Show Notes

• The importance of self-concept
• Hunger for success
• Easy to do, and easy not to do
• Your new best friend
• The most important part of overcoming obstacles
• “What one task…?”
• The Law of 3
• Where luck comes from
• A simple formula for doubling or tripling your income

Connect With Brian Tracy

✩ Website: https://www.briantracy.com/
✩ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebriantracy
✩ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantracypage
✩ Twitter – https://twitter.com/briantracy
✩ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/briantracyinternational/
✩ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BrianTracySpeaker

Additional Resources

• Book: Eat That Frog
• Book: Focal Point
• Book: Maximum Impact

Summary

Brian Tracy is a world-renowned best-selling author and speaker specializing in personal and professional development. His fast-moving talks and seminars on leadership, sales, personal growth, success, and business strategy are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that empower people to achieve their biggest goals. Brian reveals how to double your income, double your time off, and achieve your goals faster than you ever thought possible.

Full Transcript

Brian Bartes

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.
Brian Tracy is one of the world’s leading experts on success and personal development. As chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, Brian has consulted with more than a thousand companies during his storied career. He is also a keynote speaker and has addressed more than five million people in five thousand talks and seminars throughout the US and Canada and worldwide. Brian is a top selling author of over 70 books on topics including sales, time management, personal development, relationships, and business, and his books have been translated into dozens of languages. He has also written and produced more than 300 audio and video learning programs, including the bestselling “Psychology of Achievement” which has been translated into more than 28 languages. Brian has captivated audiences in over 107 countries on six continents with his profound insights, practical strategies, and unwavering belief in the human potential for greatness. In addition to being a friend, I consider Brian one of the greatest positive influences on my life. It’s truly an honor to have him on the show. Welcome, Brian, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Brian Tracy
Great to be with you, Brian, it’s such a pleasure to be with you. You and I have been friends for over 20 years now and we hit it off at the very moment that we met and it’s never changed from then to now, so I’m very happy to be with you. I hope that I can contribute something to our listeners that maybe they’ve not heard before.

Brian Bartes 

You definitely will. It’s an honor to have you on the show. Brian, you’ve dedicated most of your adult life to the field of success and personal development. Let’s jump right to the chase. What do successful people, high achievers, do that causes them to achieve greater success than anyone else?

Brian Tracy  

Well, it’s very simple. What I learned very early in the game was the idea of the self-concept. And that’s the way that you think about yourself, it’s your combination of your thoughts, your visions, your goals, your mission. Each person has a self-concept, they have a way that they think about themselves and their potential relative to the world. This self-concept is formed from early childhood and it continues to form as you take in new information. Probably the greatest discovery of all is that you become what you think about most of the time. So the question I ask – and you’ve heard – is what do you think about most of the time and whatever it is, you have a tendency to move toward it, and you attract it towards yourself. If you think about becoming wealthy, you’re going to become wealthy; you’re going to have a sense for opportunities to become; you’ve got to read magazines, you’ve got to see little things. I remember one multimillionaire started off with nothing and his goal was to become wealthy. He saw a little ad in a newspaper for imported bicycles. Many years ago we had mostly Schwinn and normal bicycles in the US. Well, these were bicycles manufactured in Europe and they were racing bicycles. So it was a little ad saying, interest in distributing these. So he wrote to them, and they said, sure, so he set up a little store. He began to import these bicycles and it took off. So he opened another bike store, another bike store and within five years he was a millionaire. He had 30-40 bike stores around the country. You think, well, how could somebody do something so unusual? It was because he had set up his mind so it started to attract into his life opportunities that he would never have seen, in the absence of that goal to become wealthy.

Brian Bartes 

You mentioned that that starts at a very early age, how we think about ourselves, the things we think about. I know you didn’t exactly have a privileged life growing up, how did you begin learning about success and what eventually caused you to start writing, speaking, and then devoting your entire career to helping people achieve greater success?

