Focus and Win: Brian Tracy's Keys to Success | Motivation Speech

if you were to take action over and over again repeatedly on a new uh subject what would you eventually develop a habit if you develop the habit of taking action you become an action-oriented person and you can start off with nothing going for you you can start off with a limited education or you have good education start off with a new practice and a new town and everything else but if you're an action-oriented person and you try this and you try that and you try this and you try that and you try something else and

you learn to get feedback there's nothing to stop you from being successful is all successful people are intensely action oriented over the years I began to study the subject of success and I had one simple idea that came upon me and my late teens and I think it was the most important idea that I've ever had and it was simply this that if you study successful people and you do what they do you'll be more successful and if you study unsuccessful people and you avoid doing what they do then you will not be a failure

and one of the things I found that if you study success you begin to internalize success princi principles and if you practice proven success principles and if you do what successful men and women have done throughout history that you will be successful too and it's such a remarkable Discovery but it has been worth a fortune to me and what I want to talk to you about tonight is some of the principles that I've discovered in over 20 years of research I serve as a consultant to over 200 corporations and I have been a personal consultant

to the Presidents of $3 billion plus corporations I have studied successful men and women I have read biographies and autobiographies I have looked at the characteristics and principles of them I've studied philosophy and economics and religion and psychology and metaphysics and I've come to 10 key qualities now there may be more and there may be less but I find that each of these 10 qualities that successful men and women have starts with the letter C and the interesting thing about these qualities is first of all with them success is predictable and without them failure is

predictable that if you have these 10 qualities there's nothing in the world that can stop you from being an outstanding success and if you lack sometimes even one of these qualities that can be enough can be the weak Link in the the chain that Dooms one to a life of underachievement and failure the second principle that I discovered with regard to these qualities is that they are all habit patterns of mind and that nobody starts off with them and that you can learn them and that you can develop them with practice and the third thing

that I found is that if you will practice these principles until they become habits until they become automatic for you then nothing can stop you the first principle starts with the letter c it says clarity and Clarity is the starting point of all success it means Clarity of thinking it means thinking clearly and it extends from thinking clearly to a series of other things with regard to Clarity it means the ability to determine exactly what it is that you want to be have or do in life and the more I study successful men and women

the more I find that every single one of them the top 5% are very clear about where it is they're going and what it is they want to accomplish when I look at unsuccessful men and women or men and women who seem to be unhappy and floundering I find find that almost invariably they have a very very limited sense of direction sometimes no sense of direction at all you see we as human beings are goal-seeking organisms we only function at our very best when we are working toward accomplishing something that is important to us and

in my estimation 80 90% of all the unhappiness hostility violence psychosomatic illness alcoholism drug addiction and so on in our society is caused by people having no sense of direction they don't know where they're going as they say if you don't know where you're going any road will'll take you there write your goals down on paper and write them down in the present tense as though you had already achieved them I earn X number of dollars in 2019 I am a self-made millionaire by January 1st 2025 I weigh X number of pounds I live in

a 5,000 foot house with a separate bedroom for each one of my children I in other words write it down as though it we're on already a fact and you're just reporting it you're just reporting the fact your subconscious mind is marvelous but what it does is it only thrives on goals that you pronounce in the now in the present tense and so you now have a a dynamism it's called a dynamism in your brain where your brain knows that you're only earning this amount of money but now you're saying but I earned this amount

of money your brain knows that you're not a millionaire but now you're saying I am a millionaire and so you're brain goes to work to close this gap between where you are and where you want to be and your brain starts to work 24 hours a day and it works and it gives you ideas each person here has a a what is called the superconscious mind and this mind has been talked about for 5,000 years and some call it the the overs soul and some people call it the god mind some people call it God

