Secrets Of Self Made Millionaires: Brian Tracy (Transcript)

Well, when I realized the law of cause and effect explained everything, I thought, “Wow.”

So in sales, I went to the top of my sales force. I read and I learned, attended courses, and especially I applied what I learned. And then when I got into sales management, I again read the books and took the courses and asked for advice, and when I got into real estate and importation and development and manufacturing and distribution and a whole series of businesses over the years, the first thing I did is I asked, “How does it work? How do people succeed in this field?”

And then I buried myself and immersed myself. I spent hours and hours and hours studying, and then I did what the most successful people did. Interesting point. We say that nature is neutral. In other words, nature doesn’t care who you are. It doesn’t care if you’re tall or short or male or female or black or white, educated or uneducated. Nature doesn’t care. All that nature cares is that you do what successful people do.

Following Proven Success Methods

So I’m making a recipe. Nature doesn’t care. You follow a recipe. If you follow the recipe exactly, you get the dish. Nature doesn’t care who’s doing it, and that’s the wonderful thing about our society. It’s basically like justice. It’s blind. It’s nature doesn’t care.

In fact, there are a lot of people who are not as smart and not as talented as you who are doing vastly better than you, not because they’re better, but because they’re just following proven success methods. There’s nothing that will make you madder than to see somebody who’s dumber than you who’s making more money than you. Have you had that experience? So what we do is we use proven success methods. We just find out what they are, and we do them over and over again.

Quick point. Nothing works the first time. Please understand that. Nothing works the first time. What is the average number of times that a person tries with a new goal before they give up? Can you guess? Well, the average is less than one, because most people give up before they try even once. They say, “That’s a great goal. I’d love to be financially independent.” And then they give up. They don’t even try.

They say, “Ah, but I couldn’t because of this and because of that and so on.” And then they move away to a wonderful place called Someday Isle. You ever heard of Someday Isle? Someday, I’ll start saving money. Someday, I’ll get out of debt. Someday, I’ll lose weight. Someday, I’ll start a business. Someday, I’ll get serious about my finances. And most people live on Someday Isle. Your job and my job is to vote yourself off the island, right? And we start taking control of our lives.

Researching Self-Made Millionaires

Well, about some years ago, I was called by a major businessman. And he asked me if I would do a talk for his 800 entrepreneurs that own separate franchises within his organization on how to become a self-made millionaire. And I said, “Sure.” When you’re a young speaker, you agree to speak on any subject. Sure, I’ll speak on that subject.

And I was just like most people. When I was young, I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. And when I hit 30, I put it off to 35. And as I got to 35, you put it off to 40, and then you kind of just don’t look at it anymore. You forget about it and feel the deck is stacked against you. Well, I was about 38, 39 when he called me up and asked me. I said, “Sure, no problem.” And I said, “Now, what do I know about self-made millionaires?”

And this is a shocker. I didn’t know anything. Oh, I knew that they had more than a million dollars. But that’s a real basic piece of knowledge, you know. So I started thinking, what do I know about? So I began to study them. And that’s when I found out that they’ve been studied so thoroughly. Because we know everything there is to know about them. They are a source of incredible fascination. And there’s 50 years of research.

So I began to read the studies and find out where they came from and what they did and how they thought and where they started and the decisions they made and the kind of people they were. One of the things that I learned, by the way, is that becoming a self-made millionaire is not the important thing. What is really important is the person you have to become to become a self-made millionaire. You have to become a totally different human being.

One of my friends says that in order to achieve something you’ve never achieved before, you have to become someone you’ve never been before. And it’s a really important insight is the qualities that you need to develop, qualities on the inside to become a self-made millionaire, are incredible qualities that make you a vastly better person. Not only better in terms of character, determination, discipline, decision-making, strength, and so on, but they make you a far better person. They round out your character in a far better way.

So the real payoff of becoming wealthy is not because you can eat more, because how many more meals can you eat? How many more clothes can you wear? It’s the kind of person that you become and then the kind of people that you associate, the kind of life that you have.

Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires

And so the things that we’re going to talk about now, and I know that you’re some of the smartest people in our country, so I’m going to give you these ideas very quickly, like dealing cards. What I found in my research is that there’s a series of qualities that self-made millionaires have. If you have these qualities, your success is virtually guaranteed. And if you don’t have these qualities, the qualities are learnable.

