Business Innovators Radio - Brian Tracy – Best Selling Author – Mark Stephen Pooler – Dr. Rhonda M Wood

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Brian Tracy is a world-renowned best-selling author and speaker specializing in personal and professional development. His fast-moving talks and seminars on leadership, sales, personal growth, success, and business strategy are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that empower people to achieve their biggest goals. With nearly 45 years of experience, Brian brings immediate changes and long-term results, inspiring everyone to reach their full potential.https://www.briantracy.com/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/brian-tracy-best-selling-author-mark-stephen-pooler-dr-rhonda-m-wood

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Welcome to Brilliant Business TV, conversations with leading experts in business. I am your host, Mark Stephen Pula. We have a wonderful guest today, the world-renowned Brian Tracy. I'm so looking forward to a conversation with him today. We're streaming live on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. We're also on the E360 TV network. We're also on USA Global Radio and Television Network.

We're also on Business Innovators Radio Network. And we're also on MSPNewsVirbal.com. I am joined with my incredible co-host today, Dr. Ronda M. Ward. Dr. Ronda, welcome to the show today. What an incredible guest, we're. have on with us today. Yes, thank you so much, Mark. It is an honor and a privilege to be with you to co-host on your platform today. And yes, I am super excited, super excited about our guests, and I can't wait to dive right in. Norme, let's bring in the incredible Brian Tracy. Brian, welcome

to Brilliant Business TV. We're honored to have you as a guest today. Thank you, Mark. I'm so happy to be here. I used to have a client who organized seminars for me and his wife's name was Rhonda. And she ran all the back room, all the finances and everything else. And each time I would go and work with them, I would say to, I would remind her I say to, help me, Rhonda, help, help me, Rhonda. I love it. I love it. You're free to use that today whenever you need Ronda. let's get started with our first question. Now, Brian is a part of our amazing collaboration coming up in around April time,

and the collaboration is called World Class Expert Share, how the power of self-discipline creates a positive new future with the incredible Brian Tracy. So let's get started with our first question. Brian, how important is self-discipline to create? a new, desired future? Well, that's a great, great question. The fact is that in 2,000 years of research and maybe even 3,000,

they have concluded that self-discipline is the number one quality of success. Napoleon Hill wrote his famous book, Think and Grow Rich, which became, and still is the bestseller and personal success. And subsequently, he wrote a book called The Master Key to Success.

And in the Master Key to Success, which is about 300-page book, in every chapter he talks about, You're certain going to learn the Master Key. And then in the next chapter, he mentions that the Master Key is coming. He keeps dragging it all the way through in the last paragraph of the last chapter. It says, and the Master Key to Success is self-discipline.

And you recognize that every story in the book was coming to this. conclusion. Self-discipline is the hardest quality to develop and yet the most important. There was a famous author. His fabulous name. His name was to come back to me in the second. But he wrote so much. He was so prolific. He had to create his own publishing company. And he went down on the Titanic with his wife. I'm sorry, the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. And he wrote that 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 he said, anybody could do anything if they feel like it. It's when you don't feel like it and you force yourself to do it.

When I began studying self-discipline many years ago, and my book, I'm happy to say on self-discipline called No Excuscuses, has changed the lives of thousands of people in 30 or 40 languages. And what it says over and over again is self-discipline is a habit. And each human being is determined by their habits. You are your habits because that determines your behavior, which determines the responses, which determined your results and so on. So, for example, rich people, if you want to be rich, get up before 6 a.m. That's what rich people do.

They get up before 6 a.m. They plan their day, and they start work on their most important tasks immediately. Warren Buffett, who was one of the richest self-made billionaires in the world, was asked, What is your secret to success? He said, it's simple. I just say no to everything that is not the two or three most important things I can do. I just say no. And when you think about that, that to me is one of the things.

