The Science of Personal Achievement

  CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Brian Tracy CHAPTER 12: Living a Great Life   Part M Persist Longer The final courage you need is the courage to persist longer than anyone else. Persistence is the quality that will ultimately guarantee your success. Your willingness to persist in the face of every adversity can be your greatest asset. It can be the one factor that guarantees your success. If you refuse to quit, you must ultimately succeed. Just as in baseball, you won’t ultimately hit a home run unless you keep on swinging. In 30 years of studying successful people, I have discovered one fact over and over. No one was ever defeated until they accepted defeat as a reality. No one can ever defeat you but yourself. When you discipline yourself to do what you should do, whether you feel like it or not, and you use this inner strength to build high levels of courage and persistence within yourself, you will become an incredibly powerful person. You will soon feel that there is no

CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Brian Tracy CHAPTER 12: Living a Great Life   Part L Face Your Fears You need the courage to turn toward danger continuously. Identify all the fear situations in your life that cause you stress or anxiety today. Decide what the worst possible outcome of each of those situations might be. Resolve to accept the worst, should it occur. And then take action to resolve each of those situations. Refuse to allow a fear situation to remain in your life, dominating your thinking and emotions and holding you back. Practice Zero-Based Thinking You need the courage to practice zero-based thinking continuously in your life. Ask yourself, “Is there anything in my life that, knowing what I now know, I would not get into or start up again today if I had it to do over?” There are situations in every person’s life that, knowing what they now know, they wouldn’t get into again if they had to do it over. If you decide that there is something you wouldn’t get into a

CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Brian Tracy CHAPTER 12: Living a Great Life    Part E FACE THE TRUTH Living in truth means that you face the truth about yourself and the world around you. You face the truth about your work and your relationships. You look yourself directly in the eye and you live consistently with your innermost convictions. You do not play games with yourself or wish and hope that things could be different than they are. Integrity means that you accept that your world can only get better when you get better. No one is going to come along and change things for you.  If you want things to change, you are going to have to make the changes yourself. Integrity means that you accept that your marriage gets better only when you become a better spouse. Your business gets better only when you become a better manager or executive. Your sales results and customers get better only when you become a better salesperson. Your financial life improves only when you become mor

CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Brian Tracy CHAPTER 12: Living a Great Life    Part H THE UNIVERSAL MAXIM There is a wonderful test that you can give yourself on a regular basis to measure whether an act is good or bad, right or wrong. It is simple and you can use it throughout life. It is based on the Universal Maxim of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, postulated more than 200 years ago. He said that you should live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law. In other words, before you make a decision or take an action, imagine that everyone else was going to do exactly the same thing. Imagine that your decision was going to become a law for yourself and everyone else. This is the true test of whether your decision is a good one. It is the true test of a value or behavior. What kind of society would we have if everyone lived and behaved exactly the way you do? Many of the problems in our society would not exist if this test were applied regularly i

CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Brian Tracy CHAPTER 12: Living a Great Life    Part I DO THE THING YOU FEAR A fundamental part of becoming personally powerful requires that you live consistently with the highest values you know, in every area of your life. These virtues and values not only are self-reinforcing, they also are self-rewarding. You get an immediate payoff of inner satisfaction each time you force yourself to do what you know you should do, even when you don’t feel like it. The fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. The antidote to the fear of failure is the courage to take action. Courage is so important as a quality that, like physical fitness, it requires a series of exercises to build it and maintain it. Your best way to develop courage is by facing your fears. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.” When you do the thing that you are afraid of, you take control over both your emot

CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Brian Tracy CHAPTER 12: Living a Great Life    Part F FOCUS ON ADDING VALUE Honesty means that you accept that your income is totally determined by your ability to contribute value to your company and, through your company, to your customers. An individual must generate three dollars of bottom-line profit for every dollar of salary or income that the person earns from the company. If you are not currently generating three dollars of profit or cost savings to the bottom line for your company, your job is a prime candidate for outsourcing, downsizing, or eliminating. Honesty means that you accept this as a fact and then do everything in your power to maintain and increase your value. True honesty means that you never expect to get out more than you put in.You never expect to get something for nothing. You don’t gamble or buy lottery tickets, which in a way is an act of dishonesty. It is an attempt to get something that you have not earned. The tru

CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Brian Tracy CHAPTER 12: Living a Great Life    Part G THE KEY TO SALES SUCCESS In sales, trust is the foundation of all relationships. A person will not buy from you until he or she trusts you completely. All top salespeople invest a good deal of time building high-quality, trusting relationships with their clients before they ever attempt to sell their products or services. An association to which I belong commissioned a $50,000 survey of customers last year.  Since most of our organizations sell forms of training and consulting services that are somewhat similar, they wanted to find out what caused a purchaser to buy from one company and not another. One of the questions they asked the customers was what they were most concerned with in making a buying decision. More than 80 percent of the respondents to the survey said that the honesty and integrity of the salesperson was more important than any other factor. When they asked them what they me