TOUGH TALKS – Brian Tracy’s Guide to Success

[00:01:38] Chris Dorris: Mmm.

Hey everybody, welcome back to tough talks conversations on mental toughness I’m your host Chris Dorris and before we get to our special guest today our housekeeping item as always is If you are not getting the Daily Dose mental toughness tips in 30 seconds or less delivered to your email inbox every morning at around 6 a.

m. wherever you are in the world, then let’s just go ahead and resolve that problem. Let’s make the problem a gift, shall we? By going to ChristopherDoris. com backslash DD, like Daily Dose, and then that’s right there. Name, email, click. And you’re getting the goods. You know who we got today? We got a legend.

We got another legend folks. I’m pretty pumped. We got Brian Tracy. Brian THE. You heard it. Brian Tracy. So, you know, this guy’s written over 70 books.

That’s unbelievable. He’s the chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International. He founded that in 84, 1984 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Now he’s all about leadership, selling, self esteem, goals, strategy, creativity, success psychology. I don’t know why I would ever want to have a conversation with a person like that.

Absolute legend. So, I’m happy. I haven’t met him. I think we’ve exchanged one email prior to this, after an introduction. So, um, Brian’s waiting for us. Let’s go meet the man. Get some wisdom. Found him, folks. There he is. The one and only Brian Tracy. Hello, my friend.

[00:03:33] Brian Tracy: Hello, Chris. Nice to see you. Nice

to see you as well.

So, uh, 70? Only 70? Oh, actually, you’ve done more than 70. Haven’t you written more than 70 books?

[00:03:43] Brian Tracy: I’ve written 94 books.

Oh, I’m sorry. I was only off by 24.

[00:03:47] Brian Tracy: And I have six more under contract. So, uh, my goal, I just passed my 81st birthday, and my goal They took it a hundred.

That is a . That’s amazing. Well, I’m sure you’ll do it And, uh, I have with me.

So then when, when those are done, I will be holding one 50th .

[00:04:12] Brian Tracy: Right.

One 50th. That is amazing.

[00:04:16] Brian Tracy: My books are in 55 languages. I’m happy to say,

I would be happy to say that too. Yeah,

[00:04:23] Brian Tracy: that’s a

good for you. And

[00:04:25] Brian Tracy: I have a really skilled publishers who are taking my audio programs and seminars and turning them into books.

Oh, brilliant. Perfect.

[00:04:35] Brian Tracy: Oh,

that’s

[00:04:35] Brian Tracy: so great. I just, I just got a book I’ll show you right now. It just, right here, I just got a book. Um.

Great. It’s called take charge of your life. And, uh, yeah, I just got it in the mail last week. And is that your newest one? Yeah, that’s my newest one. And it’s 12 master skills for success. And I’ve got, uh, another one as well. Um, to the, to the, the, the 10 laws of power and just came out with as well. So I’m, I’m happy to see that I keep, uh, keep relevant.

Yes, sir. Yes. How’d you get into this?

[00:05:25] Brian Tracy: Well, I, um, I was very aggressive about learning and I went to a variety of seminars and, uh, one day a gentleman came into my office and he said he sold seminars for a big national company and the market was, uh, really bad, it was 1981, and he said, uh, if you could put together a seminar, I could sell it and fill a room, and I’d been to many seminars before and I’d paid 500 for a weekend seminar and I’d I didn’t learn from them, I enjoyed them, but I was very aggressive about learning, so I said sure, so what I did is I, you can imagine shuffling cards, what I did is I took a whole bunch of my, the ideas that I enjoyed the most, and I put them all together into a seminar.

A two day seminar and, um, uh, he was going to go out and sell it and he never did, I had to go out and sell it and I got into the seminar business in 1981. And, um, and then people said, well, we really like this because it was on personal development and personal success and overcoming fears and, uh, self confidence and all those good things.

And he said, uh, but what we need is selling because the market’s bad and we need a seminar on selling. I said, well, you know, you take this, my seminar, my two day seminar, you get motivated and sales will go up. No, no, no, no. We want something. Very specific on selling my clients kept telling me that. So I put together a seminar called the psychology of selling, which was based on my 20 years of experience in sales.

And the seminar exploded and I gave it for the next 25 years to literally millions of people in 84 countries. And people basically became millionaires. They say more people became millionaires practicing my psychology of selling than any other single influence in, uh, in sales. Wow. So that was good. And I meet so many people who became presidents of huge companies, um, because of this material.

Excuse me. Anyway, so, and then I put together a seminar on leadership and sales management and, uh, time management, my time management program, which became, uh, it was called this double your, um, income, double your time off and they called it eat that frog and it’s all 5 million copies. In 55 languages,

but we need to update this because it’s, this needs to be updated.

[00:08:13] Brian Tracy: Uh, yes, it’s been, uh, the new version of it just came out and this isn’t the newest version. No, the new version is going to be released as the fourth edition.

It just don’t stop so impressive. So let’s, can we talk about the title for a second?

[00:08:33] Brian Tracy: Sure.

It’s a Mark Twain thing, isn’t it?

[00:08:36] Brian Tracy: Yes.

And you just, can you explain it?

Eat that frog.

[00:08:39] Brian Tracy: Yeah, well, he said, I talked about that from the beginning, what he said was that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that that’s the worst thing that’s going to happen to you all day long. And um, he said there’s two sub rules.

One is that if you have to, um, eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. And, uh, the second one is if you have to eat it at all, don’t sit and look at it for too long. And so, um, the frog is your biggest task and it’s amazing how many people just with that one single idea, actually there’s 21 ways to stop procrastinating in that book, but the idea of just taking your most important task and starting on it immediately and disciplining yourself to complete it.

And do that over and over again, and people have become rich people come, they became millionaires, they transformed their lives, they became the heads of large companies. I mean, for that one single thing, start every morning with your most important task. And then when you complete that task, start with the next most important task.