the great personal development ideas, just say no. If it is not the very best and most important thing you can do in terms of your long-term goals, then just say no to it. Warren Buffett reads five hours a day, five hours a day. Bill Gates reads two books a week and summarizes them and puts them on his website. These are some of the busiest and richest self-made people in the history of the world and they practice self-discipline. They practice discipline and not just once or twice or occasionally when it feels like it. They breathe in, they breathe out, and they discipline themselves. Napoleon Hill said in his first book, he said, discipline is to the character of man

as carbon is to steel. In other words, steel can be bulk steel that you can use for Bill. ships or it can be tempered steel, which is heated and pounded and heated and pounded, and it's flexible and fast and sharp. And so you find that the very best swords ever made are made of tempered steel, which goes through heat. And it's self-discipline when you force yourself to do something that you may not feel like, it creates heat, and it actually fuses your character at a higher level. So the more discipline you practice,

the more stronger and more self-controlled you become. So self-discipline is really the essential character of success. And it's developed through hard, hard work starting with a young person, and then forcing yourself, as he said,

to do what you should do, whether you feel like it or not. right? I agree totally. That's a great answer, Brian. And I think sometimes it's about pushing yourself on those days where you don't want to do those things. And I also agree when you get up early on a morning and you do all of those important things first, I find you're so much more productive and you have so much more of the day left to do what you want to do. Whereas if you get up later, you don't want to do any of those things. So I find you get so much more done when you do it earlier in the morning. So I love the answer. Over to you, Dr. Ronda. Wow, so much knowledge was in that response.

Thank you so much, Mr. Tracy, that I love speaking about this topic, self-discipline, something that we all need. A few things that I found very profound that you said. It's just how you describe the power of no, being able to say no if it's not a priority, and then just using the examples of other very successful people and how the power of self-discipline plays into their success. So thank you for sharing that. My question I would love to ask is how important is self-discipline to create a, I'm sorry, what advice do you have for, and wanting to use the power of self-discipline to create their own success? Well, there's two answers to that.

I gave a group coaching program for entrepreneurs, and I would put 30 to 40 people through it, and they would come and spend one full day with me and them doing exercises every three months for a year. And I promised them that they would double their income and double their income, their time off if they came to my program or I would give them their money back. And they had to be earning $100,000 a year or more. This is back in 2001 to be able to come to the program at all. So I was guaranteeing that you paid $5,000 for the year and you would double your income, which was an extra $100,000.

And in seven years and more than 1,000 entrepreneurial graduates, I never had to give a refund because in the course of my program, I gave them a series of things to do that more, that overwhelmed them. If they did any one of them, they would double their income or increase it by $100,000. Anyway, so here's what I found and what I began to teach is that if you start every day and you make a list of everything that you have to do that day, you will find, and this is what I taught my coaching clients, is that if you have 20 or 30 things that you have to do today, this week, this month, you'll find that only three of them, it's called the Law of Three. It's actually in my books now. The Law of Three says that there's only three things that account for 90% of your value of the contribution that you make. So you make a list and you ask yourself looking at the list and it's very important to write it down. This is one of the most important of all disciplines.

Write it down, write it down, write it down. Write it down. It's so important. And 80 to 90% of people don't do it. And as a result, they miss one of the greatest power principles ever discovered. So anyway, you write down your goals. I have them all do this. I say, now ask yourself what one activity on this list, if you were to do it and do it well and do it immediately,

would have the greatest financial impact on your life. You see, one of the things that we know is that everybody worries about money, thinks about money, He's concerned about money. And they're not concerned about having too much. They're concerned about having as much as possible. 80% of people are unhappy for a variety of reasons, but the number one reason is they worry about money all the time. It's the 80-20 rule.

80% of people worry about money all the time. And they go to sleep, worry about money, and they wake up worrying about money, and they sit at the family dinner table, and they talk about money and do I think about it going through the day and so on. And so one of the things that you need to do, responsibility, is to earn more money so that you never worry about money again. And I learned this decades ago.

You must reach the point where you never worry about money again. Now, what do you have to do to do that? Well, you have to do the things that you do that contribute the greatest value because there are If you have a list of 20 or 30 things, three of those things count for 90% of the value. And maybe one of them counts for 90% or 85% of the value. So first of all, identify what it is. Make a list every day. Say if I could only do one thing on this list, which one would it be?

