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Good afternoon, and thank you for being here.
Joe Griffith is a native of Ennis, Texas who is a graduate
of Navarro Junior College and East Texas State University
where he received a degree in finance in 1965.
He has been a comedian, a movie actor, a commercial
pilot, a real estate developer, stockbroker,
co-host of America's first ever television stock market
program, and a featured artist on SiriusXM Live USA Channel.
Since 1971, Joe, as a renowned motivational speaker, has
delivered his message of hope to over 3,000 audiences.
He is here today to ask the question, would you hire you?
Please welcome Joe Griffith.
Thank you, Landon.
Appreciate it.
Well, I tell you he gave me a real nice introduction.
But I have to admit something that I normally don't admit.
But I'm at the age where you can admit this.
He left out something in that introduction.
Now, I graduated with it from this university with a record
that no one could ever beat.
They can tie it.
But they can't beat it.
I had the lowest grade point average you could possibly
have and graduate from a university.
Now, some of you may tie that record.
But you will never beat my record.
So if I'm not the smartest tack in the box, how come I
was successful and accomplished those and other
things that he told you about.
That's what I want to tell you.
I know some things that you don't know because I didn't
know them when I was your age.
And these are things that'll make your life more productive
and make it better.
One of the things is you have to learn to be unique.
And by that I mean you have to be different from other people
in a positive way.
I'm going to tell you how I learned that.
When I was 18 years old, a freshman in college, I entered
a talent show as a comic.
There were 20 people in the show.
I was number 19 on the program.
The first through 18 and number 20 were all piano
players and singers.
And when they introduced me as a comic, the crowd went nuts.
And the reason they went nuts is because I was different
from everybody else.
So if you want to be really successful in life, you have
to learn to do what I'm doing right now.
Let me give an example of why it's important.
When you graduate from this college, say you came here,
these are your assets, and this is your liabilities.
And when you graduate from college, you're going to have
assets more than your liabilities.
I'm talking about not financial, but personal assets
and liabilities.
So you have these.
And now, you have more assets than when you
got out of high school.
But later on, you've got to figure out how to turn these
liabilities to a lesser percentage.
And the quickest way to do that-- what's the number one
fear everybody has?
Public speaking.
You learn to do that, you have just taken a big edge over
everybody else.
And that's the way for you to be unique.
I had a friend of mine that graduated from SMU with a
banking degree, went to work for the big bank in Dallas,
the lowest job in the lowest place he could go.
And he noticed after about a year and a half that they were
having American Institute of Banking speech contest.
And he entered that contest.
And he won the Dallas contest, the first one on the way to
regional and national.
He won it because nobody else showed up.
So sometimes just showing up will make you successful when
it comes to something like speaking.
He eventually wound up winning the national championship for
the American Institute of Banking all because he wasn't
afraid to stand up in front of people.
Who else knew about this?
Well, it was in every newsletter.
Everybody in the bank began to know who he was, including the
chairman of the board who invited him up to eat lunch in
the executive dining room.
He was no longer the guy down in the bottom of the basement.
He was somebody they took an interest in.
And they saw him having some potential.
And they wanted him to be a part of their bank.
About 10 years later, he was running a holding company of
30 different banks in the Dallas area all because he
made himself unique.
So this is why it's important to understand assets and
liability--
your personal, not money.
I'm not talking about money and debt.
I'm talking about your personal assets and liability.
The more you can turn liabilities into assets, the
quicker you will become a successful person.
It's really a very simple thing.
Your finance professor-- where is he?
You know about assets and liabilities.
And when you take finance, you know about that.
I majored in finance here.
So that's how I use that analogy is I see how
important it is.
But there's something else you've got to have.
And I'm going to deal this to you here today.
I'm going to deal you four aces.
I know some of you have the look that you've
played poker before.
If you have four aces, you have a winning hand, right?
I'm going to deal to you a winning hand in life.
Remember, I had the worst grades you could have and
graduate from college.