Uh, because the, the, the key to success in life is to be productive. What is your most valuable asset? It’s your earning ability. It’s your ability to earn money. Your ability to do something that people will pay you for at your job. Your duty to yourself and your family is to become very good and productive, become valuable, to make a contribution to other people, and become better and better at it.

And the 80 20 rule seems to work, is 80 percent of people coast, and the great tragedy with coasting is you can only do it in one direction. Um, and so, uh, you think about that. So, but 20% of people earn, um, more than the 80% put together the top 5% of people with written goals and plans earn on average 10 times as much.

According to Harvard University, they earn 10 times as much as people who in the bottom 80%, and they’re the, they have the same intelligence, the same education, the same background. Um, but they coast, they, they, uh, look forward to, uh, getting off of work. Uh, they don’t, they waste about 50 percent of their time chatting with their friends and, um, they get into a habit.

So the, the, the time wasters hang out together at work. And, uh, they come in at the last minute, they leave at the first minute, they, um, just kill time, whereas the top 20%, they’re productive, they produce value, they get, they’re constantly taking courses and upgrading their skills and reading books and learning how to do things better, and they associate with productive people, and so they’re always talking about how to do things better, and they listen to audio programs, When they drive around, you know, listening to audio programs, it can make you rich.

And, and my psychology of selling program makes people rich because in the average person who drives for a living or drives to and from work and so on, it spends about two to three hours a day, uh, in their car. If you listen to educational audio programs in your car, which are available today at audible, then, um, you get the equivalent of a university education every year.

But more than that, it’s a practical education because audio programs are really condensed and practical wisdom is now do this. If you think of that formula in the military, now do this. Well, audio programs tell you now do this. Don’t listen to, um, um, fiction books and entertainment books. Listen to stuff that makes you better.

And, uh, the, the, the interesting thing is I, uh, I, I assembled across this in 1979. It was, it was the idea that the most important quality that you can have is self esteem. And self esteem means that you like yourself. And actually, uh, you can actually increase your self esteem by just saying, I like myself.

I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. And you start liking yourself more and everything that you do either raises or lowers your self esteem. So if you learn something valuable that helps you to be better at what you do. You like yourself more. You respect yourself more. You have more energy. You have more confidence.

You’re a happier person. Whereas if you don’t, nothing happens. It’s just flat. Anyway, so I’m getting off on a, on a rant, but, uh, the fact that each person, I’m very

well, I welcome rants like that.

[00:14:09] Brian Tracy: Yeah, well, each person’s job is to become the very best person they can possibly be. Aristotle, and I’ll just bounce around here, but in 350 BC, Aristotle said, behind every human action, there is a motive.

And behind every motive, there’s another motive until you become, come to the final motive, which is to be happy. Human beings strive to be happy. In fact, the most successful people help other people to be happy. Uh, a perfect example is, uh, Jeff Bezos who, Started, um, Amazon and, um, uh, everybody said that it wouldn’t work that the, uh, internet was a communications device.

It was like, uh, Facebook and he said, no, no, you can sell stuff on the internet. And he came up with this idea. He borrowed 50, 000 from his parents, then moved out to, uh, Seattle and his idea was that he could sell books. He didn’t have enough resources to do much more than that, but, but he could sell books and the publishers would deliver the books and he could offer them at seven days delivery.

And, um, unconditional guarantees and give them a discount of 30%. So that was his idea. And for seven years, he didn’t make a profit. For seven years, he borrowed money, basically. And then it turned. And within seven more years, he was the richest man in the world. The richest man in the world. He’s now third richest, but his idea was that you could sell stuff on the internet.

And of course today you think, well, everybody knows that. And he’s got something like 300, 000. Somebody came to him after he started his business and they said, can I sell my stuff on your platform? And he said, well, why not? So, uh, then somebody else came and somebody else gave, they’ve got 300, 000 companies are selling stuff on the Amazon platform and they do more than a trillion dollars a year.

And it all came about with this one idea to sell books and, uh, at a discount. So, and

he stayed with it for seven years. I didn’t know a lot of that.

[00:16:41] Brian Tracy: Yeah,

I didn’t know that he didn’t make a profit for seven years. That’s amazing.

[00:16:44] Brian Tracy: And, and his whole focus, and this is my point, his whole focus was customer service.

[00:16:49] Chris Dorris: Your

[00:16:51] Brian Tracy: customer’s happy. Uh, I, I bought, I do, I do videos like this. And I, um, uh, bought a whole set of equipment of stands and lights and, and things like that, uh, that were advised to me by other people and none of them worked. So I called them up and I said, look, I’ve got an eight stands. I’ve got about eight or 900 worth of stuff here.

Um, but none of it’s working. They said, send it back. Uh, put it by your front door, we’ll send a UPS, uh, salesman to pick it up and, um, no problem. And, um, by the way, we’ll chart, we’ll, we will credit you back the entire cost. We have it on our, uh, immediately and, uh, even before we get it back now, no, I’ll never forget that.

Imagine. Imagine that they would pay you, give you all of your money back before they even got the stuff back and they credit it, um, online. And, uh, that’s how, uh, Amazon works is they’re intensely customer focused

[00:17:59] Chris Dorris: and

[00:17:59] Brian Tracy: the most successful people, whether it’s Microsoft or, um, Amazon or any other company, uh, Apple, for example.

Is really focused on making their customers happy and in life, the, the key to success in life is to make your customers happy is to find a way to make them happy or I have this idea of I’ve written 94 books. I have the idea of writing a book called the factor. You’re the factor. That’s fun. And, and, and so how do you succeed in life?

You make people happy, er, you do things fast, er, you do things more efficient, er, um, quicker, uh, cheaper, uh, in other words, you’re always looking for ways. To make customers happier than anybody else.

Well, that’s interesting because you also say that, and I love that, but you also say that, um,

done is better than perfect.

[00:19:05] Brian Tracy: Yes.

