Moved My Cheese because I'm working on my next book which is a little business parable. I'm rereading this to get the flow of this, but I want to show you this and you’ll like this. I'm working with somebody on another one of our life-changing classics on Buckminster Fuller. I'm reading through an anthology, trying to distill the wisdom of Buckminster Fuller into a book this big.
I'm looking for the core tenets and going through this. Part of having knowledge is we are the curators of wisdom. We want to introduce all the great seminal thinkers. If your knowledge has been around for 50 years or longer, you're called a seminal thinker. We need to reintroduce the greats to the upcoming generations because everybody needs to know all these incredible people out there. One of my sparklers wrote a book and sent it to me, Prevailing Hope. Tony Bouquet wrote a book, so many good books.
On that Fuller one, you'll find it interesting. I've shared this with you. I think of Fuller in one sense, Fuller the business guy, Fuller the guy that lived a long time, Fuller the guy that was known in so many different areas and respected. I never knew his role in the nutrition world and some of the work that he did with carbon, which is becoming a big area of nutrition. Interestingly enough, Nikolai Tesla who the car is named after also dabbled in the nutrition world for a long time. It's interesting how some of these people were so smart in many different areas. They're gone but their work lives on.
You're in a science-based company. You're always going to be around people that are trying to look for the next great things. We're still discovering stuff about our world, the cosmos, our bodies. If we think we know everything, we haven't even scratched the surface of it. There's so much more knowledge out there to be acquired. That's what leadership is about.
Tracey, I’ll let you have the last word on this. A lot of people are going to read this that are maybe economically hurting. They're looking perhaps at our industry, the network marketing, perhaps for the first time. Perhaps they've been displaced from a job after many years that’s no doing of their own, this whole COVID craziness. The flip side of that is perhaps they're a young person that's looking and saying, “I'm looking for something to do with my life.” What's the best place for them to start their self-development program or their reading program? Where do they start? That is something that's never been answered. I'm asking the same questions redundantly in all these interviews. We all found a book by accident. Somebody handed us a book. We didn't go to the library and go, “Where's the self-development section?”
You might, after the fact but initially, somebody touched you as we talked about earlier. Where do they start? That 60-year-old who was in a business or a job that's no longer going to be there for whatever reason, or that 25-year-old who may have all those internet skills and all that other stuff, and they know how to work all these gadgets but they have no idea how they're ever going to support themselves, where do they start that most important step of self-development, reading comprehension, etc? Where do they begin?
You can always start by googling the top 25 personal development books of all time. I like mixing the old and the new. In my dissertation, you had to have stuff that was only two years old in research. You had to go back to the greats that founded the theory of leadership that you were working on. I would google it and say, “What are the top ten leadership?” You're going to get Think and Grow Rich, See You at the Top, The Power of Positive Thinking and How to Win Friends. Probably Life is Tremendous is in there. Those are all incredible books. The other thing is if you've got somebody that you think has it together, I bet they’re readers. Ask them and say, “What book changed your life?”
If you get it, you start reading it and it's not doing it for you. You don't have to finish it. Different people are going to be drawn to different types of leadership books. I get some leadership books and people are like, “You're going to die when you read this. I can't get past three pages. It's not my thing.” I tell people to remain open and there are many great leadership blogs. There are many people out there now that all of a sudden are realizing personal development and starting to get into it. They're curating the wisdom. I get Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Og Mandino. They're the classics.
Thank you for joining us, Dr. Tracey Jones. This is John Solleder, host of the Leaving Nothing to Chance. Dr. Jones, thank you again. As always, lots of words of wisdom.
Thanks, John. I'm honored to be here.
Thank you.