BRIAN TRACY's Game-Changing Secrets to Financial Independence

Key Takeaways

Brian Tracy is one of the legends of personal development. He's the best-selling author of over 70 books and has given over 2,500 seminars and workshops in 100 plus countries. In this exclusive interview with Chris Widener, you'll hear Brian's best advice on the secrets to high-performance thinking, the power of goal setting, and strategies to overcome obstacles and failures. And we got Chris's permission to put it up on our YouTube channel. Enjoy. My guest today is Brian Tracy, one of America's leading authorities on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness. He's a dynamic and inspiring speaker addressing subjects of personal professional development to companies such as IBM, McDonnell Douglas, and the Million Dollar Round Table. He teaches seminars on leadership, self-esteem, goals and strategies, creativity, and practical ideas to get results fast. He's authored many books including Turbo Coach, Million Dollar Habits, and The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success. Welcome, Brian. Thanks, Chris. Good to have you here. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Yeah. You have been a mentor to me through your books and your tapes and millions of other people. And so one of the things that I'm really excited about to have you here, we're going to talk about some of the books and the audio programs and all those principles. Um but as I mentioned in the opening, one of the things that I really like to help people do is see the person behind the personality. Because at your level, most people see you on a stage in front of a thousand, two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand people and they don't get to have this chance, you know, to just sit down with the man, the woman uh who they get to see in these big arenas and the the big seminars and just to sit there and find out about their life. And so I thought it would be interesting for our viewers to find out the person behind the personality. So tell me a little bit about yourself, your your family, where you live, some of those things to help people get to know you a little bit better. Well, I was born in Canada. I was born in Prince Edward Island, which is as close as you can get to uh England without being on a ship. And during the war and uh grew up in Toronto and then my family moved to California. So I grew up in California. And my uh whole experience is American. Uh I I love America. I'm a passionate American patriot. And then my family moved back to uh Vancouver, British Columbia when I was 16. I finished high school there. Uh I didn't finish, but I finished high school. Yeah. Uh worked at laboring jobs for several years and then went traveling. Spent eight years traveling around the world. I've now traveled in 90 countries. I've spoken in 42 countries since I became a speaker. And uh I began asking the question, why is it that some people are more successful than others? And coming from a poor background with no money and high school dropout and digging ditches and washing dishes and all of that stuff, I was really frustrated. I could tell you within a dollar how much money I had in my pocket for several years cuz I had no money. I slept on the ground. I slept in my car, an old car. Um I uh went on unemployment once. I went on welfare once, just once. Uh in those days they didn't encourage you to go on welfare. Mhm. Uh they said, "If we ever see you in here again, you're going to be in big trouble." And I'll tell you, they were mean about it. So went back to work. Uh just should try that a little bit more. Yeah. But uh I finally got into sales. I couldn't get a job in laboring, so I got into sales, straight commission sales, knocking on doors. Getting up in the morning. I used to get up in the morning at 6:00 in the morning. I'd be in the parking lot 7:00 waiting for people to come to work and I'd knock on doors all day long. I say I used to run from place to place so I could be rejected more often. Uh and I remember one month I made 504 calls and no sales. And I just went from place to place. I was just so frustrated and just barely hanging on by my fingernails. Living in a little boarding house, a little room. Um and uh one day I went to the top salesman of my company. And I said um what what are you doing differently from me? He was making 10 times as much as anybody else. And he said, "Well, show me your presentation. I'll critique it for you." I said, "Well, you show me yours and I'll show you mine." Because I didn't know what a presentation was. I was using what I call the blah blah sell. I'd find somebody and go blah blah blah blah blah and so on and and he said, "Well, no no, selling is a logical and orderly process with that you follow if you want to make sales." And he showed me the process. He showed me instead of instead of talking all the time, to ask questions. Find out if the person is a real prospect. Find out to establish rapport. Find out their needs. Present, show our product. Ask answer their questions. Close the sale. Get more sale. I had no idea it was a process. And I was just the light went on. I still remember this day. I can remember when when when I the light went on. Uh you know, there's an old saying, "The more you do what you're doing, the more you get of what you've got." And uh Abraham Maslow used to say, "If if the only tool you have is a hammer, then the whole world looks like a nail." Well, the only tool I had was blah blah. Just going from place to place and going blah blah about my product. He said, "No, no, no, there's a process. It's like a recipe. If you follow the recipe, you can prepare the dish." Now, the breakthrough for me was very simple is that there's a cause and effect relationship with everything. There's a reason everything happens. All business skills are learnable. All sales skills are learnable. All money-making skills are learnable. They're learnable skills. Everybody who has them didn't have them. Now they have them. Well, they had to learn them just like typing with a typewriter or using a cell phone or or reading or writing or anything. They're all learnable skills. And anybody can learn the skills. And anybody