Forging Your Self-Confidence: Part 1
Posted by Brian Tracy on Oct 13, 2009
A young woman wrote to me recently, telling me that her whole life had taken a different turn since she heard me ask the question, “What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?” She wrote that, up to that time, this was a question she had never even dared to consider, but now, she thought of nothing else. She had realized, in a great, blinding flash of clarity, that the main thing separating her from her hopes and dreams was the belief in her ability to achieve them. Read the rest of this entry »
Living Without Limits
Posted by Brian Tracy on Oct 7, 2009
The starting point of great success and achievement has always been the same. It is for you to dream big dreams. There is nothing more important, and nothing that works faster than for you to cast off your own limitations than for you to begin dreaming and fantasizing about the wonderful things that you can become, have, and do. Read the rest of this entry »
Eat That Frog… is now an iPhone Application
Posted by Brian Tracy on Sep 24, 2009
Eat That Frog… is now an iPhone Application
Eat That Frog! Every bit of planning, prioritizing, and organizing comes down to this simple concept.
Every great achievement of humankind has been preceded by a long period of hard, concentrated work until the job was done. Your ability to select your most important task, to begin it, and then to concentrate on it until it is complete is the key to high levels of performance and personal productivity. Read the rest of this entry »
3 Laws of Business Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 17, 2009
There are certain laws of the universe that are working whether you know about them or not. They may even determine some of your success in business and life. Below are just 3 of the business laws to consider for success…
Law #1: The Law of Purpose
The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.
Read the rest of this entry »
You asked… I answered, Part 2
Posted by Brian Tracy on Apr 23, 2009
Here are the remainder of the answers from our recent campaign where we asked: “What is the single biggest question that you want to ask Brian Tracy?” I hope you find them helpful.
6. Brian, what are your daily rituals for success?
Answer: Over the years, I find that I am most productive if I follow a particular course of action.
How to Get What You Want by Helping Others Get What They Want, Part 3 of 4
Posted by Brian Tracy on Mar 2, 2009
Continued from last time…
One of the most effective ways for you to get other people’s money and other people’s effort is for you to have an idea that can help them to achieve their goals faster than ever before. All great fortunes in America are started by an individual with an idea that he or she executes in such a way that others want to get involved and take advantage of.
J. Van Andel and Rich DeVoss started off as two young men selling vitamins for a multi-level marketing company back in the 50’s. Then they came up with an idea. What if they could manufacture biodegradable, highly concentrated, all purpose soap that could be used in dozens of different ways in the average household? What if this soap were so unique that they could manufacture it at a low price and then set up a multi-level marketing structure so that other people could sell it and make a profit while, at the same time, recruiting others to sell it at a profit.
They went to work with a chemist and came up with a substance called “Liquid Organic Cleanser,” or “L.O.C.” Amway Corporation of Ada, Michigan was born. Today, Amway Corporation has thousands of the finest personal, business and household products available in the world. They have millions of distributors throughout the United States, Canada, Asia, Europe and the South Pacific. And today both J. Van Andel and Rich DeVoss are billionaires and are among the richest men in the world.
In this day of expanding opportunities, there are more ideas buzzing around that you can use to be more successful in your life and career than have ever existed before. Bill Gates dropped out of college with an idea to develop an operating system for the earliest computers. He committed to developing an operating system for the BASIC computer before he even knew how to do it. Later, he bought a little company in Seattle called Microsoft and the basic “Disc Operating System” that they had developed. After several refinements, Bill Gates and Paul Allen created the MS-DOS Operating system which they then sold to IBM as the operating platform for the new personal computer. The rest is history.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen, on the strength of that original idea, are now two of the richest men in the world.
Tom Monahan was an unemployed ex-student with a used car when he came up with the idea that, when people phoned to order a pizza, they were hungry. If this was the case, he concluded, then speed was more important than quality. He rented a bankrupt pizza parlor, hired young people with cars and began offering 30 minute delivery on pizzas sold anywhere within a five mile radius. By standardizing and premaking the pizzas, he turned his little business into a thriving enterprise. As you know, Tom Monahan is the founder of Domino’s Pizza, one of the most successful fast-food restaurant operations in history. Tom Monahan is also a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world, because of his simple idea that, when people ordered pizzas, they valued speed over quality. He gave them the speed and transformed the world of fast-food delivery.
