The Definition of Wealth

If you want to be wealthy, you must understand what wealth is. Here is the best definition of wealth you will ever find. Wealth is "Cash flow from other sources."

Make Your Money Work For You

What this means is that, you are not wealthy just because you earn a lot of money. You are only wealthy when your money works for you. To become wealthy, your main job is to acquire money and then put it to work making more money for you.

Add Value Continually

The key to creating wealth is simple. It is called "adding value." Successful people are those who are always looking for ways to add value in some way to a person, a company, a product or a service.

Do It Faster

Here is an example of adding value: Domino's Pizza. The founders of Domino's Pizza took a common food, offered by thousands of little restaurants and added a value to the pizza by delivering it more rapidly than anyone else. The added value of speed enabled Domino's to create a billion dollar empire and made the founder of Domino's, Tom Monahan, one of the richest men in the world.

Buy It Cheaper Somewhere Else

Another way to add value is to buy something in one place at one price and then make it available in another place for another price. For example, buying a product or service manufactured in Europe or Asia, importing it to the United States and making it available to people to whom it was not available before, is a way of adding value for which you can charge a higher price.

Improve the Life or Work of Others

All manufacturing and marketing is based on this principle of added value. All importation and distribution aims to add value. Performing a service that enhances the life or work of another person adds value. A dentist who takes away pain is adding value. An accountant who saves a client money on taxes is adding or actually creating value. A salesperson who introduces a new product or service to a customer that helps that customer in some way is adding value. All financial success, especially business success, is based on adding value. It is based on the old saying, "Find a need and fill it."

Combine and Recombine the Elements of Value

All successful business is based on someone bringing together the factors of production, such as labor, capital, raw materials and management, and creating a product or service that a customer will pay a price for that is in excess of the cost of producing it.

How All Fortunes Are Made

Adding value is the way that all fortunes are made. Whenever you see an opportunity to give people what they want at a price greater than it costs you to produce that product or service, you see an opportunity to make a profit, build a business and begin moving toward financial success. Almost any business or occupation can make you financially independent if you can find a way to add enough value.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two actions you can take immediately to add more value to your time and activities:

First, take the time to be absolutely clear about what it is that people want and need to improve their lives and work. The more clear you are about their real needs, the easier it is for you to satisfy them at a higher level.

Second, look for ways to add value to what you are doing every day in every way. Never be satisfied with the status quo. One small idea to add value can be the starting point of a great fortune.

Becoming a Master of Persuasion

June 27, 2009

Becoming A Master of Persuasion
By: Brian Tracy

Persuasion power can help you get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Your persuasion power will earn you the support of others.

You Have Two Choices
There are always two choices: either you can persuade others to help you or you can be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware that every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence. And being unaware, they are usually the ones being persuaded to help others rather than the ones who are doing the persuading.

The Key to Persuasion
The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. Your job is to find out what motivates other people and then to provide that motivation.

People have two major motivations: the desire for gain and the fear of loss. The desire for gain motivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, more health, more influence, more respect, more love and more happiness.

Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show a person how he or she can get more of the things he or she wants by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act in your behalf.

"Learn how to influence others -- Simply by using your words" Your ability to communicate with others will account for fully 85% of your success in your business and in your life. Would you like to be able to influence people you speak with, and get them to agree with your point of view? How well you communicate, influence, persuade, and negotiate will ultimately determine the quality of your life. How to Talk: Secrets of the Great Communicators + Bonuses! In my fast-paced DVD, How to Talk: Secrets of the Great Communicators, you will learn the invaluable secrets of the most effective communicators of our time. You will learn to become a powerful communicator and you will learn the secrets of influencing others with your words.

A Presidential Insight
President Eisenhower once said that, "Persuasion is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do, and to like it." You need always to be thinking about how you can get people to want to do the things that you need them to do to attain your objectives.

The Fear of Loss
People are also motivated to act by the fear of loss. This fear, in all its various forms, is often stronger than the desire for gain. People fear financial loss, loss of health, anger or disapproval of others, loss of the love of someone and the loss of anything they have worked hard to accomplish. They fear change, risk and uncertainty because these threaten them with potential losses.

Use Dual Motivation
Whenever you can show a person that, by doing what you want them to do, they can avoid a loss of some kind, you can influence them to take a particular action. The very best appeals are those where you offer an opportunity to gain and an opportunity to avoid loss at the same time.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, before trying to convince someone of something, take a little time to think and ask questions to find out what it is he really wants. Then, motivate him to act by showing him how you can help him get it.

