- Before I start I'm going to take a vacation to a beautiful place called "Someday Isle".
Use proven success methods.
Problem unsolved is merely a goal unachieved.
Time management is the sun and everything that I do is the planets in orbit.
"Boy, that's pretty obvious".
Yes, but it's the most obvious answers that we overlook.
You become what you think about most of the time.
And my natural response, "Aaagh!"
Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world".
The rule is form good habits and make them your masters.
You're only as young or as old as your dreams.
- He's a motivational speaker and author.
- He's Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International.
- He's consulted for over 1,000 companies and addressed more than five million people.
- He's Brian Tracy, and here are his top 10 rules for success.
- Most people have good, great goals.
"I want to increase my income, and lose weight, "and get out of debt, and be thin "and happy
and healthy, and have a wonderful family".
But then they decide, "But before I start "I'm going to take a vacation "to a beautiful
place called 'Someday Isle'".
And in my estimation, 80% of the population lives on "Someday Isle".
"Someday I'll lose some weight.
"And someday I'll read that book and listen to that program, "and join The S Network"
And "Someday I'll get out of debt, "someday I'll increase my income ..." But it's always
"Someday I'll ..." If you want to be great successors one vague simple rule is vote yourself
off the island, for life.
If you decide you're going to do something, do it.
You know, they've done dozens and dozens of studies over the years, they've found that
there's one major difference between successful people and unsuccessful people, is successful
people launch, they start, they get on with it, they just do it.
Unsuccessful people get the same ideas and the same information, but they've always got
an excuse for not starting.
If you want to be successful and starting a business then you study what people have
learned, and everything that has learned that's written down or shared in seminars or put
unto audio programs is ... I've learned this from a very wise man named Kop Kopmeyer, who
spent more than 50 years studying success, and he had developed more than 1,000 success
principles that he'd drive out of something like 6,000 books.
And when I met him I asked him the question you would ask, "Of all this 1,000 principles,
'cause I've studied it all, "which is the most important principle of all?"
And he said, "Brian", he said, "it's simple".
He said, "Use proven success methods".
He said, "Learn from the experts".
He said, "Brian, you'll never live long enough "to learn it all for yourself".
So why I find is that successful people are those who learn from others who've gone before
them.
Unsuccessful people try to make it all up, like a cook going into the kitchen, taking
ingredients out of cover, throwing them all in a bowl and wondering why it doesn't taste
good.
This is why people careers, why 80% of salespeople are functioning way below their potential,
only 20% make all the money, why 20% of businesses in any industry make all the profits, why
20% of the professionals in any service make 80% of the money, and so on, it's because
they've followed proven success principles, proven recipes, proven formulas, proven combinations.
And they just do them over and over again until they master them, then they can do more
and more of 'em, faster and faster, easier and easier, at a higher level of quality.
And all that translates into greater results.
Make a list of 10 things, 10 goals that you'd like to accomplish in the next year or so,
and as this question: "if I could only accomplish one goal on this list, "which one goal would
have "the greatest positive impact on my life?"
If you could only accomplish one goal in life, which one goal would have the greatest positive
impact on your life?
Now, for most people, especially when you're maturing in your career, when you're growing
up, the biggest goal is money.
If you had money then you could buy a house, home, a car, family lifestyle and so on.
So that's quite normal.
For other people maybe a health goal.
For business owners maybe a business goal.
For people with relationship problems maybe a relationship goal.
But ask yourself, if you could achieve one goal or resolve one problem, and, remember,
a problem unsolved is merely a goal unachieved, which one would it be?
And write that down and make that the major and definite purpose of your life.
Make it the central organizing principle of your life.
When I was a young man I had a revelation that changed my life.
I had read articles and sometimes books on time management over the years, and made some
lists and set some priorities and things like that, and I've always felt, however, that
my life was the sun and that all the different factors of my life were like planets that
orbited around my life.
And whether it was physical fitness or socializing or work or time management, they were all
planets in orbit.
What changed my life is when I realized that time management is the sun and everything
that I do is the planets in orbit.
Everything we do in life revolves around time because time is life.
Time is the substance of our life.
Is that the quality of your life is determined by the quality or your time management, that
everything we have or are or ever will be will be a direct result of how we use our
time.
And the wonderful thing is we're always free to choose how we use our time.
There's a process which has made more people rich than any other single process of goals
achieving, and it's to take your major goal and structure it as a question.
If your goal is to earn $100,000 a year then you write, "How can I earn "$100,000 in the
next 12 months?"
That's an open-ended question, not "how can I earn it at my job?"
or doing a specific thing, just an open-ended question, "How can I earn the amount of money?"
And then you discipline yourself to write 20 answers to the question.
And the 20 answers are all the different things that you could think of to earn $100,000.
"Work longer", "Work harder", "Upgrade my skills", "Get a new job", "Take a part-time
opportunity".
Whatever happens to be, write down everything you could think of, but force yourself to
write at least 20 questions -- 20 answers to the question.