Right? So you’re not writing a book on est. No. No. You’re, you’re, you’re writing a book on er. On er? Yeah, yeah. Not est. Not happy est. We’re not,

[00:19:19] Brian Tracy: no, no, just a happy earth, then, you know, I say that there’s three keys that determine your success in life, your income, your success, and they are competition and competition and competition.

And so I memorize those. And in other words, what you have to do to be successful, whether Jeff Bezos or, or, um, Steve Jobs is you have to offer something that’s better, faster, cheaper, easier. It’s always something that is superior. To what is already out there, this is the wonderful thing about America in America.

You can start from nothing. You can come here from anywhere in the world without any language skills or money or anything else and find a way to make a more valuable contribution to other people. And you can be successful. And the wonderful thing is the more you do it, the happier you are and the happier you are, the more energy you have and the more you like yourself and higher is your self esteem and the greater respect you have for all the people around you.

Um, it’s, it’s, it’s all good as they say, it’s all good. You

know, I, I coach, I’d say 95. of the clients that I coach are sales leaders. Yes. What’s some of the most valuable advice that you could ever give or do give to sales leaders is

[00:21:02] Brian Tracy: don’t coast

is so define what you mean by code. I want to ask you some more questions about coasting, because I’m interested in the psychology of why people coast, but before that, tell me what your definition of coasting is.

[00:21:16] Brian Tracy: Coasting means just, uh, slowing down and, uh, just taking it easy is, uh, becoming, um, complacent where you are and, uh, never stopped getting better. Never stopped getting better. And, and there’s, I, I had a, um, experience when I started speaking. Um, I, um, young salesman came to my. It was a, I did it for a weekend seminar for a company and he came with his girlfriend to my seminar and he was from IBM.

And he was so impressed with this seminar on self esteem, personal focus, goal setting, and so on, that he called up the president of IBM, this is in Canada, and told him, we’ve got to get this guy in here because this stuff is great for IBM. And so they brought me in, and over the next three years, they booked me 30 times.

To give seminars on sales and leadership and strategy and so on. And so I got really familiar with IBM and IBM started off with an idea. It was a punch card company in 1928, and they got this idea that they could serve people better, faster, cheaper than anyone else, especially with the new technologies that were coming out.

And they did. And, uh, they had three principles. Principle number one was excellent products as good or the best in the market number principle number two is excellent service is they would serve their customers better than anybody else. They would fly people in from Europe to visit a customer in Des Moines, Iowa, uh, that needed a special service.

And there’s only one person who could do it. They were just absolutely fanatic about serving their customers. And the third was a respect for the individual. Treat people well. Treat people internally and treat people externally. And here’s the interesting story. You could, uh, make a mistake with service and with products.

Those could be, uh, repaired. But you could never make a mistake with people. If you did anything to hurt People’s feelings, if you were abrupt or rude or anything else, that was the only firing offense at IBM. Uh, and people joined IBM and worked there for their whole lives. Um, but the only thing you could get fired for Was abusing other people

[00:24:00] Chris Dorris: and

[00:24:00] Brian Tracy: it was the most amazing door.

I think I remember once I was going flying East to speak for them. And, uh, there was something came up and I phoned them and it was about eight o’clock at night there. And I was hoping that I would get in touch with someone and, uh, uh, someone answered the phone and I said, look, I have this problem. I have to couldn’t make it something.

And they said, okay, I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it. And I said, I said, you must be working awfully late, um, uh, it’s eight o’clock at night there. He said, yes. He said, of course, I’m the janitor. I said, you’re the janitor. I said, well, how come you’re dealing with this technical problem? He said, The person who answers the phone owns the job.

Wow. Answers the phone, owns the problem. And I thought, wow. Wow. What a philosophy. Right? Absolutely. And, and, and you know, one of the most important things that, Uh, people learn in life is the words, I am responsible. I am responsible. I am responsible, and all negative emotion in my experience, and I’ve spent more than 4, 000 hours on this subject.

Negative emotion comes from blaming someone else for something in your life that you’re not happy about. And the way that you stop blaming is you say, I am responsible and the blaming stops, it’s like slams on the brakes and as soon as you stop blaming and take responsibility, your self esteem goes up and your self confidence goes up and you feel strong and powerful.

And so you’ll find that the one great quality of leadership is they accept responsibility. It’s that I am responsible. I am responsible. As soon as you say I am responsible, all negative emotions stop, like, let me on break. So that’s what I’ve thought for years and years and years, you know, and the wonderful thing is, is when you’re responsible, you’re positive, you’re happy, you feel good about yourself, you have no negativity.

Okay, so that’s, that’s, so going back to the original question there, which is what, what advice do you have for leaders? And I’m hearing ownership. From you. Well, well, the first thing you said, though, is don’t coast and I’m still interested in opening that up a little bit more, but what I’m hearing from you right now is I am responsible.

It’s and what I’m hearing from that is that’s ownership taking ownership. Yes, yeah, yeah,

[00:26:46] Brian Tracy: absolutely. No, it means basically you are in charge and no excuses. Exactly. So what I did is, you know, I do, I do hundreds of hours of research. A, a book that takes you six hours to read takes about 400 hours to write.

Wow. Woo. Now. Yeah, now something else is happening and it’s ai. And AI is so phenomenal. I have an entire division in my company teaching ai and we can show you how to write a book. In about two hours, we have a, we have a basic formula where what you do is you answer 15 questions about your subject, uh, this forces you to really think and you put them in, load them in and you push the button and it prints out the book for you.

Where, okay, so that’s, that’s a takeaway. So where do people go to, uh, to, to take advantage of that?

[00:27:57] Brian Tracy: Well, just go to, uh, brian, tracy. com.

Okay. So, which is on the board here, right? And if you’re not looking at this, if you’re just listening, brian. com and then, and then where do they go?

