Bridging the Gap to Success Article by: Bob Scheinfeld

It was a sunny Saturday morning in Crans, Switzerland, in August 1969. I was at a cafe, sipping hot chocolate with a 70-year-old man who had amassed a vast personal fortune after founding and building a multibillion-dollar Fortune 500 company.

I relished the opportunity to discover the secrets of that kind of extraordinary, monumental success. Finally he set down his cocoa and said, “You’ve been peppering me with questions. Now let me tell you the secret …”

I sat with rapt attention for hours as he introduced me to the little-known strategies, mindset, and tactics he used to found and build Manpower Inc. into the world’s largest temporary help service, raking in billions in revenue.

“The process of creating wealth includes many elements,”he told me. “They’re all important, but there’s one element that’s the glue, the ‘master controller’ that holds them together and makes them all work. I became a master at working with that little-known element, and when you do the same, the highest levels of business success and wealth can be yours too.”

That man was Aaron Scheinfeld, my grandfather. Over the months that followed, he began teaching me his system for tapping into what I’ve come to call the “11th Element”to create business success and wealth.

What is the 11th Element?

Most people think the results they produce are being initiated and driven by what’s going on at the conscious level — the result of the 10 major elements of self-improvement, such as desire, goal setting, and taking action. However, these 10 elements, although powerful, have one limitation — they are limited to our conscious creativity.

My grandfather taught me to imagine a greater energy, or force, that connects everything at an unconscious level. It is the information flowing through this force that drives every breakthrough. Every success, every failure, and every result in between is a result of your ability to tap into this force beyond your consciousness. I have come to call this force the “11th Element”— the “master controller”that coordinates the other 10 self-improvement principles toward your desired ends.

All successes are the result of a series of breakthroughs — leaps across the “gaps”resulting from knowing where you want to go but not knowing exactly how to do it. For example, if you want to attract more customers, grow an existing business, or work fewer hours to make what you make now (or more), but you’re not sure what the best or quickest solution is to achieve those goals, you have a gap to jump. Or, as I call it, you have to “gap jump.”

The process of becoming successful and creating wealth consists of bridging a constant stream of gaps. The minute you bridge one gap, achieve one goal, and reach a new “destination,”you choose another goal and another destination you want to reach. Another gap forms, and the process of gap formation and bridging repeats itself for as long as you continue to desire success and wealth.

The 11th Element is the bridge that allows you to quickly and easily jump all your gaps and get to your goals in the quickest and best possible way.

When my grandfather started out, he didn’t know how to produce the results he later accomplished. It was the same for me and for my clients. We began without having the contacts, ideas, skills, knowledge, and resources we needed to succeed. But we always began with the absolute confidence that we could tap into an energy, an “invisible force”greater than our conscious efforts to bridge all the gaps necessary to find what we needed and produce extraordinary results.

The concept of this invisible force may sound crazy because the 11th Element is not a concept you may think or talk about, especially within a business context. It’s not a concept you usually hear when you consult “experts”about being successful, building a successful business, and creating wealth. However, chances are, you’ve already experienced it. You may call it a hunch or the work of your subconscious but in my experience it is so much more. So I challenge you to keep an open mind and know that the 11th Element has been proven to work for my grandfather, my clients, and me.

Also, remember Albert Einstein’s great observation: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

My grandfather taught me not to think, “Does this force exist?”But rather, “How can I become more conscious of this force and use it to grow and build my business and wealth?”And I have done so to great success.

Unfortunately, my grandfather died suddenly and before he could complete my 11th Element education. I applied what I learned from him and became a millionaire by the age of 31. Then I had a seven-year bout with Murphy’s Law, where everything that could go wrong did go wrong in my personal, business, and financial lives. I was over $150,000 in debt, angry, confused, and on a major downward spiral. And I wasn’t able to go to my grandfather and say, “What didn’t you tell me?,”"What am I missing?,” or “What else do I need to know here?” I was on my own.

