Authors: Brian Tracy
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TAKE ACTION RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE
Theodore Roosevelt once said,
“Do what you can, with what you
have, right where you are.”
This is the key to success.
“Do what you
can, with what you have, right where you are.”
Focus on the present moment and on your current situation.
Don’t wait for things to be “just right.” It is you who will make things just right. By throwing your whole heart into what you are doing every minute, you will open up doors of opportunity that are not now visible to you.
Look around you at this very moment and ask yourself, “What could I do to add value to the most important people in my work life?” What could you do to make things faster, easier, or better for the people who are depending on you? Be proactive rather than reactive. Be the kind of person who reaches out and grabs opportunities, and if you don’t have any opportunities, create them personally through your own efforts.
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MAKE YOURSELF INDISPENSABLE
A secretary in Boca Raton, Florida, told me an interesting story at one of my seminars. She had listened to one of my audio programs on personal achievement. As a result, she had set a goal to increase her income by 50 percent over the coming year from her current income of $1,500 per month. She told me that she didn’t really think it was possible to earn that much more because she was part of a large secretarial pool where salaries were fixed. Everyone made almost exactly the same.
Nonetheless, she decided to look for ways to add value to her boss. She noticed that he spent a lot of time replying to routine ccc_tracy_4_52-76.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 74
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correspondence. One day, she took all of his regular mail and wrote replies to them. She then took the finished letters to him to edit and sign. He was delighted with her work and encouraged her to do more of it. Soon, she was handling 90 percent of his routine correspondence.
She then began to take additional courses to upgrade her skills in word processing, page making, and report preparation. Bit by bit, she began to take his smaller tasks and handle them herself. Each time she took over a smaller task, she freed her boss to work on more important tasks. And he noticed.
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SOWING AND REAPING
After about three months her boss called her in and closed the door.
He said that he really appreciated the work that she was doing for him, and he wanted to increase her pay. He asked her not to tell anyone else so that it didn’t create any waves around the office. He then raised her salary from $1,500 to $1,750 per month.
She thanked him, and continued looking for ways to help him in his job. Three months later, he increased her pay again, and three months later, he increased her salary once more. By the end of the year, she was earning $2,250 per month, a 50 percent increase, while the other secretaries around her were still earning an average of $1,500.
She said it was absolutely amazing what happened when she began to focus all of her energies on adding value to her boss and to her company. And this same strategy can work for you.
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SERVE PEOPLE BETTER
Every job is an opportunity for you to solve problems and to satisfy the needs of other people. Since the problems and needs that people have are unlimited, your opportunities to create value are unlimited as well.
Every fortune begins with an idea to serve people better in some way. Almost all entrepreneurs who start and build successful companies have worked for other organizations where they continually looked for ways to increase their value to the company.
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The primary sources of value, the keys to wealth building, are
time
and
knowledge
. Your job is to continually increase your knowledge so that the value of what you do becomes greater and greater.
Over 400 years ago Francis Bacon said that
knowledge is power
. But this is only partially true. Only when knowledge is applied to some good purpose is it power. Your job is to gather the knowledge that you need so that you can do your job fast and well.
There is a saying in Texas that goes,
“It’s not the size of the dog in
the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
What is most important is not the hours you put in, but the value of the work you put into those hours. Your success is determined by your ability to contribute value to your current job, either as an employee or as an employer, as a company worker or a company owner, that determines your income and your financial future.
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PRODUCE MORE VALUE
In its simplest terms, successful people are
more productive
than unsuccessful people. Successful people have better habits. They dream bigger dreams. They work from written goals. They do what they love to do, and they concentrate on getting better and better at it. They use their natural abilities to the fullest. They are continually generating ideas to solve problems and to achieve company goals.They focus on using every minute of their time to get maximum results.
Above all, they are constantly looking around them for opportunities to add value to everything they do. They have a sense of urgency and a bias for action. They work all the time they work. They develop and maintain a sense of forward momentum. As a result, they soon become
unstoppable
.
ACTION EXERCISES
1.
Identify the most valuable things you do at work. How could you organize your time so that you do more of them?
2.
Resolve today to develop the habit of punctuality. Go on Lombardi time, and start arriving 15 minutes early for appointments.
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3.
Organize your day so that you come in and get started one hour earlier than your co-workers. Work through lunchtime, and stay one hour later.
4.
Work all the time you work. Don’t waste a minute. If someone tries to distract you, say you have to get back to work, and then do it.
5.
Look under your own feet for your personal acres of diamonds, opportunities to add more value right where you are. What could they be?
6.
Resolve today to become financially independent. Become a student of money, wealth accumulation, and wealth creation. Becoming rich is a skill that you can learn.
7.
Begin today to implement the 40 Plus Formula in your daily work life. Work on your job, or work on yourself to get better at what you do, 50 to 60 hours each week. Put yourself on the side of the angels.
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C h 5
a p t e r
Take Charge
of Your Life
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our
doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and
active faith.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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THE GREAT TRUTH
“You can learn anything you need to learn, to accomplish any goal you
can set for yourself.”
This principle offers a way for you to take complete control over your future. When I was young and struggling, failing and frustrated, this principle came along to change my life.
Generally speaking,
no one is smarter than you, and no one is better
than you.
Just because someone is
doing
better than you doesn’t mean that he
is
better than you. It usually means that he has just learned how to succeed in his particular field before you have. And whatever someone else has done, you can probably do as well.
There are few limits.
This is not an easy rule, but it is definitely
simple
. You, too, can learn anything you need to learn to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself.
