Winget 'charges' Powersports crowd at Dealer Expo
Maverick - Feb 20, 2011

 Larry Winget, the self-proclaimed “Pitbull of Personal Development,” challenged the Dealer Show attendees during a Saturday morning keynote presentation to “BE RESPONSIBLE!” 

After a brief excerpt of a televised interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer he arrived, stage-ready, riding a Zero electric motorcycle. “I didn’t think I’d ever ride an electric motorcycle, but change is inevitable! Embrace it!

Winget is a master of one-liners and he is funny! One minute he is self depreciating…the next he says “human beings are idiots!” “Human beings are the only living species that quit.” How many times do you see a tree get up to 5 or 6 feet and stop growing…while rationalizing that 5 or 6 feet is good enough? Human beings have a choice and they exercise their choice to quit; to be irresponsible, to smoke (Winget says every cigarette take 13 minutes off your life), to make excuses, and to quit. “Humans beings are the only species that choose to do less, be less, and have less!”

He doesn’t consider himself a motivational speaker, but simply tells it like it is. Winget relayed his core motivational values of “shut up, stop whining, and get a life” to shock his audience into action. “Nobody cares how good you used to be,” says Winget. Success, money and fun are not that hard. Thinking about success and talking about success won’t make you successful and rich. Getting off your butt and doing something about it is what makes a difference. According to Winget.

Winget focuses much of his ‘telling it like it is’ on established concepts. One of his primary targets is a word heard in the business every day: passion. Winget explains that passion won’t carry your business forward because simply wanting something really badly won’t make it come true.

“I know lots of people that are passionate and are the best at doing something that doesn’t need to be done,” he said.

Instead, the road to success is simply a matter of hard work and excellence. “There are no ‘secrets’ of business,” explained Winget, “and it isn’t enough to just be good at what you do. Hard work and excellence are the only things you need, but you need both.”

Winget then proceeded to give his versions of the secrets of many business subjects: on customer service, “be nice.” On closing a sale, “ask.” And what if they say no? “Ask again!” “If they say no again, go ask someone else.”  On employees, “you can’t make employees happy…it’s their choice.” “The last thing I want is someone to happy me into being happy!”

He closed by explaining his views on what a business owner truly needed for success: the willingness to sacrifice and the ability to remain flexible.

“Success is about sacrifice, what you’ll sacrifice to get there – stack the deck in your favor,” he explained. For example, “you don’t get skinny; you give up what makes you fat. You don’t get rich; you give up what keeps you poor.” 

Winget believes you need to take responsibility of your situation and remain flexible on how to get to your goals. “People hate change,” he said. “And people don’t change until they get uncomfortable.”

Winget concluded by saying; “nobody’s perfect…people should be themselves.”