Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 5, 2008
The Five Roads to Financial Success in America and How to Choose Your Own
There are basically five ways that you can become wealthy starting with nothing in America based on over 25 years of research into American millionaires. Number one, you can inherit it. Less than 10 percent of wealthy Americans inherited any of their money, and it’s less and less every single year.
The Second Way
The second way that you can become wealthy is you can achieve it professionally. You can become a doctor or a lawyer or an architect or an accountant. You can become extremely good at what you do, be paid very well, and hold on to the money.
The Third Way
The third way you can achieve it is you can become a senior executive of a large corporation. You can be highly paid; you can have stock options and bonuses. And if you stay with the company long enough, for enough years, you can be paid enough to become wealthy.
The Fourth Way
You can win it. But only a tiny fraction of one percent of wealthy Americans got that way by winning their money some way or another. As a matter of fact, the odds against you winning the lottery are the equivalent of lightning striking twice in the same place. They’re millions and millions to one.
Learn the Way To Wealth System
The Best Way
The fifth way that you can become wealthy is you can start your own business and earn it all by yourself. Starting your own business has been and will always be the high road to becoming wealthy for most self-made millionaires. Entrepreneurship in America offers more opportunities and opens more doors than all other possibilities put together. This is why it has been said that if you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you are a fool. I’ll repeat that. If you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you’re a fool.
Where do you start?
You start by getting your finances under control. The very first thing you do is you make a decision to get your finances under control. Some years ago, a man named George Classon wrote a book called The Richest Man In Babylon. It’s a classic on financial success and what Classon said in that book was that the key to becoming wealthy is to pay yourself first. Take ten percent off your earnings, off your gross income every month and put it aside. Learn to live on ninety percent or less of your gross income. So the very first thing that you do is you begin to save your money.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put yourself onto the high road to personal wealth:
First, resolve today to begin saving your money a little bit at a time. Set a goal to save 10% of your earnings, to put it away and to never touch it. This will change your life.
Second, immediately register your own business or sole proprietorship. Open a bank account, get business cards and letterhead and create the corporate entity under which you can do business. Your business opportunities will appear far sooner than you think. If you build it, they will come.
The Way to Wealth System
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Tags: Business Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 4, 2008
The Sufi philosopher, Izhrat Khan once said that, “Life is an endless series of problems, like the waves from the ocean.�?
This is a good description of your life, as well. From the time you are young, throughout your life, you will have an endless string of problems, of all kinds. You will have personal problems, financial problems, relationship problems, health problems, business problems, career problems, and who knows what else. They never end.
The only interruption to this endless series of problems will be the occasional crisis. If you’re living a normal life in our fast-moving society, you will probably have a crisis of some kind every two or three months. By its very definition, a crisis comes “unbidden.”
This means that a crisis is a large, sudden reversal or setback that you did not or could not anticipate or guard against.
Peter Drucker says that the mark of the leader is the way that “He or she deals with the inevitable crisis.”
What this means is that you are either in a crisis right now, you have just gotten out of a crisis, or you are just about to have a crisis. In any case, the only thing that will matter will be how effectively you deal with the crisis.
Average people, weak people, respond to problems and crises ineffectively. They become angry or depressed. They lash out or sulk. They blame other people or make excuses. As a result, their problems and crises often grow and become overwhelming.
Strong people, leaders, deal with problems and crisis in an effective and competent manner. There are two ways that you can learn to surmount the inevitable difficulties of life and become a leader in whatever you do.
First, focus on the solution rather than the problem. Focus on the positive, constructive actions that you can take immediately to solve the problem or to minimize the crisis. Don’t waste a moment making excuses, criticing, complaining or blaming other people. This simply distracts you, weakens you and dissipates your energy. It makes you less effective and more likely to make mistakes.
Be absolutely clear about what has happened. What steps can be taken to resolve the difficulty? What actions can you take immediately to take control of the situation? In my book, “Crunch Point,” I give 21 steps or ways of responding to problems effectively. These ideas can be life changing.
The second key to dealing with any problem or crisis is for you to “Seek the valuable lesson.” Napoleon Hill is famous for saying, “Within any problem or setback there lies the seed of an equal or greater opportunity or benefit.”
