Get it Done Now!

Own Your Time, Take Back Your Life

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781722522674
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Food Industry
• Index: Business

While productivity and time management expert Brian Tracy has been writing bestselling books and giving seminars on these topics for well over thirty years, the challenge of remaining optimally productive in our modern world has never been greater. How can this be? We live in the most technologically advanced period of history in the most technologically advanced country. With the advent of mobile phones, killer apps, internet speeds that stagger the imagination, and nearly any bit of information, products, and solutions only one click away, how can it be that remaining optimally productive is such a challenge for so many?In a word: DISTRACTION. Many of us spend precious time focusing on the inces¬sant e-mails, texts, notifications, ads, etc. that seem important-even urgent-to our success and happiness, but, in reality, only complicate our lives and take us even further from our goals.Brian addresses this challenge of distraction in its many forms and shows you how to feed your focuson a daily basis. You will learn:

• Productivity Promises and Pitfalls in our Modern Age
• The Psychology of Productivity
• The Best Productivity Methods Ever Conceived
• How to End Procrastination Once and For All
• Productivity and Relationships: Where it Applies and Where It Doesn't

Look for these other books by BRIAN TRACY

• Entrepreneurship
• Make More Money
• The Science of Influence
• The Science of Money
• The Science of Motivation

Chapter One

Productivity: Promises and Pitfalls

Productivity is the ability to get results—results that help other people, change their lives, and help them get results as well. The great tragedy today is that people take as little schooling as they can. They take the easiest courses possible, get average grades—just enough to get through—and fail to continually upgrade their ability to get results that people will pay them for.

Here I want to give people mental and physical tools that they can use to get better results faster. As a result, they will earn more money, be promoted faster, and—best of all—feel wonderful about themselves. You shouldn’t be productive just for money or to please your boss. You ought to be productive because you’ll feel happy.

We want to get results for others. Many years ago, an old acquaintance, motivational teacher Earl Nightingale, said that your rewards in life will be in direct proportion to the results that you get for other people. We always get what we deserve, he said: you never get more or less than you deserve. Many people’s lives are ruined because they’re trying to get more out than they put in. They’re trying to get more than they deserve. Earl said the word deserve comes from the Latin deservire, which is derived from servire: to serve. You get what you get from serving other people in some way.

People ask me, “How can I earn more money? How can I get ahead faster?”

I say, “You must focus single-mindedly all day, every day, on serving other people better, on upgrading your knowledge and skills so that you can help people achieve their goals, fulfill their promise, overcome their obstacles, and solve their problems. You must always be thinking about serving other people.” That is productivity.

Many people think that work is a punishment that you have to suffer to get through life. People who have this belief are always at the financial bottom of society. They earn less than others, they are often unemployed, and they are very seldom promoted. The fact is that work is what fulfills us as individuals. Our job is to find the kind of work that we most like.

Many years ago, Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work another day in your life. One of your most important responsibilities is to dream big dreams and do what you love to do. This is your responsibility.

When I was an executive, I had people come to me and say, “I’m thirty-five years old. I’m not going anywhere in my life. Can you help me? Can you guide me? Can you take me into your company and give me the training and support I need to do good work and get paid?”

I’d say, “Nobody can do this for you but you.” It’s like being a good parent. You can’t farm it out. It’s only you—face-to-face, head-to-head, knee-to-knee, heart-to-heart with the members of your family—who can be a good husband or a good parent. There’s no other way to do it.

Therefore your job is to find something that you enjoy doing. If you could do anything that you wanted for work in the whole world, what would it be, and how would it be different from what you’re doing today? If you are not now doing what you love to do, then you have to pull back and say, “If I don’t love this, what would I love?”

Many people say, “I don’t love my work right now, so I should find something else.” No, wait. You only love your work, you’re only productive at your work, when you’re doing something that you’re good at. Therefore your job is to become very good at what you do. Never give up what you’re doing just because you’re mediocre, because sometimes just one step further you will break through and you will do your work well. Suddenly all the lights go on, and you feel happy and can hardly wait to get to work.

Successful people are always self-disciplined. They discipline themselves to start early, work harder, stay later, get more done. You have to discipline them not to work, to do things that other people think are fun, because work is their way of fulfilling themselves. Their work, their ability to produce results, is what makes them feel happy about being alive.