[00:28:08] Brian Tracy: Yeah, just go to brian, tracy.

com and put in AI question mark. Okay. Um, my gang will give you all this information and the information is. Uh, either free or very low cost, but once you know it, well, you, you, you have to have it. This is, this is the equivalent of, of, of, of, of having a watch or using a, an iPhone or driving a car. You have to master AI and AI is moving so fast because, because of competition, competition, competition is the smartest people in the world.

Are spending billions of dollars to, uh, be better than, than other companies who are the smartest people in the world. And so they’re jumping over it sort of like leapfrog, they’re jumping over each other almost on a daily, weekly basis. So what you have to do is just get on board and, uh, don’t worry about mastering it.

Because it’s very sophisticated, but you can learn, you can go do a chat GPT 4, chat GPT 4, excuse me, and um, uh, pay 20 a month and you can have access to the entire world of AI. And if you don’t, you don’t even have to pay 20 a month, you can have the basic, um, because now the, what is the very best price, uh, for AI?

It’s zero. So, so, um, Jeff Zuckerberg. has just created a, an AI, which is superior to anything in the world, according to him. And, um, it’s called Llama, like the, uh, the beast, uh, L L A M A 2. Llama 2. And it’s free, and you can download it, and It will walk you through it. And it’s, I tried it just for fun and wham, you’re using it and you’re producing stuff, for example, um, uh, I have, um, a thing called, um, peripheral neuropathy, which is a swelling of your hands and feet, which comes from being in the hospital and being in a prone position in the.

Blood doesn’t flow, and then the nerves die, and if the nerves die, they never come back. Anyway, so I put in, the question is, is tell me about peripheral neuropathy, and what it is, and what I can do to minimize it. And it goes, like that, and it gives you 15 steps. And it’s, it’s, it’s so fast, it comes out faster than you can read it.

So you can take something else, uh, I want to lose weight. Give me ten ways that I can lose weight. And you just, all you do is say that, and it’ll immediately give you out. 10 different things you could do, diet exercises, sleep, rest, uh, and so on. It’s, it’s phenomenal. Um, and so if all you do is just ask questions, the answers you get, so I, I have a good friend and I’m, uh, doing a book with him.

I came up with the idea, let’s write a book together on how to start and build a successful business. Big subject. So he’s an expert in the subject and I’m pretty knowledgeable. So I said, uh, I’ll, I’ll send you an outline. So I wrote in, give me a 12 chapter book on how to start and build a successful business.

In a competitive society, and I’m pushing the button and I’ve got the whole outline, all the chapters, and it gives you the name of the book and plus 12 chapters. And then I say, this is a really helpful, please expand the chapters because they give about two or three lines, uh, with 500 words per chapter.

And I go, and I go, it’s all

the sound effects or is that just

[00:32:32] Brian Tracy: anyway, the thing is that what is possible for you now, what used to take, I said, 400 hours to write a book. Now you do it in four and be ready to go. Amazon will then take your, your, your book. Publish it, it’ll, it’ll design a cover. It’ll publish the book and it’ll send you as many copies as you want at minimum prices.

And so you can now start to send out your book. You can have your whole book on its way to you within seven days, . So I have a couple, I have friends who are very successful in business, I said. You know, you’ve probably been thinking about writing a book about your experiences for your family and for your, because they’re older, like me.

And um, so what I’ll do is, uh, I’ll give you this material and you can use it, but I’ll send you as an outline. And so what I did is I send them an outline, I take their name, uh, And, like, for instance, your name, Chris, is, everything that you’ve ever written or said is in the cloud, it’s just there, it’s almost like, it’s almost like this misty cloud, everything you’ve ever said, so what you say is, My name is Chris, and what I’d like to, gives you your full name, um, and it’s, it’s Dorns, right?

Chris Dorns? Chris Doris. No, so you said, my name is Chris Dorns, and I’d like to write a book about all my experiences so I could pass it on to others. Can you give me 12 chapters plus a title? It’s all you have to do, and it’ll just print it out so fast, and then you can download that, and you can say, okay, and then you can say, now could you expand on each of these chapters?

Give me 500, 000 words on each of these subjects, and just push the button, and it starts to pump it out for you, and you’ve got your book. And, and, and everything you’ve ever said or done is there in the cloud and the chat, um, a GPT or, um, uh, artificial intelligence has access to it in a second. And you’ll be astonished.

It’ll talk, it’ll tell who you are. Oh, you can do this. It’s who, who is this Chris Dorn, uh, character who does, uh, um, uh, I don’t know how to put it. And, and, and, and it’ll immediately print out a description of you and who you are and your background and what you’ve done and, uh, uh, your strengths and weaknesses and the impact that you’ve had on other people and the people that you’ve interviewed and so on.

I mean, it, it, it’ll come out in seconds. Are you familiar with this?

Very, very familiar. In fact, I have been cloned. There’s a company that reached out to me because they work with coaches and they clone them. So two years ago, the company reached out to me and said, can we use you as a beta? I said, of course you, yeah.

[00:35:50] Brian Tracy: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m sorry.

It’s done. So now I have a clone and we’re about to take it to market and it is, it is amazing.

[00:35:57] Brian Tracy: Yes.

And it, and it did help me write my last book.

[00:36:01] Brian Tracy: Oh, that’s wonderful. So I’m, I’m just sort of, uh,

No, no, no. No, no. You’re plowing old ground here. Well, no, no. I appreciate that because it is exciting and I hope people that will, people will embrace it.

But I, but I can’t, I keep going back to, see, I’m really, I’m, I’m a psychology major. I’ve always been fascinated with the human spirit in mind, right? I’ve all my I’ve dedicated my entire life to helping people elevate the way that they experience life and to be successful. And my definition of success is to have your life on your terms.