You're going to have better grades than I did.
So I'm going to show you how I overcame my college years to
become a successful person.
So we're going to have A-C-E-S. That's going to
represent the aces.
The first is the A. And that is attitude.
Your attitude will determine your altitude in life.
Now, think about that.
Your attitude will determine your altitude in life.
So it's very important to have a positive attitude.
Before we go any further, I want to define what I mean by
success, so we'll all know we have the same meaning.
Success is when preparation meets opportunity.
Let me say that again.
Success is when preparation meets opportunity.
I'll give you a personal story of a very good friend of mine
that I grew up with.
He went to Texas Tech, majored in industrial engineering.
He graduated from college and went to work
for the phone company.
About five years into his career, they went to a fellow
two doors down from him and said, we want you to go to
Little Rock, Arkansas and run the phone company.
He said, I don't think I want to do that.
So they go down the hall to my friend, two doors down, and
said, we need you to go run the phone company in Arkansas.
And his response was, when do you need me down there?
One had a bad attitude because he wasn't prepared.
And the other one was prepared.
And when the opportunity came, he took it.
When he was 47 years old.
He was chairman of AT&T. He went straight up the ladder
because he was always ready and prepared
for the next step.
And that's how we always have to continue to prepare.
Not only that.
When he retired from AT&T, when he was 67, President
Obama hired him for $1 to go run General Motors and bring
them out of bankruptcy.
Because they knew he knew how to do it.
And he wrote a book called, Saving an American Icon.
You see, he was ready.
So you've got to be ready.
You've got to be prepared because opportunity doesn't
always come back.
You have to be ready when it happens.
The other thing is you've got to have a positive attitude.
Now, let me give you how I first heard this.
The summer before my junior year at college here, I worked
in a tag factory in Ennis, Texas from 3 o'clock in the
afternoon until 11:00 at night, seven days a week for
93 straight days.
From 3 o'clock to 11:00 at night in that hot sun in the
tin building making about $0.90 an hour.
At the end of the summer, the president come around to all
of us and say, who wants to work here next summer?
He came to me, and I said, I'm not going to
work here next summer.
He said, why not?
I said, I didn't learn anything.
He paused and said, yeah, you did.
And I kind of smart-*** said, really?
What did I learn?
He said, you learned you don't want to do this the
rest of your life.
So sometimes, learning what you don't want to do will
guide you toward where you really want to be.
Now, when I got in the Navy-- we were talking
about the Navy earlier--
when I got in the Navy two years after that event, I'm on
an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean.
I'm standing in the chow line talking to a guy that had been
on board ship about a year.
I'd only been on board ship for about a month.
He said, Joe, how do you like it on here?
I said, I hate it.
I hated it every minute of it.
I can't believe the Navy's going to waste
two years of my life.
Two years of the prime part of my life,
they're going to waste.
And he just looked at me very calmly and said, Joe, you're
the only one who can waste these two years.
That's when I really had a wake up call.
You're going to have people give you wake up
calls in your life.
And they happen to be there at the right time.
And as I told you, I graduated with honors here--
but the other kind of honors.
And so I went to the library and got all the books to read
that I had never read when I should have in
high school and college.
And I started looking up words I didn't know.
I looked up over 300 words.
So I got my vocabulary up to about 325 after looking up
those 300 words.
And I still use some of those words today.
Also, we had airplanes flying off the carrier all the time.
So instead of sitting down there and my office just
complaining about everything, I went up and watched them
take off, and finally got somebody to let me
take off with them.
And I started getting interested in flying.
And when I got out of the Navy, I became a pilot, owned
an airplane, had 1,000 hours of flying time.
All because in that chow line, he told me, you're the only
one that can waste those two years.
You see, my situation didn't change.
What changed was my attitude.
And that's the only thing we can control in our lives is
our attitude.
The other thing about attitude--
you need to find a mentor.