right 95% of the population can learn virtually any business or any sales or any money-making skill. Once you've learned the skill, you can use it over and over again. So if you learn the a way to make money, then you can use that over and over again. And each time you use it, you get better at it. And each time you get better, it takes you less time to get the same result. And that's why some people are more successful than others. That's why people go from rags to riches. That's why some people are rich and some other people are poor. People who are rich, how do they usually they they specialized. They found and learned a success skill, success, sales, business, management. Perfect example. The high road to financial success in our society is entrepreneurship, starting and building a business. Uh 70% of adults want to start and build a business. Um 80% of all self-made billionaires come from self-owned businesses. Well, what they find is that most people go broke when they start a business. And the research is exhaustive. You know, all the answers have been found. The reason is because they don't know what they're doing. Mhm. They're flying by the seat of their pants. So they're making things up as they go along and they're running it against the clock until they run out of money and then they go back and work for wages. Mhm. But then you have on the other hand you have serial entrepreneurs. Mhm. Richard Branson is most famous, but you have serial entrepreneurs who start business after business after business. Every one is successful. Start it, build it, sell it. Start it, build it, sell How can this be? It's because they're following a recipe. And if you learn the recipe, you can start one business after another. Because as Richard Branson said, "If you can be successful in one business, you can be successful in any business cuz the principles remain the same." Mhm. Wow. And varied businesses from telephones to airlines to all the businesses he started. Basically, the principles remain the same. What I learned is that you can learn any skill you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. And for for me, coming from so far behind, I thought I was first. Um I was overwhelmed by the thought. And so I went out and I got into sales management. I did I learned how to sell. And I just sold and sold. I couldn't couldn't believe how much I could sell. Within a year I'd gone from living in a boarding house to having apartments in three cities to flying on jets to dining in the best restaurants and never having less than a thousand dollars and twenty dollar bills in my pocket. I had a Swiss bank account. I mean, it was just unbelievable. I couldn't And and and I've gone in literally from 24 to 25. Why? It's because I learned the ways to sell and I practiced it over and over again. I got better and better at it, made more and more sales. Not mysterious. Then I got into sales management. Failed completely. And I realized, "What what what what sales management is very different from sales." So I went back and I spoke to sales managers and I read the books and the articles and I learned how to do it. I learned the recipes and the formulas. There's a there's a principle I learned. I say that all of success is is combinations and recipes and formulas. A combination is like a combination lock. If you have the three numbers and you turn the numbers in sequence, the lock opens. And the lock doesn't care. If you if you do what all the successful people do, then the lock opens for you. If if you don't, the lock doesn't care. I say success is just like a combination lock, but with more numbers. Huh. So just find out the numbers. Turn the numbers in the proper sequence and it opens for you. And that's why people can come to America from 194 different countries now and become successful. Because what the smart ones do, and I've spoken to thousands of them, they get here and they ask around. They look at members of their community who are successful. They say, "How does it work in this country?" They say, "Well, this is this is the combination. This is the formula." Ah. So they follow the formula till they master it. 10 years later, still not speaking English half the time. They've got large businesses. They're millionaires. Their kids are in Harvard and everything else. "Gee, they're sure lucky." They weren't lucky. Yeah. They they could they they never knew these things before. Anyway, so the second thing is is is recipes. And what I say is is a recipe is a combination of ingredients in a certain way. And if anybody has ever developed a favorite recipe, Yeah. then they they got the recipe. They took it home. They got the ingredients and they made it up. Sometimes I'll ask my audience. I say, "How did How did it taste the first time?" Yeah. And they say, "Well, not very good." Now, here's an an important thing. Nothing works the first time. Nothing works the first five or ten times. Sometimes you'll have to work at something for years before it works. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in history took six, seven years. The perfect example, the fax machine. The fax machine was developed at By the way, at the same time that Federal Express was trying to develop an electronic message center. They spent 185 million dollars at Somebody invented a fax machine. And Federal Express wrote off their investment because the fax machine could do it almost at no cost. But it took almost 6 or 7 years before the fax machine hit critical mass. And almost all of us remember "Oh, have you got a fax machine? No, but the people down the hallway do. We can go down and use their fax machine." Remember that? Now kids have fax machines. Well, once it took off, it sold by the tens of millions. It literally transformed the world. Cell phones straggled along. You might used to have to have a whole suitcase for a cell phone. It took 5 or 6 or 7 years and suddenly they got the technology right and the price right. Boom. Personal computers. Each one of these things at a certain point the the IBM best research at IBM said the world market for personal computers is no more than 3 to 400 units. That's what they said in the what 1975-76. So they just walked away from it. Then Apple came