And then start on that and start immediately and work at it nonstop until it's finished. So this is the key to developing discipline. This is the key to creating this heat that turns your mind into carbonized steel that makes you strong and capable of doing it over and over. Now, once you do this and you complete that first task, you will get a burst of exhilaration. You will feel happy. You'll feel strong. You feel powerful. You feel like you could do damn near anything.

then you say, all right, look at the list again. Now, now we've done number one. Now what is the most important? And sometimes it will change. So then you start on that. And you always discipline yourself to work on the most important thing that you can possibly be doing. Now, Dr. William Glass, a psychologist in the 80s, wrote a book called Positive Addiction. And this is one of the most important pieces of work done in medicine and psychology, what he found is that when you do anything that has a result, you get a flood of chemicals that affect your brain. If you do something positive, you get a flood of positive chemicals. The two major ones are called endorphins, which is called nature's happy drug, and dopamine, which is very similar. And then you have

negative emotions. You have, when you do something wrong or you're late or you're under pressure and stress and you haven't completed your obligations and you're worried about money, this releases negative hormones, and it makes you feel bad. It makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes you feel irritable and short-tempered and so on. So, you know, there's a saying in poker that says the The losers complain and grumble while the winners laugh and tell jokes. And that's a really good way of putting it. When you are doing useless things, you're actually losing at the game of life, and you know it at a deep level.

So here's Dr. Glashers conclusion. He said that you could become addicted to either drug. You can become addicted to cocaine and heroin and negative drugs or alcohol and so. But you can also become addicted to the positive chemicals that your brain releases when you start and complete a task. One of the most important characteristics of successful people is task completion. Once you start something, you discipline yourself to complete it 100%. There's been several studies, but the world is full of people who started to write a book and never finished it. and there's a story of one guy who life was in the ditch and he wasn't going anywhere and he finally sat down and he wrote this book and he finished the book and he didn't believe it was any good and he killed himself.

And his mother found the manuscript in her son's stuff and said it to a publisher and the publisher published the book and it became a worldwide bestseller, sold more than a million copies. It would have made a wish. But he was just so discouraged. He just gave up. You have to be really far down to kill yourself. I mean, but why would a person do that? You read about it. And the answer is that they're so blocked up with negative chemicals

that they don't see anywhere up. They get depressed and angry and frustrated and happy. So every time you complete a task, you get a burst of endorphins, which makes you feel happy. And the more important the task is, the happier you feel. It's almost like running a race and winning in front of a huge audience that jumps to their feet and cheers. You have this great feeling of winning and success and happiness. And it propels you, like two hands at your back, it propels you into your next task because you love this happy.

feeling of being, of completing important things. So therefore, you could actually take complete control of your life and turn your life into an experience of success and make yourself happy all the time. Basically, you just are an optimist because no matter what happens, you have so much endorphins going on in your brain. All you can think about is starting and completing another task. So if you have 10 tasks to do in a day, you just start and complete a lower level task. You get a little pinch of endorphins and you feel good if you've done that, you cleaned up your desk or something. But when you complete something that's really important, a report, a manuscript, a big sale of any kind, you just feel exhilarated. And what Dr. Glasser said is that you become addicted, because of the positive addiction.

Soon you become addicted to starting and completing. It takes tremendous discipline to develop this habit, but once the habit is developed, you look forward to identifying and starting and working on and completing your major test. If you do that, I promise you, this is the secret to success. This is the secret to high earnings, the respect of other people, moving up to the top in your profession, living in a nice house, creating a nice life for yourself and your family. Everything comes down to this ability to set their most important task, start on it, and discipline yourself to do nothing until it's complete.

That's even if many people will work on something until one or two or three o'clock in the morning. And you know what happens? They can't sleep for three hours because they're so revved up. They're so pumped up. But they discipline, they some, to force themselves to keep working. until it's 100% done, not 99% or 95%, but it's 100% done. So that is the great key to success is decide your most important thing, start work on it and work on it nonstop until it's done.

And just do that regularly until you start to get this automatic rush of endorphins. Just thinking about starting and completing an important test makes you happy. You could hardly wait to do it. And you earn the respect and esteem of all the people around you. Whenever you talk to anybody who's highly admired in a company, they say he, she gets a lot done. He really gets results. They really do a lot of stuff.

If you want anything done, give it to him. Give it to her. Because they'll just jump on it and take it. That gets people promoted. I just read the new president. of Starbucks. New president of Starbucks was brought in about three years ago. He gave up his job at Chipotle, where he was the president, and after three years of turning the company around, not only does he earn $36 million a year, but they gave him a bonus of $92 million.

