Awaken the Giant within

The story usually starts in a four-hundred-square-foot apartment in Venice, California, where a fat, broke twenty-something is washing his dinner plates in the bathtub because the place has no kitchen. He's listening to Neil Diamond sing "I am, I said, to no one there. And no one heard at all, not even the chair." A few years later he's flying a helicopter over the building in Glendale where he used to work as a janitor. He weighs thirty-eight pounds less, earns over a million dollars a year, and lives in something he calls Del Mar Castle. The transformation took about three years. He spent the next thirty trying to figure out the rules of it well enough to teach them. Awaken the Giant Within is the book where he wrote them down.

Tony Robbins is not subtle. His book is over seven hundred pages, written in italics and capital letters, with exclamation points everywhere and a peppy talk-show tone that some readers find embarrassing. Underneath that surface, though, the thing is more rigorous than it looks. He treats human behavior as a system that can be tuned, the way a piano tuner tunes a baby grand. The strings will need adjusting again, but with the right method you can hit any note you want on demand. That is the wager of the book, and what follows is the case he builds for it.

The Janitor Who Owned The Building

The opening question Robbins keeps asking himself is simple. What makes the difference in the quality of people's lives? Not the abstract version, the actual operational difference. Why do two people grow up in the same broken home and end up at opposite ends of the world? He sees the answer in a story he likes to tell about a father in prison for murdering a liquor store cashier. The father has two grown sons. One is a drug addict in jail for attempted murder. The other is a regional manager at a national company, married with three kids, fit, sober. Both, asked independently, give the same answer for how their lives turned out: "What else could I have become, having grown up with a father like that?" Same evidence, opposite verdicts. Both verdicts feel like reality to the person holding them.