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".
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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
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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
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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!
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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
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Aug 22, 2008
The Importance of Self-ConfidenceBrian Tracy talks about Self-Esteem
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Posted by Brian Tracy on Aug 8, 2008
The United States is one of the most blessed countries in all of human history. After World War II, it was the “last man standing.�?
As a result, the United States enjoyed the greatest and longest period of sustained affluence and prosperity of any country in the world. An entire generation, now in politics, grew up believing that prosperity was inevitable and that each person was entitled to enjoy a wonderful life without hard work or sacrifice.
Napoleon Hill once wrote, “Never attempt to violate natural laws and win.”
What he meant was that there are certain laws in nature, like gravity, that you cannot violate for any time without paying the consequences.
There is the story of the man who decides to commit suicide by jumping off a 30 story building. As he plummets toward the ground, someone leans out from a 15th story window and shouts, “How’s it going?” The falling man shouts back, “So far, so good!”
Our problems with oil and energy are self-inflicted. We are the only country in the world with enormous oil and gas reserves that has made it illegal for our companies to extract these resources and make them available to the American people.
For some bizarre reason, the politicians in Washington became convinced that we could enjoy endless affluence without paying for it. We could have energy sufficiency, if not energy independence, without ever having to drill for oil in our own country.
Today, we send $700 billion dollars per year overseas to pay for imported oil. We are bankrupting ourselves under a debt load that will crush this country in the coming years if we do not reverse course immediately.
The fact is that oil and gas power 86% of our energy needs in the U.S., and this will not change very much over the next hundred years. We have no choice but to drill and extract all the oil and gas, plus shale oil and coal that we possibly can, to stop shipping hundreds of billions of dollars overseas into the hands of people who are not necessarily our friends.
All the hysteria over global warming does not change the fact that average global temperatures stopped rising in 1998 and have stabilized since then. We are having some of the coldest winters on record. The hottest years recorded in the United States are 1934 and 1935, when temperatures were hotter than they are today, and there were no excessive carbon dioxide emissions taking place, especially since we were in the middle of the Great Depression.
In previous eras, carbon dioxide emissions were ten times and twenty times greater over the earth than they are today. During those times, the excess carbon dioxide was absorbed by plant life, causing most of the world to be covered by dense tropical forests. Today, increased carbon dioxide levels actually lead to more luxurious and abundant crops and food stocks to feed a hungry world.
Environmentalism today has become the ultimate religion for atheists. People who do not believe in God instead believe in the environment, and with an almost hysterical faithfulness that shuts out all facts, information and contrary opinions.
The environmentalists are what Eric Hoffer called, “the true believers.” They are so passionately extreme about their viewpoint that mankind is the source of all evil on the earth, that they are willing to engage in any behaviors, including violence, burning and destruction, to support those beliefs.
The fact is that there is only one way for Americans to enjoy a sustained, high quality of life, that is affordable to all, and that is by drilling oil and gas, mining coal, and developing the oil shale in western United States that contains as much as 1.7 trillion barrels of oil.
Politicians in Washington are the only politicians in the world who are convinced that we can maintain our standard of living by making it illegal to drill more energy supplies, and bankrupting our country by sending $700 billion dollars a year overseas to oil exporters.
But, as Herbert Stein said, “What cannot go on, won’t.”
Sooner or later, the American public will awake. As Ayn Rand wrote in her Theory of Objectivism, “Reality is.” Two and two is four. What goes up must come down. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. We must aggressively drill for and extract more oil, natural gas, coal and shale if we are to provide for our energy needs, for ourselves and our families, before the nation goes bankrupt.
Keep on thinking!
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Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Aug 6, 2008
At the time of the American Revolution, Abigail Adams, a very perceptive woman and the wife of our third president, John Adams, said, “All men would be tyrants, if they could.�?
It was an astute observation. There is within almost every person, the “urge to power.”
It is amazing how many people have an intense desire to enforce their will on other people. The newspapers are full of commentators recommending that people be “forced” to pay higher taxes, drive slower, use public transportation, and in general, support whatever the writer thinks is good for them, whether they like it or not.
By the same token, we could say that, “All people would be thieves, if they could.” Almost everyone has a deep down desire to get something for nothing, something that they have not earned and to which they are not entitled.
No where is this more obvious than in the area of money. Today, we are going through a series of wrenching financial scandals and turbulence triggered by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Why did this happen?
The answer is simple. Somehow, for some reason, a mass national hysteria took place and thousands, if not millions of people began to think it was possible to get “free money” that they had not earned and did not deserve.
