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
Posted by Brian Tracy on May 14, 2008
“Esoteric Arts�?
More than 5,000 years ago, in the ancient mystery schools of Egypt, the mental and spiritual laws and principles of success were taught to students who dedicated their entire lives to learning in what was called the “Esoteric Arts.”
One of these “secrets” was the Law of Attraction, which said that your mind is a magnet and that you invariably attract into your life people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts, especially your dominant thoughts emotionalized.
Today we say, “Like attracts like” and “Birds of a feather flock together.” From ancient times, it was known that your mind sends out vibrations, like radio waves, that are picked up by the minds of other people who are tuned into the same rate of vibration.
The force that determines the sending power of your mental vibrations is the amount of emotion, positive or negative, that you put behind a thought. If there is something that you intensely desire, something that excites you and enthuses you, you will send out powerful, high-frequency vibrations that can travel large distances in split seconds and cause your phone to ring from someone you have not heard from for months or even years.
Because your mind is so powerful, especially when backed by emotionalized thoughts, you must handle it carefully, like a child handling a gun. The Law of Attraction is neutral. It works on both positive and negative thoughts. It brings into your life whatever you are thinking about on a regular basis with either fear or desire.
When the book, “The Secret” came out, along with the movie, I was happily surprised to see that the first half of the movie comes from my audio program and seminar, “The Psychology of Achievement” which was produced initially in 1981. We videotaped the live seminar which explains the Law of Attraction along with thirty-one other laws, plus how this law is applied in every area of life, and then distributed the video seminar world wide, including New Zealand, where the Author of The Secret comes from.
The weakness in The Secret is that it is “necessary but not sufficient.” Of course, it is important that you think positive thoughts and that, by so doing, you will attract positive people and circumstances into your life. But it is not enough.
In response to The Secret, I decided to write a book which is called “Flight Plan – The Real Secret of Success.” In this book, I explain that life is very much like a long distance flight. When the plane takes off, it will be off course 99% of the time. But nonetheless, the plane will eventually arrive at its destination, even thought it was off course most of the time.
In my experience, the real secret of success consists of three major factors: First, you must be absolutely clear about your destination. By this I mean that must have clear, written, specific, measurable goals, committed to paper and organized into specific, step-by-step plans of action.
Before you can set your goals, you must know exactly who you are and what you want. You must do a thorough analysis of yourself, your life, your hopes, your dreams, your ambitions, and where you want to be sometime in the future. Then, you create a “Flight Plan” to get you from wherever you are today to wherever you want to be in the months and years ahead.
The second part of Flight Plan is that you must “take off!” You must have the courage to step out in faith with no guarantee of success. You must be prepared to launch in the face of your fears, doubts and natural reluctance to break out of your comfort zone. “To achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must be prepared to do something that you have never done before.” (Les Brown).
Once you have launched toward your goal, like an airplane, you will meet with unexpected turbulence, headwinds, updrafts and downdrafts, lightning, storms and every sort of mechanical problem. You must be prepared to make continual “course corrections” as you move toward your goal.
Perhaps the most important quality for success is, and always has been, the quality of persistence. You must resolve in advance to persist in the face of any difficulty or problem that you experience. You must resolve in advance that you will never give up. You must resolve in advance that you will view every temporary setback or difficulty as merely a signal that you need to make a “course correction” as you move inevitably toward your goal.
This is a great time to be alive. The very best days of your life lie ahead of you. The highest income of your life is still to come. The greatest experiences of your life are still to be experienced.
There is very little that you can not accomplish if you will file your flight plan. Determine exactly what it is that you want to achieve, take off toward your goal with no guarantees of success, and then make continual course corrections until you finally succeed. If you resolve to do these things, nothing can stop you from creating an extraordinary life.
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Apr 23, 2008
“Building an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society flourish.�?
Last week, Barbara and I flew up to Vancouver to meet with Ib Muller and drive to the Whistler Ski Resort, two hours north of Vancouver.
