Health Care Crisis?
Posted by Brian Tracy on Aug 24, 2009
The big issue of the day seems to be “Obamacare.” In 1992, when they try to ram through “Hillarycare,” there was also a huge controversy. The issue died almost immediately when someone stood up and said “The emperor has no clothes. There is no “Health care crisis” that needs to be solved by stripping Americans of the right to choose their own doctors and putting one sixth of the U.S. economy under the control of the same bureaucrats who run the post office.” Yikes! Read the rest of this entry »
You asked…I answered
Posted by Brian Tracy on Apr 20, 2009
I recently asked you, “What is the single biggest question that you want to ask Brian Tracy?”… here are the first 5 top questions asked… also, stay tuned til next time when I will answer 5 more.
Question: How do you stay motivated and succeed in our economic state and in the face of adversity?
Take off the Gloves
Posted by Brian Tracy on Mar 25, 2009
There is good news and bad news in our economy today. First, the bad news: We are immersed in the worst economic situation of our lifetimes. As a nation, we have been on a spending binge for decades, spending money that we have not earned on things that we could not afford, and on terms that we could not pay for, to impress people that we don’t care about that much in any case. Read the rest of this entry »
Reinventing Your Life
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 5, 2009
We are going through times of turbulence today that we have not seen in our lifetimes.
And it is going to get worse before it gets better. This is therefore a great time for you to stand back and reinvent your life for the future.
In my new book “Reinvention,” I give you a step-by-step plan that you can follow to reinvent and recreate your life so that, “The rest of your life is the best of your life.”
Reinvention begins with an explanation of the many ways in which “you are remarkable.” You have talents, abilities, desires, ambitions and potential that has never existed in any person in the history of mankind. You could not use your full potential if you had one hundred lifetimes. One of your great responsibilities to yourself, your family and your world is to tap into this deep well of potential and use it to do something wonderful with your life.
In chapter two, I give you a series of questions to ask yourself to determine the answer to, “Who are you?”
“Reinvention” acts like a personal guide, coach and counselor that takes you through every part of your life, identifying what you have done well in the past, your hopes, wishes and desires, what you would like to do in the future, and what is possible for you. By the end of this chapter, you have become aware of all the different ways in which you can reinvent yourself in the months and years ahead.
As the book progresses, you learn how to decide what you want, and what you are truly worth. You learn how to see your “earning ability” as your most valuable financial asset.
You learn 21 of the best ideas to get the job you really want, in any economy. You learn how to identify the various jobs or careers that are of interest to you, how to do research in those areas, how to interview, and how to get the job you want, paying the kind of money that you want to earn.
You learn how to get paid more and promoted faster. You learn the key behaviors and skills that you can develop to move to the top of your field faster than anyone around you.
Finally, you learn how to get the most out of yourself. You learn how to be more productive, and how to focus and concentrate on the most important things that you do, every hour of every day.
In “Reinvention,” you learn how to take complete control over yourself, your life and your career and your future. You learn how to achieve more and earn more in the months and years ahead than you ever have in the past. You learn how to become proactive rather than reactive, and how to break out of your comfort zone into new levels of performance.
Make an investment in yourself and your future. Buy “Reinvention” today by going to briantracy.com/reinvention and begin changing your life in a very positive way.
Reinvention: How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life
When the Going Gets Tough
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jan 19, 2009
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”?
So wrote Charles Dickens in the first sentence of his book “Bleak House” more than 100 years ago.
From the boom times of the mid-70’s we are entering into one of the most challenging economic periods of all of our lives. Our economy and our businesses are experiencing financial reversals that have not been seen since 1937. And if the economists are correct, this situation will continue well into 2009 and maybe into 2010.
But, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. As Napoleon Hill said, “Within every problem or setback lies the seed of an equal or greater opportunity or benefit.”
Our job is to look into every problem or difficulty for the valuable lesson that we can learn and turn to our advantage. It is to look for something good that will help us to be better and stronger in the future. And the good news is that, if you look for something good, or a valuable lesson, you will always find it.