I knew my grandfather had a complete Success System, but I didn’t know what it was. Through those tough and excruciatingly painful seven years, by applying the strategies my grandfather taught me and following the clues he left, I was finally able to piece together the other parts of the system that I was missing. I first used this system to stop my “free fall”and start generating the positive cash flow I needed to get myself out of debt and to rebuild my fortune and quality of life. I was quickly led to a consulting project that paid me $209,698 over a 10-month period. This allowed me to easily pay off all my debt and start to rebuild my life, career, and finances, and ultimately soar much higher than I had in my first 31 years.

However, I didn’t stop there. I then joined Blue Ocean Software, a small, struggling company, and once again utilized the 11th Element to create a marketing model that took us from $1.27 million in sales to over $44 million in just four years. The company was named to Inc. magazine’s 500 list three years in a row. We then sold the company to Intuit for $177 million — making a lot of people, including me, very wealthy. I don’t tell you this to tout my success but rather to illustrate the resource that is available to you if you embrace the 11th element and run with it.

Consider this: One client of mine tapped into the 11th Element and went from a hard-working long-haul truck driver to CEO of his own $52 million company in just five years. Another used the 11th Element to quickly take his company from a measly $12,000 in sales one year to $8.1 million just seven years later. The possibilities are truly endless.

Here are five steps you can use immediately to gap jump toward your financial and business goals:

How exactly do you use the 11th Element to gap jump yourself to the success you desire and are capable of? Let me share with you the five steps my grandfather taught me over 30 years ago.

First, open your mind to the possibility that an invisible force is shaping your success — or lack thereof. Your mindset is just as important as the actions you take and the strategies and techniques you use. Try not to limit yourself to conscious levels of help; be open to the invisible force. Follow these steps for 30 days with an open mind and you will see the results for yourself.

Second, learn to trust your “Inner CEO”— your inner intelligence — which goes far beyond intuition or what is usually called the subconscious mind. Your Inner CEO is well connected in the industry called life. His or her job is to search, find, filter, and then deliver solutions that can help you generate income streams, create opportunities, find people, build your business, maximize your profits, increase your income, solve problems, create wealth, and improve your quality of life in ways you can’t even imagine right now. Whether you wish to create an identity for your Inner CEO or simply imagine him or her as a greater intelligence at your disposal is up to you — but the key is to know that your intuition is not passive; he or she is actively helping you.

Third, your Inner CEO can only help if you are willing to listen and communicate your desire clearly. The best way to keep your thoughts and communications clear is to literally write a personal letter to your Inner CEO asking for help. But follow these important guidelines for it to be an effective letter:

GUIDELINE 1: As appropriate, divide your desired outcome into pieces and ask for help for each piece. Larger and more complex outcomes can be divided into smaller pieces. When appropriate, it’s important to divide them up and ask for help for each piece within the same request. At other times, a simple and general request is fine. For example, if your goal was to take your company public, a request of, “Help me have a successful IPO”would probably be too general. Instead, break up the process into several steps, such as partnering with the right venture capital company, attracting the right talent for your board, the right timing, and so forth.

GUIDELINE 2: Be precise about what you want, but leave the response options open-ended. This invisible force works on an exact-match basis, so you must be extremely precise in defining the specific type of help you want. Then you want to leave the response options open-ended so you don’t limit the ability of your Inner CEO (and others you attract from this force) to help you.

For example, if your goal is to profitably acquire new customers, it may prove fruitless to request help “acquiring new customers through our outbound sales team.”You have not been specific about the new customers you want to acquire (technically one customer is “more”). And, you have been too specific as to how the new customers can be acquired and have excluded all other acquisition methods, such as Internet, radio, space ads, direct mail, and customer service.

It would be more effective to phrase your request as “help acquiring at least 150,000 new customers at a profit after nine months through the most effective means available.”This now clearly illustrates your objective but allows your Inner CEO to be creative as to the methods. This is where you’ll be surprised by results from areas you may have never even imagined.

