Brian Tracy: Personal Power Lessons for a Better Life (Full Transcript)

And the interesting thing about these qualities is first of all, with them success is predictable and without them failure is predictable. That if you have these 10 qualities there’s nothing in the world that can stop you from being an outstanding success. And if you lack sometimes even one of these qualities that can be enough, can be the weak link in the chain that dooms one to a life of underachievement and failure.

The second principle that I discovered with regard to these qualities is that they are all habit patterns of mind and that nobody starts off with them and that you can learn them and that you can develop them with practice.

And the third thing that I found is that if you will practice these principles until they become habits, until they become automatic for you, then nothing can stop you, so let’s talk about these principles. They start with the letter C, each one, and there’s ten principles.

The first principle starts with the letter C. It says Clarity. And clarity is the starting point of all success. It means clarity of thinking; it means thinking clearly and it extends from thinking clearly to a series of other things. With regard to clarity it means the ability to determine exactly what it is that you want to be, have, or do in life. And the more I study successful men and women, the more I find that every single one of them, the top 5% are very clear about where it is they’re going and what is they want to accomplish?

And when I look at unsuccessful men and women or men and women who seem to be unhappy and floundering, I find that almost invariably they have a very very limited sense of direction; sometimes no sense of direction at all. You see we as human beings are goal-seeking organisms. We only function at our very best when we are working toward accomplishing something that is important to us and in my estimation 80% to 90% of all the unhappiness, hostility, violence, psychosomatic illness, alcoholism, drug addiction and so on in our society is caused by people having no sense of direction. They don’t know where they’re going. As they say if you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there.

I remember the analogy, the fellow goes up to the edge of the woods, and he sticks his rifle into the woods. He closes his eyes and goes blam blam blam, puts his rifle down, turns to his friend says boy, I sure hope something good runs into that. If you understand this principle, this principle is terribly important, you can be the most talented, the smartest, the best educated person with the very most valuable context and all the advantages in life. But if you are not focused it doesn’t do you any good at all.

I wrote in an article for The Wall Street Journal that if you do not have clear specific goals for your life, you are doomed forever to work for people who do. And that seems to be the case and yet only 5% of people have goals. So the key starting point with regard to clarity is to know where it is you’re going and what it is you want to be and what it is you want to have and what it is you want to do, because in America, in the most blessed society in all of human history you can have anything in the world that you want if you could decide what it is that you want.

The second key with regard to clarity is decisiveness. Be decisive. I have never met a successful person who was indecisive. And I’ve never met a failure who is decisive. Be decisive. Develope a characteristic and quality of decisiveness. We know that the reason why we are indecisive is because we’re afraid of making a mistake. But the terrible thing is that the way that we think becomes a habit and the habit of indecisiveness can condemn us to failure. We can be talented and intelligent and ambitious. But if we cannot make the hard decisions in our life, and if we cannot make decisions readily and what happens is we always have to work for people who do make decisions readily.

Now the interesting thing about decisions is that about 80% of decisions should be made the first time they come up. 80% of decisions should be made the first time they come up. And if you make decisions every single time they’ve come up, sooner or later you will develop the habit of decisiveness. You will be very clear about what it is you want and it’s easy to make decisions if you know what it is you want to accomplish.

One of the major reasons why people are indecisive in my experience is they have no idea what they want to accomplish. It’s almost like they’ve come to the crossroads, but they don’t know which direction to go. 80% of all the seasons should be made the first time they come up. And I read a management consultant’s report on decisions. He said the thing to do about decisions is to make a decision and if that doesn’t work, make another decision. And if that doesn’t work make another decision and that still doesn’t work you’re probably in the wrong field anyway. But the interesting thing is that if you make a decision you gather momentum. And the difference between successes and failures is not that successful people make right decisions. It is that successful people make their decisions right. In other words, once they have made a decision they make it come out right.

Anybody’s ever started a business knows that when you start a business you start off with a whole bunch of ideas which the market promptly tells you are completely wrong, and you probably lose your shirt on most of it, and you have to revise every single decision that you have. But the desire to survive economically, the threat of losing your shirt is a great motivation to learn quickly and to make decision. So make decision.

The third point under clarity is to have a vision for yourself and a vision for your life. The key to having a vision is to have a dream. They say in the song you’ve got to have a dream if you want to make a dream come true. And you can fulfill your dreams, all the great movers and shakers throughout all of history have been dreamers. They’ve been people with dreams. They’ve been people with visions. All leaders have vision. In the book of Solomon, it says where there is no vision the people perish. And the metaphysical meaning of that is that where people lack vision they perish inside, because they lose the excitement and the thrill of life.

And what most people do because of negative experiences, because of fear of failure and so on is, if they have a vision at all they tone it down so it’s so small and so safe that doesn’t turn them on; it doesn’t excite them, and they wonder why life isn’t exciting. A beautiful line I read not long ago said the best way to predict the future is to create it, which means to have a vision and even though the vision is in the air or the sky, then build a foundation under your dreams. And when you see men and women who rise from poverty and obscurity to fame and renown, you invariably see someone who had a vision of what they could be and have and do that was far beyond what they were.

Everyone of us has had an experience at one time when we were small we had a vision of being growing up and having our own cars. And as we grew older we had a vision of having our own homes and our own families and as we grew older we had a vision of traveling and going to Europe. We fulfill all our visions. The wonderful thing is this is that we always tend to achieve our goals; the problem is that our goals are set so low, that even when we do achieve them they don’t turn us on; they don’t fill us with enthusiasm. So dream big dreams if you like and focus on results, not activities. This is the key: be clear about the results that you’re trying to accomplish. This is one of the keys of peak performance. By the way all peak performers are result-oriented; all losers are under achievers, tend to the activity oriented and in the activity orientation what they do is they work very very hard; sometimes they work frantically. Sometimes they work longer hours than you do but they lose sight of the results.

Ben Tregoe, the strategic thinker said very worst thing in the world is to do very efficiently what need not be done at all. And many of us — and many of us work very very hard and to do very efficiently what need not be done at all and anybody who’s ever had employees will tell you that every single day you come across your employees doing something very diligently but it’s completely irrelevant to the success of the business. So focus on results. Here’s a key question to ask yourself in your working life. I think it’s one of the most important key questions. I’ll give you two.