Spirit whatever it happens to be but there's this incredible power in the the universe that you can tap into you could just reach into it by simply writing down a goal clearly on a piece of paper and then this mind goes to work 24 hours a day to bring it into your life you all read the books about the law of attraction and so on well the fact is that once you are clear on a goal and you write it down not type it but write it down is you force this uh energy field of

uh attraction and it's start to pull into your life everything that you need to make the goal clear but if it's not in writing not a darn thing happens the second sea is the Sea of competence and the Sea of competence says it's very simple is that you can only earn a lot of money if you're very good at what you do I noticed that every single man or woman that I had studied who had achieved any kind of success in any field whatsoever had done it after they had made a commitment to becoming excellent

in that field and I began to look and I began to compare and I began to talk to people and I speak to thousands of people virtually every month I found that I never found a single person who was successful who was not excellent at what they did that competence the commitment to becoming excellent in your chosen field is an indispensable prerequisite for Success that if you are not good at what you do you haven't got a chance in our competitive Society unless you win the lottery that success is predictable if you commit yourself to

becoming excellent it does a whole lot of other things within your mind but if you commit yourself to becoming excellent it changes everything about you and only the top five or 10% are excellent the third sea is the Sea of concentration the Sea of concentration is your ability to focus which we talked about before it's your ability to focus single-mindedly on one thing at a time and to work on that one task until it's complete and to discipline yourself not to do anything else or to become distracted by emails and bells and bips and noises

and things like that it's just the ability to focus like a laser beam on a single task and I think that the ability to focus and concentration are the two keys to success in life that the ability to focus clearly and know exactly what it is you want to accomplish and the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on accomplishing that one thing without diversion or distraction are the keys to success successful people Peak performers concentrate on the top items and remember anything other than working on the top items on your list is a waste of your time

and time management is not just time management time management is life management you can do anything you want with your life if you'll manage your time properly we all have the same 24 hours a day and the ability to concentrate concentrate concentrate to discipline yourself to use willpower and perseverance to concentrate on one thing at a time is a quality of all success nothing great has ever been accomplished without the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time next C is common sense common sense according to the gallop organization that just did a

wonderful book called The Great American success story they surveyed 1500 people in mares who's who in America 1500 of the most respected men and women in America and they asked them what do you consider to be the most important single quality of success and they agreed almost unanimously on Common Sense you can train your mind to have common sense you can train your mind to think things through before acting in my experience action without thinking is the cause of every fa action without thinking is the cause of every failure and Common Sense comes from taking

the time to think things through before you act listen to your intuition your intuition is one of the best guides that you possibly have you know from some of the other work that we've done is that each person has inside them an intuitive sense which will always give you the exact right answer for you number five C is creativity tap your creative potential accept the fact that every single human being is a genius and all successful men and women are are creative they're creative in that they respond to their world differently they ask questions they're

flexible they're curious you know what the the Hallmark of creativity is curiosity the Hallmark of ignorance and stupidity is the cessation or stopping from asking questions and I've worked with some of the brightest men and women in this nation and I find that the smartest people of all the ones that have the greatest education and the most experience are the ones who ask the most questions they ask questions almost as if they were children but they never stop asking asking questions they're very open and flexible and they have the ability once they learn a new

piece of information to drop what they're doing if the new information contradicts it and do something else you know what most people do most people keep on doing what they're doing until they run into a wall as they say the more you do of what you're doing the more you'll get of what you've got someone would pointed out to me not long ago and I think it's very true is that all changes in our life come with the input of new information that if we do not have new information we keep on doing the same

thing forever as a result of inertia and creative people are always looking for fast fter better easier cheaper newer ways to do things remember 80% of everything that we are doing today in our general business will be different 5 years from now 80% of the products that we use the food that we eat the cars we drive the music we listen to the movies we go to even the streets we drive on 80% of everything will be new in 5 years that's how rapidly things are changing according to the research all you need is an

idea that's 10% new to start a fortune number six is continuous Learning and Development is dedicate yourself to becoming better and better at what you do it must be a part of your life you must breathe in breathe out and learn new things self-made millionaires self-made billionaires spend 60 to 90 minutes every day studying their field weeding new material Warren Buffett was just relegated from number three to number four richest man in the world and Warren Buffett reads 500 pages a day Warren Buffett reads 5 to 8 hours a day Warren Buffett reads 8 hours