GUIDELINE 3: Be optimistic but remain realistic. Like being precise with what you want, but leaving response options open-ended, you have to keep a careful balance between being optimistic (asking for help to achieve big goals and thinking anything is possible) and being “unrealistic”(shooting too high too quickly). This is a tough balance and one that comes only with practice and experience.

Once your request for help has been written, you’re ready for the fourth step. You must send it to your Inner CEO before help can be initiated. What you want is a simple, quick, and systematic way of getting through the noise in your head and saying to your Inner CEO, “Hey, I need help with this specific project — now.”

Because your Inner CEO monitors everything you think, everything you say, everything that’s said to you, everything you feel, and everything that happens in your environment on a daily basis, there’s a lot of “noise,”and it’s often difficult for your Inner CEO to know when you’re asking for help and what kind of help you really want. If you could put a tape recorder inside your head for one day, record everything, then play it back and listen to all the things you said to yourself, all the things you thought, all the things you said to other people, and so on, you’d be hopelessly confused about what was going on in your life. So, the key is to ensure that your Inner CEO is focused on your carefully crafted requests, rather than on the random chatter of your daily life.

The most effective way I have discovered is to use a “Request Box.”It can be any sort of box you choose — something you make or buy. After following the guidelines for writing your requests for help, place your completed letters in your Request Box. Then all your Inner CEO has to do is monitor the contents of your box, rather than trying to sort through all the noise in your head.

Lastly, and most importantly, be flexible and open-minded because help usually comes back in the way you least expect it. As obvious as it may sound to you, the key here is to understand that the help you requested can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time, and most likely in ways you wouldn’t expect. Your Inner CEO is always trying to get through to send you the help you requested. But you need to help by opening your mind to all possibilities and from all sources.

Don’t allow your intellect and past experiences to limit your options. This is the same as dropping a well-crafted proposal on the desk of your corporate CEO and saying, “I’d like your approval for X,”then going back to your office, closing your door, locking it from the inside, unplugging your phone, turning off your computer, and then wondering, “Where is my approval?!”

Once you have submitted your request for help, focus on expanding your idea of where solutions can come from, because solutions can come from anywhere, anyone, in unexpected ways, and at any time, and you must be open to receive them.

It takes practice, but with time, tapping into the 11th Element will become like second nature to you. Once you start looking inside (to the invisible force) for the solutions you need to succeed, instead of only on the outside (to your intellect, experts, or others), you have access to real power and can start producing extraordinary results, in less time, with less effort and much more fun. As my grandfather said, “That’s where the real magic is.”I encourage you to create your requests today, and you can look forward to the same astounding results that have brought my grandfather, clients, and me to the highest level of success and fulfillment.

For more than 20 years, Bob Scheinfeld has been helping marketers and other entrepreneurs create extraordinary results in less time, with less effort and much more fun. His journey of triumph over confusion, anger, and desperation qualifies him as an undisputed expert in the arena of business success and personal fulfillment. Bob’s keynote speeches, seminars, books, audios, and other learning resources have helped tens of thousands of people in more than 150 countries transform their definitions of success and the pathways they follow to create success in their lives.

WHAT IS THE 11TH ELEMENT?

Read any breakthrough success book and you’ll find a combination of these 10 elements of success.

1. Desire
2. Belief
3. The law of attraction
4. Goal setting
5. Modeling
6. Creating clear and detailed plans
7. Taking massive action now
8. Persistence
9. Visualization
10. Affirmations

They are all important, but they are incomplete. The 11th element is the glue, the “master controller,”that holds them together and coordinates them toward your desired result.

5 STEPS TO ACCESS THE 11TH ELEMENT

1. Open your mind
2. Learn to trust your Inner CEO
3. Write requests for help
4. Give your requests to your Inner CEO in a Request Box
5. Be flexible and open-minded; help usually comes back in the least expected way

Learn more about Bob Scheinfeld and his powerful new audio program The 11th Element