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Brian Tracy emphasizes the power of goal setting in achieving success. He shares his personal journey from challenging beginnings to success through accepting responsibility for his life, setting goals, and committing to lifelong learning. Tracy highlights the importance of idealizing and imagining without limitations, especially in income generation. He stresses the need to have a clear plan and take consistent actions towards financial goals. Success is attributed to setting clear objectives and working diligently towards them. Hello, this is Brian Tracy and welcome to the Goals tele-seminar. In the next few minutes that we spend together I'm going to share with you some of the most important and powerful ideas that I have ever learned in an entire lifetime of studying successful people. All over the world today I meet people who have gone from rags to riches, who have gone from poverty and frustration to affluence and success, and every single one of these people tells me over and over again, sometimes with their eyes shining, that it was the miracle of goal setting that changed their lives and that's what we're going to aim at doing today. Some years ago a group of very successful businessmen got together in Chicago and one of them told me what happened some years later. They were sitting around talking and they'd all started off with very little. Most of them had started off with nothing. They'd come from poor families, blue-collar families, they'd made a lot of mistakes and failures in their lives and today they were all wealthy and they were sitting around after a beautiful dinner in a lovely restaurant and they were saying, why is it that we, so many people, could have become so successful? And they went around and said, well, maybe it's because we live in America and maybe it's because we were more determined and maybe because we worked harder and we had the breaks and then one of them said something which stopped the conversation and which I never forgot. He said, gentlemen, success is goals and all else is commentary. Success is goals and all else is commentary and suddenly they all realized it. It was their ability to set goals, to write them down, to make plans for their accomplishment, to work on them over and over again, to make new plans when the old ones fail, to keep picking themselves up and moving toward their goal that enabled every one of them to be successful and that's what will happen for you. And I started off, as many of you know, I didn't graduate from high school. I started off in the half of the class that made the top half possible. I bombed out of high school and the only job I could get was washing dishes in the back of a small hotel and when I lost that job, I got a job washing cars in a car lot and when I lost that job, I got a job washing floors with a janitorial service. I actually thought that washing was in my future and by the way, the word lost when you're young is a euphemism for non-voluntary career redeployment which is when you get an opportunity to explore new careers unexpectedly. So I got fired lots of times and I went from job to job. Sometimes I was out of money. I got thrown out of my house when I was 18 and didn't go back for a decade. I lived in my car in the wintertime and I slept next to it in the summertime. My car was what she called a junker and so I always had a bunch of tools in the back so I could fix it up and sometimes I'd have to lay under my car next to the side of the road and replace universal joints and one day I had to replace a clutch and I had to repair brakes and sometimes I had to do valve jobs and so on to get my car going. Much of the time, it didn't go and I went from job to job. I worked on farms and ranches. I worked in construction labor carrying heavy things. I worked in factories putting nuts on bolts. I worked as a seaman on a Norwegian trader in the North Atlantic. When I was 23 years old, I was an itinerant farm laborer. I was working on a farm during the harvest, sleeping on the hay in the farmer's barn, eating with the farmer's family and working from dawn till dusk to get the harvest in before the first crop. I was uneducated. I was unskilled and at the end of the harvest, I was once more unemployed. Now, sometimes when I'm on television or radio and I've done more than 4,000 interviews, people ask me, what was the turning point? What was the great moment for you? What changed your life? And what used to frustrate me because I know that I had done so many things. I've read thousands of books and tens of thousands of articles and I've worked for years, sometimes 12, 14, 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, 2 or 3, 4 years at a time until I was so tired that my face was black from exhaustion and it was never one thing. And one day in frustration, I started to think, is there really something that turns your life around? And then I realized that there were three turning points with me. It's almost like you're going to turn and you turn, you turn right, then turn right and then turn right again and you're going off in a different direction. Number one is when I decided to accept responsibility for my life. At the age of 20, I had this incredible epiphany. I was working in a factory. I was broke. I had no money. It was cold outside. And suddenly I realized that everything that was ever going to happen to me for the rest of my life was going to be up to me, is that no one was coming to the rescue, that no one was going to do it for me. Nobody cared but me. And up to that time, I blamed my parents and I blamed my boss and I blamed the economy and I blamed my education and I blamed my mistakes. And then I realized that it doesn't matter where you're coming from, all that really matters is where you're going. And that everything that ever happened to me from then on had nothing to do with the past, it had only to do with the future. And that was the turning point. That was when I put my hands on the steering wheel of my own life and made the first turn. Now, about three or four years later, when I was in my mid-20s, I tripped over, stumbled upon goals. And I read something that said, decide what you want, write it down, make a plan, work on it every day. Well, that was pretty simple, so I grabbed a piece of paper, I was living in a sharing cheap room in a woman's house, I grabbed a piece of paper, I wrote down five or six goals I wanted to accomplish, and I promptly lost the piece of paper. Within one month, my whole life had changed. Within one month, my income had exploded, I had moved up in my field, I had been promoted to manager of 22 salespeople, I moved out of a boarding house into an apartment. It was the most amazing thing, and it was exactly what I had written down. It's almost like touching a hot electrical wire. When you start to write down goals, you'd be literally astonished at the things that happen to you. So that was the second part. The third turning point in my life, and this is the one that never stops, is I found that you can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you've just had for yourself. It's that in order to achieve something you've never achieved before, you must master a skill you've never had before. You must learn and do something you've never done before. You must become someone you've never been before. And so at that point, I dedicated myself to lifelong learning. I accepted I was responsible, no blaming, no excuses, no complaining, no criticizing. I decided exactly what I wanted, and then I said, now what do I have to learn to get it? So, the starting point of success, and we'll start off, we'll call this number one, is to decide exactly what you want in life. Exactly what you want. And the way you do this is you idealize. And idealizing is the hallmark of the superior person. Idealizing is sort of like fantasizing or dreaming at the beginning. But what you do is instead of saying, well, I don't have any money and I'm set back with this and I have these problems, what you do is you imagine that you have no limitations. You imagine you have no limitations and that you have all the time and all the money and all the friends and all the contacts