Like an epidemic, this “free money” craze has swept across the country. People bought homes they could not afford, and borrowed money against their homes they could never pay back. Instead of behaving responsibly, as many people did, too many homebuyers became “home flippers.”
Herbert Stein, the economist, once wrote that, “What cannot go on, won’t.”
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “America will be a great land until the people become convinced that everyone can become rich at the expense of everyone else.”
Do you remember the old Smith Barney television commercial, where the actor looked into the camera and said, “We make money the old fashioned way; we earn it.”
There is only one way to become financially successful, and that is to “add value” wherever you are. It is to earn it in some way.
You have to put in more than you take out. You have to contribute greater value than you receive in compensation. You have to continually upgrade your skills and abilities so that you can serve your customers and employers at ever higher levels, making yourself ever more valuable to them.
The only way to become rich is to “spend less than you earn.”
In my recent book Flight Plan, I wrote that it is not possible to become financially successful by thinking happy thoughts, visualizing and attracting wealth into your life.
Instead, you must decide how you are going to “deserve” the wealth that you desire. What value are you going to offer to others that they will reward by voluntarily choosing to pay you for your products and services? How are you going to improve or enrich the lives of others in some way? If you want to prosper financially, you must find ways to help others to prosper, in advance.
Some years ago, a book was written entitled, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” This book documented the financial crazes that take place periodically, in different places in the world, starting with the “tulip craze” in Amsterdam in the 1600’s.
People became convinced that tulip bulbs would go up in value endlessly. Speculators were paying the equivalent of thousands, and tens of thousands of dollars for a single tulip bulb, convinced that there was a “greater fool” who would come along and buy it for an even higher price.
But as Herbert Stein said, “What cannot go on, won’t.” Eventually, the tulip craze collapsed, bankrupting thousands of individuals and causing the collapse of the Dutch economy.
In the last few years, we have had the “buy’em and flip’em” craze. Now it is over, like a massive drinking binge, and the hangover is extremely painful.
Just as it took about three years of craze to drive home prices up 50% and 100%, it will take about three years of collapse before home prices, like a water level, return to normal.
Just like a hangover, there will be enormous pain and suffering. But this is inevitable. What goes up must come down. And often it must come down a long way before it stabilizes.
For the rest of your life, refuse to think or act like a thief. A thief is someone who attempts to take something that does not belong to him, or her. Whenever you attempt to get money that you do not deserve, you are thinking like a thief. And the end is near.
Keep on thinking!
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Posted by Brian Tracy on Jul 1, 2008
For ten years, I was consistently overweight.
My clothes were too tight and then didn’t fit at all. This year, I developed a formula that I have used to get my weight under control for the first time in a decade. I have dropped from 196 lbs to 179 lbs. I feel terrific and get compliments from strangers about how trim I look. I now fit all of the suits and clothes that had been gathering dust in my closet.
The turning point for me was at Christmas, when I realized that I would have to change my lifestyle dramatically if I was ever going to get back to my ideal weight. Here is what I learned and practiced.
First of all, I realized that we all get into certain habits and rituals of diet, exercise and lifestyle, and then it becomes very hard to change, to get out of this “comfort zone.” But to get your weight and level of fitness back to where you want it, you are going to have to make some sacrifices.
Make a Decision
The biggest weight gainer of all is dinner time. It had become a ritual for me to come home, or go out, and have dinner between 7:00pm and 8:00pm with my wife, or with friends. We would share a bottle of wine, if not a little more, and generally eat more than could ever be justified for survival.
Then I read the works of Adele Davis, the nutritionist, who was famous for saying, “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”
To lose weight, the goal is to consume 80% of your calories before 2:00pm in the afternoon, in breakfast and lunch, and finish the day with something light and nutritious. If you just discipline yourself to eat lightly in the evening, you will start to lose weight almost immediately.
Salads at Six
A major turning point for Barbara and I was when we began to have “salads at six.”
This is an incredible weight loss technique! Instead of drinking wine and eating a large dinner, we instead have salad for dinner together as often as possible, Monday through Friday, at 6:00pm or thereabouts.
To break the natural tendency to come home at night and have a glass of wine, or some other drink, immediately drink a large glass of fruit juice, preferably cranberry or apple juice. This “sugar jolt” immediately cancels your desire for an alcoholic beverage, satisfies your appetite, and prepares you for your “salad at six.”
With your salads at dinner, add protein of some kind – chicken, fish or even slices of the steak you bring home from the restaurant. You can’t gain weight on salads. Without protein, you will be hungry in a couple of hours.