We skied for most of Saturday and Sunday, had dinner in a wonderful restaurant Saturday night, and stayed at the Fairmont Hotel at the Vancouver Airport Sunday night prior to our return flight on Monday morning to San Diego.
On Tuesday, we boarded our flight to Atlanta for a four day meeting of the Heritage Foundation at the Four Seasons Hotel in Downtown Atlanta.
The Heritage Foundation is the “800 pound Gorilla” of conservative think tanks in the world today. It started as an idea in 1973, funded by several friends of liberty and free enterprise, and has since grown to more than 200 professionals working out of a large office complex on Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington DC.
The motto of the Heritage Foundation is, “Building an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society flourish.”
For three days, some of the best thinkers and speakers on economics, welfare and entitlements, employment, national defense, and the environment came together to share ideas and experiences, and to suggest policy prescriptions to assure that America remains the “Best hope for mankind.”
There are two basic philosophies that define our political system today. The first philosophy, the Heritage position believes in limited government, lower taxes, less regulation, and greater freedom and opportunity for the individual. Heritage believes that non-government activities provide more effective solutions to the inevitable problems that arise in a large country with 300 million people.
The other side of the political spectrum believes in greater government, higher taxation, more regulation on businesses and individuals, and a welfare state where as many people as possible are depended upon the government in some way.
Each person, each voter in our society, must eventually make a choice. Do you believe in greater freedom and opportunity for the individual, or do you believe in greater taxes, regulation and control of individuals by the government?
Ludwig Von Mises once said that every society exists along a spectrum of total enslaved to totally free. Of all societies, the United States has offered greater freedom and opportunity than any other society in human history. But what Von Mises, and others, concluded was that every growth of government taxation, regulation and control over the individual American moves the society along the spectrum toward total slavery. It is a gradual process, one degree at a time, but it is the reason and explanation why, throughout the centuries, countries have gone from relatively free to completely un-free.
Fortunately, American’s are an exceptional people in that they love their personal freedom and liberty more than that of virtually any other nationality on earth. No matter how many government officials or bureaucrats attempt to limit personal freedom with taxes and regulation, the American people continue to fight back through their representatives and alone, if necessary.
At the Heritage Foundation meeting, we heard from Karl Rove recently the personal advisor to President George W. Bush, and the architect of his electoral victories in 2000, 2002 and 2004. Karl Rove is a warm, witty, charming man, telling stories and jokes about people and politics in America. His talk was scheduled for 20 minutes but he went on for almost an hour, to the delight of everyone in the audience. This is the second time that I have met Karl Rove and on both occasions, he has been a friendly and enjoyable person to associate with.
On Saturday night, Edward Meese III, previous attorney general in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, spoke to us for almost an hour on the evolving political situation in America, and especially the legal situation.
I have known Ed Meese for almost twenty years. He is a real gentleman, and an incredible brain. He has a wonderful ability to pull together threads of ideas from many sources and weave them into a spellbinding talk that is funny, informational and uplifting.
As the political silly season continues its relentless march toward the republican and democratic conventions this summer, it is important for each person to keep in mind the issues that are at stake. One group wants greater freedom and opportunity for more people. Another group wants more taxes, regulations and government control on more people. The individual voter will be forced to decide which of these two visions represents what he or she believes is best for American in the long term.
Subscribers and readers of this blog are usually among the smartest people in American. This is why it is so important that you take the time to inform yourself and fully understand the issues rather than being caught up in the emotions and contradictions of the campaign. I will talk to you again soon.
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Mar 14, 2008
Why it was that some countries and some parts of countries were more successful economically than others.
Many years ago, I began studying economics. I wanted to know why it was that some countries and some parts of countries were more successful economically than others.
Before my study was finished, I had spent more than 4,000 hours and assembled a vast library of books on the subject of economics. I attended conferences on business economics and national economics, and eventually got an MBA degree in which I had to study both microeconomics and macroeconomics. I finally learned a little bit about the subject.
The bottom line is simple: incentives!
