Tracy - Personal Success

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BRIAN TRACY

WHY ARE some people more successful in their careers than others? Why do some people grow and flourish, get promoted more often, move ahead rapidly, and enjoy greater satisfaction in their life and work?

Is the person who earns $250,000 per year ten times smarter, better, or more capable than a person who earns $25,000 per year? Of course not! In a research study, 1,000 adults were given standard IQ tests. The most intelligent person in the sample was only 2.5 times smarter than the least intelligent person in the group. The income difference, however, was astonishing! The highest-paid person in the sample was earning 100 times more than the income of the lowest-paid person in the sample.

Here is another important point. The highest-paid person in the sample was not the most intelligent in terms of IQ. The lowest-paid person in the sample was not the least intelligent. Up to a certain point, intelligence, or raw natural talent, had something to do with the success or lack of success of the individual. But after that, it came down to personal qualities, hard work, continuous learning, and excellent time management.

The Pareto principle states that the top 20 percent of income earners take in 80 percent of the total income in any business or industry. Meanwhile, the bottom 80 percent of income earners share only 20 percent of the total income. Why does this happen?

After many years of research and study, we finally have the answers to these questions. The starting point is called the winning edge concept, which says that small, marginal differences in competence in vital areas can translate into enormous differences in results. This concept also states that small weaknesses in critical areas can, in themselves, be sufficient to keep individuals at low levels of achievement and income, year after year, whether or not they are aware of those weaknesses.

If a horse runs in a horse race and comes in first by a nose, it wins ten times the prize money of the horse that comes in second, by a nose. Does this mean that the horse that comes in first by a nose is ten times faster than the second-place horse? Of course not. Is the winning horse five times faster or 50 percent faster? Is it 10 percent faster? No, the difference between the winners and the losers, the famous champions and the has-beens who are forgotten to history, is only about 3 percent in the critical areas.

In his work on elite performance, K. Anders Ericsson found that the people at the top of any field were characterized by having invested more time over their careers to hone their most important skills, while the others had not.

There is an excellent quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that describes the most successful people of every age:

Those heights by great men, won and kept,

Were not achieved by sudden flight;

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

This book contains twenty-one ideas that you can use to begin developing the key requirements for personal success, while simultaneously ridding yourself of deficiencies that may be holding you back.

This book is based on the Law of Accumulation, which says that everything counts! Everything you do on a day-to-day basis, every decision you make, every action you take or fail to take, accumulates over time and ultimately manifests in your success, or lack thereof.

Consistent application of the ideas in this book can lead you to greater success, faster than you ever imagined possible. Lets begin.

IN 350 BC, at a time when people believed in the gods of Mount Olympus and in luck, coincidences, and random acts of fate, Aristotle postulated his principle of causality. He said that there are no random events. There is a cause-and-effect relationship between everything that happens. Even if we do not know the causes, they do exist.

Everything that happens to you or for you in your life happens for specific causes, which lead to the effects that make up your life as it is today. If you want to change the effects, you must change the causes. If you want to change what you are getting out, you must change what you are putting in.

This Law of Cause and Effect is the foundation law of Western thought. This law underlies and is the granddaddy law of mathematics, science, physics, medicine, technology, business, and warfare.

Natural laws, mental or physical, work 100 percent of the time. It does not matter whether you know about them, agree with them, like them, or whether they are particularly convenient for you at a particular time. They are neutral. They work for everyone, at all times, under all circumstances.

Our main job is to understand them and, especially for the mental laws, conform our behavior to them if we want them to act on our behalf. There are three main mental laws.

The first, the Law of Belief, is the foundation principle of all philosophy, religion, psychology, metaphysics, and success. According to this law, whatever you believe with feeling, with emotion, becomes your reality. Wayne Dyer says, You dont believe what you see; you see what you have already decided to believe.

It doesnt even matter if your belief is true. If you believe it long enough and intensely enough, it becomes true for you, whether it is positive or negative.

The interesting thing about beliefs is that no one is born with them. Everything that you believe today about yourself, other people, and the world you have learned from someone, somehow, at some time. Whatever the source, once you start to believe it, it becomes your truth because it is true for you.

Each person holds two types of beliefs: positive and negative. The very worst of these beliefs in terms of success are self-limiting beliefs. These are beliefs that you have about yourself or your business that limit you, that hold you back, and often undermine all of your hopes for success and achievement. What are yours?

Your negative or self-limiting beliefs are the brakes or barriers to your success, whether or not they are true. And the great discovery is that most of your self-limiting beliefs are not true at all. They are the result of something that someone has said to you, something you read or heard in a class or that you picked up along the way without giving it much thought.

For you to achieve your full potential, you must eliminate the self-limiting beliefs that hold you back. For you to move on to the highway of personal progress and success, you must give up all beliefs that suggest that you may be limited with regard to your intelligence, your creativity, your natural ability, and your personality. You must be willing to give up any idea that may be holding you back from achieving your full potential.