10 Qualities of Influential People

How to Inspire Yourself and Others to Greatnes

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781722505424
• eBook ISBN: 9781722526283
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Bestselling author and world-renowned speaker Brian Tracy teaches readers how to become influential.

A person will only move, change, take an action of any kind, or be influenced if they feel that they are going to be better off afterwards. While influential people come from all income levels, races, genders, backgrounds, and personality styles they do share 10 unique qualities in common:

• Great communicators
• Sincere
• Goal-Oriented
• Well-informed
• Well-prepared
• They love people more than gadgets
• Great integrity
• Well-mannered
• Great Attitude
• They persevere in the face of difficulty

1 The First Quality: Goals

In the introduction, I’ve given an overview of some of the most important principles of influence. Let’s now explore what influential people are like. While they come from all income levels, races, genders, backgrounds, and personality styles, they share ten unique qualities.

Possibly the most important is goal orientation. Influential people are goal-oriented: you cannot imagine a leader without goals.

Influential people come from all income levels, races, genders, backgrounds and personality styles; but they are all goal-oriented.

As of late 2021, there were about 2,755 billionaires in the world. Astonishingly, there are an estimated 20 million millionaires worldwide. In both of these categories, about 87 percent are self-made.

Researchers asked these successful individuals, “Why are you so wealthy? How were you able to make so much money in such a short time?”

The answers were remarkably similar. In the first place, these people said, “I had a clear goal of being financially independent.” They had clear goals and written plans, and they worked very hard—up to sixteen hours a day, five to six days a week—usually for five to seven years.

These individuals also said, “I was willing to try everything.” That’s another quality of self-made entrepreneurial successes: they will try many different things. If one thing doesn’t work, they’ll try something else. If that doesn’t work, they’ll try something else again.

Another characteristic of wealthy individuals who are self-made is that they are willing to take risks. Every so often you have to go all in, like in Texas Hold’em poker, because you have an opportunity with a big upside and a big downside.

The ability to set goals is connected to maturity. Recent research shows that the human brain does not fully develop until the age of twenty-five. At that point, it begins to think in the long term. Before then, the brain is short-term-oriented—immediate gratification, short-term pleasure. The future is fuzzy, vague, unimportant. Only after the age of twenty-five to twenty-seven do people start to set long-term goals.

I myself was twenty-four or twenty-five when I discovered goals, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I couldn’t believe how powerful goals are. It was 1ike driving across country in a strange land and never being able to find your way anywhere, and then discovering and learning how to use road maps. Once I learned to use goals, I realized that you could make much more progress much faster, and more easily and predictably.

When I discovered goals, I was sleeping on the floor of a small one-room apartment, which I shared with someone else. I read an article in an old magazine that said, “If you want to be successful, you have to have goals.” I took a scrap of paper and wrote down ten goals.

Although I lost the paper and the article, I remember the goals, because I wrote down ridiculous ones. Ten days later, I had achieved all of them.

At that time, I was earning $100 a month and just staying alive, so I wrote down a goal to earn $1,000 a month. Because I found a new way to sell, open calls, and close sales, I began to earn that amount. At that point, I was the top salesman in the company, so they made me the manager and had me train everybody else.

Suddenly, my whole life began to change. I became excited about goals, so I got a pad and I began to write them down, as well as lists of things that I could do to achieve them. Then I began to review the lists and do something to achieve my goals each day.

Inspirational speaker Earl Nightingale said that happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal. Whenever you feel yourself moving step by step towards something that’s important to you, you feel happier, you have more energy, and you’re more creative, positive, and influential. As you work and achieve one goal, you start to achieve others as well. As you do, you get more energy and confidence, which causes you to want to set other goals. When you accomplish them, you feel even happier.

Happy people are far more influential than negative people, so a wonderful way to be more influential is to have clear goals. A person who knows what they want, is working toward it every day, and has a feeling of progress is far more impressive and influential than someone who’s just hanging around. When you have goals, you come into the office, your day is planned, and you’re ready to go to work. It makes a big difference.

Today I’m the best-selling author in at least twenty-two languages on how to set and achieve goals. Countless people from all over the world tell me that my audios, videos, and books on goal setting have made them rich. They’d been drifting for years until they read the book or listened to the audio. They followed the instructions and transformed their lives. Their incomes went up, they moved to nicer homes, and they lost weight.

“Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal.” —Earl Nightingale

One of the fastest ways to build self-confidence is to make a list of ten goals that you’d like to achieve in the next year. Then ask yourself, “Which one goal, if I were to achieve it, would have the greatest positive impact on my life?”

How to Accomplish Goals

1. Write down a list of ten goals.
2. Go through the list and determine which is most important.
3. Write down this goal on another piece of paper.
4. Write down ten activities that will help you attain this goal.
5. Pick out the single most important activity that will help you reach your goal.
6. Carry out that activity.
7. Repeat as needed.