Khrushchev once said, “Call them what you want, it is incentives that moves people to action.”
In every country, and every part of every country, wherever you create incentives for saving, investment and productive business activity, you have prosperity, growth, job opportunities and hope for the future.
Wherever you create dis-incentives, in the form of higher taxes, regulations, government control, corruption, favoritism and political trade-offs, you decrease prosperity. In the states that have the highest taxes and regulations on business, you have the highest rates of unemployment and the lowest rates of income increase.
In the policy silly season that we are experiencing right now, you have two major schools of thought. One school of though says that the key to prosperity is to punish businesses through taxes and regulations as much as possible.
For example, oil companies invest tens of billions of dollars in drilling oil fields, building pipelines, leasing tanker ships, building refineries in the US, building pipelines throughout the US to get gasoline to various places, and then delivering the gasoline to your local station. For this, they charge less than a bottle of water that the driver purchases at the convenience store per gallon of gasoline. Oil companies earn an average of 7% on gross sales. Now, congress wants to pass an 18 billion dollar tax on all companies to punish them for their activities.
In economics today, you have the “Something for something party” vs. the “Something for nothing party.” One party offers to give endless amounts of free money to voters if they will support them in November. The other party says that the only way that you can become prosperous is by producing something of value and selling it at a profit.
The great tragedy in politics is that most politicians have never worked in a private business, never started or built a private business, and never made a payroll. They know nothing about how business functions. This is why the average politician in Washington, or in the States, is convinced that businesses earn an average of 50% profit on sales. They are living in a cloud coo-coo world completely divorced from reality.
The fact is that businesses create all wealth. Businesses create all employment. Businesses pay all taxes. When governments place a tax on businesses, the businesses can do several things. They can pay the tax, and pass the costs on to their customers. They can pay the tax and reduce the wages, benefits and incentives for their employees by a similar amount. Or they can move away to a place where taxes are lower. They can even shut down, as many large businesses have been forced to do. But businesses are merely tax collectors for the welfare state.
Coming back to the subject of incentives, there is only one number that counts in our economy: The rate of new business formation. Businesses collapse, merge, or shut down at a rate of 6% to 7% per year. Therefore, there must be new businesses being created at a rate of 7% to 8% per year or more, for the economy to remain stable. This is an economic number that has never changed.
Wherever state or country creates a large number of incentives for new businesses to start up, new jobs are created, new wealth is created, prosperity and opportunity are made available to more people, and the country grows.
When you look at the political policy and statements made by people running for office, simply ask this question, “If these policies are enacted, will this increase the incentives to start new businesses. Will it increase the incentives for savings, investments and the risks necessary to create economic opportunity?”
By the way, whenever there is an election, the out party always claims that the economy is in terrible shape. Most American elections are determined by the state of the economy at the time of the election. If you want to get elected, offering change of some kind, you must declare loudly that the situation is terrible.
If your friends in the newspapers take up the cry, they will also say, day and night, that the economy is in terrible shape. We need new leaders. Vote for the other guy.
Don’t be taken in. in the final analysis, government cannot create jobs. Government cannot create prosperity. Government can only redistribute wealth by taxing the people who are producing it and giving it to the people who are not producing it.
When governments redistribute wealth, they punish the successful and the productive, and they reward the unsuccessful and the unproductive. They reverse the system of incentives in a very negative way. All that a government can do is make it more attractive or less attractive for new business start ups. That’s all you need to know.
I’ll talk to you again soon.
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 29, 2008
“The greatest joys in life are happy memories, and the great business of life is to create as many of them as possible.�?
My family and I took three days and went to Park City Utah to ski over the President’s Day weekend.
David and Sarah drove up from Las Vegas, while Christina, Damon and little Julie (15 months) flew in from Los Angeles. Barbara, myself and Catherine (16 years old) flew up from San Diego. After a little coordination, we all got together and drove up to the two condominium units we had rented at the base of the ski slopes in Park City.
We have not skied for two years so we had to remember and relearn the critical skills of turning and stopping as we went down the slopes.