Point number one is that all business or sales skills are learnable. All financial skills are learnable. If you can drive a car, you can learn any skill. If you can drive a car, you can learn this skill. Now number two is you’re probably only one skill away from doubling your income right now. You’re probably only one skill away from setting yourself on the road to becoming a self-made millionaire. That turns out to be the case for almost everyone.

And if you don’t know what that skill is, maybe over the course of the time we spend together, it’ll jump out at you. But whatever it is, you’ve got to find it out and go to work on it because it is learnable. It’s a learnable skill. People say, “Well, I don’t mean, I’ve never been very good with money.” Well, get over it. The fact of the matter is you can learn what you need to learn to achieve anything that you want to achieve.

So the success secrets of self-made millionaires. Give yourself a score of one to ten. And if you are weak on one of these, it can be enough to hold you back. If you’re strong on all of these, then there’s no limit to what you can accomplish.

1. Dream Big Dreams

The first is to dream big dreams. Dream big dreams. Practice what is called back from the future thinking and project forward. Develop a vision of yourself as happy, healthy, wealthy, thin. Practice what top people practice, which is what is called idealization. You project forward several years and you need to imagine that your life is perfect in every way.

Imagine that you have no limitations. Imagine that you have all the time and all the money and all the friends and all the contacts and all the education, all the experience, and that you could be or have or do anything you want in life. If you could, what would it be? If your life were perfect in five years, what would it look like? How much would you be earning? How much would you be worth? What kind of a family life would you have? What kind of health would you have? What kind of car would you be driving? What would your life be like if you could wave a magic wand and make it perfect in every way?

Now, what we have found is this is the starting point of great riches and it’s the starting point of great success in life, is for you to have a dream or a vision of a wonderful future. Here’s an exercise that we give people in our audiences, is take a sheet of paper and make up what is called a dream list.

Now, imagine this is kind of like a kid’s Christmas list and that it just allows you to just run wild and just write down everything that you could think of that you could possibly want. I had a friend who I taught this to and he got so excited about it, he bought a spiral notebook and he began writing. And he’d go through the newspaper and every single thing he saw in the newspaper that was nice, he wrote it down to school. He ended up first time through with 330 goals. By the end of the month he had 500 things that he wanted.

The interesting thing was that his life exploded. He activated the law of attraction and he began to attract into his life people, circumstances, ideas, resources, insights, that began to move him toward the accomplishment of the goals and began to move the goals toward him.

2. Do What You Love

Number two is to do what you love to do.

The Importance of Loving Your Work

Whenever you find people who are really successful in life, they are people who do what they love to do. They love their work. The great rule for success in life is to find something that you love to do and then find a way to make a living doing it. Now when you find what you love to do, it’ll be something that gives you energy, it motivates you, it enthuses you. It’s probably something that you were meant to do from the time you were born. And when you ask self-made millionaires what sort of work they do, they’ll often say, “I’ve never worked a day in my life. I just do what I like to do.”

I had a graduate in my course once who came up to me and said, “You know, that’s interesting.” He said, “When I was a little boy, I loved to study airplanes.” He said, “I got airplane books and I had airplane models and I had toy planes and then I got into competitions with remote-controlled planes.” He said, “When I grew up and went to school, I studied aeronautical engineering.” He said, “Today I’m 35. I own three companies. One builds small aircraft. Another one repairs and services small aircraft. Another one is in leasing and chartering small aircraft.” He said, “I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve just played with planes since the time I was a kid.”

So one of the things that you can do is go back to the time when you were young, as a child between the ages of 7 and 14, before you discovered boys or girls, and what is it that you really love to do? And you’ll often find that within that is something you’re supposed to do as an adult.

Commit to Excellence

Number three is commit to excellence. Now this is really, really important, and I had a hard time with this as a young man because I was never good at anything. I was never picked for any team, and if I was picked, I was the first person cut. I got lousy grades in every class. I got fired from multiple jobs. I even got fired from a job pumping gas once. Imagine that, being fired for pumping gas because you’re no good. They came out and said, “You’re no good at pumping gas.” How can you be no good? Little old ladies can pump gas. And here I was, I was no good at pumping gas. Anyway, so I got fired.