One of the research studies that I, uh, read years and years ago, um, Is by the gallop industry and it was on american job satisfaction and they’ve been doing this survey You probably know where i’m going with this They’ve been doing this survey for over 30 years and they get the same results every year and the results are that 84 percent 84 we’ll just say eight and a half people out of ten are Dissatisfied with their jobs, which is the thing that they spend more time doing than anything else in life I interpret that, I, I don’t know how else to interpret that data than to mean that people are convinced that they need to settle for less than what they want.

I’m hearing some of that in your coasting. So can you talk a little bit about the psychology of coast, like why do people coast?

[00:37:31] Brian Tracy: Well, there’s two, two quick reasons. One is the comfort zone. Is they become comfortable and my friend Jim Rome used to say the only difference between a comfort zone and uh, uh, a grave is the depth and, uh, and so that’s probably one of the problems.

The other is fear is they’re afraid that, um. Their situation is not that great now, but it could be worse if they make a mistake.

Excuse me. So, if they were guaranteed of success, they would do extraordinary things with their life, but there is no guarantee. In fact, one of the, one of the things that Jeff Bezos taught, which I’ve been teaching for 20 years before that, was that you, you learn to succeed by failing. And, uh, that’s the only way that you can learn to succeed.

Drucker said that maybe 70 percent of business decisions will turn out to be wrong. And, however, you have to make the mistakes. In order to learn how to do the right things. And so therefore you can’t be afraid of mistakes. What you do is you try it out. If it doesn’t work, try something else, try something else, try something else.

And every single person I, I, I, some years ago, I remember I was at a fishing resort and, uh, it was an expensive resort. And there were several successful business people there, very successful. And, uh, so we’re sitting talking to about four of them. And they were talking about their experience in life. And you would think that wealthy business people would be talking about how much money they had and their boats and homes and so on.

No, they all talked about their mistakes. They said, I, when I started off, I did this and I did that. And boy, oh boy, I was living in my car for six months and someone said, oh, that’s nothing. That’s nothing. When I started off, I had this, and what they did is they just sort of built on top of each other.

They tried to top off each other with the mistakes that they had made. And that would give them, give them more pleasure and more enjoyment. Because those were the most important things. Not the money that they had made, they were all wealthy. But the, uh, mistakes they had made, and what they had learned from those mistakes, and how grateful they were for the mistakes.

So, I always teach, if you, the two questions that you always ask, question number one is, um, when you made a mistake. What did I do right? What did I do, what did I do right? And question number two is what will I do differently next time? What did I do right? What will I do differently next time? And you ask those questions over and over.

Why is the

first question what it is? I love that. Why is it, what did I do right?

[00:40:55] Brian Tracy: Yeah, because you always did something right. You always, you always, it wasn’t a complete mistake, even if, even if you made a mistake that you did, that was something that you did right, and then what will I do differently next time?

And if you keep thinking like this, the answers to both questions are positive. The answers to both questions are, are basically life building. And successful people will tell you that it was the answers to one of those two questions, or both, that made them rich. Without asking those questions, without looking into the mistake that they made and learning from it, They wouldn’t have been successful.

This, uh, when I read, read Jeff Bezos, he’s written three books on the subject. Uh, he writes the same thing is that everybody looks into, um, what they learn from their mistake. One of the things that he does, which I really like, he said, he said every table where they sit down to talk about their business, there’s one empty chair.

And the empty chair represents the customer. And so they say, what would the customer say, what would the customer think, uh, listening to us talk about making the customer happier, uh, again, ER, uh, uh, and, and serving the customer, uh, fat and serving the customer better and serving the customer cheaper and serving the customer easier and so on.

So always, always everybody. And the company always thinks about a customer sitting there listening to their conversation. And I thought that’s a, that’s a neat idea.

[00:42:40] Chris Dorris: And

[00:42:42] Brian Tracy: then it becomes the richest man in the world. I mean, 136 billion or something. You know,

we we’ve mentioned the word success several times in our conversation today, and I’m really interested in knowing what is your definition of success?

[00:43:02] Brian Tracy: Well, I, um, my definition is, is to be, is to be happy, um, and to be happy for her. Um, I’m, uh, I have four children and eight grandchildren. And, um, Barbara and I have created an environment where our kids are all happy. Um, and we take them to Hawaii, we take them on cruises, we realize that the most important thing in life is the time we spend with members of our family.

And we have always done that. We don’t buy boats and planes and resorts and things like that. What we do is we spend money on the memories, um, the, the, um, author, um, whose name will come to me just in a second, um, said that the, the, the, the most beautiful thing in life are, are happy memories, and the great job of life is to form as many of them as possible.

So one of our philosophies has been from infancy, when our first child. Is to create memories, take them places, go places with them, do things with them, raise them up. And all four of our children are really happy. They have high self esteem, high levels of self confidence. They’re all happily married. They have beautiful children.

I mean, it worked. It worked. Good job. Yeah, and, and, and it didn’t work because of accident and work because of deliberation is very clear. And my job as, as, as the father was to go out there and bring in, bring home the bacon so that, uh, I could provide for my wife and my children.

I think it’s in this book.

No excuse. I think it’s in no excuses where you make a distinction that you just reminded me of. Which is the difference between discipline and willpower. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

[00:45:11] Brian Tracy: Well, uh, discipline is the most important single quality of success, uh, for 4, 000 years. It’s been repeated over and over again, is that discipline, and discipline means self control, and it means, and there’s a wonderful author in the early part of the last century named Albert And Albert Hubbard was so prolific that he had to actually develop and build a publishing company because he published so many books that he couldn’t do them through the normal publishing industry.

In fact, uh, he’d do it down on the, uh, Lusitania when the Lusitania was, uh, sunk by a German torpedo in World War I and his wife, um, stood on the deck. And went down with the ship, but anyway, he had this definition of self discipline, which I, I’ve shared with so many people is self discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

And one of the things he pointed out is it’s easy to do something. If you feel like it, don’t feel like it, but it’s the right thing to do. Now here’s the interesting thing is the, the beginning developing self discipline, whatever age you start, it’s hard. It’s really hard to make yourself, uh, do difficult things, but it becomes easier, and pretty soon, it’s just normal and natural as breathing in and breathing out.