When I joined the Sigma Chi fraternity here, they gave me
a big brother.
If you join a sorority, they're going to give you a
big sister.
And why do they do that?
To mentor you through the process and make
you a better member.
So everybody needs somebody to show them the way to make the
trip a little easier.
When I was a stockbroker, I passed all the exams.
I got my license.
And I now was allowed to lose everybody's money.
I had a license, but I had no experience.
But there were people in my office that had a lot of
experience.
And whenever I decided to do something, I would
always go ask them.
Carl, would you buy this stock?
No.
I said, well, why?
It looks good.
They got great earnings and everything.
I don't care about the earnings.
Look at where they come from.
85% of their sales come from one company.
And if they decide they don't want to do business there,
you've lost all your money.
What if I hadn't asked him that question?
So always have a mentor.
I've had them.
I've had hundreds of mentors.
Some were longer than others.
Some were shorter than others.
One of my mentors was the guy in the chow line on the
aircraft carrier who said, you're the only one that can
waste these two years.
So it's all about your attitude.
Now, that's the A, is your attitude.
The second ace I'm going to give you is C. And that's for
commitment.
Now, when they tell me in the career development office a
lot of people never come by the career development office
to find out what to do next that they're graduating.
And I said, I know why they don't come.
Well, why?
We don't know.
I said, because they don't know what
they want to do next.
Because when you pick a major, what do they give you?
A degree plan.
They gave you a plan with a step by step of how to get to
where you want to be for your ultimate goal, a degree.
Now, I got bad news.
And I got good news.
The bad news-- no one's ever going to
give you a plan again.
You're going to have to come up with your own plan.
And that's the good news.
Now, plans are important because plans
lead you to a goal.
You have to have a goal and a plan to achieve that goal.
Boone Pickens is a legendary billionaire oil man that
donated a half a billion dollars to Oklahoma State.
That's how much money he has.
He said when he was a young man, his father said, son,
your mother and I have been talking.
Said, a fool with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.
We're worried you may be a fool without a plan.
So he woke up at that day and realized he
had to have a plan.
I do not know a successful person they
didn't have a plan.
I know a lot of money managers that
manage billions of dollars.
And they all have a plan.
It may be different from everybody else's plan.
But it is their plan.
And it works for them because they have a plan.
Now, here's what's fascinating to me.
And I didn't get this when I was your age.
It took me years to understand this.
People spend more time planning a vacation than they
do planning their lives.
And the reason--
they have a destination chosen for the vacation.
And that makes them have a plan on how to get there.
If you're going to be a successful in
life, you need a plan.
Now, you can alternate the plan just
like an airline pilot.
When they take off, they have a flight plan that they're
required by law to file.
Now, they may have to go around a thunderstorm.
But they know where their flight path is, and they know
how to get back to it because they know where they've
really got to go.
So decide where you're going to go.
And decide how you're going to get there.
And develop a plan.
Now, plans can change.
But you never get rid of a plan.
They can change.
But you've still got to have goals.
It's important to realize that if you don't have a goal and
you don't have a plan, you may as well just quit.
Everything else I'm telling you is not going to work.
So let's move on to the next thing.
I've given you A for attitude.
C for commitment.
People are not committed until they have something to be
committed to.
And that's why you need a goal.
And that's why you need a plan.
The third thing is E. A-C-E. What's the E?
Enthusiasm.
That means you have to have a passion for what it is you do.
If you don't have a passion or you're not on fire with
enthusiasm.
Someday, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
So why not be the one that's enthusiastic?
Because if you're enthu-- don't you like to be around
people that are excited about things?
Well, so does every boss want to hire somebody who will be
excited about being there.
So you've got to have enthusiasm and passion.
I'll give you a current story.
Maybe some of you are familiar with.
There's a young golfer named Jordan Spieth.
Jordan graduated from Jesuit High School a
couple years ago.
And when he graduated, he'd already won the US Junior Golf
Amateur Championship.