I went from job to job, and then I discovered that all people who are successful are excellent at what they do. You know the old question they asked Willie Sutton, the bank robber, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “That’s where the money is.” Well, being in the top 10% is where the money is.

So what you have to do is you have to pay any price and make any sacrifice to get into the top 10% in your field. Now here’s the good news. If you’re doing what you love to do, you will want to be in the top 10% in your field. If you don’t want to be excellent at what you’re doing, it means you’re in the wrong field. It just means that you’re marking time. You’re treading water. And there’s a lot of people who are in their field, and they do their job, and they go home at night, and they don’t think about their work, and so on. And this kind of an attitude means that you have no future. You have a very shaky present. That crackling sound you hear is the ice breaking under your feet. And you have no future. Because if you’re not doing what you love to do and throwing your whole heart into it, you’re just marking time.

But everybody is designed so that there is something that you love to do that you can do well. And the fact that you love it means that you probably have the ability to excel at it. So make this decision to get into the top 10%. Let me tell you what changed my life. Here I was struggling in my late 20s, and I learned this. It was a breakthrough thought. It’s that everybody who’s in the top 10% started in the bottom 10%. Everybody who’s doing well was once doing poorly. Everybody who is at the top of your field today was once not even in your field at all and didn’t even know it existed. What that means is that if you’re willing to pay the price and work hard and make the sacrifices, you can get into the top 10%.

Now, how long does it take? It doesn’t take a week or a month. Most people are really impatient. To achieve mastery in your field takes five to seven years. You’ll say, “Five to seven years? I’ll be five to seven years older before I start enjoying the big rewards.” Well, how much older will you be in five to seven years anyway? Now, here’s an important point. Are you ready? The time is going to pass anyway. The time is going to pass. Five to seven years from now, five to seven years will have passed. The only question is, are you going to be at the top of your field, or are you still going to be down there with the mediocre 80%?

And the wonderful thing is this. Nobody’s better than you, and nobody’s smarter than you. If anybody else is at the top of their field, it means that you can be at the top of your field. Just go to them and find out how they got there, because they started at the bottom. Now, it may take longer for some people and less for others, but everybody who puts one foot in front of the other and keeps moving eventually gets there. And that’s where all the rewards are. Not only that, that’s where all the joy in life is. When you’re really good at what you do, you feel wonderful about yourself. You’re respected and esteemed by everybody around you. You can write your own tickets. You can open any door when you’re good at what you do, because you get up in the morning and you know you’re good. And that is more important than the rewards that go with it.

Develop Your Unique Talents and Abilities

The next key is to develop your unique talents and abilities. Every single person is designed from infancy with special talents and abilities that if you develop them to their height can enable you to accomplish anything you want in life. Everyone is genetically structured to be able to do something superbly, to do something they enjoy, to do it well, and to get great satisfaction from it. Peter Drucker often asks the question, “What are you good at? What are you good at today? What should you be good at? What could you be good at? What will you be good at?”

And so one of the questions that we ask is looking back in your life, what has been most responsible for your success up to now? What has been most responsible in the past? What is it that you have done that has gotten you the best results? Because as we said before, success leaves tracks. And if you look back into your past, you’ll often find indicators that guide you to your future.

Do you remember that fellow that won $300 million in the lottery? He was a high school physics teacher. And they asked him what he was going to do with it. He said he was going to take a week off and then get back to work because he doesn’t want to give up his job teaching high school physics because he loves his work so much. That is a person who is in the right place for him. And now he can just drive to it in a nicer car.

See Yourself as Self-Employed

Now, the next key to becoming a self-made millionaire is to see yourself as self-employed. What we found is the top 3% of adults in our society see themselves as self-employed. They see themselves as in charge of their own lives. When I started off my career as a young man, I was 21 years old, working as a construction laborer, living in a one-bedroom apartment, broke, taking buses two hours every morning to get to work and buses two hours to get back. I still remember that and I still remember a light going off one evening. I was sitting there in my little apartment, in my little kitchen alcove, and I suddenly realized that I was responsible, that I was in charge of my own life, that no one was coming to the rescue. And it was one of the great turning points in my life.

