Brian Tracy is the author of The Art of Closing the Sale and The Psychology of Selling, two great classics in the world of sales, written by someone from the “old school”, but whose advice for success in life has never gone out of fashion and never will.
I previously put together 22 commandments for being a good salesperson, based on his books about sales.
For this article, we have drawn on the chapter that Francisco Alcaide devotes to Brian Tracy in his book Aprendiendo de los mejores (Learning from the best).
1. Everyone occasionally does the things successful people do. Successful people, however, do them all the time
Occasional discipline is useless. Being disciplined for only three days or four weeks means everything you achieved is lost. We need to apply what Jim Rohn called the discipline of success, which basically means doing what needs to be done, whether or not you feel like it, until it becomes a habit. And on this point every author in the personal development world agrees, Francisco Alcaide included: “Discipline is the most important factor in success. It’s also the hardest thing to achieve, but there’s no other way to reach brilliance and mastery.” Discipline is usually what separates people who succeed from those who don’t.
The hard part of becoming a disciplined person is that we have to behave like disciplined people before we actually are disciplined.
2. If your children feel they can achieve a goal, you’ll have succeeded as a parent, because you’ll have given them the greatest of blessings
Often, even as adults, we look at people who have managed to create something spectacular or who have had enormous success, and of course we think those people are made of special stuff or come from a higher league.
But the truth is that we all come from the same place, and we all have what it takes to learn how to achieve great goals. Sometimes, because of what our own family or the people around us have led us to believe, we ourselves as adults may feel very limited, although in many cases those are just excuses we make so we don’t have to work hard or spend time learning something.
So it’s true: if you raise your child in the belief that they can achieve whatever they set their mind to, as long as they’re willing to pay the price of learning and effort, your child will have received one of the best inheritances they can get (and while you’re still alive, too).
3. It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from, only where you’re going. If what you’re doing isn’t moving you towards your goals, then your current actions are moving you away from them
In Alcaide’s words: “Your past doesn’t matter if you’re willing to build your future.”
One thing that comes up often in readers’ comments is when we talk about people like Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, the founders of Google or any other successful person. It doesn’t take long for comments to appear suggesting that these people managed to build their empires because they had the means or because their families had money. And that is completely false: right now, the ranking of the 100 richest men in the world has the highest share ever of people whose wealth comes not from inheritance but from building their own businesses, and in most cases they come from lower-middle-class families.
So forget where you come from and, first of all, start by setting yourself a goal. Second, you’ll have to be willing to sacrifice for a while, putting in the work needed to climb towards that goal.
Your background shouldn’t limit you. It doesn’t matter if you come from a poor family, but it would matter if you had a poor mindset. Coming from a poor family can be overcome when it comes to achieving success. A poor mindset can’t, unless you change that mindset.
4. Your most valuable economic asset is your ability to learn
Tracy says that the starting point for your new life comes when you realise you can learn anything you need to reach the goals you have set yourself.
And the truth is that tomorrow you could lose all your material possessions and be left with nothing, but as long as you keep your ability to learn, you’ll always be able to earn back everything you lost.
Today it’s easier than ever to get the knowledge you need to achieve anything, and you don’t have to spend money. If you want to learn about photography, thousands of photographers will teach you through articles and videos. Want to learn about sales? It’s exactly the same. There’s a “bubble” of knowledge available to everyone right now. So there are no more excuses. Of course, it won’t do you any good if you don’t then apply what you’ve learned.
5. The starting point in goal setting is understanding that you have virtually unlimited potential to be, have or do anything you truly want in life, as long as you want it badly enough and are willing to work hard enough to achieve it
Tracy himself often says that success is something you have to pay for in advance.
Wanting something isn’t enough. Wanting it badly enough isn’t enough either. We have to ask ourselves whether we’re willing to pay the price, in effort and sacrifice, for what we want. And many people who tell you they want something badly enough are, judging by their actions, telling us they don’t really want it that much, or rather that they’d like to be handed what other people are “killing themselves” for day after day.
When you set yourself a goal, remember these points to work out whether it’s the goal you should pursue:
- Have a truly exciting vision.
- Have reasons strong enough to keep going.
- Review it and feel it every day.
And if you’re going through a process of change, or thinking about turning your life around completely, I strongly recommend reading our article How to make lasting, consistent changes in your life. It’s a long article, but it will be worth it, as long as you apply what it says.
See also: Reasons you’re not successful, according to Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street
Featured image: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
