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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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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Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 11, 2008
When I was growing up, my dream, and my fantasy was to be a millionaire by the age of 30.
I soon found out this is a common dream; everyone wants to be a millionaire by the age of 30.
Throughout my twenties, I traveled and worked all over the world, touching down in eighty countries on five continents. I worked at a variety of different jobs, from washing dishes and running barbed wire on a ranch all the way through to factory work, construction work and finally into sales and sales management. But by the time I reached the age of thirty, I was as broke as I was at the age of twenty.
Then, I really got serious. I began asking, “Why are some people more successful than others?”
In the Bible it says, “Seek and ye shall find, for all who seek, findeth.”
Whenever you start looking for the answer to an important question, you will start to find that answer, and sometimes in the most remarkable places.
My first realization was that I didn’t know anything about millionaires. For many years, I had dreamed of becoming a millionaire, but I didn’t know how people achieved that magic number, starting from nothing.
Over the next few years, I read everything I could find about self-made millionaires. I discovered that this type of person had been exhaustedly studied and researched, interviewed and questioned, and very definite profiles of people who become millionaires had emerged.
The bottom line is that fully 80% of self-made millionaires started off in sales or entrepreneurship. Most of them came from average or humbled beginnings. Many did not graduate from high school or go to college. Many were immigrants who arrived on these shores with no friends, no contacts, no money, limited education and no language skills. And yet somehow they went on to become millionaires within one generation.
What they all had in common was a combination of vision plus courage. They had a clear vision or dream of becoming financially successful, although most of them started out with no idea at all how they would achieve this goal.
Most importantly, they had the courage to step out in faith, into the unknown, risking the loss of time and effort, with no guarantee of success.
Most people who become millionaires achieve their wealth in a way that is completely different from the way that they first anticipated. In a thirteen year study at Babson College, they found that successful entrepreneurs and business builders had one quality. They were willing to “launch” toward their goal, and then make continual course corrections as they got feedback from their activities.
Today, there are 26 million businesses in the United States, and entrepreneurs are forming new businesses at the rate of about one million per year. Unfortunately, 95% of entrepreneurs earn less than $50,000 per year, no matter how many years they had been working, or how many hours they worked each week.
Why is this? Why is it that intelligent, ambitious, hard-working men and woman, who have the vision and courage to start their own businesses, struggle year after year, often earning less than they would if they took a salary job? Why does this happen?
The answer is simple. People who succeed in business and become millionaires are those who “know more” about their business and the market than other people do. People who become millionaires invariably focus and concentrate with laser like determination on mastering the essential skills necessary to build a profitable enterprise.
Fortunately, all business skills are learnable. You can learn any skill you need to learn to achieve any goal you set for yourself, as long as your goal is clear.
You can learn how to market and sell, how to negotiate and persuade. You can learn how to do costing and pricing for your products and services. You can learn how to select, interview and hire the key people you need to grow your business. You can learn how to borrow money from your bank and from twenty-five other sources used by successful business people.
You can learn how to do joint-ventures and form strategic alliances. You can learn how to correctly analyze a business opportunity before you get into it, thereby saving you enormous amounts of money and time.
Today, there are more opportunities for you to achieve financial success, and to become a millionaire, than have ever existed in history before. And even though the economy goes through ups and downs, fluctuating like the stock market, the overall trend is positive in more than 90% of cases.
Begin today. Set a goal to become financially independent and determine the exact amount of money that you want to have to achieve this objective. Sit down, make a plan. Set priorities. And then launch toward your goal with complete commitment and determination.
Resolve in advance that you will never give up. You will learn from every experience. You will study every aspect of your business so that you are considered an expert in your field. You will continually make new plans to replace the old plans that don’t work. You will except feedback and self-correct as you move forward. You will never give up.
If you will do these things, including reading my series, “The Way to Wealth” books one, two and three; there is nothing that can stop you from achieving your financial goals in the months and years ahead.
Good luck!
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Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 4, 2008
The Sufi philosopher, Izhrat Khan once said that, “Life is an endless series of problems, like the waves from the ocean.�?
This is a good description of your life, as well. From the time you are young, throughout your life, you will have an endless string of problems, of all kinds. You will have personal problems, financial problems, relationship problems, health problems, business problems, career problems, and who knows what else. They never end.
The only interruption to this endless series of problems will be the occasional crisis. If you’re living a normal life in our fast-moving society, you will probably have a crisis of some kind every two or three months. By its very definition, a crisis comes “unbidden.”
This means that a crisis is a large, sudden reversal or setback that you did not or could not anticipate or guard against.
Peter Drucker says that the mark of the leader is the way that “He or she deals with the inevitable crisis.”
What this means is that you are either in a crisis right now, you have just gotten out of a crisis, or you are just about to have a crisis. In any case, the only thing that will matter will be how effectively you deal with the crisis.
Average people, weak people, respond to problems and crises ineffectively. They become angry or depressed. They lash out or sulk. They blame other people or make excuses. As a result, their problems and crises often grow and become overwhelming.
Strong people, leaders, deal with problems and crisis in an effective and competent manner. There are two ways that you can learn to surmount the inevitable difficulties of life and become a leader in whatever you do.
First, focus on the solution rather than the problem. Focus on the positive, constructive actions that you can take immediately to solve the problem or to minimize the crisis. Don’t waste a moment making excuses, criticing, complaining or blaming other people. This simply distracts you, weakens you and dissipates your energy. It makes you less effective and more likely to make mistakes.