Let me share a little about my own experience. When I started off in sales, I would get up at 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning, and I would go to work at 7:00 or 7:30. I would knock on doors. I didn’t have a car, so I would have to take a bus into the city, and I’d knock on doors hour after hour. In the evenings, I would go out and knock on doors in the neighborhoods, in the apartments, and in the homes.

I didn’t make my first sale, and it was a small sale, until thirty days after I started selling. After that, I made one or two sales a week. I didn’t earn very much, and I struggled. I found that when you are not very good at what you do, you associate with other people who aren’t very good either. Pretty soon you develop a worldview that this is the way it is. Nobody does well, sales are hard, and it will only be hard.

Then one day I asked a successful salesperson what advice he could give me. He was earning ten times as much as anybody else in our company. He was earning more, and he didn’t even seem to be working very hard. He’d start at 9:00 in the morning, and he’d quit at 5:00 or 5:30. He went to nice restaurants, and he had a pocket full of money, and here I was, working away, slogging, and taking the bus.

“Well,” he said, “have you ever read any books on selling?”

Now I’m a reader; I like to read. I said, “Are there books on selling?”

“Yes,” he said, “some of the best salespeople in the world have written some great books.”

I couldn’t believe it. I went down to the bookstore immediately. There were dozens and dozens of books on sales that had been written by top salespeople, who had gone from rags to riches. I bought my first book on selling.

I clutched it to me. I took it home. It was called Making Sales Faster, or something like that. I took it home, and I read it. Here was a man with thirty years of experience, who’d worked his way up into senior management, where he recruited and trained and managed large sales forces, and he was telling me how to do it.

Where do you start? Whom do you contact? How do you contact them? What do you say when you meet with them? How do you follow up? How do you position yourself against your competition, and so on?

I couldn’t believe it. I felt I’d died and gone to heaven. I began to read and read, and my sales started to go up. I started to become happier. I started to make more money, and people started to look at me as if I were smoking something or drinking some kind of elixir.

Then I said to myself, “Of all the sales skills that I would need to be more successful, what would be the most important?” It’s closing the sale.

I was no longer afraid to knock on doors and talk to people. Sometimes I talked too much, and too fast. I learned later when you meet a customer, you don’t talk and talk. You ask questions, and you listen carefully to the answers. You look for ways of helping this customer improve the quality of their life or work.

You keep asking questions, and then you show that your product or service would be ideal for this customer. You show how you can help your customer get better results, be more productive, or get more out of life and more income out of their work or business.

I realized, however, that closing the sales was the problem. I would get right to the final point, and I’d just be paralyzed. I was like a deer in the headlights.

So I said, “All right. I’m going to learn about closing sales.” I went down to the bookstore, and I looked at every book I could on how to close a sale. I took these books home, and I studied hour after hour in the evenings and mornings and weekends about how to close a sale.

Within a month, my income had gone up four or five times. Within a year, it had gone up ten times, because I learned a variety of ways to ask for the order. Not one of these ways was manipulative or high-pressure or grinding the person down. They were just helpful, intelligent ways of asking questions to help the person make a buying decision.

I then began to teach other people what I had learned, and their sales went up and up and up. Pretty soon, I was a sales manager, and I began to recruit other salespeople. I taught them the basic sales process and showed them how to ask for the order. I have made more people into millionaires over the years by helping them to sell well and then ask for the order than maybe anybody else in history. My books are now in thirty or forty languages. They’ve been used by millions of salespeople. At the audio company Nightingale-Conant, my friend Vic Conant told me that they had done a survey and found that more people had become millionaires using my materials in selling than any other sales influence. I’m not surprised, because it made me a millionaire as well.

So it will work for you. Here’s another thing: all sales skills are learnable. People at the top of their field in sales will tell you that when they started off, they were terrible. They couldn’t sell. They starved. They lived out of their cars, or they slept on the floor of their friends’ apartments.

Then they learned the skill. Any skill that anyone else has learned, you can learn as well. This is one of the most wonderful things about productivity: you have the ability to be five and ten times as productive as you are today, and the skills are very simple and straightforward. How do we know? Because you are surrounded by people who are earning vastly more than you are. When they started off, they were earning vastly less than you are, but they learned some of the skills that I’ll talk about in this book. They learned these skills, and they practiced them over and over.

Everything at the beginning is difficult, but when you work at it, it becomes easy and automatic. We will make high productivity easy and automatic.