Over the years, it has been said over and over again, “Learners are leaders.” It has been said “Leaders are readers.” The latest research shows that those people that start at the bottom and eventually get to the top engage in what is called “deliberate practice.” They never stop learning and growing in their fields. They deliberately select the subjects that they need to master in order to use all of their other skills and abilities at a higher level.
In the past, during periods of affluence, the majority of the population has become soft, like an athlete that has been out of competition for a long time. The average person today is preoccupied with what Dennis Waitley calls activities that are “tension relieving” rather than activities that are “goal achieving.”
Continuous learning was considered by many to be optional, an activity engaged in by some of those “positive thinkers” that seem to be earning so much more money and moving ahead so much faster than the average person.
Today however, continuous learning is the minimum requirement for survival and success in your field. If you are not getting better, you are getting worse. If you are not constantly improving and upgrading your skills, you are falling behind, like a runner in a race. And there is no time to lose.
Malcolm Forbes once wrote a story about how many factories found that the byproducts of the manufacturing process turned out to be more valuable than the actual products produced in the factory itself. For example, for many years in Germany, Bayer, a major chemical company, stacked up piles of acetylsalicylic acid next to the factory, this was a byproduct of the chemical manufacturing process.
Over time, the executives of the factory noticed that the workers would scoop up a bit of this acetylsalicylic acid powder and consume it with water when they came in on Mondays with hangovers from the weekend. They found that it had remarkable pain-killing properties. This led to the discovery of Aspirin, and to Bayer Aspirin, which became a billion dollar industry world wide.
The byproducts of your daily life are spare time. Each week, you start off with 168 hours. Of that time 40 hours is devoted to work and another 56 hours to sleep. This leaves you 62 hours per week to do with as you please.
The great discovery is that if you invest two hours per day, fourteen hours per week, back into yourself, you will soon become one of the most competent, capable and highest paid people in your field. The byproduct of your daily life are those extra hours that you have leftover to invest in yourself.
The 80/20 rule seems to apply, based on current research. What it says is that the average income of people in the bottom 80% in our society increases at approximately 3% a year, keeping pace with inflation. This means that people in the bottom 80% very seldom make any progress. They have a “JOB” which stands for “Just Over Broke.”
But people in the top 20%, those who are continually upgrading their skills, increase their income at an average of 11% per year. This means that their income doubles every 5-7 years, and then doubles again repeatedly throughout their lives. As a result, people in the top 20%, the life-long learners, are increasingly earning more money, driving nicer cars, living in nicer homes and providing nicer lives for their families. Which group do you belong to?
After 25 years of working in the field of personal development, and taking my own self from rags to riches, I discovered www.ilearningglobal.tv. I have since put my whole heart into producing programs for iLearningGlobal and encouraging dozens of others of the top speakers, trainers, authors and experts in the world to produce programs for iLearningGlobal.
When you become a member of iLearningGlobal, you have the best learning resources in the world at your fingertips 24/7. There are more than two million dollars worth of courses on iLearningGlobal today, and the number is increasing each week. You can learn how to sell, build a profitable business, negotiate, make more money from the internet, buy and sell real estate, invest effectively, manage and lead, manage your time effectively, and dozens of other essential subjects that you need to learn for you to earn the maximum amount of money that is possible for you.
Remember, your most valuable financial asset is your “earning ability.” This is your ability to earn money. You can have a low earning ability or a high earning ability. And this is totally up to you. It is a matter of your own personal decision. Your earning ability is not fixed. It is flexible, and you can make it grow, by acquiring new knowledge and developing new skills.
All business skills are learnable. All sales skills are learnable. All money making skills are learnable. All life skills and all health skills are learnable. Everything that you want to know, you can learn if you reach out for it.