The skiing is, in a way, a metaphor for life. One of the first things I learnt, to my surprise, was that the faster you skied, the more control you had.
My first ski instructor kept telling me to “Let the Skis do the work.”
She continued to repeat, “Lean over the front of the skis. You will go faster, but you will have more control in turning and stopping than if you lean back.”
In life it is very much the same. Sometimes the way you gain the most control is by taking bold action and aggressively pursuing your goals, even though you have no guarantee of success, and there is a high possibility that you will fail, at least in the short term.
The only way you learn to ski is by falling down multiple times until you finally master the balancing act of staying on your skis as they move forward. But if you are too afraid to fall at all, you can never learn to ski quickly and smoothly down the slopes.
Our children have all learned to ski at an early age. The advantage they had was that they were completely fearless. Because they were so close to the ground, falling for them meant sitting down into the snow, with no pain or discomfort.
As adults, we tend to play it safe. We are more cautious. We have a greater distance to fall, and it hurts more when we hit the ground.
The biggest single reason for failure in adult life is the fear of failure. It is not the failure itself that causes the problem; it is the thinking about the potential failure that holds people back.
The way you get over the fear of failure, whether in skiing or in life, is to confront your fears, and do the thing you fear. Throw your body over the front of your skis and focus on your goal or destination rather than thinking about falling or swerving off track.
There is another thing that I relearned on this ski trip with my family. The French essayist, Michel de Montaigne once wrote, “The greatest joys in life are happy memories, and the great business of life is to create as many of them as possible.”
The best moments of my life are the times that I spend with my family at dinners, on vacations, traveling or just hanging out.
In the non-stop world of business today, it is easy to lose sight of those things that are really important.
In your own life, your greatest joys will come from spending time with people that you care about. Your job is to create as many of those memorable moments as possible. Everything else will pass. The time will pass, and the money will be gone, but the memories will remain.
Talk to you again soon.
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 20, 2008
You have extraodinary potential
You have extraordinary potential. You could not use all of your talents and abilities if you had 100 lifetimes. Whatever you have accomplished in your life so far is only a shadow of what is truly possible for you in the months and years ahead.
One of the indispensible requirements for great success is for you to “know who you are.” On a regular basis, you must sit down and think about yourself and the qualities, characteristics, abilities and experiences that have brought you to where you are today. It is only in this way that you can move ahead with greater confidence and clarity.
Here are 10 questions that you can ask yourself on a regular basis to keep yourself on track:
1. What are your three most important values in life right now?
2. What are the three things in life that are most important to you?
3. What are your three best qualities as a person?
4. What three personal accomplishments are you the most proud of?
5. What three skills or abilities are you the best at?
6. What have been your three biggest successes in your career so far?
7. What are the three best jobs you have ever had?
8. What three activities give you the greatest joy, peace and satisfaction?
9. What are the three most important lessons that you have learned in life so far?
10. Who are the three (or more) people you care about the most?
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living?”
There is no one in the world that has the special combination of knowledge, education, experiences, insights, wisdom, goals, desires, and aspirations that you have. In the poem Ulysses, he says, “I am a part of all that I have met.”
You are an amazingly complex individual. You have within you, right now, the ability to accomplish more than you ever dreamed possible. But all this experience and wisdom is of no value to you if you do not sit down and think about what you have learned, and how you can apply it to your future.
In a multi-year study of successful people, the researchers found that there was one characteristic that enabled certain people to rise far higher than their peers in almost any field. This was the quality of “thoughtfulness.”
Top people take the time to sit quietly by themselves and think about who they are, what they want, and what they are currently doing.
Peter Drucker suggests that you ask the following questions regularly: 1) What am I trying to do? 2) How am I trying to do it? 3) What are my assumptions? 4) If my assumptions were wrong, what effect would that have on my decision making? 5) Could there be a better way?
In asking and answering these questions on a regular basis, especially when you are experiencing road blocks, obstacles or frustration in your current activities, you calm you mind, clarify your thinking and enable yourself to make better decisions for the future.
