Les Brown |
Les Brown has a dream, and he is
living it. In 1986, broke and sleeping on the cold linoleum
floor of his office, he began to pursue a career as a motivational speaker. By
the early 1990s, he was one of the highest paid speakers in the nation. His
company, Les Brown Unlimited, Inc., earned millions of dollars a year from his
speaking tours and the sale of motivational tapes and materials. Brown's
audience is wide: from Fortune 500 companies to automobile workers to prison
inmates to special-education classes to ordinary individuals. His mission is to
"get a message out that will help people become uncomfortable
with their mediocrity," he explained to a reporter for Ebony
magazine. "A lot of people are content with their discontent.
I want to be a catalyst to enable them to see themselves having
more and achieving more."
Brown's message works because
"he kindles the warmth, humor, and well being in a society that's
seen the gradual disintegration of families and mounting
technology and alienation in industry," Maureen McDonald wrote in the Detroiter.
Brown knows the function of the able individual in a worn community: he
delivers not only nurturing words but money as well, donating 20 percent of his
business revenues to fund drug prevention programs. His message also works, and
for a stronger reason, because he is not an outsider, an academic who offers a
theoretical prescription. "I can't lecture on something
unless I am living it," Brown wrote in his 1992 bestseller
Live Your Dreams. He connects with other people's lives-their
misfortunes and missed opportunities-because he has been through it all and
triumphed.
Humble Beginnings
Leslie Calvin Brown and his twin
brother, Wesley, were born on February 17, 1945, on the floor of an abandoned
building in Liberty City, a low-income section of Miami, Florida. Their birth
mother, married at the time to a soldier stationed overseas, had become
pregnant by another man and went to Miami secretly to give birth to her sons.
Three weeks later, she gave them away. At six weeks of age, both boys were
adopted by Mamie Brown, a 38-year-old unmarried
cafeteria cook and domestic. The importance of her entrance into his life,
Brown concludes, was immeasurable. "Everything I am and
everything I have I owe to my mother," he told Rachel L. Jones of the Detroit
Free Press. "Her strength and character are my greatest inspiration,
always have been and always will be."
The confidence that Brown's adoptive
mother had in him, the belief that he was capable of greatness, was not shared
by his teachers. As a child he found excitement in typical boyhood
misadventures. He liked to have fun, and he liked attention. Overactive and mischievous,
Brown was a poor student because he was unable to concentrate, especially in reading.
His restlessness and inattentiveness, coupled with his teachers' insufficient
insight into his true capabilities, resulted in his being labeled
"educably mentally retarded" in the fifth grade. It was a label
he found hard to remove, in large part because he did not try. "They said
I was slow so I held to that pace," he recounted in his book.
Teacher Encouraged Him
A major lesson Brown imparts early
in Live Your Dreams is that "there comes a time when you have to
drop your burdens in order to fight for yourself and your dreams." It was
another significant figure in Brown's early life who awakened his listless
consciousness and brought about this awareness: LeRoy Washington, a speech and
drama instructor at Booker T. Washington High School in Miami. While in high
school, Brown "used to fantasize being onstage speaking to thousands of
people," he related to Jones, "and I used to write on pieces of
paper, 'I am the world's greatest orator."'
But it wasn't until he encountered
Washington that he truly learned of the sound and power of eloquent
speech to stir
and motivate. Brown related in his book that when he once told Washington in
class that he couldn't perform a task because he was educably mentally
retarded, the instructor responded, "Do Not Ever Say That Again!
Some-one's opinion of you does Not have to become Your reality." Those
words provided Brown's liberation from his debilitating label. "The
limitations you have, and the negative things that you internalize are given to
you by the world," he wrote of his realization. "The things that empower
you-the possibilities-come from within."
Employed after high school as a city
sanitation
worker, but determined to achieve what he desired-perhaps for the first time in
his life-Brown pursued a career in radio broadcasting. He had been enthralled
throughout his life with the almost music-like patter
of disc jockeys, so he repeatedly bothered the owner of a local radio station
about a position until the owner relented. Having no experience, Brown was
hired to perform odd jobs. Firmly intent on becoming a deejay, he learned all
he could about the workings of a radio station. One day, when a disc jockey
became drunk on the air and Brown was the only other person at the station, he
filled in at the microphone. Impressed, the owner of the station
promoted Brown to part-time and then full-time disc jockey.