Your job is to look into every setback or difficulty for the lesson that it might contain. Imagine that there was a great power in the universe that wants to help you to be more successful and happy in the future. But this great power knows that you have a perverse nature, and you will not learn unless it hurts.
Therefore, whenever you suffer a pain of any kind – emotional, financial, health, personal – you should assume that this great power is trying to teach you a lesson that will help you in the future. Your job is to accurately identify the lesson or lessons so that you can learn them once and for all.
Once you begin to seek the lesson, answers will come to you quickly and easily. Don’t be satisfied with quick answers. Instead, ask the question, “What else is the answer?”
Beware of any problem for which there is only one definition, and beware of any problem for which there is one solution or lesson.
It is said that “Great souls learn great lessons from small events.”
Sometimes, if the problem is complex enough or has lasted for a long time, you can sit down with a pad of paper and ask this question, “What are all the lessons I have learned from this situation?”
You will be amazed to find that you may have learned five or ten or even twenty lessons from a difficult situation. Once you have identified these lessons and learned them, the chances of you making the same mistake are greatly reduced.
When you have a problem and you take control of it in your mind, you become a stronger and better person. The next time you face a problem or crises, focus quickly on the solution, on the specific actions that you can take immediately to resolve it.
Then, ask yourself, “Why is this happening?” What is the lesson that this problem contains for you?
It is said that wisdom is the ability to make good decisions, but that wisdom actually comes from having made bad decisions earlier.
There is nothing wrong with making decisions. The only thing that is unforgivable is our failure to learn from each situation so that we grow more surely toward the stars.
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Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 3, 2008
The Sale is More Complex Today
The entire process of selling today is more complex than it has ever been before. It used to be that we would make a single call on a single buyer who would make a single decision on our product or offering. In this simple form of selling, we used the attention/interest/ desire/action (AIDA) model of sales presentation and focused intensely on numerous different ways of closing the sale. Then, once we had made the sale, in many cases we never saw the customer again.
Everything Has Changed
Today, however, everything is different. Today we must make multiple calls, an average of five or six, in order to make the sale. We deal with multiple decision makers in an organization, each of whom can influence the purchase. Much of the sale takes place when we are not present. Sometimes we never even meet the final decision maker who signs the check. And it is not unusual for a sale to be derailed at the last minute by something completely unexpected.
The Competition is Fierce
If that weren’t enough, there is more competition than ever before and it is more determined and resolute than it has ever been in the past. Not only must we compete on the basis of price, quality, services, capabilities, financing and warranties with many other vendors of our product or service, but we must also compete with every other vendor of every other product or service who is striving to get the same customer dollar that we are after. Our competitors are extremely determined, driven the same as we are by tight markets and careful customers. They are committed to starting earlier, working harder, and staying up later thinking of ways to take our customers away from us.
Customers Are Overwhelmed
Our prospective customers are beset on all sides by every conceivable sales offering. Because they are drowning in details, options and choices, they are in no hurry to make up their minds. With markets changing and contracting, the amount of discretionary funds they have available has shrunken and they are more careful today than they have ever had to be in the past.
Make more money closing faster, easier, better than you ever thought possible with 24 Techniques for Closing the Sale
The Key to Profitability
The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. If a business does this in sufficient quantity and with proper cost controls, it will make a profit. The profit is the result of creating and keeping customers efficiently.
Create and Keep Customers
As the president of your own professional sales corporation, your job is to create and keep customers as well. And just as a company must continually restructure and redesign its product and service offerings to satisfy the changing tastes of a demanding and competitive customer marketplace, you as a salesperson must constantly upgrade the quality and sophistication of your sales procedures and approaches if you are going to create customers in sufficient quantity.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, be prepared to make multiple calls on a customer to close a large or complex sale. Plan your sales work systematically so you always have a new reason for calling back.
Second, think continually about how you have to change and improve your selling and your offering if you want to succeed in a tough market. Work on yourself every day and never stop getting better.
24 Techniques for Closing the Sale
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Tags: Sales Success
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