Number one is: what results are expected of me? What results are expected of me? Not what activities but what results or what outputs — what am I supposed to produce in my job? A second question you can ask yourself is why am I on the payroll? Why am I on the payroll? Many people especially in sales they make the mistake of thinking that shuffling cards and reading through their sales literature and organizing their multiple listings and having coffee with the other people and reading the newspaper advertisements that they placed last week that this is all part of selling. No. Selling is when you’re face to face with a real live prospect who is willing and able and capable of buying a product; everything else from that is self delusion.

What results are expected? The results that are expected of us in selling are sales and the only time that we are working is when we are doing something that contributes directly to that result; isn’t that true. Of course, but of course why do we do the other things? I’ve come to the conviction that the reason why we do the other things is because they are fun and easy rather than hard and necessary. I think the major reason why people fail in life, if I can pass this on which wasn’t part of this — but major reason why people fail in life is because of the expediency factor that we always do and we always take the fastest and easiest route to get the things that we want.

But the fastest and easiest route in life is almost always the route to failure. It’s short term gain for long term pain. We do it is fun and easy today instead of what is hard and necessary. And then we have to do what is hard and necessary at the end of our life when it’s too late and you’ll find that the willingness and the ability to discipline yourself to be clear about what it is you want, to be clear where you’re going, to be clear about the results that you’re expected to accomplish. And then to only work on those results — the ability to discipline yourself to do that is absolutely critical for success. It is not possible to conceive of a person being successful who is not capable of disciplining themselves to do what is hard and what is necessary rather than what is fun and easy. And especially when it comes to managing your time, when it comes to looking at what you should do on a day to day basis, focus on results not activities.

Now let me give you a method which has helped me. Write out your goals — all goals have to be in writing by the way. If you don’t have your goals in writing, then they’re not really goals at all. They’re merely wishes and as they say wish is merely a goal without any energy behind it. Have your goals in writing. Write them out very specifically and clearly and then do this every single morning rewrite your major goals in the first person singular as though they already existed. Rewrite your major goals every single morning. Now this should take you about two to four minutes, maybe five. You can do it all in a paragraph. For instance if your goal is to earn $50,000 a year every single morning write I earn $50,000 a year. If your goal is to be excellent in real estate say I am an excellent salesperson in my field. If your goal is to weigh a certain number of pounds, if your goal is to enjoy a certain kind of life, write down your major goals in the first person singular as though they already existed today every single morning.

And then every single evening, take about five ten minutes, instead of watching television just before you turn on the television say wait a second I’ve got to review my progress. And sit down and review what you’ve done in the course of the day and say what have I done right today? What have I done, right that’s moved me toward my goals. And second question is what would I do differently if I had today to do over again? Those four steps by the way, writing and rewriting your goal each morning, reviewing them in the evening and asking yourself those two questions: What did I do right? What did I do that moved me toward my goals today? And what would I do differently if I had the day to live over? If you’ll ask yourself those two questions in the next thirty days you’ll accomplish more than you accomplished in the last six months. This is the most incredible method I’ve ever seen. I learned it some years ago. Just rewrite your goals every morning because every time you write your goals down you’re programming them into your subconscious mind. When you program them into your subconscious mind you set up a field of vibration within your brain and this law of attraction based on this field of vibration attracts into your life people and circumstances that harmonize with your dominant thoughts.

Everybody here has had the experience of starting to read about a subject, think about a subject, become interested in a subject and suddenly you started to attract into your life books magazines, articles, conversations, people, opportunities to expand on the subject. You had that experience before? What you do is you create a force field which we cannot explain scientifically. But it is a field of vibration that goes out from you and attracts back into your life everything that you need to realize your dominant goals. And everybody’s had the experience of writing down their goals at the beginning of the year and opening up the envelope at the end of the year and finding that 80% of the goals have been accomplished; you ever had that experience. Absolutely remarkable. Isn’t it?

The only problem with goals is that we don’t set enough of them. And we don’t set them highly enough. You can have anything you want. Imagine you could have anything that you want, anything that you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis you can have, anything that you are crystal clear about wanting and are willing to pay the price to get you can have. So clarity is the key. Be clear about what you want. Be clear about what you have to do to get it. Be clear about your vision. Be clear, speak, walk, talk, and act with clarity. And that’s the final point with regard to clarity is I have seen many men and women who have tripped themselves up by being leaders around the butchers if you like. They are very careful about whatever they say and by the time they say it people have gone home for lunch.

And one of the keys to success is to be very straight and to be very clear, be very precise. Interesting: one of the reasons why people do not speak to the point is for fear of offending others. Not true? For fear of offending others. Interesting study they did last year. They asked a great number of executives, male and female, they said if you had to tell a person something unfortunate with regard to their career that was going to affect their lives, and this is something that you’ve known for a long time, how would you go about breaking the news to them? And each of what the person described the strategy they would take, they would set up the timing right, they would start off with a talk about — talking about subjects that they had in common. They would close the door and keep out the noise. And they went around and round and they’re all circuitous routes how they would get to the point.

And then they reversed the question. They said how would you like to be informed of this same subject and every single one of them said I’d like to be informed in a straightforward way. I like somebody to tell me straight the news. You see all of us want to be dealt with in a straightforward way because we know we can take whatever it is, but we think that everybody else is too fragile. So what we do is we pussyfoot and tippy-toe around and avoid giving them the news and we finally do get the news to them sometimes causes more problems than is necessary. So be straightforward. Be clear in your language; be clear in your actions. Let people know exactly where you stand and that people know exactly what you said and what you mean; very very important, and it takes practice by the way.

Every single one of these habit patterns, every single one of these qualities has to be learned by practice; competence. And this is a discovery that I made a couple of years ago. And it’s just staggered me because I’ve been studying success for years, and then there’s the book in search of excellence. And then there’s the pursuit of excellence, and then there’s refining excellence and losing excellence and all the excellence books. And I sat down and looked this whole concept of excellence and I saw something that I hadn’t noticed. It’s almost like something brought to the surface of your mind. I noticed that every single man or woman that I had studied who had achieved any kind of success in any field whatsoever had done it after they had made a commitment to becoming excellent in that field. And I began to look and I began to compare and I began to talk to people and I speak to thousands of people virtually every month. I found that I never found a single person who was successful who was not excellent at what they did. That competence, the commitment to becoming excellent in your chosen field is an indispensable prerequisite for success that if you are not good at what you do you haven’t got a chance in our competitive society unless you win the lottery. That success is predictable if you commit yourself to becoming excellent it does a whole lot of other things within your mind. But if you commit yourself to becoming excellent it changes everything about you.