7 days a week he reads all the time and he's one of the richest men in the history of the world and he and his Partners all say the same thing you got to read read and learn all the time so part of your life don't don't ever listen to the radio I say you should never even know if your radio works in your car because you never listen to it the CDs that are available to help you become better are unbelievable you can download them with Audible and put them on to your iPhone you

can listen to them in every part of your life and one idea and make you rich so just keep flooding your mind with new ideas the seventh C is consistency consistency is absolutely critical you can have all of the others but if you're inconsistent it's going to really hurt you consistency means that dependable steady predictable work is always vastly superior to spurts or flashes of Brilliance and genius that the person who is like the tortoise who just plots steadily away old Steady Eddy is always the person who tends to be more successful than the one

who flashes here and flashes there but cannot be counted on over the long term be consistent in your relationships especially be consistent with your family be consistent with your friends be consistent with your boss be consistent in your work make it so that you are the type of person that everybody can depend upon that people will believe in and they'll depend upon and they know that if you say something that you'll do it that if you say you'll be somewhere or if you undertake a responsibility that you will fulfill that responsibility that sort of consistency

that sort of dependability is one of the most valuable things in the world of work today I work with so many companies and I have staff that work in my companies and I know that the greatest joy that an employer can have is to give a person a job and know that it'll be done and the most aggravating thing in the world is to give a person a job and have no idea if it'll be done if it'll be done to a particular quality if it'll be done on time or anything else just being the

steady person you don't have to be a genius one of the things that I found if I can pass this on to you one of the things that I found when when I was a young man this cost me about 10 years of life by the way about 10 years in that I thought that you had to have good grades in school in order to be successful and then later I thought that you had to have a university education in order to be successful and then later I thought that successful people are people who are

somehow better than you and I they somehow have unique talents that somehow the gods have descended from Olympus and touched them on the heads but one of the things that I found is that nobody is better than you or I when you see men or women accomplishing great things they're not better than you or I they're not different from you or I they're just doing things in a different way you look at a person you went to school with who's now doing surgery as a doctor the person's the same person except that they've learned how

to do surgery you look at a person who you went to school with who is now an outstanding success in a particular field all they've done is learned how to be a success in that field and consistency there's a there's a law of accumulation in the universe if I can pass this on a law of accumulation that says that even though you do a 100 things or a thousand things that you don't see eventually they accumulate and they gather a force of their own that every single great accomplishment in life is the result of thousands

of minor accomplishments that nobody ever sees the next C is commitment I found that the ability or the willingness to make a complete commitment to a job a commitment to a relationship a commitment to a profession to make a commitment is one of the hardest things that human beings do that very few people make commitments that most people in this room I hate to say it most people in this room are not totally committed to their work oh yeah they're doing it they're in it they're doing a reasonably good job nobody's fired them yet right

but they're not committed their whole heart isn't into it and yet no success is possible without commitment Emerson said that every great achievement is the Triumph of enthusiasm that the ability to commit yourself enthusiastically wholeheartedly 100% to what you want to do is the starting point of all achievement that if you cannot commit yourself wholeheartedly it probably means that it's not right for you and that all of us in life seek for something that we can commit ourselves to Alan Cox in his book The achiev which came out last year found that the executives in

the corporations that he studied who achieved the very most in the shortest period of time had found the proper Niche for themselves and had lost themselves in their work Dr shy blotnik study of self-made millionaires 83 out of 1500 people became self-made millionaires over 20 years he found that the one quality that they all had in common was that they picked work that they loved they specialized in that work they became very good in it and they eventually became paid very well for it and then they held on to the money I throw that last