They gave him a bonus after three years of $92 million. Think about that. You can't even comprehend what that would mean. Did they pay him $35, six months? million dollars a year a salary and a $90 million bonus for TV goals. But you can bet your biffy. He didn't sell home watching television after he got that job. He went to work and he got results. And you read this all the time in the Wall Street Journal about people who received 10, 20, 50, 100 million dollar salaries or bonuses or stock options and things like that

because they start a complete important task. And then they get hired away and pay twice as much because everybody is looking for someone who will do the job, get the job done. They say the most important ability in the world of work is dependability. Dependability is that the person wants something done to give it to you.

They never even have to think about it again. They know that it will be done, it'll be done well and be done quickly. And when you do this, they say that new opportunities open up to you. And as you, oh, good and faithful servant, this wonderful line from the Bible, oh good and faithful servant, you have been faithful over small things, and will make you master over many. And that is the great secret of success.

Faithful over small. I love that, Brian. And I would love some of those happy drugs every single day. and who doesn't want to worry about money as well? I mean, what amazing gift to never having to worry about money again. I really, really love your explanation on all of that. Brian, what best approach do you have for individuals wanting to become the best version of themselves and create a new future?

Yeah. Well, I had, sometimes I talk about what I call my golden triangle of success. And I've had three critical, most important transformations. Number one, when I was very young, I discovered the importance of self-responsibility. In fact, I just got a magazine from Forbes and Forbes' entire quote section at the last page, his own self-responsibility. When I began to study human success, I found that the major reason for human unhappiness is negative emotions.

It's negative emotions. All the psychologists and psychiatrists in the world and all the counselors and coaches are dealing with people and helping them work through their negative emotions. And so I studied the subject for 4,000 hours In my 20s, when other people were going out to the barn, going out dating, I'd go home and study two to three hours a day. And I made a major study of this, negative emotions. And what I found was very simple, is that all negative emotions are created in your own mind.

And you not exist in reality outside of yourself. So if they've been creating, you can get rid of them. In other words, they're under your control. One of the things that I found is the law of control. I just finished the book, by the way, called 32 Laws of Money and Success. And it's one of the most profound books I've ever read. It's my latest book. It's now been released in 19 languages and counting.

But this book says one of the laws is a law of control. And it says that you feel good about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life. and you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are not in control or you're controlled by someone else or you're controlled by a bad relationship, a bad romance, you're controlled by a bad boss. In other words, it's when you feel you're in control, you're in charge, that you feel happy. And Aristotle in 350 BC said the ultimate aim of all human activity is to be happy. and if one is happy, they want to be happy er.

I call this the er factor. So we're going to be my next book. The er factor is ER, which is the comparative, is people want to be happy or, healthy er. Enjoyable er. More loving. We chair. More.

Anyway, so the er factor refers to happiness. Everything that you do is an attempt, whether it's an effective attempt or not, to achieve your own happiness. Many people make the big mistake of achieving short-term happiness, which leads to long-term failure. For example, drinking and overeating and fooling around at work. 50% of working time is wasted in idle conversation with coworkers. 50%. It's terrible. It's one of the reasons why people...

So many companies sent people home to work, but then they found that they created other problems. But the thing is that people spend half of their time not doing the work that they were hired for. And so here's a very simple rule. If you want to get ahead, work all the time you work. This is not playtime. This is not school time. This is not fun time. This is work time.

You've got to work. It's 8.30. This is work time. and like a runner in a marathon, when the gun goes off, you start running and you just keep moving because this is work time. And if you've got a reputation for working all the time you work, you'll put yourself on the fast track to promotion and higher pay.

You stand out amongst everybody else. Boss comes in and you're always busy. You're always busy and you're always working on your most important task. So anyway, I'm getting off track. three points in the Golden Triangle is I found that almost all negative emotions come from blame, blaming someone or something else for something that makes you unhappy. He did, she did, he didn't, he shouldn't. And so most of them come from parents. I've met many people. I've spoken to almost five million people in more than 4,000 seminars in 84 countries. And I've met a lot of

people in their 50s who are still mad and unhappy about something that one of their parents did or didn't do when they were younger. I remember one woman, she told me that she was still angry with her father. She was married with two children in the late 30s. And I said, well, why? She said, well, one day, she was a teenager. She was 16 or 17, and sometimes teenagers put on weight. And she had put on some weight. And her father said, well, honey, you're looking a little bit pudgy today. And it was so shattering to her. She never recovered. 20 years later, she was still depressed and angry at her father. It's the most amazing thing. So, always it has to do with blame. You have to blame someone or something else for something you're not happy about. So how do you