Remember, people are motivated for their reasons, not yours.

The Magic Of Solitude

June 28, 2009

The Magic of Solitude
By: Brian Tracy

The greatest men and women of all ages have practiced solitude regularly. They learned how to use silence to still their minds and tap into their superconscious powers for answers to their questions.

In this newsletter, you learn how you can apply this wonderful technique immediately to improve the quality of your inner and outer life.

The Magic of Solitude
Your feelings, your emotions, are the access point to your inner powers of mind. The most important part in the process of getting in touch with your feelings is to begin to practice solitude on a regular basis. Solitude is the most powerful activity in which you can engage. Men and women who practice it correctly and on a regular basis never fail to be amazed at the difference it makes in their lives.

Most people have never practiced solitude. Most people have never sat down quietly by themselves for any period of time in their entire lives. Most people are so busy being busy, doing something-even watching television-that it's highly unusual for them to simply sit, deliberately, and do nothing. But as Catherine Ponder points out, "Men and women begin to become great when they begin to take time quietly by themselves, when they begin to practice solitude." And here's the method you can use.

To get the full benefit of your periods of solitude, you must sit quietly for at least 30 to 60 minutes at a time. If you haven't done it before, it will take the first 25 minutes or so for you to stop fidgeting and moving around. You'll almost have to hold yourself physically in your seat. You'll have an almost irresistible desire to get up and do something. But you must persist.

Solitude requires that you sit quietly, perfectly still, back and head erect, eyes open, without cigarettes, candy, writing materials, music or any interruptions whatsoever for at least 30 minutes. An hour is better.

Become completely relaxed, and breathe deeply. Just let your mind flow. Don't deliberately try to think about anything. The harder you "don't try," the more powerfully it works. After 20 or 25 minutes, you'll begin to feel deeply relaxed. You'll begin to experience a flow of energy coming into your mind and body.

You'll have a tremendous sense of well-being. At this point, you'll be ready to get the full benefit of these moments of contemplation.

The River of Ideas
The incredible thing about solitude is that if it is done correctly, it works just about 100 percent of the time. While you're sitting there, a stream, a river, of ideas will flow through your mind. You'll think about countless subjects in an uncontrolled stream of consciousness. Your job is just to relax and listen to your inner voice.

At a certain stage during your period of solitude, the answers to the most pressing difficulties facing you will emerge quietly and clearly, like a boat putting gently to the side of a lake. The answer that you seek will come to you so clearly and it will feel so perfect that you'll experience a deep sense of gratitude and contentment.

Trusting Yourself
When you emerge from this period of quiet, you must do exactly what has come to you. It may involve dealing with a human situation. It may involve starting something or quitting something. Whatever it is, when you follow the guidance that you received in solitude, it will turn out to be exactly the right thing to do. Everything will be OK. And it will usually work out far better than you could have imagined. Just try it and see.

You must learn to trust yourself. You must develop the habit of listening to yourself and then acting on the guidance you receive.

Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, select a specific time and place to sit quietly and practice one full hour of solitude. Don't put it off.

Second, take small periods of silence and solitude during the day, especially when you feel overwhelmed with problems or responsibilities.

Third, take action immediately on the ideas and insights you receive while in solitude. One good idea can save you months and years of hard work. The key is trust.

Practice The Golden Rule, of Selling

June 30, 2009

Practice The Golden Rule, of Selling
By: Brian Tracy

To improve your sales performance, adopt the Golden Rule mentality. The Golden Rule says to, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It also says, "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Golden Rule mentality in sales, says simply, "Sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you."

Different Strokes For Different Folks
What does this mean? Aren't there all kinds of different personalities that require different approaches and techniques? Well, yes and no. Practicing the golden rule in selling simply means that you sell to other people the way you would like to be sold to. You sell with the same honesty, integrity, understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness that you would like someone else to use in selling to you.

Seek First to Understand
If you would like a salesperson to take the time to thoroughly understand you and your situation before making a recommendation, you practice the same thing with your customers. If you would like a salesperson to give you honest information and to help you make an intelligent buying decision, you practice the same with your customer. If you would like a salesperson to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the strengths or weaknesses of his or her product or service, and that of his or her competitors, then you do the same with your product or service and your competitors.


Care About Your Customers
Perhaps the most important part of golden rule selling is the emotional component embraced in the word, "caring." Top sales professionals care about their customers. They care about themselves, their companies, their products and services, and they really care about helping their customers to make good buying decisions. If you think about the very best salespeople you know, you will recognize that they are caring individuals.