The incredible thing is that, right within your mind, you probably have several ideas, any one of which could make you rich, and famous. The great mistake that you make is that you ignore your own idea because it was you who thought of it. You think that other people who come up with ideas are somehow smarter or more insightful than you. And this is not true!
Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, “E = MC2.” This theory of relativity totally changed our attitude toward physics and the structure of the universe. But Einstein was not a great mathematician. It was left to other people to work out the implications and applications of the formula, which they are still doing today. Einstein did not have to be a great mathematician. He simply needed to have the key insight or idea and then attract the efforts, money and ideas of others to leverage his insight into the revolution in our understanding of the physical universe that it became.
To leverage yourself, you also need other people’s intelligence and other people’s cooperation. You need to be able to attract into your life and work the help, assistance, influence and active involvement of lots of other people in achieving your goals. And you can do this if you can remember the two simple laws that I will now explain.
Learn all of The Universal Laws of Success and Achievement
The first is the Law of Compensation. The Law of Compensation says that whatever you put in, you get out. It is, in a way, a way of rephrasing the “Law of Reciprocity.”
The Law of Compensation says that whatever you do to help or improve the lives of other people, will come back to you. You will be compensated in full measure for everything that you contribute or put in. This willingness on your part to contribute to helping others is a virtual guarantee that others will look for ways to contribute to helping you.
The Law of Compensation also says that you cannot get out if you do not put in. Like the Law of Sowing and Reaping, it is not the Law of “Reaping and Sowing.” The law requires that first you put in, sometimes for a long, long time, but then, by a Law of the Universe, you will be compensated, you will reap the harvest in your own life.
With regards to earning the influence and assistance of other people you must always be looking for other ways to help them to get the things they want so they will be predisposed to helping you to get the things that you want.
One of the reasons that America is the most prosperous and powerful country economically and militarily in the world is because of our free enterprise system. The free enterprise system says that, “The more enterprising you are, the freer you are.”
With our free market system, you can accomplish anything you want in life by simply finding ways to help other people to accomplish the things that they want. And the more creative you are in leveraging and multiplying your talents and abilities times the talents and abilities of others, the higher you can rise and the faster you can move forward in your life.
The Universal Laws of Success and Achievement
Success Through Goal Setting, Part 3 of 3
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jan 30, 2009
Moving on to the next letter in GOALS…
The second letter, O, stands for opportunity. Successful people do not wait for opportunities to turn their goals into reality; rather, they make their opportunities, because they are perfectly clear about the kind of life they wish to create. Once you have taken the time to decide exactly what you want, you will experience an endless flow of opportunities that will help move you in that direction.
For example, a young woman worked for me as an executive secretary. At the same time, she had a goal to be a successful real-estate agent and investor. So while she worked for me, she regularly took night courses to get her real-estate agent’s license and also to learn how to buy and sell real estate profitably. Over the course of a year, she and her husband bought, fixed up and sold three houses.
They made more money from their real-estate transactions than they did from their jobs. At the end of the year, she passed the test and got her real-estate-agent’s license.
Within a few days of getting her license, she and her husband were sitting in a small restaurant, and they got into a conversation with a woman at the next table. It turned out that this woman was a very successful real-estate agent who needed an executive assistant to work with her and learn the real-estate profession. They got along so well that my executive secretary was offered the job, where she would be earning double what she could earn as a secretary and have an unlimited upside potential.
My secretary did not wait for an opportunity to come to her. She set a goal, made a plan and went to work to prepare herself for the opportunity when it arose.
The letter A stands for ability. Many people hesitate to set high, challenging goals because they lack the ability necessary to turn those goals into reality. But remember that we all lacked knowledge and experience when we started out in our careers or fields of expertise.
Do you remember when you started your first job? You probably felt a little clumsy, inadequate and unsure about how to do it well. As you progressed and got more experience, you became more and more confident, and in many cases, you did an excellent job without even thinking much about it.