And only the top five or ten percent are excellent. You’ve heard the rule the 80/20 rule the Pareto principle that the top 20% of sales people make 80% of the sales, that the bottom 80% of sales people make 20% of the sales. Do you know what the difference that the ratio is there? The ratio is the difference between 16 to one. That the average income of people in the top 20% is 16 times the average income of the people in the bottom 80%.

Now let me ask you a question: Does it mean the people in the top 20% are sixteen times better than the people in the bottom 80%. 16 times more experienced. That they work 16 times the number of hours; do they have 16 times the number of years of education? Are they 16 times more handsome? Are they 16 times anything? You know that it’s not humanly possible to be twice as smart as somebody else unless you’re looking at very very unintelligent people and very very brilliant people. This is really not humanly possible on average for us to even be twice as smart as anybody else. But 20% of these people are making 16 times the average of the rest.

Prudential insurance company did a study some years ago and they put the thousands of agents that they have throughout the United States into their computers and compared their income and it came out the 80/20 rule worked. 20% of the sales people were doing 80% of the business. Well, they had all the data in the computer so they ran it through one more time. They said what’s the average income of the top 20% of the top 20% compared to the bottom 80%? Now for those mathematicians among you that works out to the top 4%. What was the average income? They found top 4% were earning on average 32 times the average of the people in the bottom 80%. So they said this is interesting and they ran through one more time. They found that the top 20% of the top 20% of the top 20% which is the top 0.8% that’s good. Top 0.8% were earning on average 54 times the average of the people in the bottom 80%.

What they found is that in every state and in every major city where they had an office with a large number of agents working out of it, there was one agent who was selling the same product at the same price to the same people with the same competition under the same circumstances under the same set of difficulties in the economy who was earning 50 times the amount of the average adult, that there were 50 agents in the office and one person was earning more than all of them put together. Isn’t that amazing and one of the things they found is that the key to this was that the each one of these agents had made the commitment to become excellent early in their career. They didn’t say I’m going to go into this and I’m going to earn a living. They said I’m going to go into this and I’m going to be the best and they read every single book written by the top agents, and they went to every single seminar and they listened to every single tape and they spent every single hour they could with other successful people learning what they needed to know to be successful.

You must commit yourself to excellence. You must commit yourself to becoming the best and the wonderful thing is that excellence is a journey. It’s not a destination; you never get there. Complacency and satisfaction are the key enemies of excellence but once you commit yourself to becoming excellent the whole world opens up for you. A very important point of excellence is this means simply this: do your best every time out and always strive to do it better. Do your best every time out and always strive to do it better. Remember it’s usually the last 5% or 10% of any job or project that makes all the difference. And what we do is we get to 90% done and then we start to drag our heels. We start to put the paperwork aside, we start to think of excuses, we start to do. What is fun and easy rather than what is hard and necessary.

A second point with regard to excellence is this, is that if you are not excellent in your field, you don’t go anywhere. You’re locked in place. I had a young man come up to me at an employment seminar not long ago, and he said there’s no opportunities in sales. He said I just got laid off and I said young man, I said, if you were good in your field you would not have been laid off. Because good salespeople are the rarest people in our society, and he just said well… I said have you ever studied sales. He said well, I don’t need to study sales. I said why not. He says well I just do what comes naturally. I said I rest my case.

Selling is an art. Selling today is the profession. Selling is a science that in order to be good in selling you have to study it and study it and study it and you have to study it more than the person next door who’s also determined to become excellent. Excellence yields opportunities because when you become good you open up. It’s almost like that the red sea of opportunity opens up in front of you. When you become excellent you come to the attention of people and people try to get you and they give you more responsibilities and more opportunities and you know when you put on the business card that you’re the top person in your particular field people like to buy from the best salespeople in their fields. And by the way, you can tell how excellence you are at any time, any time of your life you can tell how excellent you are; very simple measure.

How many job offers have you had this month? Interesting question. How many job offers – how many people called you up and said I want to hire you away from where you are and I’ll pay you more and give you a better deal. Because excellent people get job offers every month, some of them get job offers every single week. If you’re not getting job offers the market is telling you this is what they think of your level of competence. Very very important. And if you’re going to do anything at all the only time you’re going to get any joy out of it is if you do it well.

You see, when we do something well it gives us a feeling of self-esteem and pride; we feel like a winner. But if we do things in an average way it doesn’t give us anything. You notice that it doesn’t give us anything. We do at an average way. It doesn’t give us anything, but if we do it in a really exceptional way it makes us feel wonderful about ourselves. That’s why the companies that have committed to excellence are not hundreds of percent better in any given area; what they are is they are 1 or 2 percent better in a hundred different areas. And that’s the key. You see you don’t have to be a quantum leap different from somebody else; you just have to be a little tiny bit different in the critical areas that make a difference, and you can achieve that simply by making it a goal, setting it as a goal and working on it. You can become anything that you want to become. The harder you work the better you get. The harder you work the better you get.

You know in our society it is a lot of controversy over why should I work so hard for my job. The fact of the matter is that less than 5% really succeed. That’s less than 5% of the population really succed at life. Of a hundred people working today only one will be wealthy when they retire. Four will be financially independent. 15 will have some savings; 80% will be broke and dependent upon charities and pensions. Only one or two percent of people in each generation really makes it in life and every single study those people who make it are those who work hard hard hard. And if you think that it’s hard to be successful try being a failure; try coming to the end of the trail with no money dependent upon pensions. And you don’t know what hard is until you try living like that.