One of the things that Barbara and I have done is to have “salad at six” and then go out to a movie, thereby breaking the habit of having wine with dinner. Often, we go for a one hour walk around the neighborhood. Once you have broken this “dinner with wine” ritual a few times, it becomes easier and easier.
When you do this, you will feel lighter and brighter, have more energy, sleep well, and actually notice the difference in your weight within a few days, or less.
Eliminate the Three White Poisons
First, eliminate white sugar of all kinds, including soft drinks, desserts, candies, chocolate, and anything whatsoever that has sugar in it, for any reason. The elimination of sugar by itself will cause immediate weight loss.
Second, eliminate salt. Refuse to put it on any foods. Most foods, especially snack foods, canned foods, and processed foods, have so much salt that you need nothing additional in your diet. When you consume salt, your body retains water to hold the salt in suspension, causing you to bloat.
Third, eliminate white flour products of all kinds. Stop eating bread, pasta, rice, rolls, and even potatoes. The consumption of flour-based products is a major reason for overweight.
Your Exercise Regimen
Aerobic exercise has been the key to weight loss for me. I have always been physically active, but over the years, I had gradually cut back, putting on a pound a year over time.
Now, I get up at 6:00 AM, four or five days each week, and immediately exercise vigorously for 60-75 minutes. My favorites are the Lifecycle (reclining style), swimming, cross country ski machine, treadmill, or the elliptical machine. My goal is 200 to 300 minutes per week.
When you get up and exercise for sixty minutes first thing, your body burns calories all day long. The exercise energizes you and makes you brighter and more alert all day. When you start the day with exercise, it is easier to develop and maintain the habit of regular exercise.
After exercising, I usually have a cup of coffee and do some reading. The first food I eat is an apple, cut into four pieces and chewed slowly. When you wait thirty minutes after the apple for your protein breakfast, the apple quickly digests and then acts like a “roto-rooter” in your system 24 hours later.
Eat a Good Breakfast
For breakfast, I eat two scrambled eggs, covered with Mexican salsa heated in the microwave. This is sufficient to satisfy your appetite and give you sufficient fuel to run your system for 4-5 hours.
If you eat a handful of nuts on top of the eggs, you will not be hungry for 5-6 hours.
At lunch, eat only salads and protein. Eliminate breads, pastries, desserts and soft drinks of all kinds. I often buy a sandwich or a chicken burger and throw away the bread, just eating the protein. High quality protein takes 4-5 hours to digest slowly, giving you a continuous flow of energy without drowsiness.
When you go out for dinner, remember that your “apostate” turns off twenty minutes after you take the first bite. Because it is the evening, you don’t need very much to eat. Instead of a main course, preceded with salad and followed with dessert, have two appetizers. If you eat a salad appetizer and a protein appetizer, your appetite will be completely satisfied, you will feel lighter, sleep better, and lose weight.
One of the things I had to learn to do was to break the habit of eating large meals. Everything over and above what your body requires for healthy living is simply stored as fat.
Appetite Killers
Another thing that has helped me is Zone Bars. These are ideally balanced nutritional bars that you can buy by the box at your local store. A Zone Bar has a perfect balance of proteins, carbohydrates and fats. It is small, but it kills your appetite for 2-3 hours. It is the perfect “snack” to eat later in the day if you start to become hungry.
One of the keys to weight loss is to not allow yourself to be hungry. Once you get hungry, you lose all sense of portion in terms of what you eat. You can kill your hunger with Zone bars, or even by slowly chewing a handful of nuts.
Be Fully Rested
Sleep is very important. You need 7-8 hours of sleep each night for proper functioning. Too many people go to bed too late and get up too early. If they had eaten late, they don’t sleep well and don’t rest well.
A key to weight loss is for you to be fully rested as the result of going to bed at 10:00pm and getting eight hours of sleep each night. When you have had sufficient rest, you will not be as hungry, and you will be satisfied with smaller portions.
Lose 10 Pounds Quickly
There is a simple way to start strongly on your weight loss regimen. This method is based on the fact that your body accumulates as much as 5-10 pounds of undigested food in the 22 feet of your small intestine, plus your large intestine. Simply by flushing all of this excess food out of your system, you can drop five pounds quickly and off to a strong start.
The Cleansing Diet: Mix a level tablespoon of Sea Salt with a quart of warm water and drink it first thing in the morning. In almost exactly 60 minutes, your entire system will evacuate.