Read everything you can on the subjects that can help you to improve the quality of your life and work. Listen to audio programs in your car and on your iPod. But especially, visit www.ilearningglobal.tv today and take a look at how this website can help you move to the top of your field.
These are challenging times, but they are also full of opportunity. Your job is to develop the skills and abilities necessary to take advantage of the opportunities around you and to move ahead of your competition in the months and years ahead. Take action today!
Brian Tracy
You can sign up for iLearning Global by going to www.ilearningglobal.biz/briantracyintl and clicking on "Join Now".
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined. - iLearningGlobal
The future of learning
Riding Out the Storm
Posted by Brian Tracy on Dec 4, 2008
Our world is in financial turmoil today.
The chickens have all come home to roost. Millions of smart people world-wide became convinced that they could make quick, easy money without contributing or adding value of any kind. Since it is ultimately impossible to get something out of nothing, the house of cards eventually had to come crashing down.
In 1977, the Jimmy Carter administration passed the Community Reinvestment Act, designed to harass banks into making unsafe loans in poor neighborhoods populated by people who could not afford to buy a house. Eventually these loans became known in the industry as "Ninja Loans."
This meant, "no job, no income, no assets, no money and no credit rating." When Clinton came into power, he fired up the Community Reinvestment Act and threatened banks with lawsuits and fines if they did not make loans to people that they knew could not, or would not pay them back. So called "Community Organizers" and other individuals and groups began holding demonstrations in bank lobbies to bully banks into providing these loans so that more and more people with no credit rating could buy homes that they could not afford and agreed to paying off debts that they had no money to cover.
These "Ninja Loans" began growing in the 1990’s and when interest rates dropped dramatically after the dot.com explosion in 2001, more and more people, including millions with good credit ratings, began demanding these "Ninja Loans" as well.
What to do? The banks, in all good conscious, could not make bad loans. They were forbidden by law to issue mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. So the federal government stepped in with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government mortgage lending organizations, to "guarantee" these loans, actually converting them into a form of "cash reserve" that banks and other financial institutions could use to inflate their assets.
As you may know, banks have what are called "reserve requirements." This means that they must have one dollar of cash on hand for every ten dollars that they lend to consumers or corporations. This is called "leverage" and is the reason why banking can be an extremely profitable industry.
Banks and other financial institutions found that they could package hundreds and thousands of these mortgages, some good, but mostly bad, into packages that obscured the fact that they were lending far more than the unlined properties were actually worth. This so called "securitization" of mortgages, backed extensively by the federal government through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, became treated as cash reserves for banks all over the world. Since the yield on these "securitized loans" was substantially higher than the banks could earn in the process of normal banking business, banks and financial institutions world-wide began buying these "government guaranteed notes" and adding them to their reserves.
Then the impending disaster began. These financial institutions began to lend against these shaky sub-prime securitized notes, leveraging them by ten times and more. When Lehman Brothers went broke, they were leveraging these underline sub-prime assets as much as 40 times. To put it another way, for every dollars worth of sub-prime mortgage assets they had, they were extending 40 dollars in loans to more and more people and corporations who were then using the money to bid up real estate and assets and corporate stock prices. This was very much like a reverse pyramid with the dollar on the bottom and forty dollars on the top. When the dollar on the bottom shrunk to 50 cents, the banks had to reduce their leverage by ten times and twenty times the shrinkage of their "assets." As we see today, this led to financial collapse of multi-billion dollar financial organizations.
The Bush administration attempted on sixteen different occasions to reign-in in the out-of-control lending of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which eventually reached as high as $1.5 trillion in "government backed loans." Time and time again, the supporters of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, all of whom received huge political campaign donations from these organizations, fought back the federal regulators and refused to reign-in the out-of-control lending. The result is the financial meltdown that we are experiencing today.
What is to be done? If there is any good news, it is the fact that there have been financial panics and crashes since the first founding of the first bank shortly after the successful American Revolution. In every case, the smartest and best brains in America have gotten together to solve the problem and return the situation to some semblance of normalcy.
This financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Nonetheless, is it not as bad because the experts are far more knowledgeable about what works and what doesn’t work in getting the country out of a financial panic.
The process is messy. Every day people like Henry Paulson and others are announcing different ideas and plans to bail out banks, corporations and institutions. The most important factor is that the economy receive enough government backing to stabilize, very much like a small ship that has been hit by a squall and is listing over, taking on water and threatening to sink. This will not happen.
What can you do? In any storm, you have no choice but to "batter down the hatches." You should cut all discretionary spending and build up cash reserves in any way possible. Make a decision today to get out of debt and stay out of debt. Start paying down your high interest credit cards and be prepared to take a hit in your standard of living. This will mean eating at home more often, spending less on Christmas presents and discretionary expenses, and concentrating intensely on financial liquidity and solvency.
The biggest lesson of this financial crisis is that we have lived beyond our means for far too long. The United States Government has been borrowing 500 billion dollars per year from overseas to give the American voting public benefits and goodies that it is not willing to tax them for. The American public themselves have become like pigs at a trough, demanding ever more money and benefits from the federal government without being willing to pay for it. All of this debt is being passed onto our children and grandchildren.
The average American family now owes $450,000 as their share of the national debt. A child born today starts off with a personal debt of almost $200,000 that will have to be taken out of his standard of living in the form of reduced wages and interest payments for the rest of his or her life.
Here is the bottom line: Government must live within its means. Government should be able to manage 100% of it’s expenditures on 90-95% of its income, and use the balance to pay down the national debt.
Personally, you should make a decision today to live on 90% of your income or less, and save/invest the other 10% for financial security and financial independence. You should never again go into debt. You should never again live beyond your means. You should never again spend money that you don’t have on the off-chance that you might enjoy a financial loophole by flipping a property sometime in the future. Remember, "Hope is not a strategy." The entire population has been on the equivalent of a financial drinking binge and is now going to suffer the effects of a long and painful hangover. But at the end, with what we have learned, each of us should be able to put our financial house in order, budget appropriately, live within our means, and go on to build a solid financial estate in the years ahead.
Brian Tracy
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined!
Wall Street Journal
Posted by Brian Tracy on Oct 29, 2008
Article about the upcoming elections
Dear Readers,
Usually, I send out a message talking abut my current experiences.
However this time, in response to numerous requests for my ideas on the upcoming election on November 4, I’ve decided to send to you someone else’s opinions.
This summarizes the best economic thinking on the subject.
Enjoy!
>>>
Wall Street Journal
If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.
Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.
The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.
Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.
The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.
The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman’s Web site for a not-so-brief target list.
The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.
Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.
The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.
Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.
The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.
Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress — Democratic, naturally.
Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.
Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar’s ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.
It’s always possible that events — such as a recession — would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn’t turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama’s agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton’s was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore’s BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.
In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today’s left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.
W. Carl Wood, Senior Financial Management Analyst
Treasury Relations and System Support
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
P. O. Box 442
St. Louis, Missouri 63166-0442
>>>
Vote with your conscience. Now you know what we’re dealing with.
Best regards,
Brian
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals fater than you ever imagined!
What Are You Worth?
Posted by Brian Tracy on Sep 24, 2008
Invest in yourself to achieve the best.
In the world of work, some people earn a little and some people earn a lot. What is the difference? This question has been studied for more than 100 years, and now we know the answers.
People who earn a lot—the top 20% in any field—make a greater contribution and get better results than people who earn a little-the bottom 80%.
Your work and earning life is very much like a marathon. All the runners assemble from different places at the starting line. The gun goes off! The runners begin to run, at different speeds. Some people sprint to take the lead quickly. Others go a little slower, preferring to run steadily over the long course. Others start off slowly and fall further back in the pack throughout the race, finally coming in so far behind that almost everyone has gone home by the time they cross the finish line.