Once I learned this idea, I was unafraid to change jobs, and even industries. I learned how to sell advertising, investments, automobiles, and office supplies. I worked in real estate sales and leasing,
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and then real estate development. Then I engaged in importation and distribution, then banking, printing, consulting, and eventually speaking, writing, recording, and corporate training.
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LEARN WHAT YOU NEED
Every time I entered into a new field, I went out and learned everything I possibly could about that field, and then applied it as fast as I could. At first, I checked out the books from the local library. Then, I bought my own books and built my own library. I listened to every audiocassette I could buy on the subject, and attended every seminar.
When I was 31, I studied and prepared myself, and then took the entrance exams to get into a major university. I invested several thousand hours of study to get a business degree. I learned the in-tricacies of micro- and macroeconomic theory, statistics, probability theory, management science, and accounting. I studied marketing, management, administration, and strategic planning. I became de-voted to the concept of learning.
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THE GREAT MYSTERY
I thought I had come late to the party, that everyone knew that learning was the key to the future. I was amazed and perplexed to find, when I looked around me, that very few other people were doing what I was doing. Most people, by their own admission, were
“living lives of quiet desperation,” in Thoreau’s words. They were working at jobs they didn’t like, earning salaries far below their potentials, staying in relationships they didn’t enjoy, and living lives that gave them no satisfaction.
I tried to tell them that the way out was
up
. I told anyone who would listen that they could learn anything they needed to learn to achieve any goal they could set for themselves. There were no limits.
But few people seemed to be listening.
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REASONS FOR EVERYTHING
We live in an orderly universe. Everything happens for a reason.
When I found that the people around me didn’t seem to be inter-ccc_tracy_5_77-89.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 79
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ested in changing their situations, I began looking for the reasons underlying their behaviors. And I found them.
Psychologists and scholars have spent many years researching the psychology of success and the psychology of failure. And most of the studies conclude that there are two major mental blocks that hold people back. The first is what Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, in his book,
Learned Optimism
(Knopf, 1990), calls “learned helplessness.” According to his research, this attitude afflicts fully 80 percent of the population to some degree, and for many people it is their major obstacle to success and fulfillment.
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FEELING TRAPPED
As the result of childhood experiences, especially destructive criticism and early failure experiences, people eventually reach the point where they feel helpless to change or to take action in different areas of their lives. The majority of men and women feel overwhelmed by things that seem to happen to them, and the many things going on around them. They feel that there is nothing they can do to influence events or to improve their lives. The most obvious proof that an individual is experiencing learned helplessness is the repeated use of the words “I can’t.”
People feel that they can’t lose weight, can’t get a better job, can’t improve or change their relationships, can’t increase their incomes, can’t upgrade their knowledge and skills, and can’t do many other things that they really want to do. They have tried unsuccessfully so many times in the past that they have come to conclude automatically that there is very little they can do to change the future.
They become passive and accepting of their situations. Their lives consist of getting up in the morning, going to work, socializing a bit, coming home, eating dinner, watching television for four or five hours, and then going off to bed.
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THE TRAP OF COMPLACENCY
The second mental condition that holds people back is called the
“comfort zone.” Human beings are creatures of habit. They begin ccc_tracy_5_77-89.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 80
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an activity of any kind and they soon become comfortable with it.
They then become extremely reluctant to change what they are doing, or change the situation they are in, even if they are not particularly happy or satisfied with it. They become somewhat content and complacent. Eventually, they become afraid to change, for any reason. They get into a rut, and the longer they stay in their rut, the deeper it grows, until they finally give up all hope of ever changing or improving their lives.
Learned helplessness
, in combination with the
comfort zone
, creates a person who feels trapped and helpless, weak and powerless, and unable to take control or to make any real difference in his life.
The individual in this mental state then strives for security rather than opportunity, and often feels like a victim of circumstances over which he has no control.
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NO REAL LIMITS
But the reality is that there are no real limits on what you can accomplish with your life. Within reason, whatever someone else has done, you can do as well. The very fact that you can set a clear goal for yourself means that you probably have the ability to achieve it. Nature does not give you a burning desire for something without also equipping you with the talents and abilities you need to acquire it.
If you think back over your life, you will recall that almost everything that you ever really wanted long enough and hard enough you finally achieved. You are not helpless, and you are not stuck in a rut. Your true potential is limited only by your own imagination and determination.
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OUR BIGGEST ENEMIES
The two factors that contribute most to the feeling of helplessness and the comfort zone are
fear
and
ignorance
. Fear is and always has been your greatest enemy. Fear and self-doubt do more to hold you back from dreaming big dreams, and accomplishing great things, than any other factors.
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It seems that the
less you know
about a subject, the
more fearful
you are of trying something new or different in that area.Your ignorance makes you reluctant to reach out for something better than what you are doing today. Fear and ignorance reinforce each other, growing until they induce in you a form of mental paralysis that leads inevitably to underachievement and failure.
Here is a wonderful discovery. Aggressively
learning
about any subject builds your confidence and diminishes your fear in that area. As your knowledge or skill increases, you soon reach the point where you are ready to take action and make changes. But if you are completely ignorant in a particular area, if you have not read or learned anything about a subject, it will seem too difficult and may even appear overwhelming to you. Your lack of knowledge will make you afraid to take the actions necessary to improve your life in that area.
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NEUTRALIZING YOUR FEARS
The antidotes to fear and ignorance are
desire
and
knowledge
. The only real limitation on what you can accomplish is the level of intensity of your desire. If you really want something badly enough, there are almost no limits on what you can achieve. And the more you learn about any subject, the greater will be your desire to accomplish something in that area. As your knowledge grows, you become more confident in taking the necessary steps to make your goals a reality.