Brian Tracy  

What I started doing is I became hungry for success. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t graduate from high school, I worked at laboring jobs but I began to go to seminars and workshops and when audio programs hit the market back in the 70s, I began to listen to audio programs which were full of success ideas by other people who, just like me, started off with very little. I began to read success books and take notes from those success books. And more than anything else…I’ve got to back up and then come forward…I had a man come up to me at a seminar – we had 2500 people at this really highfalutin seminar in Washington, DC. last month – and he came up and he said, Brian Tracy, you changed my life, you made me rich and he beamed. I said, really? He said, Yes. I said, what was it that made you rich? He said, it was the goals. He said, I never understood the power of goals, almost like cannons going through your life, until I read your material. So I decided to do it. What did it cost me? Nothing. I had already read the book so I wrote down what I wanted. I made a list of everything I needed to do and I organized the list by priorities. Then I began working on the goals. He said my whole life changed forever. Now, the reason I tell that story is that I’ve heard that at least a thousand times, I hear it all over the world, I get letters in multiple languages – I speak French, German, and Spanish so I get letters in those languages, plus, I get letters in other languages. People in my seminars come up to me and they say the same magic words:  you changed my life, you made me rich, you changed my life, you made me rich – it works for everyone. This is the most amazing darn thing. It’s not that it’s a rare occasion; what you do is you decide what you want – you and I have talked about this a lot – decide what you want and then write it down. Then make a list of everything that you can think of that you have to do to achieve it. As you think of new things, add them to a list and then organize the list by priority of all the things; what should I do first, what should I do second, and so on, and then take action. Every single day, do at least one thing that moves you one step closer to your most important goal and it’s quite astonishing. Soon you get into a habit; you get up in the morning, you get into the rhythm of it, you get started thinking, reading, people give you recommendations, people will open doors for you – they won’t even know what your goal is. But because of this law of attraction, you’ll start to attract into your life people, circumstances, ideas, it’s the most wonderful thing. But the starting point is you have to decide exactly what you want to accomplish sometime in the future and write it down. There’s something about writing. When you write things down in the present tense as though they were already a reality, that sets up a force field of energy in the universe that begins to attract into your life everything that you need to make that goal come true.

Brian Bartes 

Brian, goal setting is such a powerful strategy, you teach lots of tools and techniques and strategies for achieving success, none more important than goal setting. As you’re talking, it sounds pretty simple. You write down the things you want, you create a plan for achieving them, break it down into small manageable steps that any of us can do and then you begin doing it. Like if you’re going to go for a walk around the block, you start with the first step, and then the next step, and then the next one after that. But as you were talking, I was thinking about how simple it is and yet how so many people don’t do it. What is it? You’ve been in business for a very long time, you’ve been teaching about personal development, success and achievement for a very long time. It’s one of my frustrations – and maybe it is for you too – that at a time and a place where we know more about goal setting, we know more about personal development, we more know more about success – however we define that, whether we’re talking about business success or career success or relationship success or health or fitness – yet there are so many people not doing those things. Can you speak to that? Does that frustrate you?

Brian Tracy  

Jim Rohn had this wonderful one liner, he said things that are easy to do are easy not to do as well. Sitting, working on your goals each day is easy to do. It’s not as if we’re asking you to sell everything that you own and spend it all on some wonderful process. We’re not asking you to spend a single penny. What I do in my seminars is…I would say to my clients…we have about 30 to 40 people, they would come and spend four days with me, one day every three months. I would take them through a series of exercises. The very first day I would say to them, I guarantee this coaching program. If you don’t double your income and double your time off over the course of the next 12 months, I’ll give you your money back. I charge $5,000 for four days. I include the materials and the workshop and sell it. I had a thousand entrepreneurs go through that program over seven years and not one ever asked for the money back. In fact, what they said was if you start off with the goals, then what happens is your whole life changes. I have something here, which I use, my favorite. This is what I used to hand out. I’d say ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce you to your new best friend, your best friend is a spiral notebook like you would get at school. What you’re going to do is open it up and you’re going to write down ten goals. Write down today’s date and write down ten goals that you’re likely to achieve in the next 12 months. You can write longer term goals, but just for this exercise, make them one year goals and write them in the present tense as though they were already a reality. You see, your subconscious and super-conscious mind can only function on something that is specified in the present tense. So write:  I earn this amount of money, I achieve this net worth, I weigh this number of pounds, I make this level of sales, I live in this kind of home. In other words, be specific and be present tense as though it is a reporting effect. And so I’d hand them out and everybody would fill it out. I said, now, this is your new best friend. Tomorrow morning, when you get up, the first thing you do is you take your workbook and you turn the page and you do it again. But you write down your ten goals without looking back at what you wrote yesterday. You’re going to find that every day the goals will change, the description will change, the order of priority will change. Write down ten goals tomorrow, do the same thing, do this every single day without looking back and do it for 30 days and see what happens. I never had to give a refund because everybody who did this doubled their income within 30 days, sometimes within seven days it was so phenomenal. They couldn’t believe it because now what you’ve done is you’ve taken all your mental powers, which are extraordinary, your brain has a billion cells in it. With these cells, all these cells are focused like a great canon aid. They’re focused on bringing you your most important goals and things start to happen around you that would never have happened if you hadn’t written them down. So as long as I could get people to write down their ten goals, I never had to give them their money back. One hundred percent of them doubled their income and far faster than one year. Most of them doubled their income within 30 days, sometimes, as I said, within seven days. So why is it that people don’t do this? Well, they do it in my coaching program, because everybody else is doing it and they think, well, I have to do it. I mean, I’m sitting here and everybody else is doing it, I might as well do it. Then they see things within a day. They see changes take place, they get phone calls at the break that are surprising. They think well, all right, he may be exaggerating but for 30 days, I can write down my ten goals. So they do and suddenly the nickel drops, oh my god, I can do things that I never dreamed possible. The thing is, just do it. Those are some of my favorite words; just do it.