They Don't Care How Much You Know
If you think about your very best customers, you will recall that these are invariably people you care about, and who care about you. When you think about the people you buy from, you will recall that they seem to care about you more than the average. In every part of your business life, you will find that the significant people all have the denominator of caring as part of their character and their personalities.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, resolve today to sell to your customers with the same honesty, empathy and understanding that you would like them to use in selling to you.

Second, take time to genuinely care about your customers, their individual needs and their unique situations. Make people feel important and they will make you feel important.

Using Stumbling Block, as Stepping Stones

July 12, 2009

Using Stumbling Blocks as Stepping Stones
By: Brian Tracy

Everyone makes mistakes and the busier you are, the more mistakes you will make. The only question is "How well and how effectively do you deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life?"

In this newsletter, you learn the difference between a positive and negative worldview. You learn how to benefit from your mistakes and how to remain positive in the face of adversity.

Let the Light Shine In
This is achieved through the simple exercise of self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself, or to stop being troubled by things that may have happened in your past, you must be able to disclose yourself to at least one person. You have to be able to get those things off your chest. You must rid yourself of those thoughts and feelings by revealing them to someone who won't make you feel guilty or ashamed for what has happened.

Using Stumbling Blocks as Stepping Stones
There are two ways to look at the world: the benevolent way or the malevolent way. People with a malevolent or negative worldview take a victim stance, seeing life as a continuous succession of problems and a process of unfairness and oppression. They don't expect a lot and they don't get much. When things go wrong, they shrug their shoulders and passively accept that this is the way life is and there isn't anything they can do to make it better.

On the other hand, people with a benevolent or positive worldview see the world around them as filled with opportunities and possibilities. They believe that everything happens as part of a great process designed to make them successful and happy. They approach their lives, their work, and their relationships with optimism, cheerfulness, and a general attitude of positive expectations. They expect a lot and they are seldom disappointed.


Flex Your Mental Muscles
When you develop the skill of learning from your mistakes, you become the kind of person who welcomes obstacles and setbacks as opportunities to flex your mental muscles and move ahead. You look at problems as rungs on the ladder of success that you grab onto as you pull your way higher.

Two of the most common ways to deal with mistakes are invariably fatal to high achievement. The first common but misguided way to handle a mistake is the failure to accept it when it occurs. According to statistics, 70 percent of all decisions we make will be wrong. That's an average. This means that some people will fail more than 70 percent of the time, and some people will fail less. It is hard to believe that most of the decisions we make could turn out to be wrong in some way. In fact, if this is the case, how can our society continue to function at all?

Cut Your Losses
The fact is that our society, our families, our companies, and our relationships continue to survive and thrive because intelligent people tend to cut their losses and minimize their mistakes. It is only when people refuse to accept that they have made a bad choice or decision-and prolong the consequences by sticking to that bad choice or decision-that mistakes become extremely expensive and hurtful.

Learn From Your Mistakes
The second common approach that people take with regard to their mistakes, one that hurts innumerable lives and careers, is the failure to use your mistakes to better yourself and to improve the quality of your mind and your thinking.

Learning from your mistakes is an essential skill that enables you to develop the resilience to be a master of change rather than a victim of change. The person who recognizes that he has made a mistake and changes direction the fastest is the one who will win in an age of increasing information, technology and competition.

By remaining fast on your feet, you will be able to out-play and out-position your competition. You will become a creator of circumstances rather than a creature of circumstances.

Action Exercises
Now, here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, imagine that your biggest problem or challenge in life has been sent to you at this moment to help you, to teach you something valuable. What could it be?

Second, be willing to cut your losses and walk away if you have made a mistake or a bad choice. Accept that you are not perfect, you can't be right all the time, and then get on with your life.

Third, learn from every mistake you make. Write down every lesson it contains. Use your mistakes in the present as stepping stones to great success in the future.

Think Like A Millionaire

Think Like a Millionaire
By: Brian Tracy

Attitude is Everything
The most important attitude for financial success is long-term thinking. Successful people think a long way into the future and they adjust their daily behaviors to assure they achieve their long-term goals. In a longitudinal study done at Harvard University in the 50s and 60s, they studied the reasons for upward socio-economic mobility. They were looking for factors that would predict whether or not an individual or family was going to move upward and be wealthier in the future than in the present.

They studied factors like education, intelligence, being born into the right family, or having the right connections. In every case, they found individuals who had been born with every blessing in life who did poorly. They also found individuals who had been born or come to this country with no advantages at all who had been extremely successful. What was the distinguishing factor?