It is said that the average person uses only 10% of their potential. The actual number is closer to 2%. This is because people get into comfort zones, automatic routines which they repeat day after day, seldom challenging their own thinking or behaviors.
But this is not for you. Your goal is to “Be all you can be.” Your goal is to use more and more of your potential moving forward. They way you do this is by asking yourself focused questions that help you to develop absolute clarity about who you are and where you are going.
Good luck!
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 13, 2008
“Why is it that some people are more successful than others?�?
Throughout human history, the very best thinkers have asked the question, “Why is it that some people are more successful than others?”
This is the underlying question of most history, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, psychology and success literature. Aristotle said that behind every desire we have is yet another desire, until you come to the basic desire of all people, “The wish to be happy.”
Throughout your life, you constantly strive to move away from pain toward pleasure, and away from discomfort toward comfort. Consciously and unconsciously, you strive to be happy. In business and in sales, we define happiness as “fulfilling our full potential and achieving everything that is possible for us.”
What then are the qualities of the most successful and happy people in sales and business? Over the years, based on thousands of articles and research studies, I have concluded that there are basically seven qualities, each of which is learnable via practice and persistence. Here they are:
First, successful people are ambitious. They have an intense, burning desire to be successful, to achieve more and more, and to constantly raise the bar on themselves.
In addition, ambitious people see themselves capable of “being the best.” From the time they begin their sales or business careers, they strive for excellence, to be among the very best people in their industry. They set bigger and bigger goals for themselves, and persist longer than anyone else to achieve those goals. And they never give up.
Second, successful people are courageous. They work to confront the fears that hold most people back. The two biggest fears that interfere with your success are the fear of failure and the fear of rejection. The fear of failure causes you to think more of what you might lose if you take a chance than what you might gain. The fear of rejection makes you hypersensitive to the opinions or criticisms of other people, and especially to the negative reactions you get from prospective customers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” What this means is that successful people confront their fears, face their fears, master their fears, and do it anyway. The wonderful thing is that, the more you do the things you fear, the less you fear doing them. Eventually you become fearless, and then unstoppable.
Third, successful people are committed. They believe in their companies, their products, their customers and themselves. They actually become emotionally involved in what they sell and who they sell it to. You’ve heard it said that, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Successful people care.
Because they are committed, top people love their work. They can hardly wait to get started in the morning and they hate to quit in the evening. This infectious enthusiasm for their products and services transfers into the minds of their customers. The customers then want to buy from these people and recommend them to their friends.
Fourth, top sales people and businesspeople see themselves as professional. They see themselves as consultants, dispensing good advice, council and recommendations to their customers. They see themselves as “helpers,” continually looking for ways to help their customers to get more enjoyment and benefit from what they sell.
Instead of talking incessantly about their products or services, they ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers. They look for ways that they can improve the life or work of their customers with their products or services. Their goal is to help their customers to be better off with their products or services than they could be without them.
Fifth, top people are more thoroughly prepared than average performers. Preparation is the mark of the professional in today’s competitive environment. Top people take the time to do pre-call research, finding out everything they can about their customers before they approach them the first time. They set pre-call objectives; determine exactly what questions they will ask, and what results they want to achieve in a particular sales meeting. Finally, top salespeople do detailed post-call analysis, writing down everything that was discussed in the sales meeting so they don’t forget it later.
Because they are so well prepared, top salespeople have more confidence when they approach a customer. And customers can tell. Customers know when the salesperson has taken the time to do his preparation. This dramatically increases the salesperson’s credibility with the customer, and makes it much more likely that the customer will listen to the salesperson and buy his or her products or services.
Sixth, top sales professionals are dedicated to continuous personal and professional development, to lifelong learning.
They realize that, “To earn more, you must learn more.” Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to get you any further. Your current level of knowledge and skill is only sufficient to keep you where you are, but does not allow you to go any further. To increase your income, to grow in your field toward being one of the highest paid people, requires that you continually learn and apply new ideas.