But if you work hard, the average self-made millionaire in America works 12 to 13 hours a day, works about 60 to 65 hours a week. I’ll tell you this with regard to hard work that in our society you only work eight hours a day for survival. Everything over eight hours is for success, and if you’re only working eight hours a day you’re in trouble. If you’re only working eight hours a day you’d better have a rich uncle or you better have somebody else who is going to take care of it because eight hours a day only gets you survival in our society because it’s so competitive that somebody else is working nine, they’ve got an edge on you; somebody else is working ten, they’ve got a bigger edge on you. Every hour over eight that you invest is an investment in your future, is an investment in your success. And if you put in the hours over eight or whether it’s studying or reading or working if you put in the hours it will pay off and it will pay off in spades. It’s like throwing seed in the ground. When you throw a seed in the ground the plant that comes up is not just one seed it’s hundreds of seeds. There’s a crop that you put in but you must put the seed in the ground first.

The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance; it pays below average rewards for below average performance and I talked to men and women all over America who are unhappy and they’re sad and they don’t like their work. And you know why is because they’re not good at what they’re doing. And let me give you a couple of key points is first of all you’ll never have a feeling of self-esteem and self-worth; you’ll never feel wonderful about yourself until you know that you are good at what you’re doing.

Number two is if you do not love your work enough to want to be the best at it, get out of it the way you would get out of a burning house. Do not stay at a job that you do not love because it is the high road to failure, dissatisfaction, frustration and unhappiness in life.

Concentration I think that the ability to focus in concentration are the two keys to success in life that the ability to focus clearly and know exactly what it is you want to accomplish and the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on accomplishing that one thing without diversion or distraction are the keys to success. It’s the number one key to effectiveness is to be able to sit down and look at your work and use the 80/20 rule. Say to yourself which is the 20% of the number of things that I have to do that account for 80% of the value of my work. And always work on the top 20%. You see in life there’s never enough time to do everything but there’s always enough time to do the important things.

Instead of doing what it’s fun and easy which is what most people do, or they do they make a list of everything they have to do and then they start at the bottom of the list and they work on the irrelevant things. At the end of the day they haven’t got anything done. Successful people, peak performers concentrate on the top items and remember anything other than working on the top items on your list is a waste of your time and time management is not just time management — time management is life management. You can do anything you want with your life if you’ll manage your time properly. We all have the same 24 hours a day and the ability to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate to discipline yourself to use willpower and perseverance to concentrate on one thing at a time is a quality of all success; nothing great has ever been accomplished without the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time.

Always concentrate on the best use of your time. Here is my favorite time management question which I give to you for free. It’s simply this: Before you start anything ask yourself what is the most valuable use of my time right now? Make a list and say what is the most valuable use of my time right now. When you get into your car say what is the most valuable use of my time right now. When you leave the house or leave the office, say what is the most valuable use of my time right now. Ask yourself that question over and over and over again, repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until it’s driven into the subconscious mind as a command and whenever you have a temptation to do something that is small and irrelevant that command will go blam? What is the most valuable use of your time right now and wooo and it’ll push you into doing what is the most valuable use of your time.

And whenever you’re working in the most valuable use of your time you feel great. You get concentrated effort is a source of energy and enthusiasm; it makes you feel wonderful when you’re working on something important and it makes you feel nothing when you’re working on something irrelevant. Develop a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency is a quality that is possessed by only 2% of the population. 2% of the population do things fast. 2% of the population have a bias for action.

In Tom Peters wonderful book In Search Of Excellence, he says all the excellent companies have a bias for action and all of the companies that do not classify or do not come into the excellence category do things when they get around to it. You call them up, and you have a problem or a complaint you hear from them three or four weeks later. But the excellent companies you call up with a problem or complaint bang there’s somebody back to you in two minutes. If you ever want an experience, call IBM, call Hewlett-Packard and say I’m having a problem getting some information. I’m having a problem with my PC. They won’t let you off the phone until they’ve taken care of you. You call the other companies they’ll say it’s not my job. They say the guy who takes care of that isn’t here. When we be back, I don’t know. Can you take a message? I don’t have a pencil. You know you’ve spoken to those people and then they can’t understand why they’re struggling.

You know that 20 percent of the companies make 80 percent of the profits in every industry. Interestingly enough. So develop a sense of urgency; get the reputation as the person who does things fast. Develop a reputation for speed and dependability and your future will just open up in front of you.

Imagine that you owned a company and you had two people in the company and both of them were reasonably well talented; both of them were doing reasonably well except one person had a sense of urgency and did things fast and every time you give him something to do they took it they ran with it like a ball player catching a fumble and running for the goal line. The other person got to it after lunch or maybe next Monday or no rush weeks almost over. Thursday afternoon and so on. Which one would you give additional responsibility to, which one would you promote? Which one would you spend money training? Which one would you send to places where you needed help? It’s always the person with a sense of urgency.

I can tell you this that the sense of urgency for me has been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a xonsultant I have been able to save my clients sometimes millions of dollars by acting fast when they’ve given me a project to take care of. Whereas if I had acted even a day later it could have cost a fortune. And if you’ll develop that habit of working fast, working fast, that sense of urgency, act now, do it now, do it now, do it now. In selling especially somebody calls you up and has a question get back to them now. Somebody has a problem get back to them now. Somebody needs something move on it quickly, if you have to forego coffee breaks or lunch or something else move fast. If you develop that reputation for speed it would be worth a fortune to you. Takes a little while, but it’s a habit. Most people just sort of shuffle through life. You know they get to it when they feel like it, but all the excellent people all the high performers have a sense of urgency.

And finally complete each job that you start. Get on with the job and stay with it till it’s a hundred percent finished. The difficulty that people have in completing their task is absolutely amazing. In a study amongst 160 executive officers last year they were asked what qualities out of 26 would be most important than putting a person on the fast track to success in your company? And they agreed almost unanimously on two qualities. Number one: the ability to set priorities, to determine what is relevant and separate it from what is irrelevant. And number two is a sense of urgency, the ability to get on with the job and get it finished and get it finished fast.

Common sense according to The Gallup Organization, they just did a wonderful book called the Great American Success Story. They surveyed 1500 people in Marquis Who’s Who in America, 1500 of the most respected men and women in America and they asked them: What do you consider to be the most important single quality of success and they agreed almost unanimously on common sense. Just common sense. Good common sense. As my friend Charlie Jarvis says the average person has an enormous amount of common sense because I haven’t used any of it yet. You can train your mind to have common sense. You can train your mind to think things through before acting. In my experience action without thinking is the cause of every failure. Action without thinking is the cause of every failure and common sense comes from taking the time to think things through before you act.