Brian Bartes  

I love that you say just do it. Another one that I really like is even shorter; action now. Action now, it’s the same concept. That goal setting exercise that you’re talking about is extremely powerful. I’d love to say that I’ve done it since the the day that you introduced it to me; I do it off and on. But one of the things that I’ll add…you said just do it for 30 days, just try it for 30 days. What happens within those 30 days is a couple of things. One, you really develop the habit and the momentum. So just like exercise or healthy eating or anything else that you do for 30 days, you develop the habit of doing that and so you continue that. The other thing that happens is the first couple days those goals change; I think you mentioned that or alluded to it. But by 30 days you hone in on really the very most important goals to you. Then it becomes crystal clear that those are the goals and then you create the action plan around those goals. So you have those things happening; the phone calls that come in, the emails and the opportunities that pour in, and doors that open, and people that cross your path – just because you’ve written them down. But the other thing is that you’re starting, in your own mind, to think about the development of those goals, the achievement of those goals, the plans that you need to make, the steps that you need to take. I think most people understand the concept of goal setting, at least generally and there are a lot of people that set goals but I know one thing that happens is they stumble into obstacles along the way and a lot of people just sort of give up. So they hit the first obstacle, the first stumbling block, and maybe they keep going a little bit, but then they hit another one, and then they just give up on their goals. What was it that Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. So given that obstacles and setbacks are inevitable and you and I know that they are, what are some things that our listeners and viewers can do to overcome those obstacles that we know are going to show up?