one in because I know a lot of you can relate to that they held on to the money they didn't gamble or speculate they were very conservative with their money they got paid more and more and they held on to it one of them started off cleaning toilets on the night shift for an airline and today he's the president of the airline and makes $1,950,000 a year I's been with the airline for 35 years but it's not easy to be not difficult to become a millionaire when you're making $1,950,000 a year even with taxes you

can still do pretty well he found that the quality that separated these people from the ones who struggled for 20 years and weren't much further ahead than when they started was that they became totally absorbed in their work totally committed to their work they lost themselves in their work and when they lifted up their head about the age of 43 44 their accountant told them by the way you're worth over a million dollars now did you know that most of them became wealthy without even knowing and so it's important that you find the work that

you can commit yourself to it's important that you find the relationship you can commit yourself to and if you are an employer and you have people working for you who are not committed to their work these people are like rotten apples in a barrel I have found that people who are not committed to their jobs are people who always cause trouble within an organization there's no success without commitment without you putting your whole heart into what you're doing and putting your whole heart into what you're doing for a long time but if you do there

is no limit on what you can accomplish you get up in the morning and you make a decision that my gum I am going to succeed in this business no matter how long it takes no matter how many hours a day courage is the outstanding quality of all leaders courage means that you have the ability you have the willingness to confront your fears because what I found over the years is that brave people courageous people are not people who are not afraid they're simply people who Master their fears they're simply people who face their fears

confront their fears and Mark Twain said it many years ago he said with regard to fear he said do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain now fear and courage tend to be Happ that if you are afraid and you give into the fear and you back away it becomes a habit to back away whenever you're afraid or unsure if you're afraid and you force yourself to confront the fear it becomes a habit to confront the fear whenever you find something that you're afraid of and you'll find that most fears disappear

when you confront them then most fears fears of failure fears of rejection fears of loss fears of pain fears of limitation fears of the loss of a relationship fears of ill health most of these fears disappear when you confront them head on it's almost like as you push them they just turn into smoke and courage Winston Churchill said courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues for upon it all others Depend and in Courage what you have is two parts the first part of Courage is the courage to begin to launch to take a

chance to face failure and rejection to try something with a very great possibility that you will fail and you'll feel embarrassed and upset and your self-esteem will go down and so on but the second part of Courage is persistence it's the power to keep going and keep pushing yourself and driving yourself and I had a transformation many years ago which I will give to you a woman that I was going out with before I was married she asked me Brian she said what is your best quality and I thought about that I said I think

my best quality is that I never give up that's your best quality she's very insightful woman I still remember very intelligent your best qu my best qualiity is I never give up and so I've spoken to audiences like you and I found that that's true because I never give up and my children never give up it's it is not in our vocabulary we never think we'll try something different we'll try something new we'll take the losses and so on but we'll never give up so how do you develop this unshakable quality of persistence which will

guarantee your success in life nothing can stop you if you don't quit if you don't quit then the only alternative is you must succeed and eventually you must succeed greatly Great rule you become what you think about but you become what you say to yourself so what you do is you say to yourself these magic words you say I never give up behave confidently as dorotha brand wrote in 1935 in her wonderful book wake up and live she said the key to success is this she said go confidently in the direction of your dreams act

as though it were impossible to fail go confidently in the direction of your dreams and act as though it were impossible to fail and this brings us to the most important part if I can just summarize in one minute it is this is that your true beliefs are only and always expressed in your actions it is not what you say or what you intend that tells what you believe but only what you do your actions are always the true me and the interesting thing that we've learned in behavioral psychology is this that if you do

not feel self-confident courageous consistent like concentrating clear and so on if you don't feel like it and most of us start off not feeling like it if you will act the part if you will pretend as though you have the quality already The Feelings Will generate the actions and the actions will generate the feelings that if you will act walk talk and live by the same principles and do the same things that successful men and women do even if you doubt yourself in the initial stages eventually you will come to the point where you actually

feel to the bottom of your soul like a successful positive confident cheerful optimistic Unstoppable human being and that's the key act the part until you feel the [Music] part