Here are just a few highlights of his extensive career:

– Bachelor of Science from U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

– Motivator for Superbowl athletes.

– Chairman, Psychology Committee, U.S. Olympic Sports Medicine Council responsible for performance enhancement of American Olympic athletes.

– Conducted U.S. study of Chinese brainwashing techniques.

– Rehabilitation coordinator for returning U.S. Viet Nam Prisoners of War.

– Simulation expert for Apollo Moon Program astronauts.

In addition, Dr. Waitley is the author of the all time best selling audio cassette album, The Psychology of Winning. Surprisingly, the test of this cassette program was written, as Dr. Waitley revealed in this candid interview, at a time when he was experiencing the “Reality of Failing.”

He recently introduced his latest book, The Seeds of Greatness (Published by Fleming H. Revell), which prompted us to explore how his insights could help our readers to further achievement. Here is the result of our three-hour conversation:

PSP: You have studied the success patterns of some of the greatest achievers around the world. What are the three most common characteristics these winners share?

Dr. Waitley: The first would be high self-esteem, the feeling of your own worth. The second, the realization that you have the responsibility for choosing your own destiny. The healthiest, most successful people I’ve seen exercise their privilege to choose. The power of choosing their destinies puts them in charge of their lives. The third characteristic would be creative imagination to translate dreams into specific goals.

PSP: What is your definition of a winner?

Dr. Waitley: A winner is, in my opinion, an individual who is progressively pursuing and having some success at reaching, a goal that he has set for him or herself; a goal that is attained for the benefit, rather than at the expense, of others.

PSP: In doing the research for our interview, I found that there are over 220 books that deal with the subject of winning and only 16 that deal with the subject of losing. Do you think that there is an overemphasis on winning?

Dr. Waitley: The idea of winning has been misunderstood and overexposed. It’s associated with flying through airports, driving fast cars, or standing over a fallen adversary. I’ve seen salesmen and saleswomen who were making six-figure incomes, thinking that they had won. They thought winning was reaching a certain financial level or getting to a certain point. Thinking they have arrived, they stand still and go to the country club. Now, their company expects more production, but won’t get it from them because they had the wrong idea. They didn’t realize that winning is a continual process of improvement.

PSP: In 1976, two researchers, Thomas Tutko and William Burns published a book entitled Winning is Everything and Other American Myths. They wrote: “Winning, in fact, is like drinking salt water; it will never quench your thirst. It is an insatiable greed. There are never enough victories, never enough championships or records. If we win, we take another gulp and have even greater fantasies.”

Dr. Waitley: It is true. The American version of winning is to come on first at all costs, or expediency rather than integrity.

PSP: Are you saying that people tend to get obsessed with winning at the expense of fulfillment?

Dr. Waitley: Definitely. I think athletics is the most dominant of all fields where payoff only comes to the winner, but there are notable exceptions. For example, in interviews with the five U.S. former Olympic decathlon winners, I found that their goal was to become the best they could, not necessarily the best in the world. These athletes have found fulfillment in recognizing and in realizing their potential.

PSP: Their gold medals are internal, not external.

Dr. Waitley: Exactly. The secret is to compare yourself against a standard that you have set. You measure yourself only against your last performance, not against another individual’s.

PSP: What is your definition of a loser?

Dr. Waitley: A loser is a person who has an abundance of opportunities to learn, who has successful role models everywhere, but who chooses not to try. I read the other day that only 10% of all Americans will ever buy or read a book. This means that 90% choose not to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities available to everyone in this country. Our libraries are crammed full with enough information for anyone to be an expert in anything.

PSP: Do you feel salespeople don’t read enough?

Dr. Waitley: To me, the person who chooses not to read is more of a loser than the person who cannot read. I am not suggesting you need to be an intellectual in order to sell; I am just suggesting that if you want to move up, you definitely need the additional vocabulary.

PSP: You wrote in your book The Winner’s Edge “Real success in life has no relationship to a gifted birth, talent or IQ. Would you include gender?

Dr. Waitley: Yes, and I would include race as well.

PSP: Whether you are a saleswoman or a salesman, it doesn’t make a difference?

Dr. Waitley: It doesn’t make a difference. In fact, there are advantages to both.

PSP: Where do you see the edge a woman has in selling?

Dr. Waitley: A woman has the edge of being more gifted earlier in the area of verbal communication. She has a better grasp of nonverbal signals and she is able to show more empathy in recognizing customer needs. Women are more process-oriented. Society, however, has positively conditioned a man to believe that the world is his oyster and he’s been taught to risk in order to get rewards. Women have been taught to seek security. I think women need to be more risk oriented to create security. I also think that men need to learn how to listen more before taking risks.

PSP: You have analyzed many winners. I wonder how we can ever know objectively how and why winners win.