Brian Tracy  

Well, the most important thing is your attitude toward it. If you have an obstacle or a setback or a temporary failure or you lose all of your money, what you say is:  this is a very interesting lesson, this lesson has been sent to me to teach me something that will help me to achieve my goal. Nobody is going to achieve a goal that is worthwhile without falling on their face lots of times. The critical thing is what do you do with the setback? And the answer is you analyze it and say, what can I learn from this? What lesson does this contain? You’ll find sometimes…I have one gentleman, a friend of mine, a very wealthy guy today, but he and two of his friends, in their 20s, started a business. They worked really, really hard and it was booming, running along and then they got into problems; they overspent and the business went broke. He moved back in with his mother at the age of 25. Then he did something, which I just love to hear, he sat down with a notebook like this and he said, now what did I learn from this experience? He wrote down everything that he learned and it turned out there was about 20-25 different things that he learned about people, about money, about customers, about trusting others, about accepting a person’s opinion without checking. One of the things, if you’ve been in business for any period of time, there are two words that get burned into your soul. The words are due diligence, due diligence. This is where you check into a business, an opportunity, in depth and carefully and look at it. All intelligent people have at least one negative experience where they just didn’t do their homework. They didn’t do their homework and it bit them in the bum. From then on smart people – the smartest and richest people of all – do their due diligence. They have a series of questions they ask, they have someone else also ask the questions and approach it from a different perspective. Because the time to make the right decision is before you get in so deep that you can’t get out. Due diligence means check your facts. Anybody who wants to sell you a deal wants you to buy it. You have to be very cautious. It may be a good deal but your job is to check every single detail. So anyway, what he did is he sat down, he wrote up all the things he learned and then he went back and started his business again. Within a few years his business was very successful. By the time he was in his 40s he was a multimillionaire. He moved to Palm Springs because he liked to play golf, built a beautiful home on a golf course and he plays golf every day. He retired for the rest of his life. He said that what enabled him to retire was going broke the first time and then doing the analysis and looking at every mistake that he made and making sure it didn’t happen again. He would review those lessons. And I did the same thing. Whenever I hear, see a good idea, I don’t wait until Christmas or next year or vacation or something else, I sit down now and do it now. If somebody gives you a book and says this book changed my life in some area; time management, relationships, kids and so on…by the way, the most important thing that we have in life is our children, our family and our children. When we were raising our children, we read over 30 books on how to raise children well. One book I still remember because I was talking to someone recently, which was called “How to Really Love Your Child” by a child psychologist. That is such a wonderful piece of writing; how to boost their self esteem, how to listen to them, how to ask them questions, how to reinforce them, just how to really love your child. It’s available anywhere for ten bucks and it would totally transform your relationship with your children – just something to throw out there…Why? Because that’s so important. But don’t say, well, that’s a good idea maybe I’ll read that book someday. No, do it now. Do it now. It’s ten dollars for heaven’s sake, why, why, why? You’re not going to go bankrupt if you don’t like the book. But if you really care about your kids – and I’ve read more than 30 books, my wife and I, read more than 30 books on the same subject – this was the best. So I can save you 29 books, just read number 30. I want you to tell you something important. One of the things that I’ve done a lot of writing on is millionaires. I wrote a book a few years ago called “Million Dollar Habits.” There are several books that have been written on habits and they’ve been very popular; my book is better than anything that’s been written. It’s got 12 chapters and it has about 10-12 habits in areas like physical fitness, making more money, building a business, working with people, sales management. There are 12 chapters and an average of 12 lessons per chapter. The book is absolutely excellent, “Million Dollar Habits.” One of the things that people need to do is they need to learn what other people have learned. I wanted to share an idea because one of the [desires] that people have, is they want to become wealthy. I always joke with my friends; my audience is all over the world. I call it the 3-M factor:  Make More Money. I want to make more money. I do talks like this, 60 to 90 minute talks, all over the world, sometimes just in English, sometimes in translation, I do that in every European language. I did one for something like 800,000 entrepreneurs in Europe last month. What happens is there’s translation in the background and they all call into this. I asked the organizer, what would they like me to talk about? They said, all they want is to make more money. I said, okay, let’s talk about making more money. When I was young and poor, I made a decision to become a millionaire, I said. So how do you become a millionaire? Well, the answer is, you have to increase your productivity, your performance, your output, your income by a certain percentage, every day, every week, every month. What I figured out was that if you could increase your performance by half a percent, half a percent a day, five days a week, that’d be two and a half percent, in a month that would be ten percent. What I showed people is…if they talk about the formula, but what they do is they start working on increasing their productivity by half a percent a day, and two and a half percent, ten percent a month, then they start to compound. Einstein said compounding is the greatest power in the universe. So if you start to become just a little bit more productive; you start earlier, you work a little harder, you stay a little later, you upgrade your skills in critical areas, and so on. I’ll tell you one thing that changed my life when I was knocking on doors and selling was, of all the skills that would help me the most what would be the most valuable, and it was closing sales. Closing the sale; no pressure, no tricks, no anything else, just learning how to ask professionally for the customer to buy at the end of the presentation. So I made this a major study. I spent six months, I read everything I could, I sent away for books, and I read them. Closing the sale, which I had been struggling and struggling with, started to get better and better and better. Within the next few years, I increased my income ten times. I began to train other salespeople on how to ask for the order in a professional, friendly, courteous way. They did and their sales went up and up and up. It’s the most amazing darn thing. So one of the questions that you always ask is what one skill, if I was absolutely excellent at it, would have the greatest impact on my income. There’s always one, and it may be closing sales. Some years later, when I decided to speak, I said, what would be a good subject for me to speak on? Closing sales. So I put an ad in the paper, and I said, come to my seminar, I personally guarantee, $95 a person. One hundred people came to the seminar at seven o’clock in the evening. I would get a workbook and I handed it out to them and it just blew them away. They had never heard of the process, of the procedure, the questions that you asked, the relationship that you formed, and so on. That became a book, it became an audio program, became a video program. Literally thousands, maybe millions, of people have been through that program in multiple languages. Because if you can’t close the sale, then what happens is you lose your enthusiasm for calling on people in the first place. If you think that you’re not going to be able to close the sale, then it decreases your motivation to even make calls in the first place. But if you know that you can ask for the sale, you’re out there knocking on doors like a crazy man. So I came up with this idea that if you could increase your productivity, performance and output by twenty five percent per year – very simple formula – times ten years with compounding, you could increase your income ten times. I worked at it myself and I taught it to other people and they did. It’s the most amazing darn thing, that if you just become a little bit better each day and a little bit better each week and a little bit better each month, you start to get better and better. Like physical fitness, you start to go from being unfit to running marathons, you start to go from an average income to earning three, five, ten times what you’ve ever earned in your life before and it’s just natural. So those are the things that I began to teach people. The wonderful thing is, as I taught it to people, I practiced it myself to prove that it worked and if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t teach it. It reminds me of a story by the humorous…what was his name? He said, it’s very simple to make money in the stock market. He said, you buy a stock and when it goes up, you sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it. Have you heard that one?

Brian Bartes  

I have. That’s good. This is all terrific information. I was thinking, I heard somebody say about you – this was years and years ago – that you provide more actionable ideas and content than any other speaker and it’s absolutely true. I think about the things that you’ve shared just during our time together – and we have lots more time – but very simple, easy to apply yet extremely powerful techniques and strategies, so I really appreciate that. Brian, I know one of the big challenges in the world today is attention. We have these distraction devices or phones that everybody has, and they’re attached to us like appendages and they dominate our attention with emails, social media, games, entertainment, that kind of thing so it’s easier than ever to get distracted, which of course causes us to procrastinate on all the important things that you’ve been talking about. What suggestions do you have for helping us to stay focused and increase our productivity, the incremental productivity increases, that you’re talking about, rather than being hampered by activities that cause us to be less productive?