eliminate blame. You eliminate blame with self-responsibility. And instead of blaming, you use these magic words, I am responsible, I am responsible, I am responsible. And my friend Mark Victor Hansen says, when you have a negative thought, you to cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel. He said, cancel it out. And the way you do that is by saying, I'm responsible. I'm responsible. Now, you may not be responsible for what someone else did to you, to hurt you sometime in the past, but you are responsible for how you respond for what you do from this day forward. So if ever you, it's the most amazing thing. Instead of taking a sleeping pill, if ever you're laying in bed and you're angry and you're unhappy about something, say, wait a minute, I'm responsible, I'm responsible, I'm responsible,

cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel. And you know what will happen? you would just fall asleep. All the negative emotions disappear because they cannot stay in the same place, same mental place as you're accepting responsibility.

So that's number one. And what they found is this turning point in becoming a leader, in becoming a top person in any field is to be totally responsible for everything that happens, for everything that you do or don't do, and never blame anyone else.

all negative emotions come from blame. And when you stop blaming, their negative emotions disappear. And what is left? A vacuum. An emotional vacuum. And what does nature hate? Nature hates a vacuum.

So what does nature do? Nature fills the vacuum with positive emotions of love and happiness and joy and ambition and excitement and enthusiasm and goal setting and so on. As soon as you stop making it, excuses, you start to make progress. It's the most wonderful thing. So that's the first part.

And if you don't accept responsibility, and a good friend of mine had this wonderful little sort of metaphor. He said that in the road of life, you go to a certain point, and you reach the point between childhood and adulthood. And when you cross this line into adulthood, it's when you accept responsibility for your life from now on. and most people, probably 80%, will come to the line

and they may put a toe on the line, but they will not step across the line. Superior people, like yourselves, like the people watching this, always accept responsibility. They say, I am responsible for my own life. I'm responsible. And somebody says, yeah, but he or she is,

yes, but I'm responsible for how I respond. I take responsibility because there's a direct relationship on my favorite mathematical symbols is one-to-one is between responsibility and positive emotions

between responsibility and control. So this is a starting point. I spent 4,000 hours studying this and it was the most important thing I ever learned because I just eliminated negative emotions. It's never had any more. And I've raised my children and my wife.

There's no negative emotions here. Nobody who comes in around this house is negative because everyone is encouraged to just accept responsibility, be controlled. So the second part was goal setting. And this is something that I want to contribute to your friends because this changed my life so profoundly. I was sleeping on the floor of a friend's one-bedroom apartment. I was broke. I was hungry. I lost 20 pounds at one time because I couldn't afford to eat.

And I say being in sales with no sales training is the best weight loss program in the business because I lost all kinds of weight. But anyway, so I picked up a magazine and the magazine said, if you want to be successful, you have to have goals. And so if you want to have goals, write down 10 goals. So I took out a piece of paper, you know, just found a piece of paper, and I wrote down 10 goals. And I promptly lost the piece of paper, but one month later, I'd achieved all 10 goals.

I remembered them because they started to, it was so amazing. So I began to study goals setting, and what I found is that each person has a conscious mind that Freud identified, a subconscious mind that Freud also identified, but then a third mind. They called it the ego, the id, and then the super-reaching. go, which is, we call it the super conscious mind. The superconscious mind is like a massive computer that you have available to you, which contains all the knowledge and information in the world. With this super conscious computer, if you can set a goal and be clear about the goal,

and the word is clarity, clarity, clarity, write it down. write it down, write it down, because you can't be clear unless it's in writing. Imagine if waiters came to the table and took the orders for everybody and didn't write anything down. Would you feel comfortable? How could you cannot remember? Anyway, so what you do is you write it down. So I wrote a book. I studied it and studied it.

And one of my goals, I realized when I was 31, 32 years old, I was asked to give a speech. on becoming a self-made millionaire. And I said, sure, I could do that. Then I hung up the phone, and I realized that I'd wanted to be a millionaire all my life, but I never had become one because I never set it as a goal. So I began to do research on self-made millionaires, and I believe that everybody should have a car and become a self-made millionaire, or not necessarily in that order.

