Dan Leever - The Formula: 7 Principles to Transform Doubt and Despair into Confidence and Success

To Julie, Skip, and Alex,
who allowed me to pursue my passion
even though it sometimes resulted in
my being less available than I would like.

Contents

Introduction

I recently retired as CEO of Platform Specialty Products, a large chemical company, and its predecessor company, MacDermid , after a twenty-five-year tenure. At the age of forty-two, and after many ups and downs, twists and turns, I was appointed CEO of MacDermid. From that time, the company grew its revenue from $150 million to $4 billion. Its value increased more than fiftyfold. Truly, it was one of the great value-creation stories in our industry.

MacDermid was a specialty chemical company that made chemical formulations in small quantities for small niche applications. We made the chemicals auto manufacturers used to plate chrome on car bumpers and electronic manufacturers used to produce circuit boards.

All that said, I have spent as much of my life feeling like a big failure as I did experiencing growth and success. I was able to turn the insecurities and mistakes of my early life and career into something fulfilling and fantastic, and it is still a daily practice to maintain the new state of mind and clarity I have today. Looking back, I found a formula, something I could experiment with, alter, expand upon, and finally commit to after much trial and error. That formula, the one that changed my life and continues to keep me motivated and productive, is the subject of this book. It is my opinion that, if followed, this formula can help make anyones wildest dreams come true and, at the very least, give them a path to a wholesome journey that will leave them fulfilled.

Such a formula, based on solid science, exists. I know because it has transformed me into who I am today. Many other people from different walks of life have used it, too. All have benefitted from its power. In the pages to follow, in addition to my story, you will learn about some of my heroes, some famous and some not, who illustrate the principles of The Formula that took me from shy, unconfident, and learning disabled to a world-class business leade r. If you apply these principles as instructed, you, too, will achieve results beyond your wildest dreams. The power of The Formula is not limited to the world of business. It can be applied just as successfully to sports, nonprofit activities, or personal pursuitsanything you aspire to and deem worthwhile. This is because these are life principles, not just business principles. Not only can these principles take you to a higher level personally, they can also be applied to any organization to which you belong. My hope is that by sharing these lessons and principles, you will find the pathway to happiness and success that took me a lifetime to learn.

The skills and attitudes found in The Formula work no matter when you start to use them or how deep a hole from which you struggle. My personal story shared in the following pages will prove to you that you can be in an incredibly challenging mental state, one of darkness, but through living certain principles, the light will emerge and guide you to turn your life around.

You can eliminate the lack of confidence that prevents you from trying risky activities to start with. Anxiety? The Formula can help you mitigate it. Yes, there is a step-by-step formula to reach the stars. Maybe you have been languishing, not knowing success or defeat, just existing. The Formula will give you a road map to fill the void forever.

I discovered The Formula out of necessity, of having to climb out of the depths of constant challenge, self-doubt, and shame. Life wasnt always so easy for me. But, if I was able to be successful in spite of my limitations, you can do the same.

PART ONE

The Principles
of The Formula

1. PRINCIPLE 1:
Have the Guts to Fail

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure...
than to rank with those poor spirits who neither
enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

I was a poster child for failure. My first real experience with failure happened when I was held back in third grade. Poor grades were again to blame the second time I was held back, before I made it out of grammar school. I concluded I was stupida notion from which no one in my early life had ever tried to disabuse me. I remember sitting for hours with my mother, reviewing flashcards with simple spelling words and math tables to help me learn them. I remember closing my eyes and trying as hard as I could to commit them to memory. But, as hard as I tried, I would spend hours, days on end, and nothing, literally nothing, would stick. The next day in school, Id still come away with Ds or Fs. My brain just didnt work the way other peoples did.

Eventually my parents took me to a psychologist who conducted a battery of tests and recommended I be sent to a vocational school where I could learn to do something with my hands, rather than my mind. In sixth grade, I was sent to Rumsey Hall, a boarding school specializing in intimate class settings and individual support. It was a positive experience, but it didnt fix whatever it was that was wrong with me.

Today, more than sixty years later, I understand that I had several undiagnosed learning disabilities. Schools today know how to diagnose and treat these disabilities, but in the 1950s, when I was a little kid, they did not. If your grades stank, you were presumed to be dumb or lazyand since I wasnt lazy, that left dumb. It turns out that my learning disabilities were partly due to a severe imbalance between the two hemispheres of my brain.

We know that there are two types of processing. The first is explicit processing, often referred to as left-brain thinking, which is rule-based, sequential, conscious processing. This kind of thinking is the capability that helps make a person successful in school. The second is implicit processing, which is evidenced by intuition, unconscious thought, automaticity, creativity, and lateral thinking. So, in other words, I was born with a natural mental orientation that emphasized implicit processing, sometimes referred to as right-brain thinking. While most people have the ability to utilize both sides of the brain to perform a specific, relative process, my right brain was so dominant that it was as if my left brain was asleep.