Listen to your intuition. Your intuition is one of the best guides that you possibly have. You know from some of the other work that we’ve done is that each person has inside them an intuitive sense which will always give you the exact right answer for you. They’ve done some studies between men and women when they test women’s intuition. You’ve heard of women’s intuition, everybody said women’s intuition — they find that when you give men and women tests and they’re asked to answer on the basis of their intuition, men’s intuition is equally as accurate as women’s intuition. The only difference is that in real life women have the intelligence to listen to their intuition, which is why they’re smarter than men and men do not listen to their intuition instead they override their intuition because they’re trying to get something they want the fastest and easiest way even if their gut feeling says don’t do it.

So anybody here ever gone against their intuition and had it work out? No, your intuition will always give you the most accurate answer for you. It’s almost like an inbuilt computer that will take all of your life experience and knowledge and everything going on around you and give you exactly the right answer. So listen to your intuition.

Learn from your setbacks. This is one of the characteristics of high-performing men and women is that every single time they have a problem or a difficulty they sit back and they dissect it. And they learn everything possible from it. They try to develop general principles from each setback. They say what is the valuable lesson I can learn, so you take a look at everything that has happened to you. Take a look at the very most difficult experience that you’re in right now and ask yourself: what is the most valuable lesion I can learn from this experience? And believe me if you look for the lesson — in the Bible it says seek, and ye shall find. It doesn’t say seek and occasionally you might find something. It says seek and ye shall find if you look for the valuable lesson or the seed of an equal or greater advantage or benefit in every difficulty you will find it. It’s always there.

And I love the line from Socrates that says the unexamined life is not worth living. Which means that the life where you do not take the time to reflect on your experiences. Aristotle said that wisdom is an equal measure of experience plus reflection. And the reason so few people have wisdom is what they have is experience experience experience but they never take the time to sit back and reflect on what’s happening to them, reflect on what they’re learning. How many people here have seen people get out of bad relationships and get immediately back into bad relationships? Or get out of a lousy job, and immediately join a company and get into another lousy job? What is the natural thing that people do, they get fired or laid off from a job, they quit, they go down the street, they look for what? Another job exactly just like and act exactly like it.

Tap your creative potential. Accept the fact that every single human being is a genius and all successful men and women are creative. They’re creative in that they respond to their world differently. They ask questions, they’re flexible, they’re curious. You know what, the hallmark of creativity is curiosity. The hallmark of ignorance and stupidity is the cessation or stopping from asking questions. And I have worked with some of the brightest men and women in this nation. And I find that the smartest people of all, the ones that have the greatest education and the most experience are the ones who ask the most questions. They ask questions almost as if they were children. But they never stop asking questions; they’re very open and flexible and they have the ability once they learn of new piece of information to drop what they’re doing if the new information contradicts it and do something else.

Do you know what most people do? Most people keep on doing what they’re doing until they run into a wall. As they say the more you do of what you’re doing the more you’ll get of what you’ve got. Someone pointed out to me that not long ago, and I think it’s very true is that all changes in our life come with the input of new information ,that if we do not have new information we keep on doing the same thing forever as the result of inertia. And creative people are always looking for faster, better, easier, cheaper, newer ways to do things.

Remember 80% of everything that we are doing today in our general business will be different five years from now. 80% of the products that we use: the food that we eat, the cars we drive, this music we listen to, the movies we go to, even the streets we drive on, 80% of everything will be new in five years. That’s how rapidly things are changing. According to the research all you need is an idea that’s 10% new to start a fortune, an idea is 10% new. As a matter of fact an idea that’s more than 10% new is probably too new for the average consumer to accept it. An idea that’s 10% new — the interesting point the single greatest source of self-made millionaires in America, do you know what industry it is, can you guess? who woudn’t believe it: dry cleaning. Dry cleaning shops is the greatest single source — one industry that’s contributed more self-made millionaires than any other industry. Dry cleaning shops.

Now the key to this: if you want to become wealthy — I’m going to tell you something that if you want to be wealthy in life, if you wish to become very wealthy, if you wish to become even a millionaire you can do it if you’re willing to pay the price. But most people become millionaires by offering a good or service that people use all the time and they offer it just a little bit better. They do it just a little bit faster. They put a little bit more grace or finesse into what they’re doing. They handle it. They wrap it. They are more polite. The restaurant that has people coming back to it may have food that’s only five percent different, but it’s the way that people handle it that’s so different. You can do anything you want in life; all you have to do is find an idea that’s ten percent new and you’ll find if if you flood your mind read magazines, read books, ask questions. Ask why people are doing things the way they’re doing.

I was talking to a man not long ago made a million dollars in Chicago, and he made it laying bricks, and he never laid bricks in his life. But he found he went to a union bricklaying job a large building downtown and he asked them why they were laying bricks like that and why half the men were sitting around. They said well, that’s the way we always lay bricks. He said well how come all the men are sitting around, they said well because they have to lay the corners first and then the men fill the bricks in between, so why can’t they lay the corners and the walls at the same time, said we just don’t do it that way.

So he sat down, knew nothing about construction, sat down, he came up with a system that enables you to build the center of the wall and the corners simultaneously. And then he bid on construction jobs, and he could bid 40 percent under any company using the old method and within a year he’d made over a million dollars in construction. He had half the construction in Chicago a few years ago. And he didn’t know anything about it. Look for ideas, keep your mind open and flexible, ask questions. Remember one new idea is all you need to start a fortune and within every single person here you have four ideas an average of four ideas per year driving to and from work any one of which will make you a fortune, any one of which will make you wealthy.

How many times — I can prove it to you, I’m going to prove it to you — How many times have you been going about your daily business, and you see the need for a product or service? And you said now, I wonder why somebody doesn’t produce that and about two or three years then you say well can’t be any good so I thought of it after all. Groucho Marx when he resigned from a club, once he said I wouldn’t be a member of a club that would have — I wouldn’t stay in a club that would have me for a member. I have people like me for a member so we get those ideas and we say well can’t be any good because I thought of it and then two or three years later a company comes out with that idea or some company because — and makes a million dollars that you say I thought of that idea two or three years ago. Every single person here has had that experience. What you have to do is trust your ideas.

