Clement Stone Towered Afore The Self-Help Movement

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Clement Stone first peddled newspapers.

After being bullied by older boys who already had the best corners in Chicago, he decided to innovate.

He went up to diners in a restaurant and sold each of them a copy until the owner threw him out.

A few minutes later, he was at it again until he was given the boot.

The third time he came in, everyone applauded the pluck of the 6-year-old, and the owner relented.

Such persistence set Stone on the path to write the classic handbook for sales reps, "The Success System That Never Fails."

He would turn the ideas into an insurance empire and become one of the world's leading thinkers in the art of becoming successful.

Stone (1902-2002) had to start working early because his father died when he was 3.

 

Stone's Keys

• Advocate of a positive attitude to help achieve success.
• Overcame: Fear of rejection in selling.
• Lesson: Don't overdo your planning; act fast on good ideas.
• "To know where you are going and how to get there, you must first know yourself."

The family moved in with relatives, and his mother sewed at an upscale women's store.
Within two years, she was managing the store, then started her own dressmaking business and found an apartment where her son could join her.

Meanwhile, Clement had been hanging out with a bad crowd, playing hooky and smoking. She sent him away to a parochial school, where he learned self-discipline.

Scout's Honor
Back in Chicago, he joined the Boy Scouts, where he took to heart principles like being trustworthy, loyal, courteous and thrifty.

"You are subject to your environment," wrote Stone in his "Success System" best-seller. "Therefore, select the environment that will best develop you toward your desired objective."

By 13, he had his own newsstand.

His mother set the entrepreneurial example, pawning two diamonds to get the cash to buy an insurance agency in Detroit.

She moved there alone and worked hard to make it profitable. Stone boarded with another family until he could join her when he was 16 — dropping out of high school, but later earning his diploma.
He began selling accident insurance by cold-calling offices.

It wasn't easy, yet he found that repeating positive ideas helped motivate him. "I had not licked my fear of opening a door," he wrote. "It was necessary to develop a method of forcing myself to enter. I reason: Success is achieved by those who try. Where there is nothing to lose by trying and a great deal to gain if successful, by all means try. Do it now!"

Stone also discovered that if he acted confidently, he was less nervous. "The emotions are not immediately subject to reason, but they are subject to action," he wrote. "I found that if I spoke loudly and rapidly, kept a smile in my voice and used modulation, I no longer had butterflies in my stomach." It also helped to say: "I feel healthy! I feel happy! I feel terrific!"

Stone was an avid reader of self-help books such as 1907's "Power of Will" by Frank Haddock as well as learning lessons about living from the Bible.

He developed a detailed personal philosophy of achieving success on this foundation: "You are a product of your heredity, environment, physical body, conscious and subconscious mind, experiences .. . and something more, including powers known and unknown. You have the power to affect, use, control or harmonize with all of them. And you can direct your thoughts, control your emotions and ordain your destiny."

In 1922, at age 20, Stone formed his own agency, Combined Insurance Co. of America, with a $100 investment. By the end of the decade, he had 1,000 agents selling several hundred thousand policies a year and implementing his blueprint for advancement.

Constantinos Theodorou, author of "A Guide Towards Riches," lists favorite insights from Stone about reaching goals:

• Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.
• Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.
• To every disadvantage, there is a corresponding advantage.

At the start of the Great Depression, Stone found himself $28,000 in debt and barely making payroll. The lights in the office were turned off several times because he hadn't paid the bill.

In response, he developed insurance policies priced to give his company only a small profit. That led to more sales volume than ever.

Yet Stone had another problem. His sales reps refused to believe they could sell anyone in the dead economy. With his agents dropping out, the boss realized he needed a system for training and motivating a new team.

So he spent more time in the field working with reps, sharing their ups and downs and inspiring them with his ability to convince most people they needed his policies. The new approach worked. By the end of the Depression, his company was bigger than ever.

Up With Hill
In 1952, a mutual friend placed Stone next to Napoleon Hill, the author of the 1937 best-seller "Think and Grow Rich," at a luncheon. They struck a deal to collaborate over the next decade.

Their most popular result: 1960's "Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude," which has sold several hundred thousand copies.

After the arrangement ended amicably, Hill formed the nonprofit Napoleon Hill Foundation to promote his work, which he ran until his death in 1970. Stone was invited by the trustees to become its chairman in 1983, and he remained its leader until he died at 100.

"Clement Stone was my hero," Don Green, executive director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation in Wise, Va., told IBD.

Green wrote "Everything I Know About Success I Learned From Napoleon Hill" and is a real estate developer who gives lectures in his spare time to community groups about the ideas of Stone and Hill.

Green wrote Stone to express thanks for his books and met him for dinner in Chicago in 1995. Two years later, he was asked to serve on the board of trustees for the foundation, and in 2000 he agreed to be executive director.

"As I've traveled around the world, I've found people in other countries paying more attention to the teachings of Stone and Hill," said Green. "They have their children go to special schools to help them excel, while American kids are obsessed with sports and video games. We love get-rich schemes, which is why something like 'The Secret' has such appeal, the idea that all you have to do is want something and you can have it. Stone taught that knowledge is potential power, know-how is putting knowledge to work. The real secret is to take action, not indulge in wishful thinking. Sometimes the ship doesn't come in; we have to swim out to it."

Good Outlook
In 1979, Combined Insurance reached $1 billion in assets. Stone's holding company went public the next year, with the ticker symbol PMA — for positive mental attitude.

In 1982 it merged with Aon (AON) . And in 2008, Stone's old firm was bought by ACE (ACE). The Combined Insurance unit had $2.035 billion in revenue in 2012 and still distributes Stone's books to employees.

Berny Dohrmann, chairman of CEO Space International, a business mentoring network, knew Stone as a child, since Stone was a friend of Dohrmann's father, another teacher in the self-help field.

"Clement Stone taught us all to not only live with a positive mental attitude everyday of our lives, but how to convey to others how invaluable this is in achieving goals," Dohrmann said. "He also showed us how you can succeed by being ethical and supportive of other people's success. His philosophy seemed to keep him eternally youthful; when I met him many years later, he was as energetic as ever."

By the time of his death, Stone had a net worth of nearly $1 billion and had given away $275 million, primarily to Christian, mental health, educational and civic groups, especially to what is now the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

"His early life was similar to those of the young heroes of the novels by Horatio Alger Jr., which young Clement often read for inspiration," said Terrence Giroux, executive director of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. "These helped him to see problems as opportunities for growth and improvement, as he viewed the Depression as something that forced him to learn good work habits. Our association was fortunate to have two of the major early proponents of positive thinking, Stone and Norman Vincent Peale, as members and role models for its scholarship recipients and for their fellow Americans. Their teachings continue to benefit individuals and society."

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