and you have all the connections and all the education and all the experience that you could do, be, have, anything you want in life. If you could wave a magic wand and have anything you want in life, what would it be? There are four main areas of life where you wave this magic wand and you idealize, you dream, you imagine, you project into the future and you dream of what your future could be like if it was perfect. And the first area has to do with your income. All successful people I know have a clear plan every single year for how much money they're going to earn that year and they break it down to how much they're going to earn each month and sometimes how much each week and each day. And then what they do is they say exactly what activities will I have to engage in each day to earn my money on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis. And then every single morning they get up and they start working on the most important thing they can do to achieve that financial goal. And a week, a month, a year later they look up and they've hit or they've exceeded their goal and people say, boy, you were sure lucky last year. It wasn't luck at all. If I were to give you a brand new car, beautifully running, give you the keys, give you a map, give you a clear destination, maybe even give you a GPS system in the car and I say go straight there and get the prize and you got in the car, followed the GPS system, went straight there and got the prize. Nobody would say it was luck. All you did was follow your plan. So the rule is idealize and imagine what it is that you want. Imagine how much you want to earn this year, two years from now, five years from now, ten years and so on and ask yourself, what will you have to be absolutely excellent at doing in one, two, three, four, five years in order to earn the kind of money that you want to earn? Look around you and ask, who else is earning the kind of money that I'm earning and what are they doing differently from me? And remember this, nobody's better than you, nobody's smarter than you. If they're earning more money than you, then they've just figured out how to do it before you have. They've just asked the questions and usually they've asked them of other people or read books or gone to courses or listened to audios. They've learned what they needed to learn to achieve the goals and whatever they or whatever hundreds and thousands of other people have done, you can do as well. Nobody's better than you, nobody's smarter than you. The second area where you set goals has to do with your family and it's really important to think. If you could wave a magic wand and your family life was perfect, your house, your home, your car, your travel, your lifestyle, the schools your kids went to, the lifestyle you had, the vacations you took, the clothes they drove, the things that you want to do for your family and with your family, ask yourself, if you had no limitations at all, what would they be? If you had no limitations at all, what would they be? One of the most important goals we have in life is to spend more time with the people that we care about the most and what we have to do is build our lives around that. I had a man in my seminar who came up to me and said, when I got married, I promised my wife I'd spend two hours every single day with her, at least, and if I was away, I'd make it up to her. If I was gone, I'd be on the phone. He said, when we had our first children, I promised her I'd spend three hours every single day with my family. He said, that was 21 years ago. He said, I've never missed a day. He said, you know what? It was the best decision I ever made in my life. I'm making more money today than I ever dreamed I would make. I am successful, I'm happy, I'm highly respected amongst all the people that know me and I have the most wonderful family life. He said, that decision to spend that time with my family and to organize my life and my work and everything around it changed my life. Best decision I ever made. Something to think about. The third area where you decide exactly what you want has to do with your health. Now, your goal today is to live to be 90 or 95 years old. The fact is that with our medical system today, with what you know about health, nutrition, exercise, and so on, with the fantastic breakthroughs in medicine and surgery, you're going to live to be 90 or 95 years old and the time to start thinking about it is now. So ask yourself, if my health was perfect, what would it look like? Physically, how much would I weigh? How fit would I be? How healthy would I be? Think about the foods that you'll have to eat to be healthy. Think about the exercise programs you'll have to engage in. Think about the things you'll have to start doing or stop doing in order to be perfectly healthy and have that as your vision for your future. Now the fourth area where you must decide exactly what you want has to do with your net worth. And as you know, you are responsible for your financial life. The government's not going to help you. There's no pension plan. There's no money in the social security system. And your job is to accumulate enough money so that you never have to work again. It's not that you won't work, but to have a choice of working or not working. So have enough money so that you can retire comfortably for the rest of your life. And my goal is 20 years. I say 20 years because most financial planners will tell you that you're probably going to live to be 85 or 90. You will retire at 65 or 70. Make sure that you have enough money that your money outlives you. So what you do is you say, all right, how much would it cost for me to support my lifestyle today if I had no income at all? Would it cost $3,000 a month, $4,000 a month, $5,000 a month? Whatever the number is, say, if I were to stop working today for the rest of my life and I could continue to live my lifestyle, pay for my home, travel, food, car, things like that, how much would I need? And it's a really important question because many people aren't aware of how much that is. Now, of course, imagine that your children are married and gone and are self-supporting. Imagine that you've paid off your house. Imagine a few little things. Put a few variables into the equation. So let's say it would take $5,000 a month for you to support your current lifestyle. Well, then you multiply that by 12 months, which means that you'll need $60,000 a year. And just for the purpose of this exercise, don't even think about your money glowing while you're in retirement. Imagine it just keeps pace with inflation, all right? That's a very conservative but very safe way of thinking. Well, let's say you're going to live 20 years times $60,000. That's $1.2 million that you'll require. Well, then you sit down and you say, all right, how much am I worth today? How much am I worth today? And you do an analysis. And the way you do an analysis is imagine that you are being transferred to another country for 10 years and you have to sell everything you had and turn it into cash to leave the country. That way you get a very good idea of how much your furniture and clothes and cars and lawnmowers are worth because they're worth probably about 10 to 20 cents on the dollar. Many people think, well, I got lots of money because I have all this furniture and stuff like that. No. But if you look at a garage sale and you got 10 to 20 cents on the dollar, you could consider yourself lucky. Look at your bank account. Look at the value of your insurance policy. Look at your stock markets. Look at the pensions. Look at any amount of cash you could get a hold of and ask yourself, how much do you have today? How much are you worth today? And don't worry because most people are underwater as this goes. Most people have, as they say, more months at the end of the money and then say, this is the amount that I would have if it's $1.2 million. Then you draw a line and say, okay, it takes an average person about 20 years to go from zero to a million dollars. Now, that seems like a long time, but remember, the time is going to pass anyway. People say, oh, I'm going to get rich here and there. Don't believe that. An average person who's really, really smart makes