along and built their computer in a garage and the world market became 100 million units. So when you start off with a new recipe, it's not going to work. Now what happens when people get a new idea and put it all together and try it out and it doesn't work, they give up. But the person who has tasted a dish, let's say you and I go to a friend's house or a restaurant and they have a really great dish. I say "Can I have this recipe?" I say "Yeah." Take the recipe home and we we try it and it tastes tastes terrible. We say "Wait a minute. We have an advantage. We know this can taste good cuz we have tasted it." We're not positive thinkers. We're not wishing and hoping to do it. We know it's just a matter of going back and looking at the way we mixed it. And they usually call the person who cooked it for them and say "I cooked it but it didn't taste that way." And then they get some help. Yeah. Did you do a little bit of this, do that, that? Did you remember to do this? Or wait for it to let it sit and so on. I have a good friend of one of my clients and he he started off in sales and uh for 6 months he spun his wheels and sold nothing. And then he got a hold of my psychology of selling. And he told me go over lunch because he had he had hired me to address his organization which was 2,000 people live and 85,000 people by satellite. And so we're talking over lunch. He said "You know, you changed my life. You took me from rags to riches. Now he's a very wealthy person, multiple businesses and so on." And he said it was that cause and effect thing in your program. Here I was, I've been selling for 6 months. I couldn't sell anything. I was really desperate. And I was in my 20s, had a family to feed. And then I got that program and listened to it. And it said if you put in the right causes, you'll get the right effects. Well, the effect I wanted was sell it with sales. I wanted to make money. But I must I really I must be I must not be putting in the right causes. So like a recipe, went back and looked at each ingredient. And he said "Oh, I have to do more of this and less of that. I have to say this and that and so on." And he began to change his for sale sales recipe if you like. Within 6 more months he was top in his company. Within 3 more years he was top in the country. Today he's worth about $21 million. Wow. He's very successful. He said that cause and effect. He said "If you just find out what other people have done to achieve the same result, you'll achieve it yourself." Yeah. So the the third thing I talk about is formulas. And and there's a when you say this is a scientific formula, right? This has been this is scientific. The what does that mean? Well, I came across this great concept recently and the word that the scientists use is replicability. It's replicable. If it is a truly scientific formula, I say it may have been developed over many years by geniuses but now it can be used successfully by morons. And when you understand that, that's why you see people I say there's nothing will make you madder than to see somebody dumber than you making more money than you. How could that person be making more money? They're so dumb they can't find their behind with both hands. Well, the answer is they found a scientific formula, a successful we call it a success formula for their particular field. Whether it's running a business or recipe or selling or making money or anything else. I have a good friend we're here in Dallas talking. I have a good friend here in Dallas who heard that you could buy houses and you could accumulate houses by buying them at the proper prices and then financing them and so on. Well, he had just gone broke in a business and he heard about this and he looked at people who were doing it and they did not look like they were Rhodes scholars. And so he said "I'm going to buy 100 houses." And he went out and over the next 3 years he bought and accumulated 100 houses. Now here's what happens. The first house was very hard. He had to look at a lot of houses. He had to do a lot of inspections. He had to The the first one is always hard. First sale is the hardest. You know, the first person you hire as an entrepreneur is the hardest. But then he realized there was a system to this. So he attended a couple of courses and he read the books and learned the system. And then he bought a second house and he was able to finance in and finance out of that. And then a third house. Started off with no money. He said his goal was 100 houses. In 3 years he had 100 houses and about $3 million in equity. He said "Well, it works." And now he can probably drive down a street, see a house for sale, decide instantaneously whether he's going to pick up the phone and get a deal done in a day. Yeah. Because he learned it and it's easy to do for him. But it was hard at the beginning. It was hard at the beginning. He made a lot of mistakes. And and what happens with most people when they make mistakes at the beginning, they think that they may be must be deficient in some way or the system's deficient or the product's deficient. No. This is the price that nature demands for success is you must fail. So all great successes have been great failures. Successful people fail over and over again, whereas unsuccessful people fail once and quit. Reminds me of G.K. Chesterton in speaking he said "It's not that it's been tried and found wanting. It's been found difficult and left untried." Do you think I mean do you think that that's really why most people never achieve that kind of thing? Is because they it gets hard and they just stop? I mean is it is it as simple as that? Well, almost all of us all of us have deep deep down fears of failure. Yeah. And it's the greatest single obstacle to success. And it's very easily triggered. It's very easily triggered by any kind of frustration. Like we're on our way to work and we've got an appointment and the traffic jam. Coming over here today there was a traffic jam on the other side. Car was on fire. They blocked off the entire freeway for 25 miles. Everything was stopped. Well, that person gets on there in the traffic jam and and I'm going to miss the appointment. I'm going to miss the deal. I'm going to miss everything else. Oh, damn. And