Brian Tracy  
Well, I am the best selling author on time management in the world. I have sold 3.5 million copies in 55 languages in 84 countries so I know a lot about the subject. The publishers like me a lot. I might say I’ve got a book, they can immediately check and see that I have sold millions and millions of copies of my books. And people who’ve read the books…like the gentleman I started talking about earlier read the book. He couldn’t believe how helpful just a single idea would be. Here’s what we know:  50 percent of working time is wasted. It’s wasted on idle chitchat, iPhones, it’s wasted on lunches, it’s wasted on all kinds of things. And the other 50 percent, people work on low value, no value tasks. As a result, at the end of the day, they say, I worked all day long and I didn’t get anything done. There’s an interesting sort of metaphor that I use. When you’re young, you go off to school for the first time and you’re very nervous; kids cry, parents have to hold on to them and so on. Then you go into the classroom and what you see is a whole bunch of other kids. What do you do with other kids? You play, you play. So then very soon, within the second or third day of school you realize that school is a place where you play with all your friends and the teachers have to work on you to keep you focused on learning. So now you’ve walked through school, you get into high school and you start to play different games with your friends. Then you get into university and then you can play unsupervised. Then you get out and you get your first job and you’re nervous. Many people are actually physically ill on the first day of their first job. They actually can’t go to work, they phone in sick, because they’re so nerve wracked. So your first job, you go in and you’re nervous, they introduce you around to the other co-workers and what do you notice? This is like school. What do you do at school? You play, it’s a play time. They say would you like to go out for lunch, go out for drinks? How are you doing? Did you watch this program last night on television? These become your new schoolmates. You start to spend 50 percent of your time playing with your friends. So I tell people stop, realize that work time is not playtime, it’s work time, you can play before and after work, but you don’t play at work. At work, what you do is you get to work. And one of the things I say is leave things off. Leave things off is come, start your work and do your most important task, do one task. And if it takes you an hour or three hours or half a day, put your head down and just work nonstop on one task. If somebody says, how are you doing, you say, I’m doing fine, but I’ve got to get back to work, back to work, back to work, back to work. Send people…why would you want to talk to him or her? They have no future but they’d be very happy to have you go with them and have no future. But you, you focus on getting the work done. I promise you the people who can help you and your career notice whether or not you’re doing the work. They always notice, they notice in the corner of their eye. That’s what gets people promoted. That’s what gets people more important jobs to do. So don’t mess around and play with your friends like school, put your head down and complete your most important task first thing. After that, you can go and take a break and talk to your friends and have some coffee, and then get back to work and hit it. Just hit it. Just keep working on your most important tasks. Imagine that your boss is going to be standing right there at your shoulder watching you work – because your boss is – for some reason, they know exactly who is doing the work. They know exactly who is making a valuable contribution. Do the same thing. Start every day with the most important task. I always say this, imagine that you’re going to be called out of town for a month and you can only complete one task before you are called out of town. What one task would you want to be sure to complete? Whatever it is start on that as soon as you get into the office and work nonstop on that task until it’s done. Then ask if I could only do one more task before I was called out of town for a month, what would be task number two. You hit that and all day long, you keep hitting the most important task. What happens is you start to feel great about yourself. You earn the respect and esteem of all the people who can influence your career. And you earn your own respect and esteem if you’re really good about yourself, you feel valuable. Then you ask yourself, what can I do to upgrade my skills to become even better at what I’m doing? Go to your boss and ask:  these are the most important things I feel I have to do, please organize them by your priority. If I could only do one, which one would you want me to do? If I could only do two, which should be number two? Your boss will love you for this. And surprise, surprise, most bosses haven’t really thought about it that well. If you help them to set priorities on your work, they will really appreciate you. Then they’ll start setting priorities for other people, then they’re going to want to go and have lunch with you and have drinks with you after work, then they’re going to want to talk to you about bigger projects that are coming down the pipe. I know this is true because I did it in my own career starting at the bottom with nothing:  no education, no money. I just got to the top by focusing on the most important thing I could do and I did it nonstop all day long and weekends, if necessary, to get it done. Peter Drucker said the main thing, the main word, in all of business is results. So always be thinking, what are the most important results I can get from my company, whether you own the company or not, and what would be the order of priority. Then you start on your most important task and work at it nonstop; your whole life will change, and you’ll be happy.

