Emanuel James Rohn was born in September 1930 in Yakima, Washington, and grew up as the only child of Emanuel and Clara Rohn on a farm in Caldwell, Idaho. He left college after one year and took a job as a human resources manager at Sears. A friend invited him to hear entrepreneur John Earl Shoaff, whose idea that wages make you a living but profits can make you a fortune changed his course. In 1955 he left Sears to become a distributor for Shoaff’s direct selling company AbundaVita, and in 1957 he moved to NutriBio, where its founders, including Shoaff, mentored him. He built one of NutriBio’s largest distributor organizations and in 1960 was chosen to lead its expansion into Canada. By 31 he was a self-made millionaire.
In the early 1960s NutriBio collapsed under FDA pressure on supplement claims and a saturated market, and by 33 Rohn was broke. An invitation to tell his story at a local Rotary Club led to more bookings and, in 1963, a first public seminar at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He built a philosophy around the seasons of life, teaching that winters are inevitable and that the answer is changing yourself rather than the seasons. Standard Oil hired him for seminars, and he worked with Adventures in Achievement. He mentored Herbalife founder Mark Hughes and a young Tony Robbins, then working as a janitor. He died of pulmonary fibrosis on December 5, 2009, at 79.
- Shoaff taught that a job caps your value by the clock while an enterprise lets the market scale it.
- Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Brian Tracy, Darren Hardy and T. Harv Eker all credit him as an influence.
- The National Speakers Association gave him its CPAE Award in 1985.
- He produced 17 written, audio and video works, including The Seasons of Life and the novel 12 Pillars with Chris Widener.
- Grainy clips of his seminars now circulate widely on YouTube and Instagram.
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