So what you find is that all exceptional people are highly responsible people. They look upon themselves as self-employed. Sometimes I’ll ask an audience, I’ll say, “How many people here are self-employed?” Some people will raise their hand and some won’t. I’ll say, “Now what’s the true answer to this question?” And the true answer is that everyone is self-employed. The biggest mistake you could ever make is to ever think you work for anyone else but yourself.

Even if someone else signs your paycheck for you all your life, the most valuable people in any organization are the people who treat the company as though it belongs to them. They see everything that happens as affecting them personally. They’re not the nine-to-fivers, the no-hopers that say, “Well, I go to work, when I’m out of work, I don’t think about my work.” These people, somebody has told them that’s a clever way to think. It’s the way losers think. Winners think about their company, and when they’re not there, they think about how they can do it better. When something happens in their company, they take it personally because they see themselves as highly responsible. As a result, they’re paid more, they’re given more educational opportunities, they’re promoted faster, and these are the people that eventually, like cream, rise to the top of every organization and every industry. The top 3%.

Develop a Clear Sense of Direction

The next key to becoming a self-made millionaire is to develop a clear sense of direction. Developing a clear sense of direction means that you need to become intensely goal-oriented. We find that all successful people are goal-oriented. There’s an old saying, “You can’t hit a target that you can’t see.” You’ve got to know what you want in every area of your life.

Some years ago, I worked with the Hunt Oil Company in Texas. The Hunt Oil Company was founded by H.L. Hunt, who became the wealthiest self-made multibillionaire in the world. At his peak, he owned 200 companies and had a royalty income of $3 million a day. Most phenomenal man, by the way. He was interviewed by a friend of mine on television before he died in the early 70s. He was asked, “What are the secrets to success?” He said, “The keys to success have only been two through all my life, and I will tell you what they are.” He said, “Number one, decide exactly what it is you want and write it down and make a plan to achieve it. And number two is determine the price you’re going to have to pay to get it and then resolve to pay that price.”

Now, where the law of sowing and reaping cause and effect, I learned an additional point to that. I learned that your current life today is the result of the price you’ve sown up to now. It is whatever you’ve put in, you get out. So whatever you’re getting out today is a result of what you’ve put in. If you don’t like what you’re getting out, what you have to do is you have to put in something different. What I found is this, is that life is always just in the long run. So therefore, life says this, is there’s a price you have to pay and there’s two qualities. First of all, you have to pay the price in full for your success, of study, preparation, hard work, and so on. And second of all, you have to pay the price in advance. You don’t get it afterwards. The way the world works is first you put in what you need to put in and then you get out the rewards.

So you have to ask yourself, what is the price that you have to pay to achieve the success that you desire? And you have to write it down and make a plan and work on it every day.

Goal-Setting Exercise

Now let me give you a quick exercise, which is my only take-home or homework exercise for our time together. I want you to take a piece of paper like this and write down 10 goals that you’d like to accomplish in the next 12 months. Write the word “goals” and today’s date at the top of the page. Write down 10 goals you’d like to accomplish and then ask yourself this great question. If you could only accomplish one goal on this list, but you could accomplish it within 24 hours, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on your life?

Now this is a great question because it will usually jump out at you. You’ll say, “That’s the one. If I had this, that would have more of an impact on my life than anything else.” Sometimes it’s a financial goal, sometimes it’s a health goal, sometimes it’s a relationship goal. Whatever it is, put a circle around that goal and then turn the page over and write it at the top of the page. Set a deadline on the goal. Make a list of everything that you could think of to do to achieve the goal and then begin working on your list. And here’s the kicker, do something every day. Do something every day that moves you one step forward towards your major goal.

I promise to you that this exercise, selecting your most important goal, making a plan and working on it every day, will change your life in ways that you cannot imagine. They say that people begin to become great when they determine their major definite purpose, their number one goal, and work on it every day. It is the secret to becoming a self-made millionaire. It’s the secret to great success in life. I promise to you that a week, a month, a year from now, you’ll look back and you’ll be absolutely staggered at the difference it makes.