Brian Bartes  

So a lot of what you’re talking about is really intentionality, isn’t it. I don’t know if the opposite of intentionality is distraction but I think there are so many people who aren’t doing those things that you were just describing. But if you are intentional, if you are focused, if you have your attention on the most important things, it just seems like you set yourself so far apart from everybody else, especially in a day and age where not only are people playing at work, but more people than ever are working remotely. And who knows what they’re doing when they’re working remotely; probably not working.

Brian Tracy  

Imagine if somebody runs in a race, and it’s a very competitive race and they’re running and they come in first, what do they call that person? Winner, the winner, they call that person the winner. Well, here’s what we know psychologically, whenever you start and complete a task, you actually feel like a winner; you get a jolt of testosterone, endorphins, and dopamine and one other chemical. And each of these all together, makes you feel a little bit high, makes you feel happy, makes you feel powerful, positive. Task completion is like a miracle. Now, if you complete a little task – you wash the dishes after dinner and you look at the kitchen and it’s all cleaned up, it makes you happy, gives you a little buzz, if you like. If you complete a more important task it gives you a bigger buzz. If you complete your most important task without stopping, it gives you a rush and makes you feel happy; it’s called nature’s happy drugs. There’s a wonderful series of studies called positive addiction and you can actually become addicted to these drugs. But these drugs are only positive, they only make you happy and give you energy and make you smarter and more alert. So when you get that rush, you want to do something else. Again, people will remember that if they finish a task late at night, maybe 10, 11 o’clock at night, they finish the task and they feel great and they want to start a new task at 10, 11 o’clock at night because this feeling, this rush that you get. So successful people create an environment where they feel like winners all the time; they start and complete tasks. The more important the tasks they start and complete the louder is the applause from the audience, the more they feel like winners, and they can hardly wait to do another task. You’ll find the best companies – and I worked with IBM more than 30 times back in the beginning of my career, I love IBM – IBM structured their whole work environment so that people were always starting and completing important tasks and being recognized for it and being promoted. Start, complete, recognition, promotion; start, complete, recognition, promotion. People loved working for IBM. IBM actually built cities and everybody in the city would be from IBM. Once they started working they didn’t ever plan to leave for their whole lives because they loved working with IBM and all the other people were working in the same conditions. So they were all happy to be starting and finishing tasks and working with other people and starting and finishing; everybody’s laughing. I remember one case where my clients, they would go to work on the weekends, on Saturdays and Sundays and IBM was really big about vacations and taking time off and getting enough rest and so on. And so they told them you cannot come to work on the weekend, you can work during the week. But they kept sneaking in, they’d sneak in the back doors, they would have somebody inside that would have a key. And so they had to have – believe it or not – they had to have guards watching the building to stop people from coming to work on the weekends because they got so much pleasure out of completing tasks that you couldn’t keep them away. Imagine an environment like that:  highly paid, highly respected, and people love to go to work. Well, when you start to set priorities on your work and you start to start and complete…and this is important. Solzhenitsyn talked about this in one of his books, many people will complete a task to the 95% level and say, well, I’ll get it done tomorrow, I’ll wrap it up tomorrow. No, this is one of the greatest dangers of all, because now you’re developing a negative habit. And the negative habit is non-completion. Task completion is the key to success in life, to finish the task one hundred percent, then you can take a break. And if you do that on a regular basis, it becomes a habit for you to constantly keep yourself up. You’re buoyant, you’re happy. One of the things in my company – and you’ve seen that – is you walk into the company and everybody laughs, it’s a happy place. Everybody that works with us is happy. Why is because their work is structured in such a way that they’re constantly injecting themselves with these positive endorphins. They’re constantly feeling good about themselves. It’s very important for other people to do that themselves. Make a list, set priorities, start with your most important task, and work non-stop until that task is complete. Keep doing this until it becomes an addiction, a positive addiction. This positive addiction will make you not only rich, but it will make you happy, as well.

Brian Bartes  

Absolutely. That’s great. Brian, one of the things that I’ve always admired about you is your commitment to achieving success in every area of life, not just career and financial success – we’ve certainly been talking about that – but also building strong relationships, which you mentioned, with your family and friends, staying healthy and physically fit, and continually growing both personally and professionally and also developing a strong spiritual faith. Brian, there was a time in your life when you were traveling extensively. I know you’ve backed away from that a little bit now but it must have been challenging for you, with the heavy demands of travel and business, to maintain a healthy balance in all of those other areas. I think a lot of our listeners and viewers share that. What advice do you have for people who are in demand in their careers and businesses, they’re in the thick of their career, the thick of their business growth, and find it challenging to devote proper attention to other areas of their lives, which obviously is important too.

