Secrets Of Self Made Millionaires by Brian Tracy

better life media america's leading source for life improvement presents brian tracy secrets of self-made millionaires thank you thank you thank you for being here i have some good news for you more people are going to make more money in the next few years that have been made in all of human history in the year now 1900 there were 5 000 millionaires in america in the year 2000 there were 5 million millionaires there's an increase of 1 000 times now there was a leveling off in 2001 2002 in the last two years the number of millionaires has jumped 33 it's jumped to 8.2 million millionaires in america and virtually all of them are self-made which means they started without without a pot to you know what in or a window to throw it out of and they've made it into one generation when we look at the wealthiest people in america today warren buffett michael dell of course bill gates paul allen and the walton family all first generation multi-billionaires we have a 12 trillion dollar economy today that is growing at the rate of five to six hundred billion dollars a year and all that money is going through somebody's fingers and your job is to make sure it goes through yours and some of it sticks is that a good goal for today and my job is to show you how to do it uh the good news is that all the answers have been found self-made millionaires have been studied exhaustively they've been analyzed they've been interviewed by the hundreds of thousands and millions and what we know is exactly who they are and what they do and how they think and how they tick and the decisions they make and the things that they do and they don't do and the wonderful thing is this if you do what other successful people do you eventually get the same result that they do now some people say well i started off without any money and i you know i don't have any money now well join the crowd nobody's got any money most people are broke up into their 40s and 50s so if you're broke today you're just one of the gang the only question is do you stay there and the answer is no now when i started off in in this many years ago i came from very poor beginnings i did not graduate from high school i finished in the half of the class that makes the top half possible all right when i left school i had dropped out of high school i uh could only get laboring jobs i was told by the way if you don't get a good education you won't do well in life don't get good grades you won't get a good job don't go to college you won't do well and so on and i believe that for a long time until i found there's hundreds of thousands millions of people who dropped out of high school who went on to become millionaires and billionaires as well the reason i say that to you by the way is don't let it hold you back don't let any experience that you've ever had in your life act as a break on your potential because there's hundreds of thousands of people who've had it worse than you could ever dream of who've gone on to accomplish wonderful things so i worked at laboring jobs for several years i worked in construction i worked on farms and ranches i worked in factories putting nuts on bolts hour after hour and one day in a state of frustration i began asking this question why is it that some people are more successful than others now in the bible there's the line that says seek and ye shall find for all who seek findeth ask and the door will be open so i began asking other successful people what are you doing differently from me and they told me and i did it and i got better results i got into sales when i could no longer get a laboring job like many of you and in sales i noticed that one of the guys in my company was making 10 times as much as anybody else and he was selling the same product out of the same office at the same price to the same people under the same conditions and he was making 10 times as much as anybody else so i went and asked him what are you doing differently from me and he told me and i did it now what i discovered which changed my life and which brought us here today is i discovered the law of of cause and effect the law of cause and effect sewing and reaping action and reaction are the greatest the great universal or iron law of the universe what it says is that everything happens for a reason is that there are no causeless effects is that even if we don't know what is causing the effect we trace it back it's the basis of the scientific process of all medical research of all marketing of all business is if you can define an effect that you want you can trace it back and find somebody who at one time did not have that effect and then find out what they did and then do the same things and you eventually get the same results we say that success is not an accident failure is not an accident success leaves tracks so if you just follow the tracks of other successful people no matter where you're starting from you eventually get to the same place that they get well this this was a shocker for me because and i learned later in psychology by the way that one of the the two most important things we need to have to be happy and healthy is a sense of control a feeling that we are in control of our lives that things are happening for a reason and a sense of coherence a feeling that things fit together well when i realized the law of cause and effect explained everything i got wow so in sales i went to the top of my sales force i read 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 distribution in 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 it's like making a recipe nature doesn't care if 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 is 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 matter than to see somebody who's dumber than you who's making more money than you right you have 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 okay 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 and so on and then they move away to a wonderful place called sunday isle you ever heard of sunday aisle 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 aisle your job and my job is to vote yourself off the island right and we start taking control of our lives well about um 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 is 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 my friend said one of my friends says that in order to be 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 equalities 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 wealth wealthy is not because you can eat more because how many more meals can you eat how many more cloves can you wear because it's the kind of person that you become and then the kind of person people that you associate the kind of life that you have 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 the 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 these then there's no limit to what you can accomplish 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 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 her 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 kids 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 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 with 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 this began to move him toward the accomplishment of the goals and began to move the goals toward him number two is to do what you love to do whenever you find people who are really successful in life there are people who do what they love to do they 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 are meant to do from the time you were born and when you ask self-made millionaires what sort of work do you 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 of my course once who came up to me and said you know that's interesting he said when i was a little boy i love to study airplanes he said i got airplane books and i had airplane models and i had toy planes and then and then i got into competitions with the remote controlled planes he said when i grew up and went to school i studied aeronautical engineering he said today said i'm 35 he said i own three companies one builds a small aircraft another one repairs and serves a small aircraft another one is in leasing and chartering smart aircraft he said i've never worked a day in my life he said i 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 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 uh pumping gas once can 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 little old ladies can pump gas and heroes 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 percent 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 you're 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 you know they go home at night 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 okay and you have a very 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 ten percent and let me tell you what changed my life here i was struggling in my late twenties and i i learned this it was a breakthrough thought is that everybody's in the top 10 percent started in the bottom 10 percent everybody who's doing well was once doing poorly everybody who was 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 ten percent now how long does it take it doesn't take a week or a month most people are really impatient and to achieve mastery in your field takes five to seven years people say five to seven years geez 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 you're still going to be down there with a with the mediocre 80 percent and the wonderful thing is this is nobody's better than you and nobody's smarter than you if anybody else is at the top of the 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 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 and and that is more important than the rewards that go with it 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 remember that fellow that won 300 million dollars in the lottery he was a high school physics teacher and they asked him what he's going to do with it he said he's 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's in the right place for