I was giving a seminar not long ago and a gentleman came up to me and said, “You know that goal setting exercise, it changed my life 10 years ago.” He said, “I was broke, I was divorced.” He says, “I was an alcoholic and somebody dragged me to one of your seminars.” He said, “And I did that exercise and I picked my major goal.” He said, “It changed my life.” I said, “In what way?” He said, “Today,” he said, “I’m worth $40 million.” I said, “Wow.” He said, “Yes, and I owe it to that lesson.”

Refuse to Consider the Possibility of Failure

Next, he refused to consider the possibility of failure. His most amazing darn thing is that the fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. And it’s not failure itself because each one of you is a professional failure. Each one of you has failed over and over and over again. Isn’t that true? All of us fail. All human beings fail over and over. Nine out of 10 things that we try don’t work out the way we expect it. We have failures in relationships and in jobs and in careers and investments and everything.

It’s not the failure that holds you back. The failure makes you smarter. We say that it is the fear of failure, not failure, that holds you back. And the way that you overcome failure is you never consider the possibility of failure. The rule is this. There’s no such thing as failure.

Embrace Feedback, Not Failure

There’s only feedback. It’s when you try something that doesn’t work, you get feedback, not failure, and recognize that most things you try aren’t going to work the first few times. So what you do is you say, “Oh, that’s an interesting bit of feedback,” and you pick yourself up, and you move forward, and you have more feedback, and you move forward. To become a self-made millionaire, you’re going to fail over and over again, year after year after year.

But your brain has a cybernetic mechanism, which means that every time you try something, you get feedback, which makes you smarter. And when you try something else, you get feedback, which makes you smarter, and eventually you reach the point where you’re too smart and you stop making mistakes. You start to do more and more things right and fewer and fewer things wrong, but you can’t get there unless you have experienced the failures. Henry Ford once said that failure is merely an opportunity to more intelligently begin again.

Now, let me pass on one great rule to you, which has been discovered in interviewing self-made millionaires. Self-made millionaires look into every failure for something good. They say there’s got to be something good in this that I can benefit from, and surprise, surprise, they always find it. Second is self-made millionaires always seek the valuable lesson in every setback or obstacle or temporary failure, and they always find the lesson.

Now, what do failures do? Failures whine and cry and think about what they’ve lost and blame their problems on someone else. Successful people say, “What can I learn from this that will make me smarter next time?” And my promise to you, those who seek find, is if you go looking for a valuable lesson in the biggest problem that you’re facing today, you’ll always find the lesson.

Here’s another possibility. Your biggest problem today could be the biggest gift that you have ever received, because it may contain within it the lesson that will make you successful. If you stop thinking about what happened and who’s to blame, and you start looking for the gift within your problem, sometimes it can transform your life.

Dedicate Yourself to Lifelong Learning

The next key is to dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. Now, what takes you from rags to riches is personal development, personal and professional development. In the 21st century, as Peter Drucker says, knowledge and skill are the keys to the 21st century. And the only thing that will be relevant, the only skill that will be relevant in the 21st century is the ability to learn new skills, because virtually everything you know is becoming obsolete at a rapid rate. Stephen Covey says that your current knowledge base has a half-life of two years, which means that half of everything you know will be irrelevant within two years, and two years from now, half more.

So if you’re not continually learning and upgrading your knowledge and skills, you’re not staying in the same place. As Pat Riley says, the basketball coach says, “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.” If you’re not constantly learning, you’re actually falling behind. So here are the three keys to continuous learning:

1. Read in your field 30 to 60 minutes each day. In other words, turn off the television, turn off the radio, put aside the newspaper, and just read in your field. The very best places to read, by the way, are books. Read books, the best-selling books written by the most successful people in your field, because books contain a wealth of riches that can enable you to function at a far higher level, to get much better results than you could before.
2. Take every course that you possibly can. The courses and seminars that are available to you in your field, that are given by professionals, are courses that have been developed over years and years and years. They have been tested and tested and tested. The person who is talking to you for several hours has spent thousands of hours learning their subject. They have dry-tested this or done test runs with thousands of other people. When you take a course, you can learn enough information in one or two days, more than you could learn in two or three years or maybe even a lifetime.
3. Listen to audio programs in your car. The average driver drives 500 to 1,000 hours a year, 25,000 to 50,000 miles. If you listen to audio programs in your car, according to the University of Southern California, you will get the equivalent of almost full-time university attendance just listening to learning material as you drive around. It can totally and profoundly change your life.

