How the Passion Test Was Born
We were lined up single file under a stairwell when he started moving down the line, stopping at each person with the same two questions: What is your dream? What do you love? When he reached me, I told him the truth. I wanted to be a speaker. I had always pictured myself leading transformation work. He paused and said that was a funny coincidence, because he and Jack Canfield were going to teach a speaker training in Austin in two months, and he'd send me a free ticket. I thought he was joking. He wasn't. He mailed it, I went, and the training turned out to be as good as he promised.
That's where the friendship started. Years later he had gone into business with Robert Allen, and he asked whether I would come on as a partner. At the time I was running the marketing division for the third largest book buyer in the country, a company we eventually sold to Reader's Digest for $360 million after seven years. Mark figured I'd be a good fit for what they were building. So I joined Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen.
Together we created a program called The Enlightened Millionaire and started staging conferences around it. The first one was in La Jolla. My job was all of it: logistics, structure, every unglamorous piece behind the curtain. Mark and Robert were the headliners, the ones the audience came to see.
The day before the event, the two of them walked into my office and told me they had landed a TV appearance and wouldn't make the first two hours of the morning. I asked who was supposed to speak in their place. They laughed. You are, they said. I told them that wasn't happening, that I didn't even consider myself a speaker yet. They said I was, and they left.
I barely slept. All I had to work with was this small passion test I'd been playing around with, so I built something out of it overnight. The next morning I walked onto the stage in front of 500 of the most intimidating faces I'd ever seen, and I talked for two hours. I couldn't tell you now what came out of my mouth. When I finished, the whole room stood up. A standing ovation.
That was the real beginning of the passion test. Standing there, watching people rise out of their seats, I remember thinking I might actually have something here.