If you decide that you’re going to earn a certain amount of money that you’re going to achieve a certain level of wealth, that you’re going to achieve a certain life estate, and you program that into your subconscious mind and you then turn it over to your intuition you will get the ideas, the insights, the inspirations necessary to achieve your goals. And that’s the only difference between very wealthy successful people and the average person is that they simply follow their intuition, they’re not smarter. They’re not different. They’re not more educated, they are not more talented. They just follow that inner guide.

Consideration is based on the fact that the quality of your relationships with other people more than anything else will determine your success in life. How well you get along with other human beings, your quality of interaction will determine your happiness, your success, your achievements, your wealth and anything else. Charles Schwab the founder of US Steel said that I will pay more for the ability to get along with others than for any other skill in America, and that’s very very true. Develop the people skills that you need to be successful; take courses in communications; take courses in effective listening. Take courses in public speaking. You know one of the most important parts of communicating to get along well with others is the size of your vocabulary. You’ve probably heard that before. The size of your vocabulary, your ability to express yourself orally, your ability to stand on your feet, your ability to write effectively and get your point across to others will have a tremendous impact on your life because you cannot imagine a successful person who cannot communicate effectively with other people and you can develop the capacity to be an excellent communicator .

If you were to learn one new word a day, if you were to make an effort by carrying a dictionary around — I used — I have taught myself French, Spanish, German and Smatterings of about ten other languages and the way I taught myself that was I learned the basic vocabulary. I studied it, learned the basic vocabulary and I carried a dictionary around with me and every time I saw a word I didn’t know I looked it up in the dictionary. And within a very short period of time I could eat, live, walk, talk, and speak fluently in those three societies. And I’ve traveled all over the world in those three languages. Sometimes I get in a position when I’m talking to a person in France and a person in German, the person in Spanish and my mind goes… And I end up babbling but nonetheless you can learn it just simply by looking up the word. If you looked up one word a day which would be 365 words a year within five years you’d be one of the best educated people in history because every word that you learned would introduce you to about ten more. It’d sort of open the door to about ten more. The average child learns almost 5,000 words in the first five years of life. The average adult learns less than five words a year and yet, i words are the tools with which we think that the more words we have the better is our thinking. Just like the more tools a craftsman has the better is what he creates; the more words we have the better is the world that we create. So communications is important.

The most important part about consideration is to practice the golden rule. I think that the golden rule which is based on the law of sowing and reaping whatsoever that you would have men do unto you do so do you so unto them. You get out of life exactly what you put in; what you sow in your relationships you reap in your relationships. The golden rule is the key to consideration. But you can practice, you can learn to be more effective with other people. You can take courses in it. You can study behavioral psychology.

Everybody in sales should be an expert on behavioral psychology and whenever I ever hear a person say well I don’t need to study that I do it comes naturally, the person is saying I’m determined to be a failure for the rest of my life. And I’m announcing it to anybody who’ll listen because sales is so precise, the ability to communicate and to persuade and influence other people is such a complex field that you know some psychologists study at all of their lives. If you become excellent in it you can write your own ticket. Almost all entrepreneurial fortunes, people who start with nothing to become millionaires do it because they’re good sales people; they’re good at convincing others. They get excited about their ideas but they have the skills to be able to persuade other people to go along with them. Does that make sense?

Of course, because the opposite to persuading influencing other people is to be ignored by other people and to be influenced by them. So it’s a matter of choice. The Carnegie Institute of Technology did a study about seven years ago — ten years ago now and they studied 10,000 men and women who were let go from their companies and they found that 95 percent of the people who were let go from their companies were let go because of their inability to get along with others. This is caused by low self-esteem more than anything else .In my estimation those of you who know know that low self-esteem more than anything else causes our personality problems, not liking ourselves, not accepting ourselves, feeling inferior inside cause us to lash out at other people. And the wonderful thing is that if you’re clear about your goals and you’re committed to becoming excellent and you’ll concentrate single-minded on what is important to you, you have a tendency to like yourself more; your self-esteem goes up; your ability to get along with other people goes up.

But if you have no goals and you’re not very good at what you do and you’re just doing whatever comes to hand and your self-esteem goes down. So one of the things that we’re talking about here is the building of the characteristics, the personality qualities that guarantee success and self-esteem of course is the foundation of all success in relationship.

Consistency is absolutely critical. You can have all of the others, but if you’re inconsistent it’s going to really hurt you. Consistency means that dependable, steady predictable work is always vastly superior to spurts or flashes of brilliance and genius, that the person who is like the Tortoise who just plod steadily away old steady Eddy is always the person who tends to be more successful than the one who flashes here and flashes there but cannot be counted on over the long term.

Be consistent in your relationships. Especially be consistent with your family, be consistent with your friends, be consistent with your boss, be consistent in your work. Make it so that you are the type of person that everybody can depend upon. That people will believe in and they’ll depend upon and they know that if you say something that you’ll do it, that if you say you will be somewhere or if you undertake a responsibility that you will fulfill that responsibility. That sort of consistency, that sort of dependability is one of the most valuable things in the world of work today.

I work with so many companies, and I have staff that work in my companies. And I know that the greatest joy that an employer can have is to give a person a job and know that it’ll be done and the most aggravating thing in the world is to give a person a job and have no idea if it’ll be done, if it’ll be done to a particular quality if it’ll be done on time or anything else. Just being the steady person; you don’t have to be a genius. You don’t have to — one of the things that I found if I can pass this on to you, one of the things that I found when I was a young man — this cost me about 10 years of life by the way, not 10 years so much — but 10 years in that I thought that you had to have good grades in school in order to be successful and then later I thought that you had to have a university education in order to be successful. And then later I thought that successful people are people who are somehow better than you and I; they somehow have unique talents that somehow the gods have descended from Olympus and touched them on the heads.