You just discipline yourself to eat the right foods, to exercise, to get up earlier, to work harder, to stay later. I have written, I’ve got it right here, a complete outline. Of wealthy people, self made millionaires and billionaires, and I’ve studied it exhaustively and I’ve looked at the surveys, you know that self made, um, multi millionaires and billionaires get up before 6 a.

m., and, uh, now, that used to be the common, now it’s getting toward 5 a. m. as they get up early. And they get going, they exercise, they get moving, they read, they study, they plan their day, and they get out there and get going early, whereas average people get up at the last minute. They, uh, drink coffee, watch television, uh, go off to work at the last minute, uh, waste their time at work, quit at the first minute, and, um, come home, watch TV, uh, it’s the most amazing thing.

I used to teach this, is when you come home at night, spend the first hours reconnecting with your family. Refuse to turn on the television. Most people come in and the first thing they do is fight over the control. You give me that control, that’s my control. I paid for that television. And the first thing they do is turn on the television.

And, uh, when you turn on the television, you immediately shut down all communication. With your family members. So what you do is you re establish communication. You come home, you go and talk to your kids, you talk to your spouse, you ask them what their day was like. You do all this. And I’ve had many people come back, because I taught this in my, uh, first seminar, and they come back and they said it changed their life completely.

They were just astonished at the difference it made, when instead of coming home and turning on the TV, they came home and went and talked to their family members, and then they watched TV later on, but they watched less TV, and then they went to bed. Many people watched television right till midnight.

And then they get up and they’re tired and, um, uh, they’re get up at the last possible minute and so on. So there’s just little disciplines. And so you, so I’ll give you a couple of exercises for our listeners. If you want to meet the perfect person, and I’ve talked to my average audience size when I was speaking full time, was 1, 620 people.

Um, I say that because I tracked it over a period of years and, um, sometimes 2, 000, 3, 000 people, but a lot of people. And so there’s a lot of salespeople, business people, and they’re single. So I say, now, if you’d like to meet the perfect person and everybody wants to meet the perfect person, you’d like to meet the person, perfect person, here’s how you do it is you sit down with a piece of paper.

And you say, the perfect person for me would be colon, and then you write down a description of the perfect person. And you come up, surprisingly, with 20, 30, even 40 different answers. And based on your experience in life up to now, you will have a lot of insights over what the perfect person is. And you know what?

Within a few days, that perfect person will walk into your life. That’s what happened with Barbara and I. It was actually a few weeks. But, um, I wrote a description of the perfect person for me. And she wrote out the perfect person for her. Compared lists. And we found that we were the right person for each other.

And we’ve been together for 45

years. Beautiful. And that’s also very powerful. There’s a woman named Immaculate Ilibagiza who wrote, she’s a survivor of the Rwandan Holocaust. Yes. And she wrote an amazing book called Left to Tell, because she was the only person in her family left to tell the story, because everyone was murdered except her.

And a part of the book was that, is that when she healed, she moved to America, she recovered from the trauma. And she said, I’m ready to find my guy. And she did exactly what you said. She did exactly what you just said. And I don’t know how much time it took, but she found him while she was also going to take a tour of the United nations, because that was her goal.

To work at the UN. And when she was on the tour, she did two things. One, she stole a, um, a piece of paper from someone’s cubicle that had all of the. Phone extensions, and she put her name on it and created her own extension. And she met her guy there.

[00:52:11] Brian Tracy: Well, now there’s a reason I was telling you this story.

[00:52:14] Chris Dorris: Yeah.

[00:52:15] Brian Tracy: If you want to design your perfect life, if my life was perfect, um, it would have these ingredients, colon, and then just write it down, write it down, write it down. I am. I am obsessed. Was writing down your goals. Yeah. The thing is that if you write down your goals, you’ll be astonished.

Oh, that’s good for you. Good for you.

See what those are. Yeah. And,

[00:52:42] Brian Tracy: uh, and wonderful.

Number two. Yep. So there’s a, that’s what we’ll get to that maybe, but that’s,

[00:52:49] Brian Tracy: you know, I’ve, I, I am the

best. Could you read that? Yes. I saw your seven steps to achieving any goal. Yes, well, the second one is write them down,

[00:53:02] Brian Tracy: decide exactly what you want, write it down, set a deadline, make it measurable, make a list, organize the list by priority, take action on your list and then do something every day.

Let’s slow that down because can we just go, I’m just going to repeat that I know we’re still in the middle of talking about this discipline versus willpower, but, but that’s a question which we probably won’t get to, but it’s like the seven, the seven, what do you call that list?

[00:53:33] Brian Tracy: Seven steps.

Seven steps of achieving any desire or goal, right?

Be super specific, write it down, and that’s what you’re telling me about right now. There’s something about writing it. So let’s just go with that for a second, and we’ll get back to Will Paro if we have time. Uh, why, what’s the, what’s the whole deal about writing it down? Why is that such a big deal?

[00:53:53] Brian Tracy: Well, I just finished, um, rewriting my book Goals, which is the best selling book in the world in 39 languages on goals.

Um, and, and it’s called Goals! Exclamation point. And how to achieve, um, um, anything you want faster than you ever dreamed possible. And it works. I work, I work with so many people that will tell me it made them rich. This book made them rich. It made them rich. Now, and so I tell our, our friends who are watching this, get the book.

It costs ten or twenty dollars. It’ll make you rich. Number two is I written, wrote another book called, um, the 32, uh, unbreakable laws of money and success. And that just came out on the market. It’s now in about 19 languages already. And this book, uh, talks about the super conscious mind. And the super conscious mind is something that I learn.

Very early in my career and it blew me away is each person has a conscious mind and then they have a subconscious mind and they everybody knows about that But it’s the super conscious mind and when you write down a goal in the present tense as though We’re already a fact.