Here’s an interesting point. The more you commit yourself to becoming the best person you can be, the more you like yourself and respect yourself, the more energy you have, the bigger goals you set for yourself, the more you persist. When you invest in yourself and you read and learn and upgrade your skills, you’re telling yourself, “Wow, I am a person with a great future, and it’s up to me to maximize my potential.” And your self-esteem goes up, your self-respect goes up, your sense of personal pride goes up, and you start to get promoted more and paid more in every part of your life.

Develop a Workaholic Mentality

Well, the next is to develop a workaholic mentality. In our society today, you have all these people talking about, “Take it easy, have balance in your life, relax, lean back, have fun at work, happy, happy, get along with your coworkers.” This is loser talk, loser, loser, loser. Now, there’s a time in your life when you can back off, all right? You can take it easy. But that’s when you’ve made it, not before you’ve made it. Because before you’ve made it, you’re in a competition with hundreds of thousands of millions of other people, like at the Olympics, who also want to make it. And in order for you to win, you are going to have to work harder and work better and work smarter than they do.

So the rule is to develop a workaholic mentality. What does this mean? It means that you start a little earlier, you work a little harder, and you stay a little later. Use what I call the 40-plus formula. The 40-plus formula says that working 40 hours a week gets you survival. And that’s all. You work 40 hours a week, you survive. You make no progress. You don’t go ahead. You just barely hang on. Every hour that you invest in your work or yourself over 40 is an investment in your future. So you can tell what your future is going to be with unerring accuracy by looking at how many hours over 40 you put in.

Now, how many hours does the average self-made millionaire in America work until he passes the million-dollar mark? 59. Some of them work 70, 80, 90. The average is 59 hours. How much does the average top executive work? 59 hours. So that’s rule number one, is the hours you put in over 40. If people say, “Well, my office is locked and I can’t get in more than 40 hours a week,” then good. Then spend the rest of the time investing in yourself, getting better at your work when you do do it.

Now, here’s my second principle, and this principle changes your life. It is this, is work all the time you work. When you work, work. Don’t play. Fully 50% of working time today is wasted, and it’s wasted in idle conversation, personal business, family phone calls, surfing the Internet, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, no lunch times, coming in late and leaving early. And then the other 50%, you’re scrambling because now you’re behind because you’ve wasted so much time fooling around. Now you start to work, and you don’t work on high-priority tasks. You try to get rid of all the little stuff. So what happens is the big tasks begin to build up like an avalanche overhang, and they cause enormous stress.

And you go home at night, and you’re thinking, “This job, I’ve got to get this project finished, but I can’t discipline myself to stop talking to my coworkers.” Every time one of them comes in, like automatic, like a conditioned response, it’s blah, blah time. Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. No. What you have to do is work all the time you work. If someone comes in and says, “Hey, you’ve got a minute to talk?” You say, “Yes, but not now. Why don’t we talk after work? Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you go down the hall and ruin his career, but don’t stand here and ruin mine.”

It’s really important. There’s a great story of a little girl who goes to her mother and says, “Mommy, why is it that he always brings his briefcase home, and he works in the evenings, and he works on the weekends, and he doesn’t spend any time with the family?” And she says, “Well, honey, you have to understand, Daddy can’t get all his work done at work, so he has to bring it home.” She said, “Why don’t they put him in a slower class?”

Get Around the Right People

Next key is to get around the right people. This is a key for becoming a self-made millionaire, is get around the right people. Dr. David McCullen at Harvard did studies for 25 years looking into why it is that some people succeeded greatly in life. What he found was that as much as 99% of your success in life is going to be determined by what he called your reference group. Your reference group are the people with whom you habitually associate. They’re the people that you associate with at work, the people you associate with at home, your church, your political party, your social circle. What he found in working with people is that changing a person’s reference group totally transformed the way they think.