But the thing is, everybody should be a self-made millionaire. Now I speak to people everywhere and I open it up. Even teenagers, I say you set the goal to become a self-made millionaire. And then what you do is you work on the goal every day. What this does, however, is it activates this supercharger of your super conscious mind and you start to attract into your life people and ideas and accidents and knowledge and skills and even inventions that make you, move you toward the goal and move the goals toward you.

So anyway, I'm walking down the street and I'm thinking, what am I going to say in this speech? So I did two months. I had two months before this speech. And there's going to be 800 people, 800 business owners there. And I began to study the subject. And I realized I needed to set it as a goal. So I did. And I put together a very simple formula

is if I follow this formula every day, self-discipline, every day it'll make me a goal and it'll make me a millionaire. And I'll give you, if you want, like, I'll give you this formula in a couple of minutes. So I wrote out, word out this formula, I had seven things you do every single day, and I gave myself 10 years to become a millionaire. Well, I was a millionaire in five. And it worked.

So I began to teach it to other people, and they became millionaires. And then I realized that what I had done is I tapped into what is called the power of compounding, which Einstein said is the eighth wonder of the universe. In compounding, if you get a little bit better and a little better on that, a little bit more productive, a little bit more valuable, a little bit more productive, it starts to compound by compound interest. Compound interest is the greatest power in the world. the universe. So what happened is I began to get a little bit more productive. I got up a little bit

earlier. I worked harder. I stayed later. I read. I studied. Went to courses and so on. And I started to get a little bit better every day, every week, every month, every year. And then I realized if you kept doing this, you could actually increase your income 10 times in 10 years. And so I did. And people began to teach you to people. Actually, what happened was I became a millionaire in three years. And that increased my income 10 times in five years. And I couldn't believe it. I went from earning $14,000 a year to earning $144,000 a year, exactly 10 times.

And then I went to earning $1,0.4 per year, 10 times more. And I started to train people with this formula. You know what they did? They came back and they said, I remember a gentleman came up to me at my seminar in Seattle, and he said, your formula didn't work. He said, I've been working on it ever since you taught it to our car people, car sales people. I've been working on it now for six years and it doesn't work. He said, and only took six years to hit $10 million.

To hit a million dollars. It can increase my income 10 times. He said, I've never earned so much money in my life. He said, it's unbelievable. And all the guys that, they're all selling cars. They're car salesmen. He said, these guys are the top sick car. sales from the country now, working out of the same dealership, sort of like Carl Sewell and Sewell Cadillac and

customers for life. Anyway, they just kept following this form. So what I did is I set goals, and you have to write them down and make a plan to achieve them, and there's a process. You can get this book on goals. It's a paperback. It costs $10. If you don't like it, you can set it to me. I'll give you your money back. Jim Rohn once said to me, he said it's not what a book costs is what it cost you not to know what's in it. And this book is the best selling. Go ahead.

This book is the best-selling book. I said I like that. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. Have you read goals? This is life, it's life-changing, but this is the, I think the second or third edition. The next edition is coming out. in the next two or three months. This new edition, I had to rewrite it 12 times,

and it took six months and three other writers. So the new edition is the best ever done, probably in the history of the world. This has already sold a million copies in 36 languages, but the next one that's coming out is phenomenal. But what you need to know is you need to have clear written goals, and here's the formula. And this woman who visited me last week from Ukraine, she said, this is what made her rich.

She writes down 10 goals every day. And what you do, I see. This is my book that I used to write down my goals. And every day, I open it up, Spiral Notebook. You would get a smaller one if you like. Here's the one that you used here. Get a smaller one again with my goals. And what do I do, I learned this when I was about 25, is write down your 10 goals in the present tense every morning without looking back at the previous page.

