Two Principles of Financial Success
February 9, 2010
Two Principles for Financial Success
By: Brian Tracy
There are two great principles for achieving financial success. The first principle is what we call the law of attraction. The law of attraction says that you are a living magnet. It says that your thoughts create a force field of energy that radiates out from you and attracts back into your life people and circumstances in harmony with them. Any thought you have, combined with an emotion, positive or negative, radiates out from you and attracts back into your life the people, circumstances, ideas, and opportunities consistent with it.
How to Attract the Success You Desire
Many people feel that this is perhaps the most important of all mental laws. It says that if you have a very clear idea in your mind of your desired goal, to become wealthy, and you can hold that idea in your mind on a continuing basis, you will inevitably draw into your life the resources that you need in order to achieve it. Every person who has become wealthy or successful has become wealthy and successful as a result of holding the idea of wealth and success in their mind long enough and hard enough, until they drew into their lives the resources they needed to accomplish it.
Your World Reflects Your Thoughts
The second principle is called the law of correspondence. This mental law is very powerful. It says, "as within, so without." It says that your outer world is like a mirror that reflects back to you what is going on in your inner world. And this law of correspondence says that everything that happens outside of you corresponds to something that’s going on inside of you. When we say that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world, we mean both at a conscious and at a subconscious level.
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Visualize Your Goals Clearly
If you consciously believe that you have the ability to achieve your goals and you can hold a picture of those goals clearly in your mind long enough and hard enough, eventually your outer world will correspond with it.
Three Reflections of Success
There are three places where we see this law of correspondence. First of all, your outer world of people will correspond exactly with your own attitude. You will always see your attitude reflected back to you in the faces and the behaviors of the people around you. If you have a positive, optimistic attitude, people will respond to you almost immediately, even before you open your mouth, in a positive and cheerful way.
Relationships Show You Who You Are
The second area where we see the law of correspondence is in your relationships. Your relationships will always mirror back to you exactly the kind of a person you are. When you are happy and optimistic and at peace, your relationships will be happy and harmonious and loving. But when your thinking is disrupted or negative for any reason, consciously or unconsciously, this will be immediately reflected in your relationships.
Inner and Outer Wealth
The third place you see the law of correspondence is with regard to your wealth. Your external world of wealth and financial accomplishment will be a mirror image of your inner world of preparation. The only part of the equation that you can control is your conscious thoughts, and if you can keep your conscious thoughts on what you want, on your images of wealth and affluence, eventually your external world of reality and experiences will reflect it back to you.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to apply these principles in your financial life:
First, guard your thoughts carefully. Whatever you think about, combined with the emotions of desire or fear, you will attract into your life. Be sure that you are attracting what you want by continuing to think only about what you want.
Second, keep feeding your mind with new information, ideas and pictures of the person you want to be and the life you want to live. By creating this inner attitude of mind, you change the outer aspects of your reality.
Create Large Chunks of Time
February 5, 2010
Create Large Chunks of Time
By: Brian Tracy
This strategy requires a commitment from you to work at scheduled times on large tasks. Most of the really important work you do requires large chunks of unbroken time to complete. Your ability to create and carve out these blocks of high value, highly productive time, is central to your ability to make a significant contribution to your work and to your life.
Thoughtfulness may be defined as a careful concern for the secondary consequences of each decision and each action. This is the essence of strategic thinking.
Start Immediately on Number One
Successful salespeople set aside a specific time period each day to phone prospects. Rather than procrastinating or delaying on a task that they don’t particularly like, they resolve that they will phone for one solid hour between 10 and 11 AM and they then discipline themselves to follow through on their resolutions.
Many business executives set aside a specific time each day to call customers directly to get feedback.
Create Specific Amounts of Time
Some people allocate specific 30-60 minute time periods each day for exercise. Many people read in the great books 15 minutes each night before retiring. In this way, over time, they eventually read dozens of the best books ever written.
The key to the success of this method of working in specific time segments is for you to plan your day in advance and specifically schedule a fixed time period for a particular activity or task.
You make work appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them. You set aside thirty, sixty and ninety minute time segments that you use to work on and complete important tasks.
Create Preplanned Periods
Many highly productive people schedule specific activities in preplanned time slots all day long. These people build their work lives around accomplishing key tasks one at a time. As a result, they become more and more productive and eventually produce two times, three times and five times as much as the average person.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, organize each day to create large chunks of time you can use for key task completion.
Second, make a written appointment with yourself to work on a key task at a specific time.
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Define Your Career or Business Clearly
Define Your Career or Business Clearly
By Brian Tracy
The first and most important question is: what business am I in? This question is not as simple as it seems. To identify your career or business goals, you must first learn to define your business in terms of what you do for your customer or for your company. Expand the definition of your business so that it is as broad as possible. Never stop with the first answer. Take the first answer to this question and find new applications, new markets, and new definitions for it.
Railroads
For example, at the beginning of the last century, those railroads that defined themselves strictly as railroads—providers of rail transport—failed to see that new technologies and methods of transport, such as trucks and airplanes, were a potential threat to their business. If they had defined themselves instead as movers of goods and people—providers of transportation—their response to the changes in technology might have been different. When you define your business, think in terms of how your products or services affect or interact with the lives and work of other people and organizations. Consider both existing customers, and those customers that you would like to acquire.
Target the Future
The next question to ask is: what business will I be in if things continue the way they are today? Think about your career or business two years from now, then in five years. If you do not change the way you define your work or your business, what kind of work will you be doing? Is it a sound and viable strategy to continue in your current way of working or doing business, or should be looking at changing in some way? Start by imagining what business you could be in. Where would a dramatic change in knowledge or skills, products or services, or industries and markets lead you? To express it another way, if you were willing to take stock of the environment for your career or business and commit to taking action, what business could you be in if you really wanted to be?