Since you gain the ability necessary for high achievement through knowledge and experience, if you increase the speed at which you acquire both of those, you increase the speed at which you move ahead.
Enjoy success through Maximum Achievement Affirmation CD
The letter L stands for leadership. Leadership is simply the ability to get results. And you begin to get results when you accept full responsibility for yourself, for your job and for the outputs required in your position.
You demonstrate leadership when you refuse to make excuses or blame anyone or anything for the problems you are having. The acceptance of the responsibility of leadership enables you to move ahead and take action.
When you are not satisfied with your job or income, and you sit down and make a written plan to change it, and then take action on that plan, without waiting for anyone’s approval or permission, you are behaving like a leader.
The final letter, S, stands for stay with it — the resolution to persist in the face of adversity until you succeed. Between you and every goal that you wish to achieve, there is a series of obstacles, and the bigger the goal, the bigger the obstacles. Your decision to be, have and do something out of the ordinary entails facing difficulties and challenges that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.
When you look around you, you will see that all achievement is the triumph of persistence. You will see men and women everywhere who are struggling with and overcoming adversities in order to accomplish something that is important to them. And so can you.
So these are the words and phrases to remember in setting and achieving goals: The first is get to it! Get started; take the first action at hand. The second is opportunity. Begin to prepare yourself now so that you will be ready for the opportunities that will inevitably arise. The third is ability. Resolve to learn what you need to know to live the kind of life you want to live. The fourth word is leadership. Take charge of your time and your life, and accept responsibility for your results. And, finally, stay with it. If you stay with it long enough, nothing can stop you from finally winning through.
Maximum Achievement Affirmation
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined
Success Through Goal Setting, Part 2 of 3
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jan 27, 2009
Continuing from last time…
The primary reason why you fear failure is simply this: You probably do not understand the role that failure plays in achievement. The fact is that it is impossible to succeed without failing. Failure is an indispensable prerequisite for success. All great success is preceded by great failure. If you wish to fulfill your potential, you have to be willing to risk failure over and over and over, because there is no way that you can ever accomplish worthwhile goals until you have fallen on your face so many times that you have eventually learned the lessons that you need for great achievement.
In doing research for his classic book The Law of Success, Napoleon Hill interviewed more than 500 of the most successful men and women in America. All of them admitted to him that they had achieved their greatest successes just one step beyond the point where they had experienced their greatest failures.
A key to succeeding through goal-setting is expecting temporary setbacks and obstacles as inevitable parts of the goal-achieving process.
Now, in order to be successful, you need to focus your mental and physical energy in a single direction toward a predetermined objective. People who are especially energetic or talented have a hard time with this. They are the ones who try to do several things at once and end up doing nothing well.
Setting well-defined goals enables you to channel your efforts and focus your energy toward something that’s important to you. Goal-setting gives you a target to aim at and enables you to develop the self-discipline to continue working toward your target rather than becoming distracted and going off in other directions.
Reach all of your goals with The Ultimate Goal Achieving Package
Let me share with you five keys that will help you to reach your goals more effectively. Each of these keys starts with one of the letters in the word goals.
Whenever you find yourself getting off the track, simply repeat the word goals, and think about how each letter stands for a key that just might apply to your current situation.
The first letter is G, and it stands for get to it. Sometimes, the only difference between a successful person and a failure is that the successful person has the courage to get started, to do something, to begin moving toward the accomplishment of a specific goal.
For example, when I was younger, I realized that because of my limited education, I was stuck in a low-paying job. I began reading the want ads and decided that I wanted to work in advertising, especially as a copywriter. I went to an advertising agency and applied for the job of writing advertisements. The head of the agency was very polite, but he told me that I was unskilled and totally unsuited for the position. He thanked me for coming in and wished me luck.
Now I was back on the street, but I had a goal. I wanted to be an advertising copywriter. I immediately took the first step, which was to learn more about how to write copy, so that I would not be turned down in the future because of a lack of ability. I went to the local library and checked out books on the subject of advertising and copywriting.