about 8 to 10% per year on their accumulated capital. And this is based on studies of tens of thousands and millions of self-made millionaires. They make about 8 to 10% per year on their accumulated capital over the long term. So what you say is, okay, this is how much I'm worth. This is how much I want to be worth in 20 years, say a million too. How much am I going to have to earn and save every single year between now and 20 years from now? And then you make a plan. At the end of this year, I'll have to have this much. At the end of this year, I'll have to have this much. And you can do this with calculators. And now you have a clear target. This is where you want to end up in 20 years. This is where you want to be in 15 years, 10 years, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 9 months, 6 months, 3 months. And then what you do is every single month you focus on financial independence. And I'll tell you what, in interviewing tens of thousands of self-made millionaires, the one thing they all had in common was they began thinking about achieving financial independence very early in life. And as a result, they accomplished extraordinary things. So here's an exercise that you can do, fun exercise. It's called the quick list method. And you can do this today. You can do this at the end of this exercise. If you're listening to this CD, you can stop the CD and do it. And what you do is you say, what are my three most important goals in life right now? What are my three most important goals in life right now? Quickly write down your answer in 30 seconds or less. You can give this exercise to your spouse or to your children. Because we find if you only have 30 seconds to answer this question, your answers will be as accurate as if you had 30 minutes or three hours. If you want to be even more specific, say, what are my three most important income and career goals? What are my three most important family goals? What are my three most important health goals? What are my three most important financial or net worth goals? And write them down. And that gives you a quick snapshot of what your true goals really are. Many people are quite amazed at the answers they come up to with this. I had a woman come up to me in tears at one of my seminars. And she was saying, well, I don't care about money. I care about people. And I care about life. And I care about love and happiness. I don't really care about money. So I put her through a goal-setting exercise of which this was part. And she came out of the break and she said, every single answer to every single question you asked, I kept writing money, money, money. She said, I've been fooling myself. And I finally realized it's only if I have enough money that I can do all those other things. It's that I need to become serious about my financial life. She said it changed her whole life. So once you have done the three-goal method, now you have a pretty good idea. And now that you're clear about what you really want in all four areas, step number two is to write it down. We know that only 3% of adults have written goals. You write down your goals and you make them clear, specific, detailed, and measurable. So as we move on in this session, I'm going to give you a goal-setting exercise. At this moment, what I want you to think of is when you write a goal, imagine that you're placing an order with a factory on the other side of the country. And you write out your goal so it's so clear that an average person getting this order in the mail can prepare your goal and send it to you and you can open the box and it's exactly what you ordered. If your goal is written out clearly and specifically, so you start off, first of all, you idealize, as I said before, and then you write it down and you crystallize it. For example, everybody wants to have a dream house. My wife and I used to talk about that when we lived in a little condominium, then we rented a house, then we bought a house, we had to sell the house because we ran out of money, we had a rented house. And we always wanted to have a dream house and I said, well, what would our dream house be? We said, well, you know, a big seven-room and a place for the kids and a nice backyard. Well, let's start writing it down. We began writing it down and we wrote down 42 things we wanted in our dream house. Then we began to buy magazines every month with beautiful homes, Better Homes and Gardens, Homes Beautiful, Southern Homes, Architectural Digest, and we'd read these magazines and we'd talk about them and we'd look at the pictures and we'd share what we'd like to have in our dream house. Well, things began to change for us very rapidly. My business got better and better, soon I could afford to buy a beautiful home in a lovely neighborhood, but we knew this is a lovely home, but it's not our dream house. So we kept thinking, kept thinking, within three years we looked at 150 houses in a city far away, right? The house that I'm in today, we walked into it, we looked around and this is our dream house. This is every single thing that we've written down on the list and the more we explored the house, the more we realized how perfect it was. We've been here for 19 years and you say, well, you know, it's not going to work for me. How do you know? You see, the question is not what if it doesn't work, the question is what if it does work? What if it does work? By the way, if you're single and you want to find the perfect person for you, sit down and write out a list of every single quality and ingredient that you'd like to have in your perfect person. Remember, the quality of your relationships, your family, your home, are often vastly more important than anything else. So write it down, write it down, write it down. And write out a description so that what you do is you set up a force field of energy in the universe that starts to attract the perfect person into your life. If you're running a business, by the way, and you need an employee, this is what I do is I write down a clear description of the perfect person. One day I needed a person to head up marketing for part of my business and I wrote down 38 things that I wanted in that person. And two weeks later, somebody called me out of the clear blue sky that I'd never met before in my life and he said, I'd like to come to work for you. And he came in, I was going to give him about 30 minutes to talk to him, to be polite, spent three hours talking to him. He came and worked for me for a year. And about after three months, I took out the list and showed him he had every single quality on the list. He was literally perfect. Plus, he had other special qualities I didn't even know about. Remarkable experience. Write it down. Be clear. Remember, it's not written down, it's not a goal. Only 3% of adults have written goals and everybody works for them. Step number three is make it measurable. A child should be able to tell you whether you've achieved your goal or not. The reason I tell you this is many people have goals, I want to be rich or I want to be thin or I want to be happy and I want to travel and I want to have a nice house, I want to have a new car. But these aren't goals, these are merely wishes. These are fantasies. These are dreams. We say a wish is a goal with no energy behind it. It's like shooting a cartridge with no powder in the cartridge. Most people go through life, 90% or more, shooting blanks because they think they have goals when all they have is wishes. Make it measurable. Now, number four, once you've written down the goal, you've decided a date, you've decided what you want and so on, number four is to identify the obstacles that you'll have to overcome to achieve that goal. You start off by asking yourself this question, why aren't I already at my goal? Why haven't I already achieved my goals? Sometimes people will have a financial goal, they say, well, I'm not making enough money. Well, is that true? There are a lot of self-made millionaires that never made more than $30,000 or $40,000 a year in their whole lives, be it they became millionaires. Maybe it's not that you're not earning enough money, maybe it's that you're spending everything you make and a little bit more besides, which is a real