Analyze your Market
Take the analysis a step further and thing about what business you should be in. To do this, take a careful and comprehensive self-inventory. Examine your skills, your abilities, your ambitions, your energies, and especially your heart’s desires. Then analyze the market in which your career or business will be operating. Is there a fit? If not, either evaluate the changes you would personally need to make to create the career or business that would flourish in that market, or select a more appropriate market. These questions are among the most important of your life: What changes will you have to make to become the kind of person who can live the life and do the work you would really like to be doing in the future?
Action Exercise
What business are you in? What business could you be in? What business should you be in? What business should you not be in? What actions do you commit to take immediately as a result of insights gained in this blog post?
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The Heart of the Sale
What is selling? In its simplest terms, selling is the process of persuading a person that your product or service is of greater value to him than the price you are asking for it. Our market society is based on the principles of freedom of choice and mutual benefit. Each party enters into a transaction when he feels that he will be better off as a result of the transaction than he would be without it.
Convince the Customer
For the customer to buy your particular product or service, he or she must be convinced, not only that is it the best choice of product or service available, but also that there is no better way for him to spend the equivalent sum of money that it costs. Your job as a salesperson is to convince the customer that these conditions exist and then to elicit a commitment from him to take action on your offer.
The Critical Factor: Risk
The critical factor in selling today is risk. Because of the continuous change, rapid obsolescence, and an uncertain economy, the risk of buying the wrong product or service has become greater than ever before. There are four main factors that contribute to the perception of risk in the mind and hear of the customer.
The first factor that contributes to risk is the size of the sale. The larger the scale, the more money involved, the greater the risk. If a person is buying a package of Lifesavers, the risk of satisfaction or dissatisfaction is insignificant. But if a person is buying a computer system for their company, the risk factor is magnified by hundreds of thousands of times. Whenever you are selling a product that has a high price on it, you must be aware that risk enters into the buyer’s calculations immediately. People Affected by the Decision
The second factor contributing to the perception of risk is the number of people who will be affected by the buying decision. Almost every complex buying decision involves several people. There are people who must use the product or service. There are people who must pay for the product or service. There are people who are dependent of the results expected from the product or service. If a person is extremely sensitive to the opinions of others, this factor alone can cause him or her to put off a buying decision. Length of Life of the Product
The third factor contributing to the perception of risk is the length of life of the product. A product or service that, once installed, is meant to last for several years, generates the feeling of risk. The customer panics and thinks, "What if it doesn’t work and I’m stuck with it." Unfamiliarity
The fourth major risk factor is the customer’s unfamiliarity with you, your company, and your product or service. A first-time buyer, one who has not bought the product or service before, or who has not bought it from you, is often nervous and requires a lot of hand-holding. Anything new or different makes the average customer tense and uneasy. This is why a new product or service, or a new business relationship with your company, has to be presented as a natural extension of what the customer is already doing. Action Exercise
Identify the risks that a customer might find with your product or service. Once you had clearly defined those risks it will be easier to find solutions to them to ease nervous customers.
The Laws of Money
January 22, 2010
The Laws of Money
By Brian Tracy
One of your major goals in life should be financial independence. You must aim to reach the point where you have enough money so that you never have to worry about money again. The good news is that financial independence is easier to achieve today than it has ever been before.
The Law of Abundance
We live in an abundant universe in which there is sufficient money for all who really want it and are willing to obey the laws governing its acquisition. People become wealthy because they decide to become wealthy. People are poor because they have not yet decided to become rich.
The world is full of thousands of people who have had far more difficulties to overcome than you could ever imagine, and they’ve gone on to be successful anyway. So can you.
The Law of Exchange
Money is the medium through which people exchange their labor in the production of goods and services for the goods and services of others. The amount of money you earn is the measure of the value that others place on your contribution. To increase the amount of money you are getting out, you must increase the value of the work that you are putting in.
The Law of Capital
Your most valuable assets, in terms of cash flow, are your physical and mental capital—your earning ability. How much time you put in and how much of yourself you put into that time largely determine your earning ability. Time and money can be either spent or invested. If you invest your time or money in becoming more knowledgeable and better skilled, you can increase your value.
The Law of Time Perspective
The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. 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.
The Law of Saving
Financial freedom comes to people who save 10 percent or more of their income throughout their lifetime. Savings today are what guarantee the security and the possibilities of tomorrow.
The Law of Conservation
It’s not how much you make but how much you keep that determines your financial future. The true measure of how well you are really doing is how much you keep out of the amount that you earn.
The Law of Three
There are three legs to the stool of financial freedom: savings, insurance, and investment. One of your major responsibilities, to yourself and to the people who depend on you, is to build a financial fortress around yourself over the course of your working lifetime. To be fully protected against the unexpected, you require liquid savings equal to two to six months of normal expenses.
The Law of Investing
Investigate before you invest. This is one of the most important of all the laws of money. You should spend at least as much time studying a particular investment as you do earning the money to put into that particular investment. The only thing easy about money is losing it. If you think you can afford to lose a little, you’re going to end up losing a lot. Invest only with experts who have a proven track record of success with their own money.
The Law of Magnetism
The more money you save and accumulate, the more money you attract into your life. The Law of Magnetism has been written about for more than 5,000 years. It explains much about success and failure in every area of life, especially in the financial arena. The more positive emotion you associate with your money, the more opportunities you will attract to acquire even more.
Action Exercise
Take time every day, every week, and every month to reflect on your financial situation and look for ways to deploy your finances more intelligently. The more time you take to think intelligently about your finances, the better decisions you will make and the more money you will have to think about.