Over the next 12 months, I checked out and read every single book in the library on the subject. Meanwhile, I read magazines and newspapers and thought about how I could improve their advertising. I wrote sample advertisements and began taking them to advertising agencies.
To make a long story short, at the end of the 12 months, two of the largest advertising agencies in the country offered me a job as a copywriter, and I accepted one of those offers. My income doubled. I had worked at other jobs in the meantime. But I had never lost sight of my goal, and I had kept on doing the things that I needed to do to put myself in a position to eventually achieve my goal.
You, too, may have a long-range goal. In order to achieve it, you need to sit down and make a list of all the steps that you will have to take to get from where you are to where you want to be. Then begin with the first and most obvious thing that you can do on that list. Complete it, and then start on number two.
Don’t worry about the long term. Just concentrate on the obvious first step that you can take. Surprisingly enough, everything else will take care of itself. The Confucian saying, “A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step,” is so popular in so many languages because it is so true.
Wait until next time, when I will explain the meaning of the remaining letters, and help you achieve success through goal setting.
The Ultimate Goal Achieving Package
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined
Success Through Goal Setting, Part 1 of 3
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jan 23, 2009
The ability to set goals and make plans for their accomplishment is the “master skill” of success.
It is the single most important skill that you can learn and perfect. Goal-setting will do more to help you achieve the things you want in life than will anything else you’ve been exposed to. Becoming an expert at goal-setting and goal-achieving is something that you absolutely must do if you wish to fulfill your potential as a human being.
Goals enable you to do the work you want to do, to live where you want to live, to be with the people you enjoy, and to become the kind of person you want to become. And there is no limit to the financial rewards you can obtain. All you have to do is to set a goal for financial success, make a plan, and then work the plan until you succeed in that area.
The payoff for setting goals and making plans is being able to choose the kind of life you want to live. So why do so few people set goals? According to the best research, less than 3 percent of Americans have written goals, and less than 1 percent review and rewrite their goals on a daily basis. So the reasons why people don’t set goals have been of considerable interest to me. I think that there are five basic reasons why people don’t set goals.
The first reason is that they are simply not serious. Whenever I speak with a man or woman who has achieved something remarkable, I learn that the achievement occurred after that person decided to “get serious.” Until you become completely serious and totally determined about your goals, nothing really happens.
Achieve all your goals by making a plan. A Flight Plan.
The second reason why people don’t set goals is that they don’t understand the importance of goals. We find that young men and women who begin setting goals very early in life invariably come from families in which the importance of goals is emphasized. The discussion that takes place around your family dinner table is one of the most powerful formative influences in your life. If your parents didn’t have goals, didn’t talk about goals, didn’t encourage you to set goals, and didn’t talk about people outside the family circle who had goals and were moving toward a higher level of achievement, then you very likely grew up with the idea that goals are not even a part of normal existence. This is the case for most people. And for many years, it was the case for me.
The third reason why people don’t set goals is because they don’t know how to do it. One of the greatest tragedies of our educational system is that you can receive 15 to 18 years of education in our schools and never once receive a single hour of instruction on how to set goals.
Yet we find that in certain schools where goal-setting programs have been introduced since first grade, young people become excited about goal-setting — even if the goal is only to increase the scores by 5 or 10 percent over the course of the semester, or to be on time every day in the course of a month. Children become so excited about achieving goals that by the third or fourth grade, they love to go to school. They get the best grades. They are seldom absent. They are excited about themselves and about their lives. So encourage your children to set worthwhile and realistic goals from an early age.
The fourth reason why people don’t set goals is fear of rejection. The fear of rejection is caused by destructive criticism in early childhood and is manifested, in adulthood, in the fear of criticism by others. Many people hold back from setting worthwhile goals because they have found that every time they do set a goal, somebody steps up and tells them that they can’t achieve it, or that they will lose their money or waste their time.
Because each of us is strongly influenced by the opinions of those around us, one of the first things that you must learn when you begin setting goals is to keep your goals confidential. Don’t tell anyone about them.