And when he was a senior, he won the US Amateur.
The only person ever to do that before in the history of
golf was Tiger Woods.
And then, he went to Texas and won the National Championship
his freshman year and dropped out with no status on the PGA
Tour, went out there because he believed in what
he wanted to do.
And he got out there.
He won a tournament.
No one's ever done that at 19 in 82 years.
Now, why was he successful?
Sure, he has talent.
But when he picked up a golf club when he was nine years
old, he knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
And that's where your passion comes from.
You find something you love.
Now, in golf and sports there's an obvious avenue to
get where you want to go--
Junior Amateur, Amateur, Pros, college and all that.
In the rest of our lives there's not always an obvious
way to see it.
A friend of mine became an insurance agent after World
War II because he didn't have the money to go to college.
He got married and had a child.
He was an insurance agent in Cleveland, Ohio.
He hated the job.
And after about eight or nine years, he
couldn't take any longer.
He always wanted to be a journalist.
But he didn't know how to get there.
So he wrote the president of his company and
said, I'm an agent.
I'm a good writer.
I need to come to your office, move to Chicago, and rewrite
the training manuals.
The guy bid on it.
He brought them up there.
He wrote all the training manuals.
And when he got through it, the man said, by the way, I
have an idea for a new magazine.
I'd like to have you be the editor.
He was prepared.
So he said, yes.
It turned out to be Success Magazine.
And his name is Og Mandino.
He wrote a column in one of those magazines because
somebody failed to turn in one.
And he had to think up something and put it in there.
An editor in New York wrote him a letter and said, if you
ever want to publish this as a book, I will publish it.
And he did.
Six months later, he turned it into a book.
And when he died about 15 years ago, it had sold over 50
million copies.
He was one of the happiest people I ever knew who used to
be one of the most unhappy people he knew because he
wasn't doing what he knew he wanted to do.
That's how important it is to be passionate.
The same thing happened to me.
When you're an entertainer, I didn't know.
When I got out of the Navy, I had won a
talent show in the Navy.
I hardly ever lost a talent show.
But I didn't know how to do anything.
There wasn't some agent there waiting to discover me and
take me to New York and make me a big shot.
So I came home and did what I didn't mind doing-- being a
stockbroker.
And then, one day when I'm 29 years old, a man was sitting
in my office, a little younger than I am now.
And he said, Joe, I spent 40 years working
for the same company.
And I wish I had done something else with my life.
And for 12 months, I couldn't sleep.
I knew my passion was calling me.
And I had to go figure out how to do it.
I still didn't know how to do what I want to be.
But I knew I had to go find it because it wasn't going to
come find me.
You'll find, opportunity is not looking for you.
You've got to go look for the opportunity.
And I wound up spending 30 years--
I'm in the speaker's hall of fame.
I got inducted in 1981 with some guy named Ronald Reagan,
all because I left to follow my passion.
You follow your passion, people will follow you.
Because that's how important it is.
So your goal and your passion is important.
I'll tell you a quick story.
A guy sitting in a park on a bench--
he had his dog with him.
And the dog sees a rabbit and took off chasing the rabbit.
And as he was barking and running across the park, other
dogs saw the dog and started chasing the dog.
And eventually, the other dogs started falling away
when they got tired.
But the dog chasing the rabbit kept on
going, and kept on going.
And finally, someone asked the old man, why did your dog keep
going when all the other dogs gave up?
He said, my dog was the only one that saw the rabbit.
You see, that dog had a goal.
The others were just running.
They didn't know where they were going or why.
So that's why it's so important to have it.
I have a good friend of mine that's 80 years old.
He played on the PGA Tour in the 1960s.
He's been teaching golf for 55 years.
Now, every country club, every driving range has a golf pro.
Some of them have two or three or four of them.
But I've seen them fly in from out of state to take a
one-hour lesson with my friend because he's so enthusiastic
about what he's doing.