The key to continuous learning is simple: Read in your field of sales and business 30-60 minutes each day. This will amount to about one book per week, or 50 books per year. Since the average sales or business person reads less than one book per year, reading regularly in your field will give you a distinct advantage over your competition.
Next, listen to audio programs in your car. The average sales professional sits behind the wheel of his car 500-1000 hours per year. This is the equivalent of 3-6 months of 40 hour weeks, or 1-2 university semesters. By listening to audio programs, by turning your car into a university on wheels, you can become one of the best educated, most knowledgeable and most skilled professionals in your field.
Finally, take all the seminars and additional courses that you possibly can. Attend sales seminars given by professionals in your city. Enroll in on-line learning programs for sales effectiveness. Become a life-long “do-it-to-yourself” project. Never stop learning and growing.
Seventh, and as important as anything else, top professionals see themselves as 100% responsible for themselves, and everything that happens to them.
Because they are responsible, they do not make excuses or blame other people. They do not criticize or complain. They say, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”
This attitude causes top people to see themselves as self-employed, as “Presidents” of their own personal sales corporations. They see themselves as responsible for every aspect of their own personal entrepreneurial business, including production, quality control, marketing, promotion and training and development.
Summary
You have within you, right now, the ability to be, do and have, far more than you have ever accomplished before. The only limit to what you can achieve in the future is your imagination.
You can learn anything you need to learn, to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself. You can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle, and achieve any level of income you desire, if you will but apply yourself, and practice the seven qualities of top people until they become lifelong habits.
Good luck!
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jan 29, 2008
“The Secret�?
A year ago, when I heard about the book “The Secret,” I was skeptical. Having studied success and successful people for more than thirty years, I knew that there was no such thing as a single secret that could enable people to achieve all their goals.
When I finally relented and watched “The Secret” movie and then read the book, I found to my surprise that fully half of the material comes from the first session of my “Psychology of Achievement” audio program, produced in 1983 by Nightingale Conant Corporation.
In that program, and in my book Maximum Achievement, I explain the seven basic laws that determine individual destiny, including the Law of Attraction. What I said at that time, and what I say today, is that the Law of Attraction is a powerful, positive and important law, but it is not sufficient in itself to guarantee success.
What is misleading about this book, and many other success theories is that they suggest that all you have to do is visualize and have happy thoughts and everything you want will appear in your life. Anyone who has lived for 15 minutes in the real world knows that this is simply not true.
As a response to The Secret, I wrote my own explanation in a book entitled Flight Plan – The Real Secret of Success. In this book, I explain that life is like an airplane journey. From the time you take off, you will be off course 99% of the time. All airplanes are off course 99% of the time. The purpose and role of the pilot and the avionics is to continually bring the plane back on course so that it arrives on schedule at its destination.
In life, you are the pilot of your own craft. To reach your destination of health, happiness, prosperity and a good life, you must do as a pilot does. You must first of all determine your destination. This requires clear, specific goals, written down, with plans to accomplish them for each day.
Second, you must take off toward your destination with no guarantee of success. You must be willing to move out of your comfort zone and take risks continually, even though you know that most of them will not succeed, at least at the beginning.
The third part, and the real secret of success is that you must be prepared to make continual course corrections. Just as an aircraft faces headwinds, downdrafts, storm fronts, wind shear, lightning and unexpected turbulence, you will experience the same in the pursuit of any worthwhile goal.
The key to success is for you to keep your mind fixed clearly on the goal, but be flexible about the way of achievement. Be open to new inputs and ideas. Learn from every experience. Look for the good in every setback or difficulty.
Most of all, you must resolve in advance that you will never give up. Your ability to persist in the face of all adversity in the direction of your goal is what will ultimately guarantee your success.
You make your own luck through your own hard work and determination. Decide upon your destination, take off, and be open to the necessity to making continual course corrections until you reach your destination.
Brian Tracy
Flight Plan + Bonus CDs
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
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