shock to people. Do you know that the average self-made millionaire saves 15% to 20% of their income throughout their working life and they adjust all of their life around that and they live on the other 80% or 85%? And when you start with that, the way you do it is you start off saving 1% and living on 99% and when you get comfortable with that, you save 2%, you live on 98%. You develop a habit of living on less than you earn and pretty soon within a year, two years you'll be saving 15% to 20% of your income and you won't affect your lifestyle at all and your bank account will start to grow and your confidence will go up and you'll develop this tremendous feeling of personal power that you could accomplish anything and opportunities to invest, the money will open up for you and a week, a month, a year, five, 10 years later, you're financially independent and everybody says, boy, you sure were lucky. It wasn't luck at all. So what are the obstacles that you have to overcome between here and your goal? And this brings us to what we call the theory of constraints and the theory of constraints, you say of all the obstacles that you have to overcome, what is the main obstacle? What's the constraint? What's the choke point? What's holding you back? What sets the speed at which you achieve your goal? What's your limiting factor in achieving your goal? Now what I've found is that the 80-20 rule applies to constraints. It says that this, it says that 80% of all the constraints that are holding you back are inside yourself. Only 20% are on the outside. What is it that average or mediocre people do? Mediocre people always blame their problems on someone or something on the outside. What do superior people do? Superior people look into themselves and they say, what is it in me that's holding me back? Is it a skill that you need? Is it a quality of time management or self-discipline? Is it more energy that you need? Is it better health habits? Is it harder work? Is it greater focus? What is it in you that's holding you back? And 80% of the time, your major constraint, the limiting factor on your achieving the goal lies within yourself and is under your control. So identify the obstacles and identify the main obstacle. What's the main obstacle that's holding me back? And then concentrate single-mindedly on alleviating that main constraint. Focus intensely like a laser beam to break that lock to one thing that's holding you back more than anything else. Now step number five in goal achieving is to identify the knowledge, the information and skills that you will need to get into the top 10% of your field. What skills will you need in order to achieve your goals? Remember as I said before, to achieve something you've never achieved before, you have to become someone that you've never been before. You have to then ask yourself, what one skill of all the skills that you could develop would help you the most to achieve your goal? What one skill, if you were absolutely excellent at it, would have the greatest positive impact on your life? You see, what we have found is that your weakest important skill, your weakest key skill sets the height of your income in every part of your life. Your weakest key skill is the one that is the brake, the sealant that holds you back and concentrate on bringing up that one skill, the one thing that's holding you back, prospecting, presenting, closing, negotiating, speaking, planning, organizing, whatever it happens to be, it's a skill that you can learn because all skills are learnable. All business skills are learnable and you can learn any business skill you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. So, once you have a goal, you step back and you say, all right, what are the most important skills and bodies of knowledge I will need to achieve the goal? And it may take you a week, a month, a year, or even five years to develop those skills. Do you know it takes seven years to master a craft? It takes seven years of hard work in any field from sales to mechanics to neurosurgery to get into the top 10%, but once you get into the top 10%, you become one of the highest paid people in the world. And if it's going to take you a long time to get into the top 10%, when would be a good time to start? And you start working on the one skill that can help you the most. And once you've mastered that one skill, then what do you do? Then you ask that same question again. Now, what one skill will help me the most? And you become a lifelong do-it-to-yourself project. For the rest of your life, you keep identifying the one skill that can help you the most and you write it down and you make a plan and you work on it every day. If you do this and get better and better and better at achieving your goal, the wonderful discovery is that once you've learned a skill, which is hard, you can use it over and over again. And every time you use it, you get better at it. And every time you get better at it, it takes you less time to get the same level of results. And that is the reason why some people achieve so much is they learn a skill, which is hard. They work on it over and over again to get better and better and achieve better and better results in less and less time. And you can do the same. Okay, step number six, identify the people whose help and cooperation you will require in order to achieve your goals. Identify the people in your family that you will need. Interestingly enough, in order to achieve great goals, sometimes you have to throw your whole heart into those goals. You have to work really, really hard in order to accomplish success. And you have to engage in what are called deliberate extremes, where you work night and day. You work morning, noon and night and seven days a week and sometimes for several months. And you have to explain this to your family in advance so that your family understands what you're doing and why you're doing it. And you have to get their help and cooperation to back you up until you finally get over the hump. And then you can take it, make it up to them with extended vacations and other things. Identify the boss, the people that you work with whose help you will require, especially if you're in business, identify the customers whose help you will require. Peter Drucker had a great observation. He said the only profit center in the business is the customer. And the whole purpose of a business is to satisfy customers. And so if you want to achieve anything worthwhile financially, you're going to have to satisfy lots of customers. So what you have to do is you have to identify those customers, say who are they, and then you have to throw your whole heart into satisfying those customers better than anybody else. So who are your ideal customers? What do they need to be satisfied and happy? What can you do that makes you superior to your competition? What is your unique selling proposition? What is your competitive advantage? What is your area of excellence? What is it that you can do that will make people select you rather than anyone else to buy from and do business with? That is the key to success in sales and it's the key to success in business. Always ask the question, what's in it for them? What do they get for helping me to achieve my goals? What can I give them? And as Napoleon Hill said, be a go-giver rather than a go-getter. Look for ways to help other people to improve their lives and work. And as Zig Ziglar said, you can have everything you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want. So whose people and cooperation will you need? Make a list of all the people whose help you'll need and then ask yourself, what can I do to deserve their help? What can I do to make them want to help me in every way? So that's number six. Step number seven is now you have all the ingredients you need, so you make a list of everything you will have to do. And you add to the list as you think of new things. You make a list of every obstacle you'll have to overcome. You make a list of all the knowledge and skills that you'll have to acquire and organize them by priority. You make a list of all the people whose help and cooperation you'll require. And then you stop this list and you keep adding to