Dr. Waitley: I don’t think we can put it into a formula. But we can study people who have overcome obstacles in their paths. I studied people from every walk of life like hostages, POWs, astronauts, sports figures and sales achievers to see if they have anything in common. There are surprising similarities.

PSP: Let me rephrase my question. Look at history as an example. The country who wins the war gets to write the history books. History becomes the tale of the winner. If you translate this to people, winners get to tell their stories in interviews. Winners are the most interviewed people in this country. Do you think that they give us an objective picture? Is high performance an objective science or a speculative science?

Dr. Waitley: It’s a speculative science. But instead of comparing their methods on achieving success, we need to compare patterns of achievement and see how those patterns overlap. Also, we need to review their thoughts and actions during their worst times. Personally, I’ve learned more from the worst times than I have from the best moments of my life.

PSP: Do you suggest that the strength of winners often depends on how they manage disappointment?

Dr. Waitley: Absolutely. When I studied the adversities faced by leaders like Anwar Sadat, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney, Thomas A. Edison and Golda Meir, I learned much more than by analyzing some of the great statements or decisions they made. When winners stand on the pedestal, they tend to gloss over what it took to get from the dream to reality.

PSP: Why?

Dr. Waitley: It’s a human tendency to gloss over the difficulties and remember only the great breakthroughs. Many sales executives focus on the gloss and overlook the real opportunities.

PSP: How can we learn from our disappointments in a way that enhances our growth?

Dr. Waitley: Most people never go beyond the adolescent view of failure. They say, “If they laugh at me, it isn’t worth learning from the experience.” Adolescents tend to believe that performance is the same as the performer. They take individual achievements as marks of their own self-esteem. The healthy individual views failure as a temporary setback. The stumbling block becomes the stepping stone. A better example would be the kid who got new ice-skates for Christmas. He goes out on the ice and falls on his head. His mother comforts him by saying, “Why don’t you come in and put your skates away” and he said “Mom, I didn’t get my skates to fail with; I got my skates to learn with. What I’ll do is keep practicing until I know how to do it right.”

PSP: Disappointment seems to lead up to a choice between seeking comfort and seeking solutions.

Dr. Waitley: Exactly.

PSP: We are reluctant to grow and seek solutions because it’s painful.

Dr. Waitley: Right. Eighty percent of all people view growing pain as too uncomfortable or unacceptable. Only 20% recognize it as a learning experience.

PSP: Could you give us an example of people who view pain as a learning experience?

Dr. Waitley: Well, during the 1980 Olympics I worked with Australian Eight Olympic Rowers. The problem was that they experience muscle spasms near the finish line. The coach told me that when they got from a 60-stroke per minute cadence up to 64 strokes per minutes, the pain was nearly unbearable. It appeared like a no-win situation. So, we developed an appreciation and understanding for the process of pain as being a growth experience. Pain tells you that the muscles are working and also that you are in the peak performance mode, which means that you are on your way to victory. We made the interesting discovery that the mind will block the pain as long as there is a positive expectation. By recognizing pain as being their friend, they ended the race without muscle spasms and they improved their performance significantly. Their minds, motivated by positive expectations, released powerful endorphins that killed the pain.

PSP: In your latest book, “The Seeds of Greatness,” you suggest that the so-called motivators preach too much about attitudes without linking them with aptitudes. What if you have great dreams for winning and a high tolerance for pain, but lack the basic talents to realize those dreams?

Dr. Waitley: I was cautioned by my friend, Dr. Jonas Salk and Hans Selye, not to tell people that they could walk on water. Why build up gigantic expectations in people without knowledge what their real talents are? To shorten the answer, and I said this in the book, we now have specific and reliable tests available to assess 32 areas of natural, basic talents. Like the ability to carry a tune or the ability to put tweezers together on a minute object.

PSP: Who conducts these tests?

Dr. Waitley: There is a non-profit organization, The Johnson-O’Connor Research Foundation, a human engineering laboratory with offices in major cities throughout the United States. They are headquartered in New York City.

PSP: Your father did not seem to have an appreciation of your talents when he expected you to become an Annapolis graduate.

Dr. Waitley: He appreciated my talents, but tried to apply them to his own dreams. I wanted to write the great American novel and ended up as a carrier-based attack jet pilot.

PSP: So, you are saying that before people can reach their true potential, they need to discover their true talents?

Dr. Waitley: Yes. In my seminars, I ask the audience if they could live their lives over again, what would they do. Eighty percent of them say that they would be doing something else.

PSP: In your book The Winner’s Edge you said “I didn’t realize until I was 35 that I am behind the wheel in my life.

Dr. Waitley: That’s right.

PSP: What made you aware of that?

Dr. Waitley: I was failing a lot up until 35.

PSP: At what were you failing?