The 20-question method, called "mindstorming", forces you to dig deep, deep into your mind
where you will find all your answers, and it may be "Call a person" or "Read a book".
Let me give you an example.
We had a young fellow entrepreneur, he got 35 years old, he built this successful business,
he worked to it 10 years to do it.
And he, for two years, wanted to sell his business so he could take a year off and travel,
enjoy his money.
And so, for two years he just sort of floundered around, like a fish on the dock, wanting to
sell his business.
Nobody offered to buy it.
He suggested it to people, people were not interested, and so on.
And in this exercise that they put him through, his 20th answer, often it's the 20th answer
that is the breakthrough, was "Buy a book on how to sell your own business".
And it just went off like a flash bulb in his mind.
At the break he got up, he was at a downtown hotel, got up, went down the street to a major
bookstore, went and found, he was amazed of the number of books that have been written
on how to buy and sell a business.
So he bought two or three books.
Two months later he had restructured, packaged his business, sold it completely, satisfactorily,
and took a year off.
He said, but just a single idea, it was a breakthrough idea, but it was so simple, just
get a book on the subject.
And you think, "Boy, that's pretty obvious".
Yes, but it's the most obvious answers that we overlook.
Now, the starting point of becoming a millionaire is to remember the greatest discovery of all
of human life which is that you become what you think about most of the time.
If you sincerely want to be rich to achieve all your financial goals, and to retire as
a self-made millionaire, one of the smartest things you can do is to develop the habits
of thinking and acting that enabled others to become self-made millionaires.
What is so hard about this to understand?
Most people are thinking about the little money they have, they worry about being broke,
they worry about lack and poverty, they're worrying about the prices of everything, and
they're wondering why they're not flourishing financially.
Because they're thinking about poverty and lack rather than prosperity and abundance.
Now, this habits of financial success are learnable, as all habits are, by practice
and repetition.
In other words, you can program yourself to think like self-made millionaires.
And, remember, it has to start on the inside before it ever comes true on the outside.
Now, here's an important point: nothing works the first time.
When you try something new, it probably won't work.
When you try something new several times, it probably won't work.
And the turning point in my life came, when I would hear good ideas and I was so eager
to be successful and so, I would run out and try the ideas and they wouldn't work.
I try a way of getting an appointment or answering an objection or closing a sale, it wouldn't
work.
And my natural response "Aaagh!".
And I think you have to be disappointed, and then I realized nothing works at least the
first few times.
So I decided I would try a new idea five or 10 times before I pass judgment on it.
I would not jus try it once and quit, like most people do, and that changed my whole
life.
It was a turning point in my life because I realized from then if you've got a good
idea and you've got a good goal, and you want to double your income and improve the quality
of your life, and you have to try new things in order to get new results, it's not going
to work the first times and say, "Well, that didn't work", try something else, and try
something else, and try something else.
Now, if you try, only two things can happen, what are they?
Succeed or fail.
If you succeed you do more of it, if you fail you learn from it, get smarter and try it
again.
So you cannot lose by taking action, you could only lose by not taking action.
The natural tendency when we hear or learn something great is we want to convince everybody
else of it.
And you see this people who quit smoking suddenly want there be no smoking in the world.
People who adopt a religion or political philosophy want everybody to join, the next day.
But the very best things, as I mentioned earlier in our seminar, is that you teach men at the
school of example, for they will learn in no other.
So what you need to do is be an example, and be an example for an extended period of time.
Give yourself two, three months, maybe a year, of being the new person.
When you go on a diet don't insist that everybody else go on a diet the next day, actually go
on a diet, stay on the diet, lose the weight, achieve the level of financial fitness, and
attract people so they come to you and say, "What is it that you're doing?" or "What is
it that you're reading?"
or "What is it that you have that makes you different?".
Only then, when they reach out, do you offer to them.
The flip side of this is that, in the main, people don't change.
You can change, and you find it much easier to change if you're with positive people.
It's very hard to change with people who don't want you to change, who want you to be the
person that you are.
But in the main, people don't change.
So sooner or later in life you're often going to have to make some hard choices.
In the short term, be the person, as Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the
world".
Be the kind of person that you want to see, and if that does not bring people around,
then be prepared to go to the next step, be prepared to walk away.
Well, Aristotle said that 95% of everything you do is the result of habit.
So the rule is, form good habits and make them your masters, rather than allowing bad
habits to form.
In fact, the other rule says this, is that, "Good habits are hard to form but easy to
live with.
"Bad habits are easy to form but hard to live with".
Now, one of the turning points in my life, in my studies of Psychology was the discovery
that all habits are learned and can be unlearned.
Actually, you don't actually unlearn a habit, you simply replace a bad habit with a good
habit that has more powering impact.
And, how do you develop a good habit?
You develop a habit by repetition.
Almost everything you do from the time you get up in the morning is habit.
So start to think about yourself, what would be the best habits to have?
Good question.
"At what age does one give up on their dream?"
Never.
Goto said this, Henry Ford said this, Rockefeller said this.