Go over the list and pick one goal. Imagine that that goal is guaranteed to be achieved. Write it on a separate piece of paper, along with the things you can do to accomplish it. Then ask, “Of all the things I can do to attain that goal, which one would be the most helpful?”

Now you have your most important goal and your most important activity. You take action on your most important activity, and you work on it every single day. This is a profound life changer. If you follow these instructions, you’ll notice the difference almost instantly. As you work on your goal, you start to attract into your life people, circumstances, ideas, and energy to help move you toward it.

I remember reading a book by the Russian metaphysician P. D. Ouspensky many years ago. It consisted of a series of questions from students and his answers. One student asked, “What should I do in this particular situation? There are so many details, and I’m so confused.”

“What is your aim?” Ouspensky asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What is your aim? What is your ultimate goal? What do you ultimately want to accomplish in this situation, and where do you want to end up?”

“I don’t know. I’m not clear about that.”

“Then I cannot give you any guidance on what your behavior should be. Until you are clear about your aim, it’s impossible to determine the ideal behavior for the moment. You have to be clear about your aim. Your activity then should be anything that moves you in the direction of that aim.”

There’s a story about a traveler who was hiking along a path in ancient Greece. He came across an old man clothed in a white robe, who was sitting on a stone. He said to the old man, “Excuse me. I’ve lost my way, and I wonder if you can tell me how to get to Mount Olympus.”

The old man, who turned out to be the philosopher Socrates, said, “If you really want to get to Mount Olympus, it’s very simple. Just make sure that every step you take is in that direction.”

Do you want to double your productivity and income? Imagine that you have two types of activities. We’ll call them activities number one and number two. Number one activities move you toward the goals that you want to accomplish. Number two activities do not move you toward your goals, or, even worse, move you away from your goals.

Here’s how you can double your productivity, performance, and income: do only number one activities, and refuse to do number two activities. It’s as simple as that.

Before you do anything, ask yourself, “Is this activity moving me towards something that I really want to accomplish, or is it just a distraction?” If this activity is not moving you toward any of your goals, then simply don’t do it and do something that is.

Before you do anything, ask yourself: “Is this activity moving me closer towards something I really want to accomplish, or is it just a distraction?”

If you follow this procedure on a regular basis, in about three days you’ll be spending your time on things that are moving you toward your most important goals in health, wealth, personal success, business, and family life. You’ll also start doing fewer and fewer of the other things. As long as you focus on number one activities, you’re doing good things with your life.

Number two activities give you no pleasure at all. They have no emotional food value. You can do them all day—playing with your email, checking your phone, making calls, talking to your friends, reading the paper—but you get zero nutrition from them. At the end of the day, you’re dissatisfied and stressed. You feel you’ve made no progress at all, and you’re angry with yourself.

When you see yourself making progress on things that are important to you, you feel happy all the time. When you feel happy, you have more energy. When you have more energy, you’re more creative. When you’re more creative, you want to do more of the things that are moving you closer to what is important to you. It’s a very simple technique for doubling your income, and it’s a very good way of guiding your whole life.

This is one of the great success principles: if you want to have a fabulous life, just make sure that everything that you do is consistent with where you want to end up later in life.

A great deal of work has been done over the last twenty-five years on strategic planning. It has shown that knowing where you want to be five years from now dramatically improves short-term decision making. If you know exactly where you want to be in five years, then, every minute of every day, make sure that everything you do moves you in that direction. Not only will you feel a tremendous sense of progress, but you’ll be happy, and you’ll have more energy.

Goals are not merely matters of professional accomplishment. My wife, Barbara, and I decided that our goal was to raise happy, healthy, self-confident children, with high levels of self-confidence and self-esteem, who felt terrific about themselves. We decided that everything we did with our children would harmonize with that long-term goal: we would never do anything that would conflict with it.

We have stuck to that principle ever since our children were born. We’ve taken very good care of them physically, mentally, emotionally. We’ve always been present at their most important events, we’ve always told them how much we love them and believe in them, and we’ve always expressed our confidence in them. If they made mistakes, it was always just forgotten and let go.

One time my son Michael drove my car into a ditch. It had to be pulled out by a massive tow truck. I was out of the country. When I learned about it, I said, “It’s OK. Life goes on.”

Later he told me, “You have no idea how traumatic that was for me. After you had given me your car to drive, the first thing I did was drive it into a ditch, and you never said a word about it. I thought you were going to be furious.” He’d seen all o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Many Faces of Influence
• 1. The First Quality: Goals
• 2. The Second Quality: Integrity
• 3. The Third Quality: Attitude
• 4. The Fourth Quality: Sincerity
• 5. The Fifth Quality: Being Well-Informed
• 6. The Sixth Quality: Preparation
• 7. The Seventh Quality: Loving People
• 8. The Eighth Quality: Communication
• 9. The Ninth Quality: Good Manners
• 10. The Tenth Quality: Perseverance
• Afterword