Posts Tagged Brian Tracy
The Foundations of the American Dream
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on May 3, 2011
In a free market economy like the United States, the customer is the king or queen, and they rule supreme. Business and entrepreneurship are devoted to serving customers, to improving the lives and work of ordinary people. This is what makes the American dream possible.
The Spark plug of American Prosperity
The entrepreneur is the spark plug in the engine of the free market and the business system. It is the entrepreneur who recognizes and anticipates a customer need, then assembles the resources necessary to satisfy that need at a price that yields a profit. It is this ability that creates all wealth and opportunity.
Entrepreneurship is Risky
Entrepreneurs are those who take risks to produce goods and services for customers, gambling that the customers will be there to pay prices high enough to yield profits. These profits are essential for the entrepreneur to repeat the process of developing and producing even more products and services in the future.
The Companies of Tomorrow
Some of the biggest and most profitable companies in America today, such as Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, and Apple, did not exist twenty-five years ago. Each year, new companies emerge and older companies disappear. The process of “creative destruction” in the marketplace never ends. Customers’ wants and needs are changing continually, like the weather, from one day to the next, they never remain very long.
The Dynamics of the Free Market
The free market is the vast national and international meeting place where buyers and sellers come together to negotiate and decide what to sell, what to buy, at what prices, and under what terms. The “bright side” of the free market is when businesses strive to please customers in the short term while simultaneously thinking about planning for the long term. The best businesses are those dedicated to building and maintaining customer loyalty so that once they sell something to a customer, the customer is so happy and satisfied that he or she buys again.
Competition Brings Out the Best
To succeed in a competitive market, many of the very best qualities of the individual are demanded. At a minimum, a successful entrepreneur requires courage, both to begin in the first place and persist against endless problems and disappointments. An entrepreneur must be optimistic, energetic, visionary, determined, intelligent, flexible, and able to bounce back repeatedly from disappointment and temporary failure. An entrepreneur, above all, requires an instinct for identifying what products or services he or she can produce and offer that extremely demanding customers will buy and pay for.
Action Exercise
What the U.S. needs today is a new birth of liberty expressed in a national commitment to promote entrepreneurial activity by removing the hindrances that hold it back. What is your entrepreneurial dream? What steps can you take to make your dream a reality?
The Law of Time Perspective
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on February 3, 2011
The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. This insight comes from the pioneering work on upward financial mobility in America conducted by Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s. After studying many of the factors that were thought to contribute to individual financial success over the course of a person’s lifetime, he concluded that there was one primary factor that took precedence over all the others. He called it “time perspective.”
Plant Trees
What Banfield found was that the higher a person rises in any society, the longer the time perspective or time horizon of that person. People at the highest social and economic levels make decisions and sacrifices that may not pay off for many years, sometimes not even in their own lifetimes. They “plant trees under which they will never sit.”
Doctors
An obvious example of someone with a long time perspective is the man or women who spends ten or twelve years studying and interning to become a doctor. This person takes extraordinarily long time to lay down the foundation for a lifetime career. And partially because we know how long it takes to become a doctor, we hold doctors in the highest esteem of any professional group. We appreciate and admire the sacrifices that they have made in order to be able to practice a profession that is so important to so many of us. We recognize their long time perspectives.
Long Time Perspectives
People with long term perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long, long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years from now.
Short Time Perspectives
People at the lowest levels of society have the shortest time perspectives. They focus primarily on immediate gratification and often engage in behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to lead to negative consequences in the long term. At the very bottom of the social ladder, you find hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. These people think in terms of the next drink or the next fix. Their time perspective is often less than one hour.
Delayed Gratification is the Key to Financial Success
Your ability to practice self-mastery, self-control, and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long time perspective. This attitude is essential to financial achievement of any kind.
Action Exercise
Practice a long term perspective in every area of your life, especially in your financial life but also with your family and your health. Think of where you would ideally like to be in five years and begin today to take steps in that direction.
Prepare for Your Journey
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on October 7, 2010
By Brian Tracy
Preparation is the mark of a professional. Preparation is also the mark of a successful person in any field. As you move upward in any occupation, you will find that the top people spend far more time in preparation than the average person does. The top 10 percent in any field are always more thoroughly prepared in every detail than those who struggle for a living in the same occupation.
Guard Against the Worst
For me, as a professional speaker and seminar leader, the worst thing that could happen would be for my luggage to be lost and for me to arrive without the clothes and seminar materials that I need for my speaking engagement. To guard against this situation, I carry all my essentials on board with me, never out of my sight. Because of this habit of advance planning, I have never had an insurmountable problem because of baggage delays or losses. On the way to your destination, in the achievement of your most important goal, continually ask yourself, What are the worst possible things that can happen? And then guard against them.
Plan for Any Eventuality
The mark of a superior thinker is that he or she assumes that the worst will happen and makes provisions against it. Napoleon Bonaparte was once asked if he believed in luck. He replied, “Yes, I do. I believe in bad luck. I believe I will always have it, and I plan accordingly.”
