Nineteen-year-old Tim Sanders was out for a drive, enjoying a beautiful Texas summer day in his red Pontiac Astre when he noticed his uncle's car approach from behind him.
The two cars pulled over to the side of the road, and his uncle got out of the car and delivered news no one should ever hear: Tim's father had been murdered.
For years, Sanders grappled with the loss of his father. Feeling crushed and cheated, Sanders' poise was replaced with a burning negativity. He pursued various passions and vocations, but nothing made him happy. Sanders endured nearly 15 of these "sideways years" until his grandmother knocked some sense back into him.
Billye King was a senior in high school when the stock market crashed in 1928. She was raised on the values of generosity and unwavering kindness, and instilled those ideals into her grandson, Tim. These were lessons he forgot in the wake of his father's death, but once he rediscovered the power of his grandmother's morals, he returned with a new attitude and achieved unprecedented success. In five short years, Sanders went from the breaking point to breaking the bank, earning a job as chief solutions officer at Yahoo.
We caught up with Sanders before he headed out to Dallas for the Inc. Leadership Conference starting today. (Get more information on the conference.) Sanders' latest book, Today We Are Rich, describes how to break out of the doldrums and power your career forward. Feeling stuck in neutral is a common sentiment among entrepreneurs, but Sanders believes to have found the perfect recipe for lasting achievement and happiness. To Sanders, the key to everlasting business success all boils down to one word: confidence.
Your book is very inspirational, but also very personal. What inspired you to write this?
It was October 2008. I think the market was down 5000 points that day. I was in Atlanta doing a big speaking gig, and everybody was just so terrified. This is the same group of people I'd seen a few years ago: top of the market, incredibly confident in themselves. And something just triggered inside me that said I need to write a book about how some people are confident at the bottom and others aren't. Some people are the phoenix, others are the fodder.
It just caused me to think about that library on the family farm of classic books written by, who I think were the original motivators: Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich; Claude Bristol, The Magic Of Believing; Dale Carnegie, How To Stop Worrying and Start Living; Norman Vincent Peale, Guide To Confident Living. The last two aren't the most well-known books by those authors, but they were written during this time to help people cultivate confidence through lifestyle design. What I didn't realize until 2008 was that confidence is the underlying foundation for everything: generosity, the willingness to take risks, clarity of thought, being persuasive and charismatic to others—it all comes down to confidence.
There are two kinds: there's circumstantial confidence—or, as Mark Cuban used to always say, "Everyone's a genius during a bull market"—and there's cultivated confidence, a lifestyle design principle that has to do with the information you put in your head, the conversation that comes out of your mouth, and your thoughts and deeds. So that's really what the book's about, and that's why I wrote the book.
Why do people have sideways years?
Success isn't really a destination, because you'll never get there. Talk to anyone with millions or billions, they're always thinking of the next thing. Success is a direction, and that direction is forward. And in our careers, we have those forward leap years. These are years where we either grow internally, in terms of our capability, or externally, in terms of our influence and ability to extract value.
So when you're moving forward, you're usually capturing a lot of financial value, you're gaining a lot of assets along the way—many of them intangible, such as intellectual or your network of relationships—and you have a feeling inside yourself that you have big momentum. And it feeds on itself: The more you realize it, the more you feel it, the more it improves your performance, the more you get it, the more you leverage, and that's how people really make leaps in life.
Then there are those times that something has just gone haywire in your head, and you have self-destructive thoughts, and you go backwards in your career. And that's rare, really; most people that think they're going backwards are kind of in between, and those are what we call those "sideways years."
Sideways years is where you have voices in your head sometimes, and they're triggered by voices in the real world, or what I call the "scare merchants"—on cable TV, the authors of "USA Yesterday"—these people that give you reason to be fearful as a way of drawing attention from you. What it does is it triggers the scarcity mindset inside of you. You believe there's not enough to go around, so you go from that I'm-trying-to-move-forward feeling into survival mode. Or, you just lose your fire and you don't have the ambition to move forward, as Napoleon Hill would say.
In these situations, you have a "one step forward, one step backward" type of career. Get a good job, do well initially, peter out a little bit, move to the next job. It's a cycle. But inside yourself, you know you're not moving forward. That's the one thing I'd say about everyone I've talked to who's had sideways years, is when confronted with the thought, "Am I going sideways?" they absolutely know it each and every time.
I see many of these sideways years triggered by economic adversity. It always seems to happen right after a macro-recession where the economy stops growing, and it then changes the buying behavior in almost every market, even ones not adjacent to the epicenter and millions of people come down with personal recessions. They stop growing as people because they personalize the recession.
