Million Dollar Habits

Proven Power Practices to Double and Triple Your Income

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781613083734
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

95% of what people think, feel and do, is determined by habits. Habits are ingrained but not unchangeable—new, positive habits can be learned to replace worn-out, ineffective practices with optimal behaviors that can cause dramatic, immediate benefits to the bottom line. In Million Dollar Habits, Tracy teaches readers how to develop the habits of successful men and women so they too can think more effectively, make better decisions, and ultimately double or triple their income. Readers will learn how to organize their finances, increase health and vitality, sustain loving relationships, build financial independence, and take a leadership role to turn visions into reality.

CHAPTER

1

WHERE YOUR HABITS BEGIN

Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength. At first it may be but as the spider’s web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.

—TRYON EDWARDS

YOU ARE EXTRAORDINARY! You came into this world with more talents and abilities than you could ever use. You could not exhaust your full potential if you lived 100 lifetimes.

Your amazing brain has 100 billion cells, each of which is connected to as many as 20,000 other neurons. The possible combinations and permutations of ideas, thoughts, and insights you can generate are equivalent to the number one followed by eight pages of zeros. According to brain expert Tony Buzan, the number of thoughts you can think is greater than all the molecules in the known universe. This means that whatever you have accomplished in your life to this date is only a small fraction of what you are truly capable of achieving.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote, “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” The average person settles for far less than she is truly capable of achieving. Compared with what you could do, everything you have accomplished so far is only a small part of what is truly possible for you.

The challenge is that you come into the world with the most incredible brain, surrounded by unlimited possibilities for success, happiness, and achievement, but you start off with no instruction manual. As a result, you have to figure it all out for yourself. Most people never do. They go through life doing the very best they can, but they never come within shouting distance of doing, having, and being all that is possible for them.

COMING FROM BEHIND

I started off in life with few advantages. My father was not always employed, and my family never seemed to have any money. I began working and paying for my own clothes and expenses when I was ten years old, doing odd jobs around the neighborhood. I hoed weeds, delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, and raked leaves. When I was old enough, I got a job washing dishes in the back of a small hotel. My biggest promotion at that time was moving to washing pots and pans.

I left high school without graduating and worked as a laborer for several years. I worked in sawmills stacking lumber and in the woods slashing brush with a chain saw. I dug ditches and wells. I worked on farms and ranches. I worked in factories and on construction sites. For a time, I was a galley boy on a Norwegian freighter in the North Atlantic. I earned my living by the sweat of my brow.

When I could no longer find work as a laborer, I got a job in straight commission sales, cold-calling from door to door and office to office. For a long time, I was one sale away from homelessness. If I did not make a sale that day and get my commission immediately so I could pay for my room at the boardinghouse, I would have been out on the street. This was not a great way to live.

THE KEY TO SUCCESS

Then one day I began asking the question, “Why are some people more successful than others?” Especially, “Why are some salespeople more successful than others?”

Looking for an answer to that one question, I did something that changed my life and began the formation of a habit that profoundly affected my future. I went and asked the most successful salesman in my company what he was doing differently from me. And he told me. And I did what he told me to do. And my sales went up.

In the Bible, it says, “Ask, and ye shall receive.” I soon developed the habit of asking everyone, in every way possible, for the answers I needed to move ahead more rapidly. I began to read books on selling and put into action what I learned. I listened to audio programs while I walked and, eventually, as I drove around. I attended every sales seminar I could find. I continually asked other successful salespeople for advice. And I developed the habit of immediately acting on any advice or good idea I received or learned.

As a result, and not surprisingly, my sales went up and up, and eventually I surpassed everyone else in my company. Soon, my company made me a sales manager and asked me to recruit and teach other people the same skills that had enabled me to be so successful. Soon, I was recruiting salespeople with newspaper ads, teaching them the sales methods and techniques I had learned, and sending them out to call on prospects and customers. In no time at all, my students began making sales and moving upward and onward in their own lives. Many of those young salespeople are millionaires today.

THE IRON LAW OF THE UNIVERSE

What I learned from this experience was the great law of cause and effect. This is the foundational principle of Western philosophy and modern thought. It says that for every cause, there is an effect. Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by accident. This law says that even if you do not know the reason something happens, there is still an explanation for it.

Here is one of the most important principles of success: If you do what other successful people do, you will eventually get the same results. And if you don’t, you won’t.

Nature is neutral. Nature does not favor one person over another. The Bible says, “[God] sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” When you do the things that other successful people do, over and over again, you will eventually get the same results. It is not a matter of luck, or chance, or accident. It is a matter of law.

