Foreword – Achievement IQ® Moments
Foreword
How It All Began
Prior to embarking on the Achievement IQ 2007 Vision Quest Tour, I hosted a radio show in Phoenix, Arizona, known as the Achievement IQ Show. As the host, I would call highly successful individuals in the Phoenix area to set up interviews with them.
Anyone who has ever done a lot of cold calling knows it’s extremely difficult to get people to want to talk with you when you call them out of the blue. However, I noticed two things when I started calling these highly successful individuals:
Nearly all the people I called would listen to me. I believe I was only hung up on once; and
Approximately fifty to seventy-five percent of them (depending on the industry) agreed to appear as guests on my show.
To me, those numbers were staggering. It told me I must be doing something right, but I had to figure out what it was. After much reflection, I realized people were agreeing to appear as my guest for two main reasons:
I was offering them something of value; and
I was asking for nothing in return (I wasn’t trying to sell anything).
The other thing I learned from meeting these individuals was that I was building my network, and filling it with “high powered” people who ran “high powered” companies. There was no doubt in my mind that building my network in this manner would have long-term, beneficial results, both for them and for me. What I needed to figure out was a way to expand this concept nationwide.
That’s how the Achievement IQ 2007 Vision Quest Tour came about. By writing this book, and profiling “high powered” individuals in it, I’d be offering them something of value. I was giving them a chance to tell their stories, and to help others learn about their successes. The only thing I needed to do was come up with a way to find these “high powered” people and then line them up.
To find out where successful people were located, I decided I should start reading newspapers and publications from various cities around the country. To that end, I began collecting and reading the various business journals from more than forty U.S. cities. By reading these journals, I was able to quickly identify key individuals in those cities. The rest was a matter of making phone calls.
While I made many of those calls personally, much credit must go to my in-house public relations staff, which was headed by Peter Ziebron. I had met Peter through one of my Toastmasters groups a few months earlier. After appearing as a guest on my radio show one morning, Peter was so struck with the idea behind this book, he readily agreed to assist me in finding quality individuals.
Walt Disney once said: “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” And so, more curious perhaps than I’d ever been, I began my quest.
My first stop was in Hawaii, where I met some wonderful folks, whose stories you’ll be reading. Then, once back on the mainland, my Achievement IQ 2007 Vision Quest Tour would take me on a 50-day journey down 10,292 miles of new paths – all across America. The rest is history.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Mr. Achievement – Stanley F. Bronstein
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