Achieve More with Less Effort With Better Focus | Brian Tracy

you can be the most talented the smartest the best educated person with the very most valuable contacts 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 five percent of people have goals so the 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 can decide what it is that you want I think that the ability to focus and 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 eighty percent 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 is fun and easy which is what most people do you know 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 property 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 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 it'll push you into doing what is the most valuable use of your time and whenever you're working on 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 two percent of the population two percent of the population do things fast two percent of the population have a bias for action until in Tom Peter's 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 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 complain bang there's somebody back to you in two minutes focus single-mindedly on one thing at a time and to work on that one task until it's complete and to discipline yourself not to do anything else or to become distracted by emails and bells and bips and noises and things like that it's just your ability to focus like a laser beam on a single task 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 five percent are very clear about where it is they're going and what it is they want to accomplish 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're working toward accomplishing something that is important to us and in my estimation 80 to 90 percent 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 we'll take you there whatever skill you identified you can learn there's nothing that can stop you from excelling that in that skill it's simply a matter of time some people will get will get better at it faster others slower but they've discovered in 25 years of research at the University of Florida they've looked at people who started at the bottom and got to the top and became the heads of Fortune 500 heads of Fortune 1000 corporations and they went all the way back to their early performance appraisals and comments by their supervisors and they found that they had all settled on the same strategy and the same strategy was to identify the one skill that would help them the most at this stage of their career and then concentrate single-mindedly on learning that skill and they were serious about this they didn't just you know read a book or an article they made a plan like a lesson plan and they they asked what are the best books to read in this area what are the best programs audio programs to listen to what are the best courses to attend and they developed a course of study and they worked for weeks and months and even a year or more to develop that skill and once they had developed that skill and people started to tell them hey you're pretty good in that area that was their sign that they had mastered the skill and then they would ask their boss or ask their co-workers to look at the top people around them or the most successful business people around them and they would identify the next skill and what we find is that all of life is like climbing a ladder and each step on the ladder is mastering a new skill and what they've taught people do and this is one of the greatest breakthroughs in business success I've ever seen in an entire life of study in the subject is what they do is they get better one skill at a time they don't try to get better at 10 skills because that just exhausts you and you see no progress and you soon quit so what they would do is focus like a laser beam on a single skill until they had mastered it but here's the most amazing thing when you are focusing on the development or acquisition of a particular skill your whole mind is in Improvement mode so what happens is you automatically start to get better at everything else without even thinking about it you're just more conscious and aware of things that you can do to be better in other areas by focusing on a single skill they call this Paris Anderson who did all this work calls it deliberate practice and it is the key to great success deliberately practicing one skill at a time now once you have learned this skill which you will nothing only one person in the world that can stop you from mastering a skill who is that it's always yourself it's a lack of self-discipline lack of personal management lack of control and so on I don't have enough time I'm so busy I'm tired all the time wow shut up shut up so what it takes and they found that it takes about two hours a day five days a week of deliberate practice or focus on a new skill to master the skill once you have mastered the skill then what do you do well it's obvious you ask the question again now what one skill if I was absolutely excellent at it would help me the most to achieve my financial or business goals what's the one skill I uh was at a private meeting with the head of one of the biggest companies in the world and that's terrible because the Name Escapes me for a second but I had read a book that he had written 10 years before and it was based on over 30 years of experience and he'd run two Fortune 500 companies he said what they discovered was that your weakest important skill sets the height of your income your weakest important skill in every field there's five to seven vital skills your weakest skill in this little group of skills sets the height of your income and your success and so often it's one skill that's holding us back more than anything else and when I say that everybody knows what I'm talking about it's the one skill usually in business it's marketing or sales or a combination thereof sometimes it's business development customer relationships and so on but we know what it is but the only question is are we going to sit there passively or are we going to say damn I'm going to learn that skill I'm going to become very very good at that skill whatever it happens to be and the wonderful thing is that once you learn a skill another thing happens is a nickel drops in your brain and you realize I can learn new skills damn I could learn any skill I could learn languages I could learn any wow and suddenly the Dam breaks in your mind and all the hesitation and lack of confidence and and lack of uncertainty that you had suddenly you realize I could learn anything I need to learn and it gives you a tremendous sense of power so from then on your whole life becomes a do it to yourself project your whole life becomes a process of learning one skill at a time climbing the ladder of success every rung on the ladder is higher income greater influence greater power in your profession getting better in your field is one of the most important things you can do so I have a question for you moving right along uh what is the most important work that you do in your field what is the most important and highest paid work that you do thinking you've obviously been here before and the answer is right the answer is thinking when I first heard this question I wasn't wasn't clear about what the answer was but the most important work you do is thinking is thinking well about yourself and your work in fact every mistake that you've ever made has been a result of poor thinking or not thinking at all we all know what I'm talking about every every success you've ever had has usually been the result of really good thinking prior to taking action now the reason why thinking is so important is the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your decisions and it's an interesting observation is that you are where you are and what you are today as a result of the total of all your choices and decisions up to this moment in every part of your life from the time you became an adult or before you've made choices and decisions the cumulative result is where you are today your income your health your happiness your business everything else but my Great rule which is quoted all the time is that it doesn't matter where you're coming from all that really matters is where you're going and you can you're where you're going it's only limited by your imagination so what you do is you say forget the past in the past I could have done things differently but I can't change the past but I can change the future completely by what I do now so