They finally determined that there was only one key attitude that mattered. They called it "Time Perspective." Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.


Time Perspective
People with long-time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes. When you spend weeks, months and years developing your skills and ability and expanding your experience in order to be successful, you have long-time perspective. The average professional person has a time perspective of 10, 15 and 20 years.

Begin to see that everything that you are doing today is part of a long-time continuum, at the end of which you are going to be financially independent or financially unfortunate. People with short-time perspective think only about fun and pleasure in the short term. They have what economists call "The inability to delay gratification." They have an irresistible tendency to spend every single penny they earn and everything that they can borrow.
When you develop long-time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification and to save your money rather than spending it. The combination of long-time perspective and delayed gratification puts you onto the high road to financial independence.

Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do to develop the attitudes of financially successful people:

First, think long-term about your financial life. Decide exactly how much you want to be worth five years, ten years and twenty years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day.

Second, develop the ability to delay gratification. Instead of buying something on impulse, put off buying decisions for a day, a week or even a month. Decide in advance to "think it over" before you buy anything. This can change the way you spend money almost immediately.

July 5, 2009

The Law of Compensation
By: Brian Tracy

You Get What You Give
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, "Compensation," wrote that each person is compensated in like manner for that which he or she has contributed. The Law of Compensation is another restatement of the Law of Sowing and Reaping. It says that you will always be compensated for your efforts and for your contribution, whatever it is, however much or however little.

Increase Your Value
This Law of Compensation also says that you can never be compensated in the long term for more than you put in. The income you earn today is your compensation for what you have done in the past. If you want to increase your compensation, you must increase the value of your contribution.

Fill Your Mind With Success
Your mental attitude, your feelings of happiness and satisfaction, are also the result of the things that you have put into your own mind. If you fill your own mind with thoughts, visions and ideas of success, happiness and optimism, you will be compensated by those positive experiences in your daily activities.

Do More Than You're Paid For
Another corollary of the Law of Sowing and Reaping is what is sometimes called the, "Law of Overcompensation." This law says that great success comes from those who always make it a habit to put in more than they take out. They do more than they are paid for. They are always looking for opportunities to exceed expectations. And because they are always overcompensating, they are always being over rewarded with the esteem of their employers and customers and with the financial rewards that go along with their personal success.

Provide the Causes, Enjoy The Effects
One of your main responsibilities in life is to align yourself and your activities with Law of Cause and Effect (and its corollaries), accepting that it is an inexorable law that always works, whether anyone is looking or not. Your job is to institute the causes that are consistent with the effects that you want to enjoy in your life. When you do, you will realize and enjoy the rewards you desire.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, remind yourself regularly that your rewards will always be in direct proportion to your service to others. How could you increase the value of your services to your customers today?

Second, look for ways to go the extra mile, to use the Law of Overcompensation in everything you do. This is the great secret of success.

Earn The Respect of others

July 11, 2009

Earn the Respect of Others
By: Brian Tracy

The Most Important Measure of Success
Being respected by others is very important to each of us. A survey done by the Gallup organization found that the most prominent living Americans rated the respect of others as the most important measure of success in life. They worked very hard to earn the respect of their parents, the respect of their spouses and children, the respect of their peers and colleagues, and the respect of mankind at large.

Why You Respect Yourself
It seems that we truly respect ourselves only when we feel that we are respected by others, and we will go to great lengths to earn and keep that respect. When we feel that someone respects us for who we are and what we have accomplished, we tend to be more open to that person's influence.

Two Things You Can Do
We can do two things to put ourselves in a position to be respected by others. The first is to develop our knowledge of our field. The more people perceive you know about your subject, the more they will respect you. The highest-paid people in almost every field are those who know more than the average people. They are recognized as experts, and they develop what is called "expert power." Because of their superior knowledge, they are looked up to and listened to, and they are much more capable of influencing others to act in a particular way than they would be if their knowledge level were just average.

Develop Your Expertise
Another way to put ourselves in a position of being respected by others is to develop your expertise. Expertise is closely tied to knowledge, but it is a little different. Expertise is the ability to do, the ability to perform well in your chosen field. Men and women with expertise are those who practice over and over in whatever they do until they become known far and wide as the very best in their field.

Action Ex ercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, study your field in detail. Dedicate at least one hour per day to reading, listening to audio programs, studying to become more and more knowledgeable about what you do.

Second, continually upgrade your knowledge and skills in your field. Identify your weakest important skill and go to work on that.

Knowledge and know-how are the keys to the 21st century.