him and now he can just drive to it in a nicer car anyway now the next key to the next key to becoming a self-made millionaire is to see yourself as self-employed what we found is the top three percent 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 labor 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 is 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 and 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 is affecting them personally they're not the nine to fivers the no hopers that say yo i go to work when i'm not at 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 three percent 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 a hot oil company in texas the hot oil company was founded by h.l hunt who became the wealthiest self-made multi-billionaire billionaire in the world at his peak he owned 200 companies and had a royalty income of three million dollars a day most phenomenal man by the way and he was interviewed by a friend of mine on television before he died in the early 70s and 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 he said 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 is whatever you've put in you get out so whatever you're getting out today as 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 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 where 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 now let me give you a quick exercise which is my only uh 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 in 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'll usually jump out at you you 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 but 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 my 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 do 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 my promise to you is 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 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 dollars i said wow he said yes and i owe it to that lesson next is refuse 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 ten 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 is there's no such thing as failure there's only feedback is when you try something it 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 fine 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 the next key is to dedicate yourself to lifelong learning now what takes you from rags to riches is personal development personal 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 number one is 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 than you could before so read 30 to 60 minutes a day i've had people tell me countless people over the years that reading an hour a day has doubled and tripled their income within a year the second thing you do is take every course that you possibly can the the courses and seminars that are available to you in your field that are given by professionals that 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 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 all distilled and put together people say i can't afford a course you cannot afford not to buy books you can't afford not afford not to go to courses some years ago i had a dentist and he was a very successful dentist i was recommended to me by a friend and this status retired at the age of 53 and just before he retired he sold his practice for about two million dollars just before he retired he told me why he said about eight years before he had attended a dental congress in hong kong his front this is from california it's flown all the way to hong kong to attend this international dental congress because there were specialists giving private lectures sort of plenary sessions on the side and he attended this session and it was on a particular technique of cosmetic surgery that this dentist had developed that no one else knew where you could basically straighten out a person's entire front jaw so they looked beautiful at a very low cost at a very high level of effectiveness he came back and he began implementing this in his practice people began flying from five hundred a thousand miles away every dentist sent their families members and themselves to this dentist he was able to charge whatever he wanted to charge he said eight years later he retired as a self-made millionaire at the age of 53 to enjoy his money for the rest of his life from what he learned from one session at one convention at one course now that's that is a true story and maybe it's an exception but you can never tell where the information is going to come from the third uh way that you can upgrade your skills is listen to audio programs in your car the average driver drives sorry 500 to a thousand hours a year 25 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 very very important 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 started to get promoted more and and paid more in in every part of your life 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 co-workers 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 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 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 fifty 50 of working time today is wasted and it's wasted an idle conversation personal business family phone calls surfing the internet reading the newspaper drinking coffee long lunch times coming in late and leaving early and then the other 50 percent you're scrambling because you're 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 it does this job i've got to get this project finished but i can't discipline myself to stop talking to my co-workers every time one of them comes in i like automatic like a conditioned response it's blah blah time cheddar 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 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 next key is to get around the right people this is a key for becoming a self-made millionaires get around the right people dr david mcclellan at harvard did studies for 25 years looking into why it is that some people succeeded greatly in life what he found was as much as 99 percent 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 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 is 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 worldview they're positive they're upbeat they're focused they're learning they're growing they're positive of what they're doing and you start to become like that we know that our relationships determine 85 percent of our happiness or unhappiness in life in other words if you have bad relationships and 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 and work if you have one negative co-worker 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 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 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 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 uptrends and there's downtrends the question is what is the general direction of your trans 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 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 you're going to be knocked down over and over again and what we know is 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 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 from a crisis problem problem problem problem problem crisis it's like the waves of the ocean six problems in a crisis six problems in 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've 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 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 you 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 right 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 10 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 till you've written 20 answers we call this mindstorming the first three to five answers will be easy the next three to five 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 once you've got 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 the number the next key to becoming a self-made millionaire is to become an unshakable optimist unshakable optimus 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 three wonderful qualities number one is they learn more things as a result they dramatically increase the likelihood that they will learn the right thing at the right time number two is they try more things which dramatically increases the likelihood that they'll try the right thing at the right time and number three is 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 i want to leave you with the last two qualities of self-made millionaires second to the last quality is that they have developed 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 two types of courage to succeed the first type of courage is 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 the second part of courage is the courage to endure it's the courage to persist it's the courage to keep on keeping on is to make the decision in advance that you will never give up no matter what happens you'll 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 so courage means it means the courage to begin and the courage to endure 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 is 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 is 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 just 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 onto an upper spiral but 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 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 we hope you've enjoyed this special presentation of brian tracy's secrets of self-made millionaires if you would like to own a copy of this program or any of better life media's programs please visit our website at betterlifemedia.com where you'll find all types of valuable life improvement information you

Channel: The Johnsons

Views: 298,241

Rating: 4.9023256 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Tracy (Author), kristen johnson, ryan johnson, empire unchained, wealthunchained, mlm, direct sales, business, day trading, mentorship, education

Id: KAGn_k1jHsY

Length: 46min 34sec (2794 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2015