Brian Tracy  

There are two words that I was going to share with you, two of my favorite words; one is clarity. Be absolutely clear about the most important things you could be doing. As you know, in my coaching program, I would ask you to make a list of everything that you do in the course of a week or a month. The average person does between 20 and 30 different tasks. Right now, if you look at this list of tasks, and if you were to be called out of town for a month and you could only do one task on the list, which one task would contribute the greatest value to your company? That usually pops out at you quite clearly so put a circle around it. Now what if you could only do two tasks, what would be the second task that would contribute the most value to your company? And go through it. This takes a little bit more effort then you’ll find down here. And then the third question is if you could only do three tasks, what would be number three. I call this the Law of Three. And the Law of Three says that if you have 20 or 30 things to do, and some people have 40 or 50 things that they do, three will be worth 90 percent of everything you do. I told you I worked with IBM and I liked IBM and IBM gotten into trouble in the late 80s. When I started working with them in the mid 80s they had 82 percent of the world market for computers. They were the giant far and away, the other companies were just small companies, incidental. They had 82 percent and then they got into a turbulent storm, they brought in the wrong people, a new president and he brought in the wrong people and so on. The company went just like a boat in an ocean storm. They started to lose money, lose sales, lose everything. The story is quite interesting. They brought in a new president, a man named Lou Gerstner, who worked for RJR Nabisco. They called him the cookie salesman. He said, quite honestly, I don’t know anything about computers. I have never used one. I don’t know how to turn them on but I do know about sales and marketing. He reoriented the company so that the most important people in the company were once more the salespeople, everything was focused on the salespeople and the sales managers. He introduced the Law of Three. He said, have every single person and every single manager use the Law of Three every day. They would ask them, what are you doing, how are you doing it, how’s it going, what are your three biggest tasks and are you working on them? And within a year, the company went from losing billions to earning billions and came back up to world championship. But the critical thing was the Law of Three. It’s one of the most important principles for success in life; what are your three biggest and most important tasks and whatever they are, write them down. It’s one, two, and three and then you start with number one. You do number one until it’s on hundred percent complete. It doesn’t sound very complicated but it’s life transforming, it’s business transforming. The biggest and best companies in the world have discovered that; keep everybody focused and rewarded and encouraged and praised and everything for doing tasks number one, number two, and number three.

Brian Bartes  

How can we apply those concepts to other areas of life? We apply that in business and that helps us with our careers or with business success. How can we make sure that we’re giving sufficient attention to other areas of life like our family, our health, fitness, relationships, faith, those areas?

Brian Tracy  

Well, what I have discovered is that my family, my wife and children, are number one for me. It’s never been different. I’ve never wondered, I’ve never compromised, they’re always number one. Whenever there’s a choice between a member of my family and my work, the member of the family takes precedence. I know that and they know that. Therefore, if I have to be away, they know they’re more important than anything but I have to be away on occasion because of my work. So my kids and my wife are completely content because they know that they come first, and that’s the starting point of a really great life. Then the second part, of course, your spiritual life. What Barbara and I started doing many years ago is reading one to two hours every day in spiritual material and that had an enormously powerful positive effect on our lives. We’d get up every morning and read spiritually and then our kids started to get up and read spiritually. Our house became a reading house. We had a rule – and this is back in the days when people went to bookstores all the time – we would go to bookstores and there was never a budget for books, you can buy any book or any number of books that you want, every time we go. They always ran to the book department that was age appropriate and they would buy books and buy books and order books. Each one of them had a library of more than 300 books. They would buy their books and read their books, sometimes they would voluntarily turn off the television and just read and that’s a wonderful thing.

Brian Bartes 

I’m smiling as you say that because I know you’ve always been a voracious reader for as long as I’ve known you, and an active learner. With the world evolving as fast as it is, faster than ever before, how important is continuous learning and personal and professional development?

Brian Tracy  

Well, the fact is that you accomplish on the outside that which you’re prepared for on the inside and if you haven’t prepared yourself on the inside, you will not get an opportunity to use your non-existent knowledge. I learned this studying the metaphysics – in fact I’m re-reading them now – you will never learn something new without somehow getting a chance to use that new material. There’s something in the universe that sets up a force field of energy that brings into your life opportunities to learn the new material. So you could be reading something in an airline magazine on a plane and within a few days, something’s going to happen, that new piece of information is going to have a place in your life. It’s going to be easy. I just read about that the other day, it’s the most amazing darn thing; you’ll never learn something without getting a chance to use it. The more things you learn, the more opportunities you will get to use more things and then they will cross fertilize each other, then you’ll learn more things and more things. Then you’ll start to get referrals and people will…I wrote a book called “The Luck Factor” and I recorded the book. It’s a great book because all of these…where does luck come from? One of the things that I found in my research is that often great luck comes from a chance meeting with a stranger. You’re chatting with them and you ask them a question or they ask you a question. Have you ever thought about this or thought about that? And that is an insight that for the rest of your life you remember that time where you spoke to that person at the bus stop and your life is different ever after. So the more you expose yourself to opportunities to learn, the more likely it is you’re going to expose yourself to something that can change your life.