If you are really serious about starting strongly and losing weight safely, you can go on to what is called the “Lemonade Diet” for a week. Beyonce Knowles, the singer, recently lost twenty pounds in twenty days for her role in Dream Girls simply by using this diet.
The way it works is simple. To a ten ounce glass of warm water, you add two level tablespoons of pure maple syrup, two level tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice, and a dash of cayenne pepper.
This miraculous combination provides you with all the vitamins and minerals you need, plus the sugar energy you require for efficient working, thinking and functioning (but not strenuous exercise).The cayenne pepper stimulates your digestive system to operate more efficiently.
You can drink as many glasses of this mix as you like during the day, each time you feel hungry for any reason.
On the first day, you will drink 6 or 7 glasses. On the second day of this diet, you will drink 4 or 5 glasses. On the third and fourth day of this diet you will be drinking about three glasses spread over the day.
Each evening, before you go to bed, you mix and drink a large cup of herbal laxative tea. This will cause your system to continue cleaning out as you sleep. You will lose one pound or more for every day that you follow this lemonade diet.
When you use the lemonade diet to give yourself a “fast start”, you will drop five to ten pounds in 24-48 hours. You will see and feel the difference. You will then be motivated to continue.
Take Food Supplements
In addition to your regular diet, you must take excellent vitamin and mineral supplements. The very best are Nutrilite from Amway/Quixtar. When you are taking sufficient nutrients, your appetite will decrease. You will feel completely satisfied with less food, but better quality food. You will lose weight.
The key to long-term weight loss is for you to follow the suggestions above and commit to losing one pound per week indefinitely.
Your goal is to establish a new “set point,” the weight to which your body naturally returns, like a gyroscope, over time. The only way that you can permanently reduce your weight by reducing this set point is by losing weight slowly and surely over an extended period of time, one pound per week.
Be Patient and Persistent
One last point: Be gentle and patient with yourself. It has taken many years to develop your rituals of eating and drinking. Like a drunk, you will “fall off the wagon” occasionally. You will eat and drink more than you intended.
But everyday is a new day. If you over-ate or over-drank last night, resolve to start again today by getting lots of sleep, exercising 60-75 minutes, eating an apple to start off the day, and then sticking to proteins and salads as much as you can.
The key to health and long life has always been the same, contained in five words, “Eat less and exercise more.”
If you do all the things that I am suggesting above, you will be astonished at the results.
Good luck!
Fit and Trim for Life
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Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 25, 2008
The race for the presidency of the United States now boils down to John McCain versus Barack Obama.
This may be the most important election in our history, at least for each of us who are Americans today and who will be affected by the outcome.
In my book Something for Nothing, I wrote that the most powerful principle governing human behavior is the Expediency Factor. This E-Factor says that, “People strive to get the things they want the fastest and easiest way possible with little or no concern with the secondary consequences of their behaviors.”
Alexis de Toqueville, in his book “Democracy in America,” wrote that, “America will be a great country until the people learn that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. After that, it will be a war of all against all with each person striving to get the greatest amount of ‘free money’ possible.”
At about the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, a Scottish history professor by the name of Professor Alexander Tyler had this to say about “The Fall of the Athenian Republic” over two thousand years before.
“A democracy can not exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy (which is always followed by a dictatorship).”
Professor Tyler went further:
“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From abundance to complacency;
5. From complacency to apathy;
6. From apathy to dependence;
7. From dependence back into bondage.
I do not personally believe that America and Americans will follow this sequence of history, but as professor Rufus Fears says, the first law of history is that “People do not learn from history.”
Today, one party and one politician is offering “free money” to all who desire it, in the form of government handouts, bail-outs, increased spending at all levels. This is all going to be paid for by raising taxes on “the rich.”
Since the top 50% of income earners in America already pay 96.5% of all taxes, and the top 10% pay 76% of all taxes, where is the money coming from? Americans believe that they can have energy independence without drilling for oil or gas, or finding new reserves.
Many Americans believe that they can have prosperity without working, wealth without extraordinary dedication, and the highest living standard in the history of man on earth by simply putting in an average day’s work.
Fortunately, there are men and woman who continue to push, pull and drive our society forward on the basis of innovation, risk-taking, hard work, courage, determination and persistence. The entire future of America depends on these people.
A person of character is one who never asks for or expects to get something for nothing. A person of character is one who does not encourage others to seek for or to enjoy rewards without working, knowing that this is the surest way to personal destruction.
2008 is shaping up to be a very interesting election season. Be sure that you vote for the person or persons who spouse the vision, virtues and values that you stand for and believe in, and which have made America great.
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