But one of the things that I found is that nobody is better than you or I. When you see men or women accomplishing great things they’re not better than you and I; they’re not different from you, or I; they’re just doing things in a different way. You look at a person you went to school with who’s now doing surgery as a doctor. The person’s the same person except that they’ve learned how to do surgery. You look at a person who you went to school with who is now an outstanding success in a particular field all they’ve done is learned how to be a success in that field. And consistency — there’s a law of accumulation in the universe if I can pass this on. A law of accumulation that says that even though you do a hundred things or a thousand things that you don’t see eventually they accumulate and they gather a force of their own. That every single great accomplishment in life is the result of thousands of minor accomplishments that nobody ever sees.

One of the people on the program lifestyles of the rich and famous who had become successful as a singer. They said isn’t it wonderful that you become so successful as a singer. She said yes, it’s wonderful. She said but when I’m up on stage in Las Vegas, and I’m making $50,000 a week or whatever happens to be says nobody sees the 16 years that I spent traveling around living in a van singing in cheap Honky tonks where people throw up on your piano and get drunk on the floor in front. Nobody sees the 16 years of living on the road living at an average of less than $5,000 a year. What they see is the person up there on the stage. But every single great success was at one time a failure and they failed and failed and failed and failed over and over again and all great successes are story of failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, outstanding success boy ain’t he lucky? Isn’t that right boy? He was lucky, sure had the right connections.

So consistency is important and even if you don’t see yourself getting the results be consistent, keep working steady steady steady knowing that you’re accumulating, you’re putting yourself on the side of the angels when you’re working consistently.

Finally with regard to consistency guard your integrity as a sacred thing. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Never compromise your integrity for anything and never compromise your peace of mind for anything. You see compromising your peace of mind is a way of compromising your integrity. Never do anything that disrupts your peace of mind. If it makes you feel unhappy get out of it; don’t stay in relationships. Don’t stay in jobs; don’t stay in Situations that cause your peace of mind to be disrupted because your peace of mind is the highest good that you have. And a person who practices consistency consistently structures their life so what they are doing is being true to themselves. What they are doing is living up to the very best that is in them as a human being and that takes tremendous courage; it takes tremendous courage because it’s so easy to go along with a crowd. But you’ll never be really happy unless you know that you are being true to yourself and completely true to yourself.

Commitment. I found that the ability or the willingness to make a complete commitment to a job, a commitment to a relationship, a commitment to a profession, to make a commitment is one of the hardest things that human beings do. That very few people make commitments, that most people in this room — I hate to say that most people in this room are not totally committed to their work. Oh, yeah, they’re doing it. They’re in it. They’re doing a reasonably good job. Nobody’s fired them yet right but they’re not committed; their whole heart isn’t into it and yet no success is possible without commitment. Who is it that Emerson said that every great achievement is the triumph of enthusiasm, that the ability to commit yourself enthusiastically wholeheartedly 100% to what you want to do is the starting point of all achievement, that if you cannot commit yourself wholeheartedly it probably means that it’s not right for you. And that all of us in life seek for something that we can commit ourselves to.

Alan Cox in his book the achievers which came out last year, found that these executives in the corporations that he studied who achieved the very most in the shortest period of time had found the proper niche for themselves and had lost themselves in their work. Dr Scully Blatnick, study of self-made millionaires, 83 out of 1,500 people became self-made millionaires over 20 years. He found that the one quality that they all had in common was that they picked work that they loved. They specialized in that work. They became very good in it, and they eventually got paid very well for it, and then they held on to the money. I throw that last one in because I know a lot of you can relate to that. They held on to the money. They didn’t gamble or speculate; they were very conservative with their money. They got paid more and more and they held on to it.

One of them started off cleaning toilets on the night shift for an airline and today he’s the president of the airline, and makes 1,950,000 dollars a year. He’s been with the airline for 35 years. But it’s not difficult to become a millionaire when you’re making 1,950,000 a year; even with taxes you can still do pretty well. He found that the quality that separated these people from the ones who struggled for 20 years and weren’t much further ahead than when they started was that they became totally absorbed in their work, totally committed to their work. They lost themselves in their work and when they lifted up their head about the age of 43, 44 their accountant told them by the way you’re worth over a million dollars now. Did you know that most of them became wealthy without even knowing it.

And so it’s important that you find the work that you can commit yourself to. It’s important that you find the relationship you can commit yourself to and if you are an employer and you have people working for you who are not committed to their work these people are like rotten apples in a barrel. I have found that people who are not committed to their jobs are people who always cause trouble within an organization and the people who are committed — you don’t have to be the most talented and you don’t have to be the best-looking, you don’t have to be the best educated, but if you’re committed to your work you’ll do more than all the people with all of those blessings. So commitment is important. Commit yourself to your boss. Commit yourself to your job; commit yourself to your relationships; commit yourself to your company. Loyalty is one of the most valued single qualities in work and Peter Drucker says that more executives fail in life because of lack of loyalty to their companies, to their boss than for any other reason. And why is lack of loyalty — lack of loyalty is just the expression of lack of commitment to that organization.

Courage means that you have the ability, you have the willingness to confront your fears because what I found over the years is that brave people, courageous people are not people who are not afraid. They’re simply people who master their fears. They’re simply people who face their fears, confront their fears. And Mark Twain said it many years ago. He said with regard to fear, he said do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

Now fear and courage tend to be habits that if you are afraid and you give in to the fear and you back away it becomes a habit to back away whenever you’re afraid or unsure. If you’re afraid and you force yourself to confront the fear, it becomes a habit to confront the fear whenever you find something that you’re afraid of. And you’ll find that most fears disappear when you confront them. And most fears, fears of failure, fears of rejection, fears of loss, fears of pain, fears of limitation, fears of the loss of a relationship, fears of ill health — most of these fears disappear when you confront them head on. It’s almost like as you push them they just turn into smoke and disappear.

Dare to go forward in your life. Dare to go forward in the direction of fulfilling your potential. When I was — many years ago, I was a karate student. I was also a karate instructor, and I competed in three international championships, and one of the things that I learned from my best karate instructors and I studied under six world champions is they told me that when you fight always move forward. Even if you’re only moving forward half an inch at a time, he says always move forward. He said when you’re moving forward a hundred percent of your attention is forward. But if you’re moving backward even a half an inch at a time half of your attention is always behind you and where you’re going. So always move forward. Always have it, dare to go forward.

