Jim Rohn

Emanuel James Rohn was born September 17, 1930 to German-Russian immigrant parents on a small Idaho farm in Caldwell. His upbringing was modest, rural, and — as he put it in thousands of lectures — the foundation of the practical Midwestern philosophy he would later teach. He dropped out of the University of Idaho after one year, married young, and by age 25 was broke, carrying debt, and stuck in a junior-level job with a pay grade below what he needed just to keep his family fed.

In 1955 he met John Earl Shoaff — a self-made millionaire, direct-sales executive, and the single most important mentor of his life. Shoaff hired Rohn into his AbundaVita nutritional-supplement distribution business. Over five years Rohn absorbed Shoaff’s entire operating philosophy — ethics, discipline, the law of averages, the power of a well-kept journal, the importance of books and mentors — and applied it with a directness that transformed his income. By age 32 Rohn was a millionaire.

Shoaff died unexpectedly in 1965. Rohn had, by that point, already begun speaking to Kiwanis clubs and Rotary chapters about the principles he had learned. In the late 1960s he transitioned to a full-time speaking career. His first paid lecture was a single-topic presentation titled Idaho Farm Boy to California Millionaire. That presentation evolved into what would become his life’s work: the multi-hour seminar he delivered in hundreds of cities across forty years under the title The Challenge to Succeed.

Rohn mentored generations of now-famous teachers. In 1977 a 17-year-old Anthony “Tony” Robbins attended one of Rohn’s seminars in his California hometown, was so impressed he approached Rohn directly, and ended up working for Rohn’s company as a promoter for four years. Tony has publicly said — many times — that Jim Rohn was the single most important mentor of his life. Mark Hughes (founder of Herbalife), Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Soul), Brian Tracy, T. Harv Eker, Les Brown, and dozens of other top-tier 20th-century American personal-development figures all trained directly under or cite Rohn as their foundational teacher.

Rohn published several books — 7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness (1985), The Five Major Pieces to the Life Puzzle (1991), The Seasons of Life (1981), and Leading an Inspired Life (1997) — but his medium was the spoken lecture. He recorded dozens of audio programs through the Nightingale-Conant organization and, in his later years, through his own imprint. His aphorisms — “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practiced every day,” “Work harder on yourself than you do on your job,” “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better” — became the shared vocabulary of nearly every American motivational speaker who followed him.

Jim Rohn died on December 5, 2009 at age 79 of pulmonary fibrosis. His estate licensed the full audio and video archive to SUCCESS Magazine, which maintains and distributes it today. His YouTube channel — managed by the estate — has accumulated hundreds of millions of views in the decade-plus since his death, and clips of his seminars continue to circulate widely on every social platform.

His central teaching, compressed: success is not a mystery. It is a predictable result of a small set of simple daily disciplines compounded over years. You are the sum of your five closest associates, the six books you read last year, and the thousand small decisions you are about to make tomorrow. Work harder on yourself than you do on your job. Let others live small lives — you were not designed for that. Give your dreams all you’ve got, and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.