In life, we all start off at the same place. When we get out of high school or college, we have few, if any, marketable skills. We take the first job that we can get and go to work. At that point, most people settle into the hum-drum of work life, doing what they are told to do, coming in at nine and leaving at five, and going home and watching television in the evenings.
But this is not for you. The race is on! The good news is that most people do not know that they are in a race so they are easy to beat.
From the time you take your first job until the time you retire, you are the president of your own personal services corporation. You are the president of an entrepreneurial company with one employee: yourself! You have one product to sell in the competitive marketplace: your personal services.
Throughout the history of economics, there has been only one way to increase your income, and that is to "add value." Every day in every way, you must be looking for ways to add value to your work, to yourself, your employer, and your customers.
Perhaps the greatest question you can ask repeatedly is: "What can I do to increase the value of my service to my customers today?"
Successful people never rest. They read continually in their field, looking for ideas and insights that will help them to add greater value. They listen to audio programs in their cars, seeking ways to contribute more to their business and to their customers. They attend seminars, and today, they become members of iLearningGlobal and plug into the preeminent source of continuous learning in the world.
One of the most important qualities of successful people is that they are highly responsible. They do not make excuses or blame others. They do not criticize or complain. They say, "If it’s to be, it’s up to me."
But responsible for what? They are, first of all, responsible for setting goals and writing down how they will achieve them. They are responsible for working on those goals every hour of every day. But they are also responsible to themselves, to earn the very most of which they are capable throughout their working lives. In this sense, they are responsible to their spouses and children, who depend upon them to earn a good living and to provide a good life.
Don’t Waste Your Potential
Perhaps the greatest tragedy in our society is that of "wasted potential." Many people have the ability to earn two or three times the amount of income they are presently enjoying by simply adding one or two new skills to their skill set.
Over the years, I have trained more than 5 million people in 47 countries. Many thousands of those people have told me and written to me giving examples of how one new skill enabled them to increase their income by 500% and even 1,000%. Many people go from rags to riches with one additional skill. Many people go from living in rented accommodation, worrying about money, to living in big houses on the hill, driving new cars and putting their children in private schools with one additional skill.
The terrible tragedy would be for you to go through your life with the ability to earn three times, four times, five times what you are earning today by simply dedicating yourself to continuous learning, and upgrading your skill set on a regular basis.
The greatest miracle of success is continuous learning, continuous personal and professional development. And just like physical fitness, you have to work at mental fitness every day. "If you don’t use it, you lose it."
The wonderful thing is that all the answers have been found. Every skill that you need to learn to increase your income radically and permanently has already been discovered and is already being taught somewhere, probably on iLearningGlobal.
Perhaps the best investment you could ever make is to buy stock in yourself. Realize that you are your most valuable asset. Your ability to earn money is the most precious thing you have. Everything that you do to increase your ability to add value and to serve other people increases the amount of money you earn and the quality of life you enjoy.
Go for it!
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined!
Europe in September
Posted by Brian Tracy on Sep 17, 2008
This has been a great week!
During the last week of August, I was flying, traveling and speaking all over the country, starting in Seattle for 16,000 people, moving on to speak for Precor for the entire day, and then on to Houston to speak for Guardian Home Care.
From Houston/Galveston, I flew to Chicago and recorded a new program, “The New Psychology of Achievement” before flying on to Grand Rapids to do a seminar for 1,000 Sales Professionals to introduce the “Sales Master Academy”.
When you enroll for the Sales Mastery Academy, you receive a $295.00 gift, a 16-CD Program on personal and professional success, plus unlimited access to more than 100 high powered selling programs, delivered online to your website, anytime, anywhere. Thousands of Sales Professionals all over the English speaking world are lining up and signing up for these programs in Sales Excellence. Upon completion, each person receives a “Certified Sales Professional” certificate for framing.
On Saturday morning, I flew via Washington/Dulles to Frankfurt and onto Moscow to speak for 2,200 highly motivated dealers, distributors and representatives of the Kirby Company, easily the best vacuum cleaner in the world.