[00:55:20] Chris Dorris: Hmm

[00:55:20] Brian Tracy: put a date on it So you say, I weigh X number of pounds by this date.

I earn X number of dollars by this date. When you write it down, it goes through your subconscious, into your super conscious, and then your super conscious begins to work on the goal 24 hours a day. Uh, sleeping, waking, while you’re doing all kinds of other things, the super conscious mind is working. To bring you the goal.

If you write it down, if you don’t, it may help you, but writing it down is imagine sitting up to the keyboard of your super conscious mind and typing it in. And then you’re this incredible mental computer, which is so powerful, it’s actually scary. It’s so powerful that, um, it works on it 24 hours a day, sleeping and waking.

And it brings it to you faster, just like writing down a description of the perfect person for you is that. The most amazing thing, you’ll meet the person on a bus, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll find somebody at work that you had never paid attention to, and suddenly you realize that this is the perfect person.

My wife and I have been married, we’ve been together for forty Seven years, married for 45, and we’ve never had an argument. We’ve just been, we’ve just been happy for all that time, and we brought up our kids. We don’t have any, we have no destructive criticism, no negativity. No fear. It’s, it’s astonishing what happens and people say, Oh yeah, well, I don’t know if it’ll work.

For cripes sakes, all it takes is a pen and a piece of paper to find out.

Well that’s interesting though, because you said pen and paper. Like, do you think that there’s a difference between pen and paper versus typing it into a computer?

[00:57:26] Brian Tracy: Yes. There’s, there’s, there’s exhaustive research. That shows when, uh, students, university students, when they write down by hand their, uh, note, they, uh, score much higher on the final exams than the ones who type out the, uh, the answers.

I never heard that. That’s amazing. That’s fascinating to me. Do you have any idea why that is?

[00:57:52] Brian Tracy: It’s because when you write something down, you imprint it into your subconscious and super conscious minds, and, um, and you remember it longer, you remember it In greater, uh, detail, um.

But not, but it’s not as effective when you’re typing it into a computer Word doc.

[00:58:12] Brian Tracy: No, it’s not as effective when you type

it. Fascinating.

[00:58:15] Brian Tracy: Yeah. And, and they, again, this is, this is research that’s been done at university after university is they track students. Did they write it down or do they type it? If they wrote it down, they, they, they knew five times more likely to teach their exams.

I have, I even encourage, I do, I practice that. I’m constant. I take more notes than anybody I know.

[00:58:40] Brian Tracy: Yes,

I, you know, I write down when I’m editing something, I use pen and paper and you know, my team are, are like super amazing, brilliant tech geeks. They’re like, why are you writing it? You could just, I’m like, because it’s the way it works for me and I encourage people to do it, but I cannot explain why it’s so powerful.

I am, you’re incentivizing me to go do some research of my own to, to understand the how. Like the mechanics of what is specifically, and we don’t need to get into it, or if we even could, you know, the, the biomechanics, or what is the neurology of writing words on paper? You know, it’s fascinating to me, but we don’t need to know why it works.

[00:59:22] Brian Tracy: Let me tell you a quick story for seven years, I offered a group coaching program. I charged 5, 000 a year and you came to my, um, offices for, um, every three months for one full day actually got to my offices. I would, because I had 20 to 30 people, so I would have a, uh, used an executive center. And in a major hotel near the airport, and people came from even Singapore and Australia.

And I said, they said to me, um, 5, 000 is a lot of money. This started in 2001, the middle of the recession and the dot, uh, the dot bomb. And, um, they’re all entrepreneurs. And I said, they said, how can I justify spending 5, 000? And I said, well, I’ll give you what I call my double double guarantee. You will double your income and you will double your time off with your family in within 12 months and the minimum income to attend my program was 100, 000 and it went up to 500, 000, 600, 000.

So I said, so therefore you will double your income, minimum 100, 000, that’s 200, 000. And, um, and if you don’t, I’ll give you your money back, no charge. And they said, okay, uh, on that basis, uh, I’ll come. And they did. And then the first day I would give them a spiral notebook, would hand them out, would talk about the course and what we were going to be doing and a series of exercises that they would discuss and, and, and, and set goals and so on.

Anyway, so one of the things, to guarantee that I never had to give back their money. I would hand them out a spiral notebook, and I would say, this is your new best friend, the spiral notebook. And by the way, if anybody’s watching this, this new spiral notebook will make you rich. If you want to be rich, this will do it.

This is a slam dunk, absolutely guaranteed way. So, what I would do is I’d hand out the workbooks. And I would say, now, I want you to write down 10 goals on the front page, and the 10 goals would be in the present tense, and they would be exactly as we’ve said, um, uh, they would be time dated and, uh, and measurable.

So, I earn X number of dollars. By this date, all right? And we try to keep them to one year goals. Because one year goals are much more motivational than longer term. So, write down your goal. And now what you’re going to do is every single morning, you’re going to turn to a new page, without looking back, and rewrite your ten goals.

And you’re going to do this for one month. We all promised to do this. Everybody promised they would do this, all right? And once you’ve done it for a month, you’ll probably do it for the rest of your life. I started doing it, I learned about it when I was about 20, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I write down my ten goals every day, every day, every day.

It takes three to five minutes to write down your goal, but you can’t look back. You don’t look back, you’re not just copying your goals, you’re writing your goals from memory. All right? And they will change. And the goals will change in order, they’ll change in description, some will drop off, new ones will come on, and so on.

Just do it for 12 months. But you don’t need

to memorize anything, it’s just whatever your truth is

[01:03:05] Brian Tracy: that morning. Yes, and that, and they, whatever it is. And they would come back after 90 days. And I would say, all right, uh, how did it go? Every one of them had doubled and tripled their income. And usually in 30 days or less, every one of them, but in seven years and more than 1000 clients, 100 percent of them doubled their income.

