Today I want to share with you a presentation titled “Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success.”
Richard St. John has a wide variety of professional experience, including working in scientific research and development for Nortel, researching and writing speeches for company CEOs and founding the St. John Group, an innovative marketing and communications company. He has also earned a black belt in judo, run over 50 marathons, cycled halfway around the world and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Mount Aconcagua in the Andes in Argentina.
Needless to say, Richard has plenty of experience with success. In fact, he is known as a success expert, having spent 10 years researching and writing his best-selling book The 8 Traits Successful People Have in Common: 8 To Be Great and speaking about success at events all over the world.
At the 2005 TED Conference, Richard embraced the art of brevity – which we’ve talked about before on the Inspiring Speakers Blog here and here – by cutting down what is normally a two-hour presentation on success into a three-minute talk. I encourage you to watch it.
Richard’s topic was interesting and his delivery was enthusiastic. His eight steps to success can be summed up as:
- Having passion
- Working hard
- Getting good at what you do
- Focusing on one thing
- Pushing yourself (or getting your mom to push you!)
- Serving others
- Fostering ideas
- Persisting through failure
While they are all great things to learn and to remember, I think the biggest lesson of all is that you never know where – or when – you’ll find your inspiration. In yesterday’s post on networking, I suggested that you mingle and talk to strangers whenever you get the chance, and one of the examples I gave was to chat with the person sitting next to you on your next flight. Which is precisely what Richard did when he found himself sitting next to a high school student on the flight to a TED conference.
If Richard hadn’t talked to that student – who asked him the very important question: “What leads to success?” – the question may never have occurred to him, let alone lead him to research and write a best-selling book about the topic and to travel around the world speaking about success. So, as we said yesterday, it pays to have a genuine interest in the people around you – and in what they have to say. You never know what might come of it!
Where do you find inspiration for your presentations?