and they and they they develop what is called learned helplessness. They feel helpless. I can't do anything. Then next time they think "Well, what's the use?" So they don't even bother at all. And eventually I say they they talk themselves in and they talk themselves right out of doing what is necessary for success. Whereas successful people, they say "Okay, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. What's the next thing?" I I was stuck in a traffic jam recently. I was driving along the freeway and it was out in the countryside and and you could see you're driving along about 70-80 miles an hour and suddenly everything all the cars are stopping. You know, you're stopping. You know, you're stopping. Do you realize there's a there's a jam up there and you can't see but you can see way ahead and cars jammed. The other side is whipping along. Yeah. So I'm sitting there and just almost at an off ramp. And uh you're thinking "Well, should I sit in traffic and wait?" And then I saw a couple of guys in pickups, four-wheel drive SUVs going right up the side of the ramp back onto the road. They I mean they were driving off the road, dummy, driving down the the uh the uh the boulevard and right up the ramp and onto the road and getting out and finding another route. And I thought "That's for me." So I So I turned off and I drove and drove and drove and I finally drove all the way around this traffic jam which was about 15-20 miles long. Got back onto the freeway and was empty. Freeways like that. It's like an empty parking lot. And got it for and drove home. Well, I learned later that a semi had turned over and the traffic was backed up for 3 hours. The entire afternoon. It was about 2:00. For the entire afternoon those people who did not move quickly were stopped. Now there's a metaphor there. I mean that's what that's what successful people do in life. If things don't work, they try something else. They move quickly. They don't say "Oh, well, maybe things will get better, you know." The masses just sit there and go "I wonder why we're not moving." That's right. Yes, so you find that entrepreneurs are very fast on their feet. Yeah. You know, the the here in Dallas they made that movie actually it was in Houston Apollo 13 and Eugene Krantz was famous for that line. Where he stands up and he tells everybody he said "Ladies and gentlemen, he said there's people talking about what we will do and how we will explain it if it doesn't work out and they all die." And people are thinking of covering themselves. He said I want to tell you something. Failure is not an option. Yeah. Failure is not an option. And uh that has to be your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, failure is not an option. The the possibility of failure is is not even considered. There will be temporary setbacks and defeats and disappointments. Uh most self-made millionaires have been broke 2.3 times. Broke or nearly broke 2.3 times before they made it. Some of the most successful people in America at one time Henry Ford was the richest man in America. He was bankrupt at the age of 40 third time. Most most amazing story. He just never stopped. And that's the most wonderful thing. If you ask what's the key to the key to success is to become unstoppable. Well, that's one of the amazing things about sitting here with successful people like yourself is I hear it over and over and over. I was born in poverty. You know, Albert Mensah was born in Ghana in a hot, you know, and and I like for the viewers to see everybody saying "I've had obstacles. I had, you know, cancer. I had I was born into poverty." And it it helps people say "Wow, if they can do it, I can do it." Because there's nothing that stops me from that. Now here's here's a couple of great points and I I tell tell this to my my audiences. I say remember this. Nobody is better than you and nobody is smarter than you. Get that out of your head because that is a killer. That's a self-sabotaging idea. You see somebody doing better than you, the natural conclusion is if he or she is doing better then he must be better. No, they're not better than you. They're not smarter than you. They just learned the cause and effect relationships before you did. Some of them are idiots. But what they got and and but but an idiot who's got the right formula will be successful. Whereas a genius who doesn't would drive in a taxi cab at the age of 50. So nobody's smarter than you. Nobody's better than you. You have more intelligence and potential than you could ever use in a hundred lifetimes. It's the the question is if it doesn't work, try something else. And they it's very much like like working out with weights. If you want to build muscle I used to be a bodybuilder. What you do is you pump iron. And pumping iron, what you do is you pump blood into your muscles and it breaks all the capillaries. It actually is an act of destruction. And then your body repairs itself and builds new capillaries around, which is how you build muscles. And it's the same thing with your mind. It's when you have experiences and you have setbacks that are distressing and you learn from them, your mind pumps iron. You get smarter. You become quicker. You become more alert. You become more aware. There's a price that you pay. You can't go from innocence to success in a highly competitive society without getting bruised a bit. It's like someone wants to be a championship boxer just doesn't want to get punched. You know they say everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. Well, everybody wants to be rich but nobody wants to take the poundy that is necessary to be financially independent. Just keep remembering failure is not an option. I'm unstoppable. Nobody's smarter than me. Nobody's better than me. If they're doing better, it's because they figured out the formula before me. But if hundreds of thousands of millions of people America today has 8.2 million millionaires. Almost all of whom are self-made. Uh my daughter was was married in August and my first daughter and four children. Daughter, two boys and a daughter. And married to a wonderful young man. Comes from a good family. Just and so we they just she decided she wanted to have the wedding at