the list. By the way, I've had this conversation with many people who are single. And they say, well, how do I meet the ideal person for me? And I say, what you do is you set it as a goal to meet the perfect person. And you make a list of every single ingredient or quality that that perfect person would have. And it will be in that 10, 20, 30. I spoke to a very intelligent young woman the other day and I gave her this advice. Three days later when I saw her again, she said, my list is up to 51 points, 51 qualities I want in the ideal person. And she was completely transformed. She'd been alone for a long time. She'd gone out with jerks, which most women know about. As men, we don't know about that, but women know about the jerks that are out there. And she said, it's absolutely amazing. Totally changed her attitude because she hasn't really thought through what she really wanted in a perfect man. And I do the same thing. I say to men, write down what you want in the perfect woman. If you're a boss, write down what you want in a perfect employee. If you want to get your dream home, write down all the things you want in your perfect dream home. You cannot imagine the power of writing out a list of the ideal ingredients in your ideal person, ideal job, ideal company, ideal home, and so on. So you make a list and you keep adding to the list as you think of new things. Then number eight, you organize your list. And you organize your list in two ways, by sequence and by priority. You organize your list by sequence by first organizing your list by what you have to do first, what you have to do second, what you have to do third. There's a rule that before you do anything, you have to do something else first. And in setting or achieving a goal, you usually have to do something else before you do something else. So write it down in sequence. What's the very first step that you'll have to take? I'll give you a great story. This gentleman was in our seminar and he had built a very successful business. He's in his 30s and he wanted to sell his business and take a year off and travel. He'd been trying for a year to sell his business. He didn't know anything about it. And someone said, well, have you gotten any knowledge? Have you read a book on how to sell a business? He said he never even thought of that. So at the break, he went across the street to the bookstore and bought a book on how to sell your business. He came back, read it from cover to cover. Within 60 days, he had sold and concluded the transaction and went off on a world trip. He said it was absolutely amazing. The first thing he had to do if he wanted to sell his business is get a book on how to sell your business. Sometimes it's as simple as that. You change your whole life. So organize your list by sequence. What do you do first? And then organize it by priority, by what is most important, what is least important. When you make a list of all the things you have to do, the 80-20 rule will apply. 20% of those items will account for 80% of the value. Sometimes one or two things on your list will be more important than everything else. And the natural tendency of people, if they don't think it through, is they start on little things and they focus on little things. They focus on trivia rather than focusing on the critical things that can make a big difference. Sometimes if you do the most important thing and you do it first, that will give you a huge jump in achieving your goal. In my work on time management, I find that there's a 20-80 rule that often the first 20% of things you do in the achievement of any goal are worth 80% of all the things you do in achieving that goal. So make sure that you think through and decide clearly of all the things that I could do on this list, which is the most important, which comes first. Now, number nine is to make a plan. A list organized by sequence and priority is a plan. You organize the list into steps. What is the first step you take? What is the second step you take? What is the third step you take? And then what you do is you work your plan. You know the old saying, plan your work, work your plan? You'll find that when you are working from a list, like a checklist, you will accomplish things at a rate that you cannot now believe. In every experience I've had in life working with a checklist, I've been absolutely staggered at how fast I've gone from literally zero to building multi-million dollar businesses, sometimes in as little as six months, working from a checklist. But if you don't have a checklist, what will happen is you'll just ramble all over the place. You do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and you'll come back to this and you'll come back to that, and you'll try this and you'll try that. It's the most amazing darn thing. So organize your list into steps. Now you have a goal and a plan. You have a clear idea of what you want. You have a plan to achieve it, and what you have done now is you've increased the likelihood of achieving your goal by a thousand percent. You've increased the likelihood of achieving your goal by ten times. Now sometimes people say, well, that's just a bunch of motivational stuff. Well, for years I have said this, by writing down a goal and making a plan organized by steps with deadlines and everything else, you'll increase the likelihood of achieving it by ten times. And then a couple of years ago, USA Today did a study on New Year's resolutions. And what they did is they asked people, have you made New Year's resolutions? And almost everybody said yes. They said, have you written them down? And they divided the study into two categories. Those who had made the resolutions but had not written them down, and those who had made the resolutions and written them down. And then they followed them, and at the end of the year they said, how did you do? Well, here are the numbers. Of the people who had set resolutions but not written them down, only four percent had fallen through. But of the people who had set the same resolutions but had written them down just once on a list of paper and put it away, 46 percent had carried through on their resolutions. Forty-six percent versus four percent is over 1,100 percent difference in achievement. It's over 11 times the level of achievement. And the only thing that was different was that the one group had written them down, had taken an extra two or three minutes to say, I resolve to lose weight, save money, exercise more, spend more time with my family. They'd written them down, and at the end of the year they were absolutely astonished at how many of those resolutions they'd followed through on. So now you've got this. You have made a plan. You've organized your list into steps. You know what you need to do first, second, third, and fourth, and so on. So now step number 10 is you begin to plan your life around your goals. You plan your year in advance. You plan each month in advance. You plan each week in advance, and you plan each day in advance. There's a 6-P formula that says proper prior planning prevents poor performance, 6-Ps, proper prior planning prevents poor performance. What we have found is that people who plan meticulously also accomplish 5 and 10 times as much as people who don't, because when you have a clear written plan, starting off for the year, this is what I'm going to do this year, and then you break it down. This is what I'm going to do each month in terms of my business, sales, income, physical activities, family, travel, and so on. Then you break it down by the week, and you do your weekly plan the week before, usually the Saturday or Sunday before, and then you do your daily plan, and you do your daily plan the night before, and you make out a list and you plan each day in advance, and each day fits into each week, which fits into each month. Well, what's the payoff from planning in advance? The rule is that every minute spent in planning saves 10 minutes in execution. Let me repeat that. Every minute that you spend in planning will save you 10 minutes in getting the job done, in getting the results. What is the payoff? It's 10 to 1. It increases your productivity by 10 times to plan meticulously in advance. Peter Drucker once said