Often, it’s the fear of criticism that, more than any other single factor, stops you from goal-setting in the first place. So keep your goals to yourself, with one exception. Share your goals only with others who are committed to achieving goals of their own and who really want you to be successful and achieve your goals as well. Other than that, don’t tell anybody about your goals, so no one is in a position to criticize you, or to discourage you from setting your goals.
The fifth reason why people don’t set goals — and perhaps the most important reason of all — is the fear of failure. People don’t set goals because they are afraid that they might fail. In fact, the fear of failure is probably the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. It can hold you back more than any other psychological problem.
Watch out for parts two and three, where you will learn the the primary reason why people fear failure, and other ways you can achieve success through goal setting.
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined
Planning Your Year — Part One
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jan 15, 2009
There has never been a better time in all of human history to be alive than today.
There are more opportunities for you to accomplish more things, in more different fields, engaging in more different activities, than have ever existed before.
Resolve today to make the coming year the very best year of your life. Resolve today to draw a line under your past and to focus very clearly on your future. Resolve today that you are going to set goals, make plans, take actions and achieve more in the coming year than perhaps you have ever accomplished in any one single year before.
One of the great rules for success is this: “It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from; all that really matters is where you’re going!”
No matter what you have done or accomplished in the past, “that was then and this is now.”
The very best days, weeks, months and years of your life lie ahead. The most exciting accomplishments and the greatest achievements are still to come. As Shakespeare said, “The past is merely a prelude.”
As it happens, everyone has goals. But some people seem to accomplish their goals far more systematically and with greater assurance than others. Why is this? The answer is simple. People who accomplish goals at a higher rate than the average are people who use a systematic, proven method of goal setting and goal attainment.
Attain all your goals with the Maximum Achievement Goal Planner
Perhaps the two most important qualities of success are focus and concentration. Focus means knowing exactly what it is you want and concentration means having the discipline to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing, until it is complete.
If you have these qualities, and both of these qualities are learned through practice, you can accomplish virtually anything. There are no limits on your future if you can focus and concentrate every hour of every single day.
The starting point of setting goals for the coming year is for you to project forward and think back. Practice what we call “Back from the Future” thinking. Project forward to the end of the next twelve months and ask yourself, “If everything happens perfectly, what will it look like?”
The one quality of men and women who become leaders in their own lives and societies, throughout all of history is the quality of vision. They have the ability to visualize. They can see the future well in advance of it becoming a reality. They can then see the steps that they will need to take to get from where they are to where they want to go.
So if your next twelve months were ideal, in every respect, what would happen or, what would have happened, at the end of that twelve month period?
You need to set goals that are multi-dimensional. You need to set goals for every part of your life so that you function like a well-oiled machine, like a balanced wheel that goes around smoothly in every respect. You need goals for your health, for your career, for your finances, for your relationships, for your personal and professional development, for your community and for your spiritual growth.
Nothing happens by accident. Everything happens for a reason. And you are the “primary creative force” in your own life. You are the reason. Things are happening in your life because you make them happen, not because you sit around and wait for them to happen.
Here is the basic seven-step model of goal setting. You can use this like breathing in and breathing out on a regular basis to accelerate your attainment of any goal you can imagine for yourself.
Step number one is for you to decide exactly what you want. This immediately moves you into a separate category of people because most people have no idea of what they really want.
Clarity is the most important single quality of goal-setting and perhaps the most important single quality of success. Decide exactly what you want in each area of your life. Instead of fuzzy goals like more money, better health and happiness, be specific about exactly how much more money you want to earn in a specific period of time and combine that with exactly what level of health and fitness you desire.
Most people are unconsciously preoccupied with the fear of failure. It is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. And the fear of failure can work on you unconsciously by blocking you from setting clear specific goals.
Why? Well, if you don’t set clear, specific goals, then you can’t fail to achieve them. So your subconscious mind is actually protecting you by helping you to avoid failure.
You must resist and overcome this tendency by having the courage to be bold and specific about exactly what you want.
This is step number one. Read steps two through seven next time.
Maximum Achievement Goal Planner