our home. And so we sat down and you never want to talk about how much it costs. They won't they won't even tell me afterwards because it's too heartbreaking. I have three daughters so don't tell me that. The cost are only what whatever number they give you at the as the maximum maximum number, multiply it by two. Um anyway, so so so in order to accommodate 160 people, they had this beautiful tent like something out of the Arabian nights and bands and music and sushi bars and and and karaoke and flowers that you cannot believe. Everything and it so we're at this at the wedding reception after the wedding. And my my son-in-law, Christian's husband, his family, they brought the whole family down and they're all in our house from from Los Angeles. It's a 90 90 minute two two hour drive. And they're all standing around and of course there's a lot of you know face here. We want to be able to put on a wonderful wedding for your daughter. And these people are wealthy. They own large businesses and law firms and everything else. So they brought them all down. None of them had ever been there before. They're looking around. It's not a bad house and the wedding is beautiful and everything is what So I'm sitting there talking to two of them, the most successful of them all. And they said this is a beautiful house. Brian and done a wonderful job here. I said, well I can't tell you how happy I am to have be able to do this for my daughter, especially since I started with nothing. And I've made it everything I've done on myself. And And the other person who's in charge of a 102 lawyer law firm with 250 staff supporting the lawyers. Multi multi million. He said, well, I started with nothing too. He said when when I got out of school I had nothing. My family had nothing. The guy next to him is a senior partner. I had nothing. Then they were referring to my my I call my father-in-law. The father of my my son-in-law. Larry started with nothing too. We're talking about everybody started with nothing. Everywhere I go I talk to my best friend, one of my best friends who's got now a real estate fortune about 25 million dollars. He's an immigrant. Came over he started with nothing. I find that this is the story of America. Everybody starts with nothing. People I don't have anything to start off with. Well, join the crowd. Well, and even the people on the Forbes 400, the people who inherited it they got it from somebody who started with nothing. It always is traced back to somebody started with nothing. Yeah, it's and it's the most amazing journey. It's amazing how many self-made billionaires there are. The richest people in America. If you start to look at the richest people in America, I follow this and you follow it. Number one, Bill Gates. Started with nothing. You know, good education, good family but nothing. Self-made. And and and number two, Warren Buffett. Started with nothing. Self-made. Number three, probably Larry Ellison of Oracle. Started with nothing. Michael Dell started with nothing. Paul Allen started with nothing. The next five are the descendants of Sam Walton who started with nothing. Exactly. And at the end he basically was still driving that old blue pickup truck, you know, cuz he didn't need anything. Yeah, I mean just I mean the richest people in our country and most respected. Now here's here's a difference between America and most of the world. I speak all over the world. I speak French, German, Spanish. I speak do all kinds of seminars multiple languages and cultures. But one of the differences in America is that if you started a business and you failed in the business and I meet you for for dinner or socially I say, "How's your business going?" You say, "Well, I went busted. I shut the doors. Went bankrupt." My reaction would be, "Geez, that's amazing. What happened?" "Well, I did this. I didn't do that." "Well, what would you do next time?" "Well, I'd do a little bit of this and this." "What are your plans?" "Well, I'm going to start another business." In other words, in America going bankrupt is not a mark of shame. It's it's a it's a mark of maturity. It's a means it means that you took a chance. You gave it a shot. It didn't work. And everyone you speak to a person who went bankrupt, they're talking about their next business, their next project. In America you can start a business within 24 hours. If you go on the internet, you can do it even faster than that. We have the fastest rate of new business formation of any country in the world. We have the we have the most entrepreneurial country in the world according to the OECD in Paris. We have more people starting more businesses in more areas because you can start a business by just saying I think I will have a business. You and I could say Chris, why why don't we start a business? Okay, and we're in business. We can start We we can start buying and selling before we get any paper signed. He said, "Let's buy some stuff from these guys and sell it." Okay, great. I'll put in some money. You put in some money. We're in business before we walk out of the building. We can do that. That's not possible in 95% of the world's countries. So so so America is wonderful. And if and if we fail, we need to try something else. Yeah. That's the attitude that all successful people have. I always find it interesting, you know, we talk about is America great and all these and the fact is if you if you open the borders up, the earth would tilt off its axis because everybody would rotate over to America because everybody wants to pursue it's the American dream. Nobody talks about the Chinese dream or the European dream. It's the American dream of being able to build your own wealth and and set your own destiny and and that type of thing. Hey there, it's Chris Widener and I hope that you're enjoying this interview that I did with one of the legends of personal development. And if you'd like even more information and great resources from the legends of personal development, all you have to do is click on the link below in the description and I've got a plenty more for you. So with that let's get back to the interview. One of the things I wanted to ask you about knowing you were going to be on the show. I I got a whole list of