that poor planning lies at the root of every failure. Planning without thinking, acting without planning lies at the root of every failure. What that means is that acting preceded by planning is the root of every success. So people say, I don't have time to plan. Many people say, I don't have time to do it right, but of course I'll have time to do it over. It's absolutely amazing how many people spend years of their lives going around in circles when they could have accomplished extraordinary things if they had a clear written plan for each day, each week, each month, each year, and for their lives, and they just followed the plan. Here's an example. Let us say I'm going to give you a prize, and the prize is $100,000. And all you have to do is go to a blue house in your city and knock on the door and go in the house, and under the couch in the living room will be an envelope, and in that envelope will be your $100,000. So I say, okay, go get them. What's the first question you would ask? You'd say, well, what's the address? No, no, don't worry about the address. You just drive around in circles in this large city until you find it. Well, how far is it? Is there a map? Is there any guidance? What about the outside? What about the inside? There's thousands of blue houses in a large city. I say, well, don't worry about it. Just drive around until you find it. How long would it take you to find the right house? And the answer is probably your whole life. How long does it take most people to succeed? It takes them their whole life, and they don't make it because they drive around without a clear road map and without an address. When you have clear written goals and plans, you have a clear map, a clear compass. You have the right wings in your sails, and you will sail straight and true to your destination. Remember that old saying, if you don't have a goal, you're like a ship without a rudder, and a ship without a rudder never reaches port. So that's number 10, plan each week, month in advance. Goal number 11 is select your number one priority for each day and start on that first. Select your most important goal for each day and start on that first. So what you do is you make a list of everything you have to do for that day, and then you ask yourself, if I could only do one thing on this list before I was called out of town for a month, what one thing would it be? And you write a one next to that item. Then you say, if I could only do two things on this list before I was called out of town for a month, what would be the second thing? And then the third thing and the fourth thing, and you put numbers by the first seven items. And then first thing in the morning, you start on number one, and number 12, you discipline yourself to work 100% single-mindedly on that goal. You work on your number one task. You ask yourself, of all the things that I could do on this list, which one activity represents the greatest value? Which one will make the greatest difference? Which one will have the most important consequences for me if I were to complete it? And then you discipline yourself to work on just that goal all day until it's done. Now, some people say, what if something else comes up? Put it aside, delay it, or come back to your goal immediately afterwards. Remember, this is your most important goal. Everything and anything else you can do by your own admission is a relative waste of time. It's a relative waste of time. If you can discipline yourself to keep coming back to your major goal, you'll accomplish five and 10 times as much as people who go from pillar to post, back and forth, from little things to big things, and back again. Here's another discovery with regard to single-minded concentration. If you do a job from beginning to end through without stop, you will save 80% of the time that it takes you to do that job. What they have found is if you take a major task and you start on that task and then you stop to do something else, when you come back, you have to find out where you were, you have to refresh your memory, you have to pick up, and then you have to start again, which takes far more time than you could imagine. If you then stop the task and do something else and come back to it, you suddenly find that you have to go back into the task, find out where you were, review, and so stopping and starting the task actually takes five times as long to finish a task than starting the task and forcing yourself to push it all the way through. As many of you know, I write four books a year. I write them and I publish four books a year with major publishers, and I know many people who have not written one book in four years. All of them, they mean to. Everybody means to write a book, and so they say, well, how do you write so many books? I say, well, it's very simple. There's a plan. You sit down and you follow the plan, and the thing that you do is once I start to write the book, I stay at it nonstop until the first draft is finished, and I've learned that other people who are very prolific writers who write multiple books do exactly the same thing. They clear their schedule completely for three or four or five days, and then they just simply write nonstop until the basic outline of the book is complete. By the way, if there's anybody out there who's interested in writing a book, people ask me over and over again if I would write down, how is it I write so many books so quickly if I would write down the plan, all right, in order, priority, sequence. So I did. I wrote it down, and I put it on my website. It's with my free newsletters, and it's free. If you've ever thought of writing a book, go there, download the instructions on how to write a book, and take step one and follow the plan until it's complete, and I will see you on the New York Times bestseller list in a few years. Okay, that's number 12. Train yourself to work single-mindedly, to concentrate, and to stay on your most important task until it's complete. This brings us to number 13. Number 13 is to visualize. Now what we have found is that your ability to visualize or to imagine your goal as accomplished is one of the most powerful faculties that the human mind has. In your subconscious mind, there is a mechanism that begins to orient your life toward your mental pictures. In fact, if you feed a new mental picture into your mind of something that you want to be, or do, or have, your mind goes to work to bring it into reality. Your subconscious mind passes off this picture to your superconscious. Your superconscious mind then works 24 hours a day to bring it into reality. And here is our discovery. The greater clarity you have with regard to the goal that you want to achieve, the faster you achieve that goal. The faster you move toward the goal, and the faster the goal moves toward you. But the fuzzier you are about the goal, the longer the process takes, and sometimes it takes a lifetime. So when you visualize, you close your eyes, you take a deep breath, and you imagine what the goal would look like if it was complete. Imagine what the goal would look like if it was perfect in every way. For example, let us say you want to have a great body. Well, go through a magazine and find someone who has a great body in a bathing suit, and put that picture with your picture glued on their face on the front of your refrigerator, or in your bathroom mirror, or someplace where you can see it on a regular basis. Feed your mind the picture of yourself as physically perfect, as perfect as you can possibly be. And so what happens is your subconscious mind sees that picture, and it begins to adjust your appetite, your habits, your exercise schedule, it begins to give you the inner drive and discipline to make that picture your reality. If you want to drive a beautiful car, the very first thing you do is go down to the dealership and test drive the car. Drive it around the block a few times, feel it, smell it, change the gears, move the steering wheel, adjust the controls, get a copy of the brochure, take pictures of that vehicle and put them all over your house. Just imagine yourself owning that vehicle. I had a friend who wanted a brand new BMW, but he was unemployed, and he was driving a junker, if