At 80 years old, he's out there five,
six hours a day teaching.
Because his passion for the game rubs off on other people.
Passion will follow you.
If you don't have the passion, you're going to be following
other people.
So you really have those two choices.
So I've given you the A, the C, and the E. And we've got to
get the fourth ace I'm going to give you is service.
There's an old saying that I love.
You will get what you want out of life once you have given
enough other people what it is they want out of life.
Let me show you why I believe that.
You've heard of Walmart.
There's a Walmart store over across the street from here.
Sam Walton died.
And his estate was cut in half by state taxes.
And his four children divided the rest of it.
So there's a fourth of a half.
And today, his four children are still in the top 20 of the
four wealthiest people in the world.
The reason is Sam Walton found a way to give more people what
they wanted that anyone had ever done before in retail.
How about Bill Gates?
Dropped out of college.
Huh, I wonder how he made it.
You know why he made it?
He found his passion.
He dropped out of college to follow his passion.
I'm not saying, drop out of college.
But he knew what his passion was and if he didn't do it
then, someone else may do it or it may not get done.
Look at Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs didn't say, what kind of phone do you want?
He came up with a phone that everybody would want that made
their life so much better and less complicated.
And he died a wealthy man.
Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college also.
They followed their passion.
It's very important to follow your passion.
And all of them were serving other people.
You will get what you want once you give enough other
people what they want.
Now, I've given you four aces--
A-C-E-S. This is a winning hand.
I've seen it win over, and over, and over again.
But if you don't play the hand, you're not going to win.
So you have to play.
It's like if I gave you a free ticket on an airplane.
You've still got to get out of bed and go out to the airport
and get on the airplane or the ticket is worthless.
Now, I can tell you all these things today.
But you've got to get up, and go out to the airport, and get
on the airplane.
And these aces will change your life.
Now, I want you to be successful.
I want you to be happy in life, and do what you want,
and help other people, and you will be successful.
So go for it.
I've given you four aces, and it's how you play this hand
will determine how you're going to live the
rest of your life.
Thank you.
Does anyone have any questions for Joe.
Yes sir?
How can I lecture after this?
[LAUGHING]
That's a big compliment.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Joe, for the person that says, well, I don't know what my
passion is, do you have any guidance?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a very good question, Dale.
If you're looking for it, you'll find it.
It's like opportunity.
It's not going to come find you.
I knew what I wanted to do when I was seven years old.
I just didn't know how to do it.
I didn't understand passion at that time.
Any time a comedian was on television I
just watched them.
I studied them.
I heard things, saw things that other people watching
them didn't see.
You've got that.
There's something about that in your life, something that
you can't wait to get out of bed to do.
You'll know.
That's how you'll know what it is.
You'll know what it is.
Og Mandino found it after, you know, when he
was in his late 30s.
I found it.
I got to it when I was 30.
Jordan Spieth got to it when he was nine.
Everybody has a different time.
You know what it is you want to do.
And that's the most important thing.
There's no one way to find it.
It's personal.
And it's individual.
But everybody--
as a friend of mine used to say-- everybody has a reason
for being here.
Some of us it's just being a bad example.
And that's kind of what I've been quite a bit of my life.
But that's a very good question, Dale.
And I don't think there's an easy answer.
Everybody has to answer it for themselves.
And knowing that there is a passion for you, will
help you find it.
Joe, would you tell us about how you got comfortable
speaking before a group?
Who said I was comfortable?
Very good question.
When I got out of high school, my father made me-- before he
let me go to college-- made me take a Dale Carnegie course
and learn how to speak.
Because he was a very shy man.
And he wished he would've learned to overcome that.
And so he wanted to make sure that my brother and I learned
to overcome that.
And so when I got into college, and there was a
chance to be in a contest, a talent show, I didn't have the
fear of doing it because I had already overcome the fear.
It's like anything.
How to babies learn to walk?
They fall down a couple times.
Then, one time they just don't fall down again.