Why? It’s because we are like chameleons, and we absorb through the skin the attitudes, the opinions, the behaviors, the style of dress, the style of speech of the people with whom we associate most of the time. If you start to associate with winners most of the time, you find that they have a totally different world view. They’re positive, they’re upbeat, they’re focused, they’re learning, they’re growing, they’re positive in what they’re doing, and you start to become like that.

We know that our relationships determine 85% of our happiness or unhappiness in life. In other words, if you have bad relationships, personal relationships, they will drag you down worse than a sea anchor. If you work for a bad boss, it will destroy all your joy in work. If you have one negative coworker, they found that one negative person in an office can cast a blackness over the whole office because of his or her negativity.

And so the most important thing you do is you choose your relationships with care and only associate with people that you like and respect and enjoy being around.

Be Prepared to Climb from Peak to Peak

Next is be prepared to climb from peak to peak. One of the keys to becoming a self-made millionaire is to realize that life is never one continuous train. It’s always up and down.

Life’s Cycles and Trends

So it goes up, like if you climb a mountain peak, you have to go down into the valley before you climb the next peak. So all of life is cycles and trends. All of life is cycles and trends, and there’s up cycles, and there’s down cycles, and there’s up trends, and there’s down trends. The question is, what is the general direction of your trends?

We say this, is that life is two steps forward and one step back. Successful people focus on the two steps forward, and then they protect themselves on the downside. They build up cash reserves. They put in stop-loss orders on their stock market. They very carefully watch what they’re doing. So they try to maintain that two steps up and then make sure that the one step back is not so far. And then they want to make sure that this curve is generally upward so that each time there’s a step back, they’re still further ahead than they were before.

Develop Resilience and Bounce Back

The next one, which is to develop resilience and bounce back. Developing resilience and bouncing back is one of the key qualities of self-made millionaires because, as I said right at the beginning, most things won’t work. This is a very interesting point, is that you’re going to be knocked down over and over again. And what we know, as my friend Charlie Jones says, is you have to bounce, don’t break. And when things go wrong, bounce.

And so what I learned many years ago was this interesting technique of what is called mental rehearsal. And mental rehearsal says that you mentally prepare for the inevitable downturns before they occur. So you say, all right, in the course of life, things are going to go wrong, but when they do, I’m not going to become upset. I’m not going to get mad or angry or anything else. I’m just going to take it and learn from it and pick myself up and keep going.

Sometimes I ask this question, does anybody here have any problems? And everybody says, yes, everybody’s got problems. Well, here’s the rule, is all of life is a continuous series of problems. They never end. The problems just keep on coming, like the waves of the ocean. The only break in this unbroken series of problems will be the occasional crisis. So life will be problem, problem, problem, problem, problem, problem, crisis. Problem, problem, problem, problem, problem, crisis. It’s like the waves of the ocean. Six problems and a crisis. Six problems and a crisis.

Which means that everybody here is either in a crisis right now, has just gotten out of a crisis, or is just about to have a crisis. So what we have found is this. The hallmark of superior people, 30 years of research, is how you respond to a crisis. How you deal with problems and how you respond to a crisis.

And what we have found is this, is superior people look for the solution to every problem. They don’t allow themselves to become upset and angry. When something goes wrong, they say, “Okay, what’s the solution?” And they become intensely solution-oriented. When you have a very intense problem, that stimulates creativity to solve the problem. So what you do is you write and define the problem clearly. If you have a problem, you say, “Wait a minute, what is my problem? What is it that I’m worried about?” And write it down. And the very act of defining a problem clearly often triggers the solution to the problem.

The 20-Idea Method

One last technique that I want to give you with regard to your major definite purpose. And if you only do these two things as a result of our time together, they will transform your life. You’ve already identified the one goal that can have the greatest positive impact on your life. Now what you do is you take that goal and you write it at the top of a page in the form of a question. And you say, let us say your goal is to double your income. That could have a major impact on your life.

You say, “What are all the things that I could do to double my income in the next 12 months?” Write it as a clear question. Even better, if you’re earning $50,000 a year today, write, “What could I do to earn $100,000 over the next 12 months?” The more specific the question, the better.