In the late 1960s, Brown moved to
Columbus, Ohio, where he had a top-rated radio program, and was eventually
given added duties as broadcast manager. Here his world widened. He became more
socially conscious and more of an activist, urging his listeners to political
action. Part of the motivation behind this fervor
came from Mike Williams, the station's news director and an activist who would
eventually oversee Brown's motivational speaking tours and programs. "I
thought he was a master communicator," Williams told Cheryl Lavin of the Chicago
Tribune. "I knew it was a gift. I saw him as an international figure.
I saw him in very large situations, moving audiences." But the owners of
the radio station thought Brown was becoming too controversial of a figure. He
was fired.
Became Ohio Legislator
Urged on by Williams, Brown ran for
the Ohio State Legislature, winning the seat of the 29th House District. In his
first year, he passed more legislation than any other freshman representative
in Ohio legislative history. In his third term, he served as chair of the Human
Resources Committee. But he had to leave the state house in 1981 in order to
care for his ailing mother in Florida. While in Miami,
continuing his focus on social issues, Brown developed a youth career training
program and held community meetings, speaking out on social injustice.
Again, controversies arose around
him. The Dade County state's attorney general investigated his handling of the
youth program. After a year, during which time Brown openly invited any
inquiry, the case was dropped: no improprieties were found. The motivating
factor behind the criticisms, Brown believed, was jealousy.
"A lot of people felt threatened and offended
because I came on very strong," he told Jones, "and I had an instant
following they couldn't get." This effect was not lost on Brown.
Encouraged again by Williams and by a chance encounter with motivational
millionaire Zig Ziglar, who was earning $10,000 for one-hour talks, Brown
decided to become a motivational speaker.
"Life takes on meaning when you
become motivated, set goals, and charge after them in an unstoppable
manner," Brown wrote in Live Your Dreams. It is a maxim he learned
well. When he entered the motivational speaking arena in the mid-1980s, he had
virtually nothing, having moved to Detroit with his clothes and just one tape
of his motivational speeches. He rented an office that he shared with an
attorney. He worked hard and always seemed to be the first one there in the
morning and the last one there at night. Indeed, he never left the office,
having to sleep on the cold floor because he could not afford an apartment. But
he welcomed this ascetic lifestyle. "I didn't even want a blanket
or a pallet
on the floor," he explained to Jones. "I wanted it to be hard and
cold so it would motivate me to keep striving. I didn't want to get soft."
Became "The Motivator"
Brown read books on public speaking
and studied the habits of established speakers. He first spoke to grade school
students, then high school students. Clubs and organizations followed. Less
than four years later, in 1989, he received the National Speakers Association's
highest award-the Council of Peers Award of Excellence-becoming the first
African American to receive such an honor. He was known in professional circles
as "The Motivator."
"Victories can become obstacles
to your development if you unconsciously pause
too long to savor them," Brown wrote in his book.
"Too many people interpret success as sainthood. Success does not make you
a great person; how you deal with it decides that. You must not allow your
victories to become ends unto themselves." His goal was not just to win
awards, but to inspire people to pursue their own goals.
In 1990, Brown reached for a wider
audience by recording the first in a series of motivational speech
presentations for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS-TV). He conducted
motivational training sessions not only for executives of corporations such as
American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble,
but also for prison inmates and-remembering his own back-ground-for special
education students in high schools. "We all have a responsibility to give
something back," he told a reporter for Upscale. "I am who I
am because of the relationships I have developed, because of the people who
have enriched
my life."
Brown details his life and the
relationships that have helped shape it in his book Live Your Dreams.