This was an extraordinary idea for me. Even today, I am awed by the immensity and power of this simple principle. If you want to be happy, healthy, prosperous, popular, positive, and confident, just find out how other people who are enjoying these benefits got that way and do the same things they do. Think the same thoughts. Feel the same feelings. Take the same actions. And as sure as two plus two makes four, you will eventually get the same results. It is no miracle.

YOU CAN LEARN ANYTHING

Over the years, I have worked in a variety of businesses and industries. I have traveled in 120 countries, learned different languages, and developed various skills. In my 30s, I completed high school and got a business degree from a leading university. In every job and in every situation, I started off by asking, “What are the rules or principles for success in this area?” I then read books, attended courses, and asked everyone I could find for their insights and ideas.

When I became a sales manager, I read every book and article I could find on sales management and applied the ideas and principles I learned to building and directing a successful sales force. When I got into real estate development, I read dozens of books on the subject. Within a year, starting with no money and no contacts, I developed and built a $3 million shopping center and came out owning 25 percent of it.

When I got into the importation and distribution of Japanese automobiles, I again read the books, spoke to the experts, and did my research to find out how to set up a network of dealerships. In the next four years, I established 65 dealerships and imported and sold more than $100 million worth of vehicles.

Over the past 35 years, in my work with more than 1,000 large corporations, my entire focus has been on discovering the reasons for sales, revenues, and profits in each business or industry, and then determining how those principles could be best used to achieve the results of the most successful companies.

When people complimented me on my successes, I eagerly shared with them what I had learned. I told them they too could learn anything they needed to learn to achieve any goal they set for themselves. All they had to do was find out the cause-and-effect relationships in any area of focus and then apply them to their own activities. If they did this, they would soon get the same results as other successful people.

TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE

But instead of taking this advice, most people would nod, smile, and agree and then turn away and go about their day-to-day activities. They would start work at the last possible moment, waste much of the day in idle conversation with co-workers, checking email, social media, and personal business, leave work at the earliest possible time, and then spend their evenings socializing or watching television.

In frustration, I began to study psychology and metaphysics. I eventually learned that there are a series of universal principles and timeless truths that explain much of human success and failure. These principles explain happiness and unhappiness, riches and poverty, health and ill health, and good and poor relationships. They explain why some people have wonderful lives and others do not.

The Law of Control

The first law I discovered was the law of control. This law says, “You feel happy to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life. You feel unhappy to the degree to which you feel you are not in control of your own life.”

Modern psychology calls this “locus of control theory.” Psychologists differentiate between an internal locus of control and an external one. Your locus of control is where you feel the control exists in each area of your life. This location determines your happiness or unhappiness more than any other factor.

For example, if you feel that you are the primary creative force in your own life, that you make your own decisions, and that everything that happens to you is a result of yourself and your own behaviors, you have a solid internal locus of control. As a result, you will feel strong, confident, and happy. You will think with greater clarity and perform at higher levels than the average person.

On the other hand, if you feel that your life is controlled by other factors or people—by your job, your boss, your childhood experiences, your bills, your health, your family, or anything else—you will have an external locus of control. You will feel like a victim. You will feel like a pawn in the hands of fate. You will soon develop what Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania calls “learned helplessness.” You will feel unable to change or improve your situation and will soon develop the habit of blaming others and making excuses for your problems. This type of thinking leads inevitably to anger, frustration, and failure. We will talk more about this later in this chapter.

The Power of Belief

The next law I discovered was the law of belief. This is the basic principle that underlies most religion, psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics. This law says, “Whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality.”

In the New Testament, Jesus says, “According to your faith, be it unto you.” In the Old Testament, it says, “For as he thinketh in his heart [his beliefs], so is he.” Professor William James of Harvard wrote in 1895, “Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

The fact is, you do not believe what you see, but rather, you see what you already believe. Your deeply held beliefs distort your worldview and cause you to see things not the way they are but the way you are.

The worst of all beliefs are self-limiting beliefs. These are beliefs that you have developed throughout your life, usually false, that cause you to believe you are limited in some way. Your negative beliefs soon become habitual ways of thinking. You may believe you lack intelligence, creativity, personality, the ability to speak publicly, the ability to earn a high income, the ability to lose weight, or the ability to achieve your goals. As a result of your self-limiting beliefs, you continually “sell yourself short.” You give up easily in the pursuit of a goal, and—even worse—you tell other people around you that you lack certain qualities or abilities. Your beliefs then become your realities. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”

In developing million-dollar habits, one of the most important steps you can take is to challenge your self-limiting beliefs. You begin...