Let me repeat that. Every morning, open your book and write down your 10 goals in the present tense, as though they're already a reality. Not, I will learn. Your subconscious mind can only focus on something that is phrased in the present tense. intense and positive and personal. So you say, I earn X number of dollars by January 31 of the particular year. That is a perfect goal because your subconscious mind then accepts it as a command and passes it to the superconscious. And the super conscious then works on it 24 hours a day until it comes true. and it'll be slow at the beginning,

but sometimes people will set outrageous goals and then win the lottery the next day. I mean, they're just beyond belief with things that happened. So the thing is it costs you nothing except a few minutes of time. And what she did is she showed me. She brought me her spiral notebook

and she showed me how she woke down her goals every single morning, exactly the way I'd instructed. And if all you do is that, which requires what? What does it require? It requires self-discipline, self-control. It requires taking charge of your own life. But it only takes five minutes, and it will make you rich.

And that's what happened to me. I wrote down my 10 goals many years ago, and I achieved all 10 within 30 days. I could not believe it. I just remembered that as a goal. Does it work? Yes. Does it work for everyone? Yes. Does it work everywhere in the world? Yes. It works in third world countries. People say they want to become dollar or euro millionaires in third world countries, Africa and Middle East and South America. And it works. It's just extraordinary what happens to them. I had this one young guy in Africa, in an African country, and a poor country. And he had poor background, poor. everything and he wrote to me and he said, Mr. Tracy said, how do I, how do I become wealthy with no advantages and a poor country and corruption and everything else? And I told him, just write down what you want in the present tense and then accept responsibility for yourself and whatever job

you get to do, do it twice as well as anybody else. And he wrote back to me two or three, four years later. He's now the head of a major company. He's paid more than his parents made in a lifetime. He's one of the most respected people in his feel. And he's just beaming. He was so happy. He sent me pictures and everything else. Anyway, the point is that it works. It works. It works. Harvey McKay, the author, wrote a testimonial for one of my books. And he said, read this book and practice it because for three reasons, it works, it works, it works. And so that's what we say to our friends. Number one is accept responsibility, no more blaming.

From now on, the magic words are I am responsible. That's the power command. Number two, write down your goals in the present tense and pick your most important goal and work on it every single day, seven days a week. Read, listen, learn something. And then number three is continuous learning, which is, of course, where you guys are dedicated to. As you see behind me, what you're seeing there is one-tenth, one-fifteenth of the books in my house, thousands of books. I've read 6,000 books in my lifetime.

I read two to three hours every day. So I never stop learning. I'm now 81 years old, and I'm still buying two books a week. and my goal is to get through them, get to them and get through them. But continuous learning, sometimes you just pick up a book like this, and I've had many people tell me this book made them rich. This book made them rich because they didn't understand about a goal. Sometimes people come up to me and they say these magic words,

and I love the words, they say, you're Brian Tracy. You changed my life. You made me rich. You changed my life. You made me rich. and that's what we want people to say about you. You're Mark. You changed my life.

You made me rich. Or Rhonda, you changed my life. It made me rich. What was it? And they always say the same thing. They beam, they smile. They say, it was the goals. It was the goals.

I never understood the importance of written goals until I read your material. And that changed my life. I went to a million dollars, two months. million dollars, three million dollars. I won't even talk anymore, but I can live forever on the amount of money that I have in the bank. My major goal was to provide wealth for my family and my wife because men die earlier than women. And it's amazing. Sixty-seven percent of women, I read this, end up dependent on their children two years after their husband dies. even if their husband is a big success and had lots of money, but because they do nothing about it,

they ended up destitute and had to live in a back bedroom in one of their kids of houses or apartments. So one of my goals is to make sure that my wife is well taken care of, and she is. And anyway, that was my goal. That was my major goal. Number one is to take care of my family so that they never had to worry about money again. Wow.

And it's the same thing with our friends is except responsibility, no blaming. Number one, that's the key mental discipline. Number two is set right down and work on your goals every day. And number three is continuous learning. That golden triangle will make you happy. By the way, every time you read something good in a book, it releases endorphins and dopamine in your brain. It makes you happy. Why did you be me?

You want to go and say, hey, I've got, let me read you this. And you share it with somebody else because it was so good because you already enjoyed it. Well, it's the same thing. Every time you learn something that could help you to be better, it makes you happy. And so you become addicted to the happiness that comes from self-discipline and from learning. Anyway, I'm getting carried away. But subjects will sometimes the keys to success. are very simple.