I never had to give a refund.

You know, my favorite part of that is simplicity.

[01:03:38] Brian Tracy: Yes. And, and, and it requires, what does it require? Self discipline. It requires self discipline. So I say get up in the morning, exercise, whatever you do, and then write down your 10 goals. And just keep, I have shelves full of spiral notebooks all my life.

I’ve been writing my goals in my spiral notebooks. And they’re all over the place. And my kids, I didn’t even realize it. My kids come in and read my, uh, goals from years past, and they write down their goals. And so, so, all I say is, please do this. Do this. It’ll, it’ll make this yours and my program, Chris and Brian.

It’ll make this the most valuable single hour that people have spent in their lives. It’ll make them rich and happy and successful and positive. It’ll give them a sense of personal power, uh, and responsibility. It’s everything that you want to be a fully functioning human being. Everything is in writing down your goals.

And you can write more than 10 if you like. But write down 10 goals every single morning before you start off and, uh,

so perfect because you just beat me. It’s like this couldn’t be a better way to wrap it up because literally you’re answering the last question that I wanted to ask you. I didn’t I don’t this would have been the question, but you already answered it, which is now if you could only give maybe have a different answer.

I don’t know. I doubt it, but maybe if you could only give one one piece of advice to people with respect to creating their lives on their terms. What would it be? Is that is that the answer?

[01:05:31] Brian Tracy: That’s it?

Yeah.

[01:05:32] Brian Tracy: That’s it.

Okay. One final question. Since you stole my last question, uh, I’m going to make up another one.

Okay. No, I answered. I

[01:05:42] Brian Tracy: answered it in anticipation.

You’re you’re a genius. You have you in addition to all your other skills, you have ESP. So what? Here’s my final question for you.

What is your source?

[01:06:00] Brian Tracy: Well, I’m a very happy person. I’m, I’m, I’m always positive. Um, many years ago, I read a book by, uh, Napoleon Hill and, uh, W. Clements Stone called Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. I must admit that it was written back in the forties and fifties. Anyway, he said there every morning, get up and say, uh, I feel happy.

I feel healthy. I feel terrific. And so all my life, I’ve done that. I say, I feel, I feel terrific. How are you doing? I feel terrific. How’s life? I feel terrific. And if I’m laying in a hospital bed, how are you feeling today? I’m feeling terrific. They always feel terrific. And just by saying those words, it makes me positive and optimistic and happy.

And, uh, so I’m just a genuinely. Happy person. I’m married to a wonderful woman. I’ve got wonderful kids. I love my work. I constantly get better at it That’s a very important point. By the way, it’s continually get better at what you do I’m 81 years old and I still read three hours a day. I am I love to learn new stuff so love to learn ideas that enable me to be Even a little bit better, and, uh, that’s really important.

Well, I gotta tell you, I’m a lot better because of this conversation. You don’t need to, at this stage of your career, you don’t need to be doing this.

[01:07:39] Brian Tracy: Why

are you?

[01:07:42] Brian Tracy: Well, because I really respect a person like you, who is committed to helping other people to be better. And sometimes one liners from you in a course of an hour can change a person’s life forever.

And, uh, so if you’re, if you’re willing to do it, I’m willing to work with you.

Amen. I could not appreciate you more. I am. So thank you. Levin Ditchburn, by the way, for the introduction to this amazing man, got to give Levin a shout out. He’s the person that introduced us. Levin Ditchburn, the world’s greatest courage coach.

Well,

[01:08:17] Brian Tracy: thank

you, Chris. So, thank you. Laban. so much, and Giselle, uh, for, for setting this all up for us. And Brian, sincerely, I just want to say thank you so much for making the time and sharing all this love. Really, I’m going to call it love. You’re sharing love. And, and, and

[01:08:35] Brian Tracy: I love you, Chris, and I wish you the very best of continued success.

Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. That’s why I do it. What a wonderful You know, I never met him before. I never had any I never met him before the We didn’t have one conversation. We exchanged maybe one email prior to doing this. And I feel like I’ve known the guy forever. And I And I love the dude. So let’s do this, all right?

Let’s do this together. Uh, I’ve done versions of this. But I haven’t done this. I haven’t done it this way. And I’m I just Before, um, recording this, right, the outro, I, when I hung up with Brian, I went on Amazon and ordered, uh, a bunch of Spiral Notebooks, okay? So we’re gonna do this, alright? Let’s do it!

Let’s get all in on this. I’m gonna be sending him a, uh, a link to the all in audio program too, because I do, I do want to have a conversation, a follow up conversation with him, you know, I’m not trying to be disruptive, but I would like to open up a conversation with him. About goals versus decisions, but that’s for another time.

Let’s, uh, commit together to writing down for 30 days 10 goals. First, one of the first things in the morning. You know I start my mornings with best damn day of my life. And after I do that my, you know, wash up and oral hygiene and all that stuff I go to the kitchen, I slam a glass of water. Now the next thing on my action, my, my morning routine now Will be to write down 10 goals.

And my spiral notebooks arrive tomorrow. So I’ll just do it on a piece of paper. Tomorrow morning. And then, uh, I’ll shift over to the spiral notebook. Do it! Do it! Alright you guys, now, uh, last thing. If you’re, as always, and I mentioned this in the introduction. But if, you know, well actually I did mention this in the introduction.

If you don’t have this you know this I thought of this I didn’t want to bring this up in our conversation because the Conversations these interviews ain’t about me, but I did think about this several times during the during that Beautiful conversation if you don’t have a copy this book is selling like hot cake.

It’s just two years now It’s been out which is amazing. It still feels like it’s new Um, but yeah, get your copy of the book of dental toughness mantras on Amazon. And if you’re not getting the daily dose that we need to fix that by going to Christopher Doris. com backslash D D short for daily dose name, email, click, and you’re getting all, all the goodness.

All right, folks, as always create miracles until next time.