Today, if you offered me $1,000 an hour to work for you, I would have to decline. I’d say, “I’m sorry. I book my time out for much more than that. I would like to help you, but I just don’t work at that rate.” At one time, my first job paid $1.12 an hour. If you had offered me $5 an hour, I would have asked, “Who do I have to kill to get $5 an hour?”

Today I wouldn’t accept $1,000. I know countless people for whom $1,000 an hour is of no interest because they earn so much more. But when they started, they started with nothing; they started off at the bottom.

The most important thing is to make a decision. Make a decision about how much money you want to earn. Make a decision about what you’re going to have to do to earn that money. Make a decision about what skill you’re going to have to master. Make a decision about how you’re going to organize your time and your life in order to get the results that will cause people to happily pay you the kind of money that you want to earn.

Angela Duckworth’s book Grit says the most important quality of successful people is that they have determination. No matter how many disappointments they have, they just pick themselves up, and they just keep working. They just keep pushing forward every hour of every day. No matter how many times they’re set back, they bounce back. Similarly, successful people select skills that they need to master, and they deliberately practice those skills all the time. One of the success secrets of self-made millionaires and billionaires is that they started developing one skill at a time.

Furthermore, every one of these millionaires gets up early in the morning. You’ll find it repeated over and over again: successful people get up at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. The average self-made millionaire gets up before 6:00 a.m.

I made that decision years ago. I set my mental clock, so I can see my clock from my bed. When it gets to be five minutes to 6:00, I get up. I get up and get moving, almost as if the house is on fire. I get up, I start moving, and I start the day with physical exercise. Because I live in the San Diego area, most of the year I can get up, go downstairs, throw myself in the pool, and thrash back and forth ten or twenty times.

When I was buying this house years ago, I wanted a house that had a ten-stroke pool. I looked at a lot of houses. I finally found this one, and I paced off the pool from corner to corner: ten strokes.

So I go in and do fifty strokes, five laps back and forth. When you’ve done fifty strokes, you are wide awake. Less than twenty minutes have passed, and you are charged for the entire day.

Then wealthy people study for sixty to ninety minutes. They’re conscientious about studying all the time. They’re always reading. Who do you think buys and reads all these books? It’s not poor people.

If you go into a rich person’s house, you see books everywhere. I was talking to a successful real estate agent who sold expensive homes in expensive neighborhoods. He said when he would show a couple a house, the woman would ask where the living room is and where the kitchen is, and the man would ask where the den is, where the study is, and where the office is. He found that when wealthy people bought homes, they needed places for their books because they had so many. They had to have a library. One of the most attractive things you could do is put in a library, rows and rows empty for books, because rich people would be highly attracted to that.

My late friend, the entrepreneurial speaker Jim Rohn, once said if you go into the homes of rich people, you see books everywhere. When you go into the homes of poor people, you see the biggest television that they can afford, and no books. They just don’t read.

Many wealthy people create a television room. I have a good friend, author Robert Allen, who has a lovely home. He has a complete theater for watching TV. But you actually have to get up and go from one side of his house to the other and down into the theater to watch it. He does that to make it harder to mindlessly watch TV.

Don’t make it so easy that you can just click it on when you come home at night, and when you get up in the morning, and during the weekends. The average wealthy person watches TV maybe an hour to an hour and a half a day. By comparison, the average poor person watches TV anywhere from five to seven hours a day.

What do these people do if they’re not watching television? They spend time with their families. They talk to their spouses. They talk to their kids. Kids develop their personalities, their self-esteem, and their self-confidence by the amount of time their parents spend talking to them, asking questions, and listening to them talk. It’s absolutely essential.

In the best marriages, you come home at night—they call this the hour of power—and you talk to your spouse. You don’t say, “Where’s the remote control?” and run off and watch television for the rest of the night.

These are some habits of wealthy people: they’re continually building relationships with their family, and they’re learning all the time. They read all the time.

My wife and I have four children. All of our kids have stacks of books and bookcases and libraries. They read all the time. Sometimes it seems that they’ve read more than I have, and I’m a big reader. I read no less than three hours a day and sometimes more.

These are some of the habits of successful people. If you want to be successful, if you want to be rich, do what rich people do. If you want to be poor, do what poor people do.

Napoleon Hill wrote the most successful book on wealth building in history: Think and Grow Rich. He created more millionaires than perhaps any other writer in history. They called him the millionaire maker, and that was his...