Be absolutely clear about what has happened. What steps can be taken to resolve the difficulty? What actions can you take immediately to take control of the situation? In my book, “Crunch Point,” I give 21 steps or ways of responding to problems effectively. These ideas can be life changing.
The second key to dealing with any problem or crisis is for you to “Seek the valuable lesson.” Napoleon Hill is famous for saying, “Within any problem or setback there lies the seed of an equal or greater opportunity or benefit.”
Your job is to look into every setback or difficulty for the lesson that it might contain. Imagine that there was a great power in the universe that wants to help you to be more successful and happy in the future. But this great power knows that you have a perverse nature, and you will not learn unless it hurts.
Therefore, whenever you suffer a pain of any kind – emotional, financial, health, personal – you should assume that this great power is trying to teach you a lesson that will help you in the future. Your job is to accurately identify the lesson or lessons so that you can learn them once and for all.
Once you begin to seek the lesson, answers will come to you quickly and easily. Don’t be satisfied with quick answers. Instead, ask the question, “What else is the answer?”
Beware of any problem for which there is only one definition, and beware of any problem for which there is one solution or lesson.
It is said that “Great souls learn great lessons from small events.”
Sometimes, if the problem is complex enough or has lasted for a long time, you can sit down with a pad of paper and ask this question, “What are all the lessons I have learned from this situation?”
You will be amazed to find that you may have learned five or ten or even twenty lessons from a difficult situation. Once you have identified these lessons and learned them, the chances of you making the same mistake are greatly reduced.
When you have a problem and you take control of it in your mind, you become a stronger and better person. The next time you face a problem or crises, focus quickly on the solution, on the specific actions that you can take immediately to resolve it.
Then, ask yourself, “Why is this happening?” What is the lesson that this problem contains for you?
It is said that wisdom is the ability to make good decisions, but that wisdom actually comes from having made bad decisions earlier.
There is nothing wrong with making decisions. The only thing that is unforgivable is our failure to learn from each situation so that we grow more surely toward the stars.
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Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on May 29, 2008
What is your most valuable asset?
According to Dr. Theodore Leavitt, Dean of the Harvard Business School, the most valuable asset that a company has is its reputation.
Dr. Leavitt defines reputation as “How you are known to your customers”.
In marketing and business, we refer to this as your “positioning” or “brand.” Your reputation is determined by the way that your customers and prospective customers talk about your company in the marketplace.
When we work with business owners and executives, we ask the question, “How would it be helpful or useful for people to talk about your company?”
In other words, if you could be a fly on the wall and listen to one of your customers talk to one of your prospective customers about your company, what would you want them to say?
Would you want people to talk about your company by saying that you have high quality products and services, excellent customer service, before and after the sale, that you are a high integrity company and that your people are some of the nicest people to deal with in the industry?
What would you like people to say about your company? More importantly, what could you begin doing, starting today, to make sure that people talk about you in a positive way after they have done business with you?
In positioning, you build your reputation around the words that you want to own in your customer’s mind. Top companies like BMW own the words, “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”
Wal-Mart has become the most successful retail company in history with the words, “Everyday Low Prices.”
Every company that is successful, and every product that is successful, can be summarized in one or two words in the minds of its customers and prospective customers. What are yours? What could they be? What should they be?
This brings us to the most important part of these Words of Wisdom today. It is the discovery that your personal reputation is your most valuable asset as well. Your personal reputation, the way that you are known to others and talked about by others when you are not there, is the most valuable asset you have in determining your success and happiness.
People who succeed over the long term are invariable those who have excellent reputations. The people around them respect them and talk highly of them when they are not there. Top people are known for certain qualities, especially integrity, honor, straight-forwardness, quality work and dependability.
In other words, your most valuable reputation is your character. It is your willingness and ability to make commitments and then to keep your word. It is your ability to deliver on your promises, to do what you say you will do, every time, without exception.
One of the great weaknesses in the human character is the tendency to follow the path of least resistance. This leads people to do things that are fun and easy, and which offer immediate gratification, rather than to do the things that are hard and difficult, but which lead to greater success in the future.
The key determinant of character is self-discipline. Self-discipline was defined by Albert Hubbard as, “The ability to make yourself do the things you should do, when you should do them, whether you feel like it or not.”
It takes no character or discipline to do things when you feel like it, such as getting up earlier in the morning to plan your day, engaging in vigorous physical exercise to keep healthy and alert, eating the right foods, and fewer of them, etc.
It takes tremendous discipline and willpower for you to discipline yourself to do those things that are hard and necessary, but which lead on to success and happiness.
The most important emotion determining your happiness and your relationships with other people is your level of self-esteem. The more you like yourself and respect yourself, the more you like and respect others, and the more they like and respect you in return.
There is a direct relationship between self-discipline and self-esteem. The more you discipline yourself to do the things that you know you should do, whether you feel like it or not, the more you like and respect yourself. The more you like and respect yourself, the more you like and respect others and the better is your entire life.
Your most valuable asset then is your character, based on willpower and self-discipline. It is your ability to keep your promises, no matter what it costs. It is your determination to do high quality work, and to do it on time and on budget, as you promised.
When you develop a reputation as a high-quality person, who’s word is absolutely trustworthy, and who does high-quality work, your future will be guaranteed.
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Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
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