Moscow is amazing! More than 400 billion dollars has flowed into the Russian economy as the result of high oil prices, and most of this money has gone to Moscow and St. Petersburg. The streets are full of Mercedes- Benzs and BMWs. The restaurants are jammed. The prices are now the highest in the world. For example, a typical hotel room downtown costs $1,000 per night, or more. A cup of coffee is $10.00 and a glass of wine is $25.00.
The city of Moscow is quite beautiful. They have built brand new roads and highways, new apartment buildings and hotels, and everything is clean and modern. The city itself is bustling, with individual and economic activity everywhere. Although there is a lot of crime and corruption, as a traveler or tourist you don’t experience it very much. Fortunately, my clients picked me up at the airport in a private car and dropped me off at the airport later in the same vehicle. It was all very smooth.
The city of St. Petersburg is one of the most beautiful in the world. It was designed and built to compare with the finest cities in Europe, starting with Peter the Great and then later, Catherine the Great. The magnificent palaces built along the canals and rivers once housed the crowned princes and princesses, as well as the czars. Today they are museums, like the Hermitage, one of the great art museums of the world, and the Ministries of Government. Again, Russia has changed dramatically since the fall of the Soviet Union and is now clean, modern and busy.
My seminar participants, 2,200 in Moscow and 800 in St. Petersburg, were positive, enthusiastic, and eager to learn new ideas they could use to be successful in the fast growing economy.
After three days in Russia, I caught a 6:30 am flight from St. Petersburg via Vienna to Belgrade, Serbia. It is hard to believe that we were bombing these people back in the Clinton years. Today, the city is rapidly merging with the European Union, and construction is taking place everywhere. New hotels, office buildings, apartment buildings and homes are rising in every direction.
We had 600 people at the Conference Center in downtown Belgrade for the entire day. As in Russia, everyone is eager to learn and apply new ideas. I shared with them some of my best methods and strategies on Personal Planning, Goal Setting, Time Management and Sales Success.
My host Matt Marinsek is the Regional Vice President for Kirby in the Eastern Block.
His story is fascinating. He grew up in Communist Slovenia and began earning his living by selling novels door to door. His average sale was one in nine doors that he knocked on. Over the course of five years, he knocked on more than 100,000 doors in order to make a good living.
When he was 22, he set out and crossed the Sahara Desert into Niger Dahoney, now Benin.
He took a trip to the United States and met a Kirby Sales manager in a bar in Miami. Since his English was already quite good, he began selling Kirby Vacuums door to door in Southern Florida. Within a year, he was the number one salesman in his region.
The Kirby Company gave him the rights to distribute Kirby vacuum cleaners in Eastern Europe, where they currently had no market. Since then, Matt has built an organization of ten thousand people selling 60 million dollars worth of Kirby vacuum cleaners each month! It is an amazing accomplishment.
From Belgrade, I caught an early morning flight on Friday and flew all day, gaining nine hours in flight and arrived back in San Diego by 3:00 on Friday afternoon, completely exhausted.
In October, I will be returning to Russia and the Ukraine, and in November, I will be speaking in China and Malaysia. What never ceases to amaze me is that you can get onto an airplane in virtually any city, and travel to almost anywhere in the world almost as easily as driving to work. It just takes longer.
Health wise, I have dropped 17 pounds this year and kept it off, after having set it as a goal over and over again. The key to weight loss is to change your lifestyle. Make a decision today to dramatically cut back on all the foods that cause you to gain weight, eat more salads, exercise more regularly and in effect, “get serious” about health and fitness. There is no other way.
In my next blog, I will talk about the presidential campaign and the economy.
See you then!
Brian
Brian Tracy talks about Self Esteem
Posted by Brian Tracy on Aug 22, 2008
The Importance of Self-ConfidenceBrian Tracy talks about Self-Esteem