Mark and Rhonda, they're very success. Very simple. The key is for you to do it. People say, well, this is a simple shit. Yes, it is. Do it. And do you have the ability? By the way, the Guta, the German philosopher,

one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, had this beautiful line and said, everything is hard before it's easy, like the development of self-discipline. Very true. Pardon? Very true. Everything is hard before it's easy,

but once it becomes a habit, it becomes easy and automatic. So developing discipline is very difficult at the beginning, but then it becomes easier and easier, and then you cross, it's almost like a mountain. You cross the upper point, and from then on it's easier and easy. and easier for you to be disciplined and focused on accomplishing the things that are most

important to you. So at the beginning, everything, most people quit right at the beginning. They try something new or different and they give up and they go back to doing what they were doing, which wasn't working. But my friend Charlie Jones used to start off his seminars. He's a great speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, he has his kind of slur. Ladies and gentlemen, he says, I want to tell you something.

I'm going to tell you something that you're not going to like. He said, but I've got to tell you this anyway because you're here to learn, but I have to tell you this. And here it is. You write this down. You write this down. And go to somebody in the front row. You write this down.

And you say, here it is. Nothing works. Nothing works. no matter how good it sounds on paper or what they teach you or anything else. It doesn't work. He said at least it doesn't work the first time or the second time or the third time. Nothing works the first time you try it. And it was one of my great inspirations because I had always decided that when I learned something new,

I would try it 10 times before I passed judgment on it. because the first time I tried it, it didn't work, because I didn't have a familiar argument with it. It was an experience. It's like riding a bicycle. You fall off the first time you ride a bicycle. Right. But you don't get up.

You know that it's possible because so many other people are riding bicycle. So you keep trying, and you keep trying, and soon you develop the balance, and then you can ride a bicycle for the rest of your life, or drive a car or anything else. So nothing works at least the first time. So that's really important when you try self-discipline, which is going to change your life forever, when you start to develop self-discipline, pick one really important area.

It could be weight loss. It could be physical fitness. It could be exercise. It could be a reading a certain amount. Whatever, pick one area where you have a tendency not to do it and then force yourself to do it until it becomes automatic. and easy. And successful people are those who have developed a series of successful disciplines. And unsuccessful people are those who have not. It's real simple, nothing complicated about it. Brian, you are full of wisdom, Brian, real wisdom. I think our viewers,

I love the taking responsibility and how you respond is a big, big thing in life, because we always have control how we react and respond to things. And I think I'm going to be writing eight ten goals. And I think all of our viewers are going to be writing eight ten goals as well. And I also think continual learning. I'm one that's constantly learning as well, which is so, so important. You're full of wisdom, Brian. You've showed so so much golden nuggets, wisdom.

You've given over-gift to us today. actually. Do you want to add anything there, Rhonda? No, I've definitely learned so much and I appreciate how your three keys are very simple, but they're so powerful. I mean, definitely life-changing, for sure. And I took good notes. So I am personally going to implement these in my daily life. And, you know, I hope this isn't the last time that we all are connected. I want to be able to stay connected because I've really enjoyed this conversation. I know our viewers are going to enjoy this conversation. It's definitely transformation on life-changing.

So thank you so much. Thank you. Honestly, it's been full of so much value. I really, I'm really big on the subconscious mind and awareness, being the observed, of thought, not believing every single thought. I know you mentioned cancel, cancel, cancel. So I'm very big on observing, not believing. And I agree with everything what you said about emotions as well. Your emotions can really make or break you. So mastering those negative emotions, that is such a big, important skill to have. I do a lot of reading out goals and things,

but I've never tried writing out in present tense 10 goals a day, which is such a small task to do every day to really get that programmed into the mind as well. So that is definitely something I'll be doing as well. Now, Brian, I know people can learn more about you. They can connect with you at your website at brionetracy.com. That is bryantracy.com. Brian, I fully enjoyed having you on the show today.

You have overdelivered. You gave so much wisdom. And I really, really appreciate you being my guest today. And the amazing Dr. John D. Martini connected us, who also is an incredible guy full of wisdom again. So I want to genuinely thank you for being my guest today, Brian. Well, it's been an honor to be with you and Rhonda. I just love Rhonda's name.

And Mark's a nice name too, but Rhonda's better. Thank you very much. Thank you. And let's do this again later. And I'm so happy that John D. Martini brought us together. He's been my dear friend all my life, 40 years. Thanks for listening to Business Innovations. To hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters, visit us online at business innovators.com today.