You're only as young or as old as your dreams.
As long as you still have dreams and visions and goals, they keep you young.
It's the most amazing darn thing.
One of the great stories is the story of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Once upon a time there was a little boy named Harland, and Harland was taught by his mother
a special recipe down south the United States on how to make chicken.
When he grew up he got a job as a short-order cook in a small cafe, and he asked his boss
if his boss would be interested in this chicken recipe, and his boss said, "Sure, throw it
together, "see what the people say".
Turned out that everybody liked this special chicken recipe with all these secret herbs
and spices.
Well, for the rest of his career, right up to he was 65 years old he either worked in
little cafes or sometimes he owned the little cafe.
When he was 65 he had a little cafe and he was making his chicken, and he had people
coming from all around to eat his chicken, and the highways department built a highway
past his little restaurant, his little chicken place, and put him out of business.
It cut off the roads and nobody could get to it.
About the same time he received a social security check, his first social security check the
age of 65.
And he became angry, he said, "I'm 65 years old but I'm not ready to give up on my dreams.
"What do I have to sell?"
And he realized the one thing that had kept him going all those years, the main stay of
his little career was his mother's recipe of 17 or 18 herbs and spices.
So he put them together in little bags, one bag per chicken, and he put his pots and pans
on the back of his old car and he started driving up and down the eastern seaboard going
from cafe to cafe to cafe to ask them if they would pay him five cents a bag for his magical
combination of herbs and spices.
He called on more than 1,000 restaurants, sleeping in his car, week after week, and
finally he came across a little restaurant in Toronto that agreed to pay him five cents
a bag for his herbs and spices, this is back in the '60.
And because of exchange controls, they had to give the money to the Red Cross.
That was the beginning of the Kentucky Fried Chicken empire.
He began to sell this recipe more and more, people began to put it on their signs, a major
corporation came along and said, "We could make a real business of this", so they embraced
him, they built the franchise, they made him one of the best known people in the world.
When he died some years later he's worth more than $50 million, because he never gave up
on his dreams.
So I don't know if you're 65, and broke, and living in your car with pots and pans with
no money, but wherever you are, you never give up on your dreams.
- Thank you so much for watching.
We made this video because Freddie Jr., Jean Batiste, asked us to.
So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want to us to profile next leave it in the
comments below, and we'll see what we can do.
- An please let us know which one of his top 10 rules that you liked the most.
Please leave a comment below, we will join in at the discussion.
- Thank you guys for watching.
Continue to believe.
And we'll see you soon.
- Bye.
- We say that in zero-based thinking you ask this question, "Is there anything that I am
doing today "that knowing what I now know "I wouldn't get into again today if I had
to do it over?"
We call this a KWINK analysis.
"Knowing What I Now Know", KWINK.
In times of rapid change there's always areas in your personal and business life that knowing
what you now know you wouldn't get into again today if you had to do them over.
Your willingness to ask and honestly answer this question is the key to remaining flexible
and quick on your feet in times of turbulence.
How can you tell if you have a zero-based thinking situation in your life or business?
Simple: stress.
Whenever you experience ongoing chronic stress about any person or a situation you should
ask yourself, "If I was not now in this situation, "knowing what I now know, "would I get into
it again today?"
This is a great question.
Here's another question for you: what percent of the time do you think that you would turn
out to be wrong?
Well, the answer, according to the American Management Association, is about 70%.
70% of your decisions will turn out to be wrong in the fullness of time.
It's amazing how many people will stay in a bad situation or continue with a bad course
of action because of their unwillingness or inability to admit that they made a mistake
or that they were wrong in the past.
But, remember this, when you made the decision it was probably a good decision, based on
the situation at that time, but now the situation has changed.
Now you have to evaluate your situation based on the current reality.
Recognize that everything that you achieve in life is going to be with the help or support
or cooperation of other people.
So always think, what is it that other people want and need from me?
How can I help other people so they'll want to help me back?
If you're in sales, tough sales people think about their customers all the time, they think
about who their customers are, and what they customers want, and how they can help them
the most, and how they can help them even more today.
In their relationships, successful people are very focused on the most important people
in their worlds, both personal and in business.
If you've made mistake or something has happened in the past that's unfortunate, you can cancel
it out by simply saying the magic words: "I am responsible".
"I am responsible".
If someone has hurt you or you had a difficult experience in your childhood, you can say,
"Well, I didn't do anything".
Yes, but you're responsible for how you respond today.
A Nobel-prize winning study of the evolution of civilizations came up with the term "response
ability".
It's your ability to respond effectively with the ups and downs and negative events of life,
is the key measure of your ability to be successful and happy in the future.
And what you do is you say, whenever you feel negative or unhappy about anything you say,
"Wait a minute, I'm responsible.
"I'm responsible for my life.
"I'm responsible for what happened.
"I can't change the past, "so I'm not going to spend a second worrying about the past.
"I'm going to become so busy working on my future and my goals "that I don't have time
to think about the past".