With an estimated net worth of more than $5 billion, Amway co-founder Rich DeVos celebrated his 87th birthday this March as the wealthiest man in Michigan. Globally, he’s “only” the 239th wealthiest person.
But that’s just the start of talking about his riches. He has huge abundance in other ways, too. In one of those categories—the ability to dream—the trait, without a doubt, is one of the key ingredients that led directly to DeVos’ financial wealth.
In the “Second Semester” of Og Mandino’s University of Success, in the lesson “How to Give Your Dreams a Chance to Come True,” an excerpt is taken from DeVos’ 1975 book, Believe!
DeVos humbly notes that he is no expert on motivation, but offers straightforward views on what it takes to succeed. And it all goes back to the one-word title of his book: “I do have a firm conviction that almost anyone can do whatever he really believes he can do.”
“There are no areas of life which are immune to the combination of faith and effort,” DeVos later states. “The personal philosophy of ‘I can’ does not apply just to business but to politics, education, church work, athletics, the arts, you name it.”
When both were in their 30s, DeVos and his longtime best friend, Jay Van Andel, began the Amway business. It was just the latest in a series of business ventures, including an aviation school and a drive-in restaurant—both of which they had no experience in before launching those enterprises.
That lack of experience didn’t discourage them, and likewise for me and so many other Amway Independent Business Owners over the last half-century, the absence of any prior business ownership hasn’t stopped us.
That’s a similar path taken by many leaders in World Wide DreamBuilders who likewise possessed zero business background.
“One never knows what he might accomplish until he tries,” DeVos writes. “That is so simple that some people completely overlook it.”
I am far from mastering this issue of giving new and often-intimidating things a real try. But with each triumph that I achieve, it’s another steppingstone toward whatever could be next—if only I am willing to go through the uncertain outcome that follows each new pursuit that I attempt.
While it is tempting to poke fun at World Wide DreamBuilders’ name as hokey, it’s really not when you consider that throughout history any truly magnificent accomplishment has come only on the heels of someone’s outlandish dream.
And in partnership with Amway, World Wide DreamBuilders like Norm and Pam Kizirian nurture and create an environment for those fragile dreams to be protected, to grow and ultimately to come to fruition.
But when we lose that drive, what is it that keeps us from trying? A major point that DeVos emphasizes is that often those we are closest are the ones who put the kibosh on our dreams, if we let them.
“Why do so many people let their reams die unlived?” DeVos writes. “The biggest reason, I suppose, is the negative, cynical attitudes of other people. Those other people are not enemies—they are friends, even family members. Our enemies never bother us greatly; we can usually handle them with little trouble.
But our friends—if they are naysayers, constantly punching holes in our dreams with a cynical smile here, a put-down there, a constant stream of negative vibrations—our friends can kill us!”
It’s a great reminder that to others in my life, who are going after their dreams, I am the potential naysayer, the one who could be flashing that cynical smile or making a put-down.
And I am determined not to be what DeVos describes as the “easiest thing to find on God’s green earth… someone to tell you all the things you cannot do.”