Much more than a simple autobiography, the book, which is divided into ten
chapters followed by written exercises in a built-in workbook,
focuses on areas of personal deficiency-such as fear, inattentiveness, and
laziness-as well as on areas of personal value, such as self-knowledge,
courage, and dreams. Brown makes vague, personal faults understandable and
ambitious virtues attainable by elaborating on them through personal or
historical narratives that are almost parable-like. He moves easily between the
ordinary and the extraordinary to emphasize his point. For instance, a
discussion about a boy who was scared of a bulldog
that constantly chased him until he realized the dog lacked teeth might be
followed on the next page by a discussion of how basketball superstar Michael
Jordan handles the pressures of being a public persona.
To prove a maxim, Brown links the worldly
with the mundane. In Live Your Dreams, he retells the stories of
Terry Anderson, the Associated Press correspondent held hostage for seven years
by Shiite Muslims, and that of an anonymous young boy who had to fight a
neighborhood bully on a school bus. For further reinforcement,
Brown sprinkles quotes throughout from historical figures such as former U.S.
president Theodore Roosevelt, American nature writer Henry David Thoreau, and German poet Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, and from personal figures such as teacher LeRoy Washington and his own
mother, Mamie.
The book's idealistic
tone is tempered by an acceptance of life's realities. "You will be
cruising along, knocking them dead, in full synchronization-and then you'll hit
the speed bumps," Brown wrote. "You miss a bus.
Your paycheck bounces. Your car won't start. That's life. Maybe it is set up
that way so that we learn and grow." Brown knows this firsthand
and that is his point: he has faced life's obstacles and has been inspired to
overcome them in quest of his own dreams, so he tries to inspire those whose
dreams are similarly thwarted by life's misadventures.
"I am intrigued by the concept
of selling people on their own greatness with the same fervor that Madison
Avenue sells them on the wondrous attributes of Nike athletic shoes, Chevy
trucks, and Calvin Klein jeans," Brown wrote in Live Your Dreams.
"What if our young people heard encouragement to dream and strive
as many times a day as they are exhorted to drink Dr. Pepper or to go to the
land of Mickey Mouse?" Brown got his chance to answer this question and
share his philosophies with his widest audience ever when his own television
talk show, the Les Brown Show, debuted in the fall of 1993. It was
short-lived, despite receiving good ratings. The program, which was Brown's
most ambitious project to date, was syndicated by King World, the same company
that distributes the popular Oprah program. "I think people are
ready to be entertained and inspired and I want to make them feel good about
themselves," he explained to Jefferson Graham of USA Today. "I
want to use TV in a way in which it's never been used before-to empower
people."
Books Became Best-Sellers
On August 29, 1995, Brown married
Gladys Knight, the famous soul singer, in a private ceremony in Las Vegas,
Nevada. They both had been married previously and between them had ten children
and seven gradnchildren. The next year, Brown released his next book, It's
Not Over Until You Win!: How to Become the Person You Always Wanted to Be-No
Matter What the Obstacle, which covered a wide array of topics ranging from
his marriage to the quality of television. A Publishers Weekly reviewer
commented, "This volume successfully translates Brown's natural charisma
from the podium
to the page." His two books together sold more than half a million copies.
After the cancellation of his
television show, Brown briefly went to work for radio station WRKS
in New York then, in October of 1996, was hired on as morning host at WBLS,
also in New York. However, in May of 1997 he announced that he would be leaving
his job to spend more time on his speaking career and to undergo treatments for
prostate
cancer. He and Knight announced the next month that they were
divorcing due to irreconcilable differences, though he claimed the
two would remain friendly.
Into 1998, Brown's empire remained
strong; he was reaping about $4.5 million per year from speaking engagements
and television appearances. His Detroit-based firm continued to serve
high-profile clients such as Chrysler, 3M, and Xerox
Corporation. "Downsizing trends and the changing global market
require people to reinvent themselves and think like entrepreneurs," Brown
stated in Black Enterprise. In addition, Brown was branching out to
train future public speakers, concentrating on promoting the field to more
minorities.
Counsel: You too can become like him by ensuring that;
1. you discover the real you.
2. you recover from the failures of the past.
3. you live in the now.
4. plan for your future even as you face the battles of today and
5. always remember that God created you. Pray to Him and always worship Him.
From
Emchis Motivational Network Crew.
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