Refuse to be Passive
My traveling experiences have taught me two things. First, prepare for the worst. No matter what anyone tells you, be prepared for the possibility that he or she will not follow through. Second, be proactive, not passive. Instead of becoming angry or depressed, get busy and get going. Find an alternative. Refuse to accept the current situation if it is not satisfactory. Instead of waiting for things to happen, make things happen.
Prepare a Checklist
Pilots carefully review a checklist prior to every flight. Even if they have flown thousands of hours and have been active pilots for twenty years, they still go through the checklist every single time. You should prepare a checklist as well. No matter how many times you have made the same trip, you should review your checklist once more. Never trust to memory. The failure to check just one critical detail can leave you stranded and maybe even put your destination out of reach. As you proceed toward your personal destinations and struggle toward your goals, the consequences of not following your checklist will not be as severe. But it is not unusual for a business to go broke or a person to lose all his or her money because someone failed to pay attention to a critical detail.
Action Exercise
Get in the habit of making checklists for big and small tasks. Make checklists for travelling and for work related tasks.
Think Like a Millionaire
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on August 18, 2010
Attitude is Everything
The most important attitude for financial success is long-term thinking. Successful people think a long way into the future and they adjust their daily behaviors to assure they achieve their long-term goals. In a longitudinal study done at Harvard University in the 50s and 60s, they studied the reasons for upward socio-economic mobility. They were looking for factors that would predict whether or not an individual or family was going to move upward and be wealthier in the future than in the present.
They studied factors like education, intelligence, being born into the right family, or having the right connections. In every case, they found individuals who had been born with every blessing in life who did poorly. They also found individuals who had been born or come to this country with no advantages at all who had been extremely successful. What was the distinguishing factor?
They finally determined that there was only one key attitude that mattered. They called it “Time Perspective.” Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.
Time Perspective
People with long-time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes. When you spend weeks, months and years developing your skills and ability and expanding your experience in order to be successful, you have long-time perspective. The average professional person has a time perspective of 10, 15 and 20 years.
Begin to see that everything that you are doing today is part of a long-time continuum, at the end of which you are going to be financially independent or financially unfortunate. People with short-time perspective think only about fun and pleasure in the short term. They have what economists call “The inability to delay gratification.” They have an irresistible tendency to spend every single penny they earn and everything that they can borrow.
When you develop long-time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification and to save your money rather than spending it. The combination of long-time perspective and delayed gratification puts you onto the high road to financial independence.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do to develop the attitudes of financially successful people:
First, think long-term about your financial life. Decide exactly how much you want to be worth five years, ten years and twenty years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day.
Second, develop the ability to delay gratification. Instead of buying something on impulse, put off buying decisions for a day, a week or even a month. Decide in advance to “think it over” before you buy anything. This can change the way you spend money almost immediately.
Why Money Is Good
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on August 10, 2010
The way you think about money will determine how much of it you accumulate more than any other factor. Your attitude toward money affects your emotions and your motivations.
Do You Feel That You Have Enough?
In psychology, money is what is called a “deficiency need.” This means that it only motivates you when you feel deficient in it, when you don’t feel that you have enough. Above a certain level, when you feel that you have enough, it is no longer a motivator. Put another way, when you have enough money, you don’t think about it very much. But when you have too little, you think about it all the time.
Determine Your Attitude Toward Money
The effect money has on your emotional life depends on your attitude toward it. If you feel that you have too little, money can become an obsession for you. It can dominate your thinking, feelings and actions. Arguments over money are a major reason for marital breakdown. Problems with money are the primary reason for business failure, the ruination of friendships and psychosomatic illnesses of all kinds. It’s not uncommon for people to even kill themselves over money problems.
Practice the Reality Principle
The Reality Principle applies especially to matters of money. This principle states that, “You must deal with life as it is, not as you wish it were, or could be.” Most people live in a world of partial self-delusion, with regard to money. They wish, hope, and pray about their financial futures while at the same time, deep in their hearts, they know their dre ams will never mat erialize. In Lewis Carroll’s book, Alice in Wonderland, one of the characters says quite happily that he is quite capable of believing several impossible things before breakfast each day. In the same way, many people believe quite impossible things about money and then they wonder why they are having so many financial problems.
Overcome Deep Seated Beliefs
One of the most common obstacles to achieving financial independence is a deep-seated belief that somehow money is wrong and that people who have a lot of it are inherently evil. This belief is not based on any factual foundation. It goes back to early childhood conditioning when the growing child is often told this because of other people’s desire to rationalize away their own financial failures.
Money Is Good
The fact is that money is good. It takes money to buy homes, cars, clothes, food and most of the good things in life. Money has an energy of its own and it is largely attracted to people who treat it well. Money tends to flow toward those people who can use it in the most productive ways to produce valuable goods and services, and who can invest it to create employment and opportunities that benefit others. At the same time, money flows away from those who use it poorly, or who spend it in non-productive ways.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to improve your attitude toward money:
First, be perfectly honest to yourself with regard to money and to the amount you want to acquire in life. Pretending that you don’t care about money when you really do will only make you unhappy.
Second, begin today to think about all the wonderful things that you could have in your life if you had more money. Then, begin to think of all the things that you could do to increase the amount you earn and the amount you keep.