things that I wanted to talk to you about. Secrets of self-made millionaires. And I know that that's one of your major courses of research. What are some of the the secrets of self-made millionaires? The people who start with nothing like we've been talking about and they end up at the end with a big stash and yeah, millionaires. What what are what are the secrets of that? My book, The Secrets of The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires has just 21 qualities and I won't give you all of them. But they're but they're very simple and and I'm lacking the absence of any one of them can be fatal. I say first of all, dream big dreams. I found that the number one reason that people do not become wealthy is because it never occurs to them that they can become wealthy. It never occurs to them. And so they never say, "Hey, I can become wealthy too." Cuz you've been brought up in a poor background. You associate with people who don't have much money. If you've been broke or you know, have too much month at the end of the money for too long, it'll never dawn on you that it's possible to do it any other way. You you fall into it a negative comfort zone. The number two reason that people don't become successful they never make a decision to. They say, "Oh, I'd like to and I want to and I hope to and I wish to" and so on. But they don't make a decision because if you make a decision that by golly I'm going to do it and you'll find that every successful person is a decisive person. At a certain point they said, "All right, I'm going to do it. I'm going to get in." Here in Texas they have this great card game, Texas Hold'em. Or or yeah, Texas Hold'em. Now in Texas Hold'em, which is one of the most popular games of all this, there's that point in Texas Hold'em where you go all in. Yeah. All the chips in the middle. Now it can be be because you're you're down to your last few chips and you have no choice cuz you can't match anybody else or it can be because you got a great hand but you go all in. They don't play Texas Hold'em in any other country in the world because in America we go all in. If we we make a decision we go all in. If we lose it, then we pick ourselves up and try it again. So that's first one is they is they never never occurs to them. They don't decide to. And then if they do decide to, they procrastinate. And they say, "Well, I'm going to but not yet." They live They They They say, "I first of all I'm going to take a brief vacation to a wonderful fantasy place called Someday Isle." And so they go to Someday Isle. Someday I'll give that a chance. Someday I'll read that book and someday I'll set some goals. Someday I'll live within my means and save some money and so on. And so they live on Someday Isle for the rest of their lives. And so it goes on like that. So I say dream big dreams and just remember and I finished a talk to 800 people just last week and I was talking to them about the strategies of successful entrepreneurs. And at the end of it I said remember this 5% of adults in our society are going to become millionaires. But we don't know who they are. We know that of any hundred adults walking around today at the end of their or halfway through their career, five will be millionaires. But, because of the uncertainty principle, we don't know just exactly which ones they are. I say, "So, let's take this room and let's say not 5% of the people in this room. Let's say 100% of the people in this room are going to be in the 5%. So, I want you to just say these words, 'I am a millionaire.' Everybody say it. 'I am a millionaire.'" And good. Now, from this moment on, make that come true. Mhm. Make it come true. Decide to and take action on it. And everybody was really happy with that concept cuz it never occurred to them to think, "I'm a millionaire." And they probably felt uncomfortable the first time or the first five times that you had them say it. Yeah, and then I said, "Remember, everybody who's rich today was once poor. Everybody at the top was once at the bottom. And nobody's better than you, nobody's smarter than you. So, there's a hundred thousand ways that you could become millionaires." I said before, we have 8.2 million millionaires. That means we have hundreds of thousands and millions of men and women who started with nothing and become millionaires. Uh so, if all of those people can do it, hundreds of thousands and millions of them can do it, then so can you. Just make a decision. And if you took it all away from them and redistributed the wealth to everybody, which some people would love to do. You and I wouldn't agree with that, but skin it all out, give it 20 years, 30 years, what's going to happen? Give it one or two. Give it one or two. Yeah, exactly. It's all going to gravitate right back to those people who learned how to do it. Yeah. It's It's like in in Russia, they gave away, you know, state companies and some companies countries they will What What is the What's the word I'm looking for? They will nationalize or denationalize. They'll take a state bank or a state railroad and they give out shares to everybody. You within a year or two, most of the shares are in the hands of a few people. They bought them all up. Um you know, you were talking about tilting the world on its axis. Um my friend Bill Bennett, who used to be the Secretary of Education, was once asked by a high school student, "What is the How can you tell a good country from a bad country?" He said, "Because we read all these negative things in the paper about America." Right now, America is the most prosperous country in the history of the world. There is more economic opportunity, more possibilities, greater longevity, faster levels of growth, lower levels of unemployment, higher levels of home ownership, and more possibilities than any other country at any other time in human history. This is the best country. This is a This is the dream. This is the golden age that man has dreamed about for years and years and years. And yet, four out of five stories in the press condemn the American economy. The majority of Americans today believe that America is in a recession. They say, "Oh, I'm doing really well, but just read the papers. America's in a recession." It