you like. So he began going once a week, every Saturday, down to the BMW dealership to test drive the new BMW. They got tired of seeing him, I can tell you this, but he did it every single Saturday. He went down and took it for a test drive. In the course of that year, he got a job where he got some skills, and he lost the job, got a second job, which didn't work out, got a third job, which was ideal for him, and he did extremely well. In the middle of December of that year, he walked into the dealership and bought a new BMW. He had bought the money, he had attracted the resources, it's the most amazing darn thing. When my wife and I decided we wanted to get a dream house, what we did is we made a list of everything we wanted in our perfect house, and then we went out to the open houses in the best homes in the best neighborhoods in the city. Every weekend, we went out and we looked at beautiful homes, and we looked at the balconies, and we looked at the stairways, and we looked at the entranceways, and the landscaping, and the family rooms, and the living rooms, and the bedrooms, and the bathrooms, and the pools, and we looked at everything until we had a clear mental picture of all the things we wanted into our dream house. And then one year, 19 years ago, we walked into a house, and we looked around, and this was the house. It was the house we had visualized, it's the house we'd written down, it's the house we'd taken pictures of and clipped out of various magazines, it's the house we're in today. Now, does this work? Some people say, well, yeah, but what if it doesn't work? No, you nitwit. The right question is, what if it does work? What if it does work for you to sit down and write down a clear description of what you want in each part of your life, your ideal health, your ideal lifestyle, your ideal physical well-being, your ideal partner, home, business, everything else, and then visualize and imagine. Before you go to sleep at night, create a clear mental picture of what you want to see accomplished. By the way, visualizing works both for short-term goals and long-term goals. If you have a meeting, a presentation, a job interview, you have something coming up tomorrow, even a negotiation, before you go to sleep at night, visualize that negotiation coming out perfect in every way. See it absolutely perfect in every respect. Then when you go into it the next day, you'll be amazed at how well it turns out. You can have a long-term visualization for a beautiful home in the mountains or a home by the beach or for a trip to Europe, but what you do is you keep feeding your mind with pictures. Before you go to bed at night, feed your mind with pictures of what you want to see happen. Feed your mind with a beautiful picture of your goal as a reality, and then you activate all of your subconscious and superconscious powers to go to work to bring it into your life. People who visualize are absolutely astonished at how fast they achieve the things that they visualize. So that's number 13. So your goal is complete, and one extra part of visualization has to do with emotionalization. Emotionalizing means that with the mental picture, you create a feeling that you would have when you achieve the goal. For example, if you achieved a prize, you'd feel proud and happy. You'd see people smiling and clapping and applauding. If you made an enormous amount of money, you'd feel successful. You'd feel like a winner. If you won a contest, if you had the beautiful home or house or car or ideal person in your life, think of how happy you'd be. Think and experience. Actually create within yourself the emotion that would go along with that mental picture, because a picture combined with an emotion dropped into your subconscious mind activates all your superconscious powers to work for you 24 hours a day until that goal becomes a reality. So what do we do now? Well, we've had a long talk about goals. I'm going to give you a goal-setting exercise that you're going to do after this program, and this goal-setting exercise will change your life. I learned about this goal-setting exercise about 23 years ago. I was skeptical. I said, well, I'll give it a try, and I tried it for a month. It changed my life in ways that I just never believed. Every single person I've taught this exercise to has come back just shaking their head and said it's so powerful, it's like pushing down a dynamite detonator. Your whole life explodes. So here's what it is. What you do when this seminar is over is you take a blank sheet of paper, and at the top of the paper you write the word goals and today's date, and then you make a list of at least 10 goals that you'd like to accomplish in the next year, and you write the goals with the three Ps. First of all, you write them in the present tense as though you've already accomplished them, as though you already have them. So you don't say I will earn. You say I earn X number of dollars this year or by such and such a date. You don't say I will lose weight. You say I weigh X number of pounds, not I will drive, but I drive a brand-new BMW Series 6. In other words, you write it down as though it were already a reality. I am in a relationship with a perfect person in my life, and I am extremely happy. So you write it down in the present tense. Second of all, you make it positive. You don't say I will quit smoking. You say I am a non-smoker. You don't say I will lose weight. You say I weigh X number of pounds. And third of all, you make it personal. For the rest of your life, whenever you set a goal, you always use the word I, and you write the word I. I earn X number of dollars by such and such a date. I weigh X number of pounds. I spend such and such many days with my family each year. I sell. I earn. I achieve. I accomplish. I run. I climb. I acquire. I save. Whatever it happens to be, you start with the word I plus an action verb. The words I plus an action verb are a command from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind, and they activate all your mental powers. So what you do is you write down at least 10 goals. Now, you can write down more than 10. You can work on as many as 15 goals at a time. Your subconscious mind has got enough capacity, if you like, to work on as many as 15 goals, but you must have a minimum of 10, and you must sit there with that pad of paper until you have at least 10 goals. Then once you have 10 goals, number 14, a part of this exercise is you look over this list of goals and you ask yourself, if I could only achieve one goal on this list, which one goal would it be? If I could only achieve one goal on this list of 10, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on my life right now? And this is one of the most important questions you ever ask. Napoleon Hill once said that a person's life begins to become great when they decide upon their major goal, their major definite purpose. Now, whichever goal you select, this becomes your major definite purpose. This is number 15. That goal becomes the organizing principle, the focal point of your life. Once you've written down a list of 10 and selected one, that goal becomes the ball carrier for all the rest of your team. That goal becomes the goal that you work on and think about every single day. When you get up in the morning, you think about that goal. Through the day, you think about that goal. You imagine, you visualize, you talk about the goal. In the evening, you visualize and imagine that goal. You write down and you plan to achieve the goal. So once you've determined this goal, you then go through the goal setting exercise that we've talked about. You write it down and make it clear, specific, and detailed. You set a deadline for the goal and you set sub-deadlines if necessary. Remember there's no such thing as an unrealistic goal, only an unrealistic deadline. If your goal is to earn a certain amount of money, set a deadline. People say, well, what if you don't achieve it by the deadline? Then you set a new deadline. Major deadlines are merely guesstimates. Deadlines will often be off. Sometimes you'll accomplish the goal vastly before the deadline. Sometimes you'll accomplish it afterwards, but set a deadline. Then identify the obstacles