In speaking, you can't learn it in the privacy of a room.
You've got to just get up and do it and get past the initial
part of it, and it'll never be a problem.
Were any of you hoping I would be bad today?
And every speaker that doesn't know how to do this thinks
that, oh, they're going to hate me.
They're all judging me.
No.
You want the speaker to be good.
So they're not out to get you.
They're pulling for you.
Because if your bad, who suffers?
They do.
So it's not like an adversarial relationship.
Very good question.
Any Sigma Chi's got a question?
You want to know where the white cross is hidden?
Joe, would you comment on your consistency of keeping a low
grade average in college?
Dyslexia.
I didn't know I was a dyslexic until I was 42 years old.
And I saw it in the paper, never heard the word before.
And I called my general practitioner doctor and said,
what is dyslexia?
I didn't have iPads where you look everything up back in
those days.
And I went, oh my gosh.
I bet that could be me.
And then, a year later I saw another article.
And I said, oh, I think that is me.
So school wasn't my happiest time.
Let's put it that way.
But it was something I knew where I wanted to go, and I
wasn't going to let school stop me.
They told me when I was in eighth grade, I'd never get
out of high school or ever go to college.
So my goal was not to learn something.
My goal was to prove them wrong.
And so I had to grow up with that attitude or I would still
be in eighth grade somewhere.
You know, the oldest eighth grader in American or
something like that.
You know, I'm certain I'd get a
trophy for that or something.
Anybody else got a question?
I love questions.
Do you think you would've turned out the same way had
you not gone to the Navy?
No.
The Navy was--
I hated it.
But gosh.
In fact, next week, two weeks from now, a buddy and I were
in the Navy here together.
We're going to our ship reunion.
We never thought we'd ever want to see each other again,
much less talk about the Navy.
It was one of the best experiences of my life because
I had to grow up.
And we were forced to grow up.
And it happened overnight.
And we didn't like that.
But yet, we got it behind--
it's like speaking.
Once you get past the initial part of it.
You know, it's that first step.
You can take Toast Masters.
The secret to speaking is you've got to get up over, and
over, and over until it just doesn't bother you anymore.
Like now, when I was in that first talent show, I was the
least talented person in there.
Everybody else was a singer.
They'd had voice lessons for years.
Piano players had piano playing lessons for years.
They were prepared.
They were trained.
You can't learn that in a room somewhere.
You just have to get up in front of people and do it.
And eventually, you know, I found out-- like I told you--
I found out, if you can speak, you've got the jump on
everybody else.
And my dad made sure we knew how to do it.
He understood that before I understood it.
So that made a difference.
The Navy was-- you're going to go in the Navy?
No.
Well, maybe I could talk you out of it.
Come see me afterwards if you're thinking about it.
Yes?
How does like being in like a fraternity setting, how does
that prepare you-- how does it prepare you to like speak and
to interact with people?
Because you interact on sometimes a different level.
Because when you come from different places, you don't
have a lot of commonality with everybody.
You come here, everybody's from a different town,
different high school, different whatever.
But in a fraternity, the school got a little smaller.
And you get to know people.
And I've kept up with a lot of them my entire life.
And I've got friends that were in other fraternities and
other colleges.
Like my friend that ran AT&T, he graduated from tech, and he
was in the fraternity came back and gave a commencement
speech just few years ago.
And the guy that introduced him was the president of the
college who had been one of his fraternity brothers.
So if you're around people, like people that are
trying to go places.
You've got a commonality.
It's a good way to deepen a friendship.
Otherwise a campus could be pretty-- how many students are
there here now?
12,000
12,000.
Dianne, how many were here when we were there.
3,200
Yeah.
By the way, this was Miss East Texas when I was over here.
Yeah.
If she would have gone to Texas, they would have never
heard of Farrah Fawcett down there.
I'll promise you that.
Anyway, I appreciate your time.
And I appreciate you coming.
And remember aces.
That's it.