Brian Bartes  

That’s terrific. Brian, I know you’re in your 70s now, I know your travel schedule has slowed down, although you’ve told stories of recent speaking engagements and I think a lot of those are online – thankfully, that’s maybe one good thing that’s come out of COVID is the ability to do so much more online to broadcast all over the world. You’re still actively engaged in your business, I know you’re speaking all the time, you’re doing shows like this, you still have occasional events in San Diego. What keeps you going, what drives you?

Brian Tracy  

I love my work. I think that, all my life I had the good fortune of doing stuff that I love to do with people like yourself who I really enjoy. Whenever you and I have a chance to get together, it’s always friendly, it’s enjoyable, it’s spontaneous. The people that I work with who are interested in learning and growing and becoming better and being more successful – which has been my major field of study for 50 years – they’re a great pleasure to be with. These are our people. These are the people that believe in the things that we believe in and are working toward the things that we work for. Then you want to share ideas because if you really like your ideas, you want to share them with others so others can take these ideas and use them as well. So it’s a great pleasure, it’s not even work really, if you’re in this kind of a field or any field that is right for you. It’s more of a joy than it is hard labor.

Brian Bartes  

It’s incredibly rewarding, isn’t it. Brian, I appreciate you very much, you know that. I’m so incredibly grateful for our time together today. What final thoughts or advice would you like to share with our listeners and viewers who are on their success journey?

Brian Tracy  

Well, I would go back to make more money. There’s a very simple formula that I have taught over the years and if you practice this formula, you will make more money, you will double and triple your income, and far faster than you can imagine. It’s very simple; write down ten goals that you’d like to accomplish in the next 12 months or so. Then go over that and say if I can only accomplish one goal on this list, which one goal would have the most positive effect on my life? I have all these goals, just pick one. It’ll usually jump out at you, solve your major problem, deal with your major worry, or answer your major ambition, but it will jump out at you. Put that right at the top of a clean piece of paper. Now, what are all the things that I could do, and what is my date of completion for this, when do I want to accomplish it? You should have a goal achievable within 12 months. Then the third part is how will I measure it? How will I know I have achieved that goal. You pick the goal, you write it down, set a deadline and make it measurable. If all you do is those three your life will change just almost overnight, things will start to happen; the phone will ring, it’s just miraculous. Step number four is make a list of everything that you can think of to achieve the goal. As you think of new things, keep writing them on the list and keep writing until you can’t think of anything more. This may take a few days, may take a week or a month. But just keep going back to that list. If you get a new idea, write it down, write it down. Then step number five is organize the list by priority. What should I do first, what should I do second, what should I do third; organize the list like a plan. There’s a book, by the way, called “The Checklist Manifesto.” A wonderful book. Have you heard of that?

Brian Bartes 

Yes, I have, very good.

Brian Tracy  

By Atul Gawande, a doctor. It is simple, short. What it says is everything in life is done by checklist. The way that you can dramatically increase the speed and the quality of your results is making a list, a checklist of everything you need to do, in sequence. So now you’ve got your list and you’ll organize it; what do I need to do first, second, third, and so on. Step number six is take action on your list. Now it’s time to put the pedal to the metal, as we used to say. Now, take action on your list. And step number seven, which is the most important of all, is do something every day that moves you at least one step toward achieving your most important goal. So therefore, write it down, set a deadline, make it measurable, make a list of everything you need to do, organize this by priority. Number six is to take action on your list and number seven is do something every day. That sounds very simple, but it is life transforming. Every time you do one step or take one step towards your goal it’s like winning in front of a large audience – the cheers. The cheers are endorphins and all kinds of dopamine which has caused you to feel wonderful about yourself and motivate you to do it more and motivate you to do it more. Pretty soon you become a goal achieving machine. You just get up in the morning and you think about what you’re going to accomplish today and you can hardly wait to get started.

Brian Bartes

This has been awesome. For our listeners and viewers, I encourage you to go back and either listen to this again and again and again or watch it again and again and again. You can get the transcript in the show notes and take notes, and most importantly, take action. If you do the things that Brian has shared today, I promise you that you will achieve more success than you ever thought was imaginable. He’s written over 70 books, the ones that he mentioned, “Million Dollar Habit” is great. “Eat That Frog” is a great book. I love “Focal Point,” but any book that Brian has written is just chock full of tools and techniques and strategies to achieve success in every area of life. Brian, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s great to see you as always. I appreciate the strategies that you’ve shared today that will help all of us to achieve greater success in every area of life. Thanks, my friend.

Brian Tracy  

Thank you, Brian.

Brian Bartes 

Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Brian Tracy on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.