that you'll have to overcome to achieve this major definite purpose, this number one most important goal. Say, what is it in me that is holding me back from achieving this goal right now? And look into yourself. Identify the most important obstacle. Of all the obstacles that stand in my way, what is the one obstacle that if I removed it would have the greatest positive impact? Then you identify the knowledge and skills that you will need. What knowledge will you need? What skills will you need? What will you have to become really, really good at in order to achieve that goal? What one skill, if you developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would help you the most to achieve your most important goal? Then you identify the people whose help and cooperation you will need. Your boss, your family, your customers, your bankers, your suppliers. If you're in business, by the way, sometimes forming a terrific relationship with a really good banker is the most important single thing you can do for your business. That is sometimes the thing that holds people back or makes them successful. So who is the most important person? Of all the people who can help you the most, who are the most important? Then you take these and you make a list of all the things that you'll have to do. What you want to accomplish, the steps that you'll have to take to achieve it, organize the steps by sequence and priority, make a plan, which is your list organized into steps from beginning to end, and then take action on your plan. Every single day you get up in the morning and you make a plan for the day and you organize the list of your plan and you focus on your major goal. Here's the kicker. Do something every day on your major goal, seven days a week. When you drive along, think about your goal. When you have a problem, think about your goal. When you get up in the morning and go to bed at night, think about your goal. Seven days a week, every single day, do something that moves you a little closer to the goal. Even if it's just reading a book or getting a piece of information or making a phone call or crossing the street or calling on someone, do something every day. There is a principle of success called the momentum principle. And the momentum principle of success says that it's very hard to get started on any new effort. But once you get started, it's fairly easy to keep going. For example, it may take you ten units of energy and determination to get started on a new goal. But once you get started on a new goal, it only takes you one unit of energy to keep going. So that's why we say do something every day. Keep the plate spinning. Keep in motion. Develop momentum and maintain this momentum, and you'll go faster and faster toward your goal, and your goal will come faster and faster toward you. Now, here's the exercise that we teach in our programs and which changed my life. When this course is over, get yourself a spiral notebook. It will cost you $1.59 or $1.95. Get yourself a spiral notebook, and this is going to be your goals book. And from now on, every morning when you get up, before you start off, open the book, write today's date at the top of the page, and write down your ten goals. Write down your ten goals in the present tense, positive, personal sense. And write down your ten goals without looking at the previous page. Never look back to see what you wrote before. What you do is you just write down your ten goals every single day. Now, the first time you do this, the goals will turn out a particular way. The second time, the goals will change in order of priority. The third time, the goals will change again, and you keep doing this week after week for the first month. And by the end of the first month, some goals that you wrote down the first day, you'll find that you're not writing down anymore. Other goals, you find yourself rewriting in the same words day after day. What will happen is like cement, your goals will start to fix. Just be able to sit down and write down your ten goals. And what I do is I write down my ten goals every day. When I travel, I take my spiral notebook with me. Every day I pull out my goal book and write down my ten goals. And my promise to you is this, is if you write down your ten goals every single day, you'll be absolutely astonished at what happens. You'll find your life will start to move ahead faster and faster. You'll become more and more focused and streamlined. You'll be more creative and innovative. You'll be smarter. You'll come up with ideas and insights to help you to achieve your goals. And your major definite purpose becomes your ball carrier. Just like in football, the ball carrier determines the line of scrimmage. As you work on your major definite purpose, you'll find yourself making progress on all your other goals simultaneously. And pretty soon you'll achieve your goals and they'll drop off the list. And you'll write new goals on the list. And you can have as many as fifteen goals, but write down ten every single day. If you will do this for one month, from today to the end of the month, thirty days, my promise to you is that your life will change in ways that you cannot now imagine. You will be accomplishing more than you can even dream of. People will notice that you've become a completely different person. You have more energy. You have more motivation. You're more confident. You have more enthusiasm. Your gaze is stronger. Your handshake is firmer. Your body language is more powerful. You get up in the morning with energy. It totally transforms your life to have a list of goals to work on. And here's the final key to goal setting, and it's the most important key of all, is back every goal with persistence and determination. Make a resolution in advance that no matter what happens, you will never quit. You may have to revise your goal over and over again. You may have to make new plans. You may have to try and try again. You may have to try nine different things before you find a tenth thing that will win or succeed. But make a decision in advance that no matter what happens, you will never quit. It is that you will keep on going like the energizer bunny. You'll keep on going and going and going. And if your goal fails completely, you'll pick yourself up. You'll brush yourself off. You'll rewrite your plans, and you will start again. Every single day, do something on your major goal, and when you get knocked down, you just say to yourself, wait a minute, I am unstoppable. I am unstoppable. I can do it. I can do anything I put my mind to. And remember this final point with regard to setting and achieving great goals. There's no such thing as failure. There's only feedback. There's no such thing as failure. There's only feedback. Every successful person fails over and over again on the way to achieving their goals. They learn a hundred different lessons that they would never have learned if they weren't working toward a goal. The goals that you achieve and the way you achieve them will almost invariably be different from what you expected when you started out. But successful people realize that there's no such thing as failure. There's only feedback. So thank you very much. I hope that you've enjoyed this. I hope that you will listen to this over and over again, practice it over and over again, and that the very first thing you do is write down your three most important goals in life and then get a spiral notebook and every single day write out your ten goals. And if you do that, then write to me by email or letter, and I get hundreds and thousands of emails and letters from all over the world telling you that this ten goal method changed their lives forever. And I hope to get that same message from you. Now I'd like to give you a free gift as a way of saying thank you for being a loyal supporter of mine and a determined, continuous learner. So find out what I've been working on lately and receive your special at www.bryantracy.com slash learner. That's www.bryantracy.com slash learner. Just go there right now and see what I've got for you. Thanks again for listening. I look forward to talking to you and maybe even seeing you soon.
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