has never been better. Anyway, so they asked Bill Bennett this student asked Bill Bennett, "How can you tell which if a country is a good country or not with everything we read?" He said, "Well, it's very simple." He said, "You use the gate test." And what is the gate test? He said, "You just raise the gate and watch which way the people go." Exactly. It's what you were saying about tilting the axis. You know, we don't even have to raise the gate. I mean, we have to have thousands of people basically almost arm to arm on on the borders to keep people out because everybody wants to come from every country in the world. There's no country in the world people trying to get into. No other country. They're not trying to jam into Germany or France or Russia or China or Japan or anywhere else. Yeah, nobody else has immigration problems. Do you know Do you know that that that America is is the most generous country in the world? Is that we give more in charity nationally and internationally than all the other countries in the world put together? And they say, "Oh, we only give 1.6 1.16% of our gross national product." But they don't realize that in America, most giving is private giving. It's by the tens of billions. You know, the charity alone was last year was $186 billion. And it goes up every single year. No matter how much they change the taxes, people give more and more and more. Tens of millions. Look at the Gates have given what, $46 billion to to charities? We could take in more immigrants legally and about illegally each year than all the rest of the countries in the world put together. People are saying, "Oh, America's this, America's that." Yes, we're the most generous, we're the most open, we're the most giving, the most prosperous society in history. So, you can never underestimate the power of envy. The power of envy to explains almost everything that's happening in our world today. Well, and and I was talking to Albert Mensah at the same table and he said that's what drove him. He was in Ghana. They put up They put a movie, an American movie, up on a side of a building. Right. And he said, "Everybody has shoes in that movie. Everybody They're all wearing shoes." He had never seen a fork before. And and or a spoon. He He didn't They always ate with s p o o n. And and And that's what drives them. They scoop like this. Yeah, they see what what we have and they want to they want to move here because of the American dream. Yeah. But you know, there's there's a a MiG pilot The man flew the Russian MiG out of Russia into Hakodate in Japan many years ago. It was a big big story, big controversy and everything else. Well, they asked him why he defected. He said, well, he he was a colonel in the Soviet Soviet Air Force. He said, well, the they'd taken the movie The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda, and they were playing it all over the country. That was a 30 1935 movie, okay? They were playing it all over the country as though this was an actual depiction of America today. Dust Bowl, starvation, everything else. And people kept going back to see the movie and the Russians thought this was a great propaganda coup. So, people were going back. And then they asked them why. They said, "The poorest people in America have got cars." And they had to pull the movie from every screen in Russia because it would every I want to go to a little place where the poor people have cars. I have a good friend from India who was talking to to a friend of his. He's immigrant here, very successful. So, he had a friend of his in India. He said, "All I ever want to do in my life is is go to America." He said, "Why?" He said, "I want to go to a land where the poor people are fat." [Applause] [Laughter] Which is the which is the case. It's the most most amazing darn thing. Bill Gates was been very generous in speaking to university students. And he was once asked a question which came up several times. So, he asked answered it the same way. He said, "If a person was standing behind a screen and you could only ask him one question, you Bill Gates, richest man in the world, ask him one question. Um uh and the and the and the question to us to determine his economic prospects, okay? What question would you ask?" And he said, "The question is very simple." He said, "What country do you live in?" Cuz if you live in the United States, your economic prospects are better than if you live anywhere else in the world. chances you're you're in the ball game. Yes. And And then he then later on he was piggybacking. They said, "Well, if you could ask him a second question, what would it be?" And he would say, "What is your level of education?" You What country do you live in? What is your level of education? Those two will more predict your success than anything else. Now, when I was in my teens, I failed out of high school. When I was in my 30s, I went back and took an entire MBA program at a leading university. And I didn't learn a damn thing. And and I and I share this with my audience cuz cuz a lot of people have this uncomfortable feeling that they really can't be successful cuz they didn't didn't get a great degree. So, one of the things I emphasize is forget about it. What I discovered and when I was taking the MBA, I do a lot of research, is that two years after you leave school, whatever school you leave, whether it's Harvard or Hugger Mugger University, two years after you leave school and start work, nobody cares about what school you went to for the rest of your life. All they care about is your performance on the job now. And you can get the best education by reading practical stuff, by listening to practical programs, by listening to practical audios and seeing practical DVDs. You can learn more in a few hours with someone like you or I who's been out there in the front trenches sharing really practical stuff than you could in hours and hours and hours at the university. The very best education is self-directed education. And there's a reason for this. If you go to the university, 95% of what they teach you is unusable and you'll forget it by the time you get home after graduation. But if you are learning self-directed, everything you learn you have selected because it will help you now to do your job better. So, you're a self-directed education, if you have the discipline to do it, is worth 10 20 times a university education. So, never let yourself be held back because you feel you lack the formal education. Cuz most of those people with formal education are working for people who dropped out of high school. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of practical stuff, one of the my favorite titles of anything you've ever done, ultimately very practical cuz it has to do with what we do every day. Eat the frog or eat that frog. frog. Eat that frog. Okay, tell us about that cuz I I I think it's just a brilliant title for one thing. It's engaging and intrigue. What is it? Well, it's based on a little story. It says, "If the first thing you do when you get up in the morning is you eat a live frog, then you'll have the pleasure of knowing throughout the day that's probably the worst thing that's going to happen to you all day long." Right. Now, your live frog is your biggest and ugliest task. It's the one that had will make the biggest difference in your life, the one that counts the most, the one has the greatest impact. But it's also the one you're most likely to procrastinate on. So, then there's two corollaries to eating the frog. One is, if uh you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. And the second corollary is, if you have to eat the frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for too long. Just get on with it. So So So, here's the key to success. Uh no, here's one of the great keys to success. Is make a list of everything you have to do each day and go over the list and say, "If I could only do one thing on this list, which one thing would have the greatest positive impact on my life and career?" Put a one next to that. And then say ask the question again, "If I could only do two things, two." And write it down to seven. And then start on number one. And if you can start on number one and discipline yourself to stay at number one until it's finished, you will double your productivity that day. If you do this repeatedly, you will soon develop a habit of starting on number one. You will double your productivity and double it again and double it again and become a great success in life. And if you can't do that, you'll always have to work for someone else who will supervise you and hold your own hold your feet to the fire and make you do it. And so that's the choice is that only 2% of the American population, 2 to 3%, have the ability to discipline themselves to do their most important task and do only that until it's done. And those people make all the money. The top 1% of Americans pay 34.47% of the income taxes because the top 1% make that much money. The top 5% pay, you know, 45%. The top 10% pay 55%. The bottom three point The bottom 50% of Americans pay 3.4% of all the taxes. In other words, they pay nothing. They're off the rolls. That's why they always vote for more taxes than the rich. Right. So I want to talk about another one of your programs which is I'm I'm guessing it's probably your best selling of all time, Psychology of Selling. Is that Well, The Psychology of Selling is the best selling audio program on sales in the history of the world. It's not my best selling because I Psychology of Achievement has sold even more. But Psychology of Selling has been a top seller in 16 languages and 24 countries. And it's the best seller in the English language. It has outsold all other programs ever produced put together. More people have become millionaires listening to Psychology of Selling in sales than any other single influence. So it's it's it's really good. So tell me the principles that are behind it. Obviously it's a multi-CD program, but what are the basic principles of the Psychology of Selling? Well, the starting off principle is this is that top sales people have high self-esteem, which means they like themselves and respect themselves and value themselves. The word is they feel comfortable in their own skin. And when you genuinely like yourself, you you you're not continually preoccupied with what other people might think of you. You just like yourself. So therefore you like other people. And the more you like other people, the more they're like you back and the more they want to buy from you and recommend you to their friends. So that's the starting point of the Psychology of Selling is that 80 to 90% of your success is going to be determined by how well you get along with others, by how much they like you. Because because there's a there's a factor that says that people will not buy from you unless they like you and trust you. And it starts with liking yourself. Yes, it starts with liking yourself. you don't? I mean what There are people out there who who they don't Maybe it's self-confidence. They don't feel confident about themselves. They They They're unsure of themselves. How do you get that? I mean it's it's not something you go, "Well, today I'm going to like myself." Okay, one of the things we teach people to just say continually throughout the day, like lifting weights, is to keep saying, "I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. I like myself." And then we say, "Make other people like themselves." Now the way that you make other people like themselves is you make other people feel important, which is what Dale Carnegie wrote 75 years ago. It's just make people feel important. Make them feel appreciated. Thank them. Congratulate them. Appraise them. Admire them. Be a nice person. Don't argue with them. Just be a nice Just be a genuinely nice person. The number one word to describe the highest paid sales people in every field in America is he or she is a nice person. Why do you buy from that company? Why do you buy from that person? Well, he, she, they, they're nice people. But what about the product? You can get it cheaper somewhere else. You get better Yeah, I I might prefer to go there. They're nice people. They're really nice people. They treat They treat me well. When I phone up, they always treat me well. When When I have a problem, they treat me well. So you find that your your most successful people are nice people, but that niceness is is a