Dr. Waitley: I became a good Navy pilot, but I never became the astronaut that I wanted to be. That, to me, was a failure. I could fly a plane, but I didn’t get to fly a spaceship. Later as a business executive, I earned an income, but never retained my money. I had a couple of business failures. I fixed the blame on my father’s suggestion to go the Naval Academy. I rationalized, what can an ex-Navy pilot do except fly for an airline?

PSP: You thought that your opportunities were limited?

Dr. Waitley: Yes. Then, I figured that I had never learned anything bout money. I know a lot about words, so I took several staff positions. I began to see myself as a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. People told me “Denis, you are one of the most gifted, talented, creative, wonderful individuals we ever met. We are sure sorry you have not been able to convert that to financial or any other lasting success.” At 35, I probably was at the lowest point in my life. I had been traveling all the time. I didn’t have an good family life. My resume looked like Who’s That? instead of Who’s Who and I was actually believing that I might be born to lose. Like my dad, because he never made any money either. Interestingly enough, and I don’t think he would mind my saying this, a best-selling author today, a friend of mine, said as we were walking on the beach that he had the same experience. Until he realized that his dreams had substance, and until he started simulating success, and being around people who were successful, he was destined, as I, to have permanent potential. Now, his book has come on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year.

PSP: What is his name?

Dr. Waitley: Spencer Johnson, the co-author of The One-Minute Manager.

PSP: So you walked on the beach, wondering if your dreams were realistic or not?

Dr. Waitley: Some of my dreams were pipe dreams. Becoming an astronaut was unrealistic. I recognized that these unattainable dreams led to repeated failures.

PSP: What did you do to get out of this failure pattern?

Dr. Waitley: I happened to get fed up with the repeating cycle. I began to seek shelter under the shade of winners. I got tired of running with the turkeys. The first thing that I did was to find a very strong clergyman. I needed some real fatherly advice. We did go up 10,000 feet in an airplane. He knew flying was a comfortable environment, a success pattern for me. As we were going through the stalls and spins, he gave me reassurance and spiritual dimension at a time when I need it most. The second thing I did was start going to seminars conducted by high-powered professionals who talked about stress, health and success. I was studying their patterns of success. I got excited that maybe I was going to be acceptable in this kind of company. When things were at their worst, I began to write The Psychology of Winning.

PSP: So at the lowest point of your life, you actually created the biggest sales hit in the cassette market. How did your program get published?

Dr. Waitley: I think Earl Nightingale and Lloyd Conant are the only two who know this, but after I’d finished The Psychology of Winning, I took my last $500.00 and flew to Chicago. At that time I was speaking in churches, getting less than $50.00 a speech. Someone who believed in me had sent a single cassette to Earl Nightingale that I’d recorded in church. He called me and told me that he liked my voice and thought I had some good ideas. He said if I were ever in Chicago, I should see his partner, Lloyd Conant. I went on the next airplane and Lloyd Conant believed in my work enough to help me polish up my initial draft and took a chance on recording, The Psychology of Winning, which literally converted me from almost total anonymity to a certain measure of success.

PSP: Now that you’ve met with success, do you feel an overabundance of success can spoil us?

Dr. Waitley: Absolutely. If you put the road of the approving crowd, the amount of money you make and the material accomplishments into a bag and say that is success, you would be making a big mistake.

PSP: What are the danger signals of success? When you know that you are not riding success, but success is riding you?

Dr. Waitley: there are several tell-tale signals. Number one, an obsession to talk about your own accomplishments al the time. Two, whenever people tell you something about what they did, you top them. The third thing is an obsession with your own material rewards. A tendency to show them more. You invite people to see the monuments that you’re collected.

PSP: In your new book you are suggesting that trying to collect life is a self-defeating proposition.

Dr. Waitley: Yes. We can’t collect life; we can only celebrate life.

PSP: But, if we examine your journey to success, we could say that before we can celebrate, we need to manage our disappointments.

Dr. Waitley: I really believe so. We’ve got to view failures and rejections as healthy experiences from which to grow. We’ve got to replace “someday” fantasies with goals that we can really track and chip away at every day. We’ve got to let go of our impossible dreams and stop putting happiness and success on layaway.

PSP: I’d like to share an interesting quote with you. Abraham Zaleznik wrote in a Harvard Business Review article entitled “Managing Disappointment” “There is irony in all of human experience. The deepest irony of all is to discover that one has been mourning losses that were never sustained and yearning for a past that never existed, while ignoring one’s own real capabilities for shaping the present.”

Dr. Waitley: That is really profound and is said so well. Because planting the seeds of greatness means investing your natural talents in the pursuit of realistic goals. Not every seed will grow into a flower, so you need to view these failures as learning experiences. But to enjoy the flowers in your garden, you have to pluck the weeds. This means that you have to recognize and give up your pipe dreams.

PSP: And if you don’t?

Dr. Waitley: Your natural seeds of greatness will never have an opportunity to bloom.

PSP: Thank you.