the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your choices and decisions the quality of your choices and decisions determines the quality of your actions and the quality of your actions determines the quality of your results and in business and life everything is results results are the most important single word is what results are expected of you what results do you need to get in order to achieve the goals that you've set for yourself and the ability to be absolutely crystal clear about the results that are necessary is the mark of the Leader Peter Drucker said that the first question of the leader is always what results are expected of me what results are expected of me to fulfill my responsibilities to fulfill my commitments and it's absolutely amazing if you ask this question you'll find that eighty percent of your time at work is spent on doing things that have nothing to do with results they are just busy things there are conversations and reading the paper and making phone calls and going for lunch and so on and if you're really strict with yourself you'll find that much of what we do contributes nothing to the results that are most important to our success and successful people are those who are very disciplined does this this is this the very best use of my time now the reason that that thinking is so important aside from the results is because of the word consequences I began studying time management and designing programs and books and I'm now one of the maybe probably the best the top time management author in the world in books in 42 languages and uh what I found when I was studying time management is this concept of consequences which was one of those life-changing Concepts what it said was that something is important to the degree to which it has big potential consequences something is unimportant to the degree to which it has low or no consequences and what is the difference between top people and average people top people do more and more things that have big potential consequences not guaranteed consequences but potential consequences average people spend most of their time doing things that have low or no consequences at all in other words if they did them all day long it wouldn't make any difference but top people realize there's two or three things they can do learning a critical skill making a critical decision taking an important action there's certain things they can do that have enormous potential consequences you can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself and I teach that and I've taught that for more than 30 years you can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set if you want to become healthy or wealthy or raise happy children or build a successful business you can learn how which means there are no limits and that was the big turning point in my life the most important thing is to think about what the other person needs what the other person wants and needs it's interesting when you study the mindset of successful business people they are focused on the customer and and how can they help the customer improve their life with their product or service is they they believe in the goodness of their product or service whether they're selling vitamins or cell phones or Home Furnishings they believe that these are good products and that if you have them your life will be better and they use the products themselves and they would sell them to their mother or their father and so they're always thinking how can I help you to improve your life in some way now because everyone is skeptical and because the average person in France or the U.S receives three thousand to five thousand commercial messages yeah advertisements of some kind each day everywhere uh people are skeptical so you have to break through that skepticism and the way you do that is you think what is it that my potential customer really needs and wants to improve their life what are the problems that they have that my product can solve what are the needs that they have that my product can satisfy what are the goals that they have that my product can help them to achieve and then you say to them if you have this problem or need my product or service is something you should look at and let me explain to you why it can help you most people the bottom eighty percent are lazy and it's something that it's not polite to talk about but most people are lazy and they're looking for an easy way they're looking for a shortcut to be successful and there are not there aren't any but if you do something repeatedly over and over you develop a habit so most people are in the habit of looking for easy ways to get the things they want and they're surrounded by people who think the same way you know as much as 95 percent of your thinking is determined by the people that you associate with on a regular basis if you associate with people who don't do don't work hard don't learn socialize after work then you become like them you think like them you talk like them you dress like them you marry them and so you're married to someone who also has no ambition and you raise children and your children have no ambition just go to work and complain about your work but top people associate with other top people there is what you've heard about the law of attraction and the Law of Attraction says that if you change the way you think you start to attract new people into your life if you become aggressive about personal development and personal growth you start to meet other people who think the same way and the old groups of people that you associated with fall away and the new group of people appears so people say well where do I find positive people who are thinking about success all the time first you become one and then you will naturally Attract it if you like and respect yourself you will set big goals for yourself and if you like and respect yourself you will persist longer and you'll eventually succeed and so how you feel your emotions about yourself is the starting point and the most important part of success and so the the goal of children the goal of parents is to raise children with high levels of self-confidence and self-esteem your goal as an adult is to build your own self-esteem your own mental Fitness like physical fitness requires physical exercise mental Fitness feeling very positive about yourself and your life requires mental exercise now what I discovered which was one of the most important things of all is that self-esteem the other side of self-esteem is called self-efficacy which is a word that means that you are good at what you do so therefore when you work to become better in your field whatever you're doing whether it's in school or in your job you feel more confident and more positive about yourself so the more you like yourself the better you become and the better you become the more you like yourself so you can actually get onto an upward spiral which brings us to your subject of success for young people the key to success is very simple I've written two books on this is you must become very good at doing something that is important and valuable to an employer you must become very good at it there are no successful people who are average and it takes a long time to become very good at something even it's to if it's to be a gardener or an interviewer or a speaker it takes a long time to become good at it but you must be determined from the beginning to work extra hours to become very good at the work that you do if you do that every door of opportunity will open for you your self-confidence will go up people will admire you and respect you your employers will open doors for you it's the most amazing thing and yet only 10 percent of the population knows this eighty percent of the population works for a while according to research they work to become okay at their work and then they level off and years go by and they never improve they do their job just enough not to lose their job unless of course there's a downturn in the economy and they are the first ones that are let go from their company so the top 10 percent however are constantly improving a lifelong Improvement learning new things and becoming better if you do that you own the future and if you don't do that you are always a victim of Rapid change

Channel: Wealth Mindset

Views: 136,531

Keywords: brian tracy, brian tracy motivational speech, brian tracy motivational video, brian tracy motivation, brian tracy goal, brian tracy audiobook, brian tracy seminar

Id: THvLajBMQBY

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023