Whenever you have a choice of either staying still and playing it safe or moving forward, move forward not because you’ll necessarily succeed every time because it reinforces and cements the habit of moving forward. And most people when they have a choice of moving forward or staying, playing it safe play it safe. But I think General MacArthur — General Douglas MacArthur said there’s no security in life only opportunity. Life is very perverse in a way because the more we seek security the less we have it and the more we seek opportunity the more we have security. Helen Keller said this beautifully. She said life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all, that the tendency she said in the earlier parts of this statement — she said the tendency to seek security is the low road to failure, that courage is absolutely essential.

And one of the things that — I used to think that if you were really courageous eventually you got to the point where you weren’t afraid. I’m going to tell you something that if you’re not a little bit afraid at least three or four nights a week you’re not trying hard enough. If you’re not falling your face over and over again, if you’re not trembling when you go to sleep with your heart pounding, then what is happening is you’re not trying hard enough. You’re living too far within your potential that all really successful people live on the outside edge of what they’re capable of and it’s always a little bit scary on the outside edge because we all have feelings of uncertainty we all have fears. We all have doubts that hold us back. But the brave person is simply the person who moves forward and keeps taking the chance and you cannot imagine a successful person without courage. You cannot imagine a successful person without the courage to face and confront their fears and to move forward.

In my experience the fear of failure is the greatest single reason for failure in adult life. The fear of failure, the fear of making a mistake of losing our money, our time or effort is what paralyze us and holds us back, but the fear of failure is a habit which can be counteracted by the habit of courage. And if we don’t overcome that fear of failure then we’ll just be like the 80%, 90% that do not fulfill their potential.

See the wonderful thing is only a few percentage of people fulfill their potential in any generation, and we can join those people simply by deciding to do so and doing what the other people do. As simple as that if we decide to become an engineer what do you study you study engineering. If you want to become a better cook, what do you do? You study cooking. You try to do it all by yourself? No. You get cookbooks, you take classes and so on and so forth. If you want to be successful, if you want to fulfill your potential study the men and women who are fulfilling their potential and just do what they do.

And finally with regard to courage, the great expression of courage is to persist in the face of adversity. But to persist when things really get rough, to be able to pick yourself up and pick yourself up over and over again and believe me if you decide to go for the goal in your life, you’re going to get knocked down over and over and over and over again. Every single week you’re going to have heartaches and disappointments and frustrations and setbacks and obstacles, but without those obstacles no success is possible.

You see the only way we can be successful is if we develop momentum and we cannot develop the momentum unless we are struggling with obstacles and struggle with adversity goes hand in hand with all great success. What most people do is they back away from adversity, but if you want to see if you’re a brave person, what they call the four o’clock in the morning courage weight when things go completely to pieces, when things are the worst, when your very best deal falls apart and your rent is late and you’re tired, and you’re sick, and everybody is mad at you and your car doesn’t work, then it’s the person that picks themself up and says nothing is going to stop me.

You know you know the best quality in the world that you can develop and I give it to you because I’ve made it my life’s habit to develop this — I hope I’ve got it I don’t know for sure, but the quality is to develop the quality of being unstoppable. Develop the quality of being unstoppable. Say in yourself that no matter what life throws at me it’ll never stop me. No matter, how rough it gets I will never quit and nothing will ever stop me. Make the decision that you can be tired, you can be worn out. But nothing is ever going to stop you. That’s a wonderful decision because then no matter what life throws at you, you pick yourself up. And you say okay, give it — give it your best shot as Fonzie says nothing is going to stop you. It’s a wonderful feeling; it’s a wonderful feeling. It’s the basis of self-esteem.

Confidence. And confidence comes as a result of everything else. If you do all the things that we’ve talked about, if you concentrate on becoming excellent, concentrate single-mindedly, be clear about your goals, consider other people, practice the golden rule, if you practice courage, if you practice consistency, if you practice all of these, then pretty soon you develop a level of self confidence. Your confidence comes as a result. You don’t get confidence out of a bottle. You don’t get confidence from a pill; you can’t learn confidence in a motivational seminar. You only get confidence by doing certain things over and over again that build a solid foundation within your own mind that you can do whatever you need to do that you have what it takes to be successful.

Self-doubt is the great paralyzer of all activity. We all have self-doubt and the way we overcome that self-doubt is by doing the things that we would normally back away from, as I say continue to move forward. Self-confidence begets great achievement. You cannot imagine a successful person with lacking self-confidence. The wonderful thing is this and I learned this from a very great man who died recently is that if you persist until you succeed at achieving the goal that is important to you and you complete it like a degree in school, or you wrap up a sale or you make a career successful.

You plug into your subconscious mind a success pattern, and then the subconscious mind running on the basis of inertia attempts to adjust your words, actions and feelings to duplicate that success pattern, and that’s why they say nothing succeeds like success. That once you’ve been successful you have a pattern set down which will enable you to apply that pattern to another part of your work to be successful in that. And the more you succeed the more this pattern of success is reinforced. And you’ll finally reach the point where it’s impossible for you to fail if you succeed enough times. Because you will have within you a self-adjusting mechanism that will guarantee your success.

Behave confidently as Dorothea Brande wrote in 1935 in her wonderful book Wake Up And Live. She said the key to success is this: she said go confidently in the direction of your dreams; act as though it were impossible to fail. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and act as though it were impossible to fail .And this brings us to the most important part if I can just summarize in one minute it is this, is that your true beliefs are only and always expressed in your actions. It is not what you say or what you intend that tells what you believe but only what you do.

Your actions are always the true measure and the interesting thing that we’ve learned in behavioral psychology is this, that if you do not feel self-confident, courageous, consistent by concentrating clear and so on, if you don’t feel like most of us start off not feeling like it, if you will act the part if you will pretend as though you have the quality already, the feelings will generate the actions and the actions will generate the feelings. That if you will act, walk, talk and live by the same principles and do the same things that successful men and women do, even if you doubt yourself in the initial stages, eventually you will come to the point where you actually feel to the bottom of your soul like a successful positive confident, cheerful, optimistic, unstoppable human being.

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