Polish Power Teaches You How To Polish Your Personal Persona

Ted Nicholas: The heroes in my life are mostly authors of books and a few speakers and I will identify a few of them. Some are the business men who were the early pioneers in America.

I think that America is really the country that has shown that entrepreneurship, given free reign, can produce miraculous results.

The early people, like Andrew Carnegie, Bernard Gimble, and Henry Ford and others that I've mentioned in other interviews that I've done with you are the ones that are my heroes, because they have shown me not only great accomplishment but that setbacks or failures did not dissuade them from ultimately succeeding.

In addition, there have been a few seminar speakers that have been highly influential to me. I was privileged, for example, to be in the audience of Napoleon Hill, before he passed away. He spoke from the platform and ultimately his books that I read were greatly influential to me.

Also greatly influential to me was the late Joe Cossman. When I was in my mid-twenties, there was a fellow by the name of; I believe it was E. Joseph Cossman who wrote a book called "How I Made a Million Dollars in Mail Order."

I went to his seminar and what I was so impressed by, is here is this millionaire, good-looking, articulate fellow who was so interested in the audience and what the audience got out of his presentation that I made him a personal hero.

I had the wonderful privilege of speaking with him on the platform of a cruise that we were on. As a matter of fact, it was a marketing cruise in about 1998 or 1999. I got to meet him and interact with him personally, and I was so pleased that he considered me one of his heroes. So it was a great relationship.

Other heroes to me have been sports heroes. I've always been interested in physical things and sports and I've liked people like Bill Tilden, reading about him and seeing his videos. Great tennis players, I'm very interested in tennis. Also baseball players like Babe Ruth have been tremendous heroes.

Football players and also football coaches have been great heroes of mine. My high school coach was such a hero. He was Russell Coleman, who later became the principal of the school. I had to be on a team and we were state champions in our particular division. He was just such a disciplinarian. I learned the concept from him of "tough love."

He was so tough, such a disciplinarian, but at the same time, he loved us. He could be tough with us and he loved us. I've tried to be in life, working with employees and all, to be loving with all my people but also expecting a very high standard.

If the people were not living up to, not just my standard but a standard that they and I had mutually developed, if they didn't live up to it, I tried do be a executive or entrepreneurial leader that was like my coach. I learned a lot of that from my coach.

Basically what I learned was that I could be kind and loving as well as tough at the same time. So those were just a few of some of my major heroes.