Then you devote yourself to writing 20 answers to this question. You must write a minimum of 20 answers. Work harder, work smarter, start earlier, stay later, change occupations, upgrade my skills. Whatever it is, keep forcing yourself to write until you’ve written 20 answers.

We call this mindstorming. The first 3 to 5 answers will be easy. The next 3 to 5 answers will be difficult. The last 10 answers will be incredibly difficult. But I have given this exercise to people who’ve gone on to become millionaires so many times I’ve lost track. Because they often find that the 20th answer changes their whole life. And if you’ve ever done this once, it’s absolutely staggering. More people have become millionaires with this simple idea of mindstorming, what I call the 20-idea method, than any other single method of creative thinking ever discovered.

Once you’ve got your 20 answers, pick one answer and take action on it immediately. It doesn’t matter what it is, just take one answer and take action on it and that will keep you thinking and acting creatively all day long.

Become an Unshakable Optimist

The next key to becoming a self-made millionaire is to become an unshakable optimist. An unshakable optimist means that you think and talk about what you want most of the time. Optimists think and talk about what they want. They look for the good in every situation. They seek the valuable lesson. They’re constantly feeding their mind with great ideas which opens up new perspectives.

What I have found is that optimists have 3 wonderful qualities:

1. They learn more things. As a result, they dramatically increase the likelihood that they will learn the right thing at the right time.
2. They try more things which dramatically increases the likelihood that they’ll try the right thing at the right time.
3. They persist. They never give up.

Optimists make a decision that once they’ve decided they’re going to become wealthy, they just never stop until they achieve that goal. Now, will they have many setbacks and obstacles and difficulties? Do you know that almost everybody succeeds in a different direction from what they originally intended or from what they originally thought? But they just keep going. Almost like a football player running down the field, running, blocking, changing, moving back, forward, continually, but never loses sight of the goal. So optimists learn more things, try more things, and persist longer.

Develop Courage and Persistence

I want to leave you with the last 2 qualities of self-made millionaires. Second to the last quality is that they develop the qualities of courage and persistence. I said before the biggest single obstacle to success is the fear of failure. The antidote to the fear of failure is the habit of courage.

And what we know is that you need 2 types of courage to succeed:

1. The courage to begin. It’s the courage to launch with no guarantees of success. Someone once said that if all obstacles must first be removed, nothing will ever get done. So successful people are willing to think, plan, make decisions, and then take action with no guarantees. We say leap, and the net will appear. Take action with no guarantees, and then learn.
2. The courage to endure. It’s the courage to persist. It’s the courage to keep on keeping on. It’s to make the decision in advance that you will never give up. No matter what happens, you will never give up. You will get knocked down over and over again, but you’ll never give up. And the interesting thing is if you make that decision in advance, you’ll find yourself continually bouncing back.

The Master Key: Self-Discipline

And the final quality of self-made millionaires, and Napoleon Hill called this the master key to riches, after studying 500 of the richest people in American history, he said it’s the quality of self-discipline. It’s the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. The quality of self-discipline is the quality that will make you a big success. It’s the ability to force yourself to do what you know you should do.

And here is the wonderful discovery. Persistence is self-discipline in action. Every time you persist, you build your self-discipline. Every time you practice self-discipline, you build your ability to persist. And the two of them are tied into your self-esteem.

So the more you persist, the more you like yourself. And the more you like yourself, the more discipline you have. And the more discipline you have in practice, the more you like yourself, as a result, the more you persist. And eventually you get on to an upper spiral where you become absolutely unstoppable.

You reach the point where you know you can achieve the goal and nothing in the world can stop you. And every step that you take forward makes you stronger and stronger and stronger, until finally people say, “I know one thing about him, I know one thing about her. You cannot stop him or her. Once they decided they want something, they will not stop until they get it.”

And when you develop that quality, there will be nothing that is impossible to you.

Conclusion

So let me just leave you with these last points. We’re living at the very best time in all of human history. More people are going to make more money in the next few years than have ever been made in all of human history. More people are going to become millionaires and are becoming millionaires today at a faster rate than we’ve ever thought possible. And no one is better than you and no one is smarter than you. And if you do what other self-made millionaires do, then nothing in the world can stop you from eventually getting the same results as other self-made millionaires. And I hope you do.

Thank you very much.

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