The Resilient Mind - How To Master The Art of Self-Discipline - Brian Tracey

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Brian Tracy is a Canadian-American motivational public speaker and self-development author. He is the author of over eighty books that have been translated into dozens of languages.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People who are going to be really successful in the future are willing to make sacrifices in the present in order to guarantee that future. And by sacrifices, we mean they're willing to put in the long hours. They're willing to get up earlier. They're willing to work harder. They're willing to stay later. They're willing to invest and save their money, even though they don't have a lot, knowing that with compound interest, it will grow and grow over time. They're willing to spend an enormous amount of time investing in their children, knowing that this investment in their children, in time and love and affection and support will pay off for decades and generations,

even into the lives of their children and grandchildren. So sacrifice is the critical word, and sacrifice means that you have the ability to discipline yourself. You have the ability to delay gratification in the short term so that you can enjoy far greater rewards in the long term. We say that self-discipline is self-control. It's self-mastery. Now, the payoff for practicing self-discipline is immediate. People think, well, geez, you know, I'll get these rewards way down in the future.

No, no, there's an immediate reward. There's a wonderful line in spiritual development that said, you are not punished for your sins, but by them. In other words, there are things that you do that are harmful to you that cause immediate detriment. But you're also rewarded for the good things that you do, and you're rewarded immediately. So what we know is when you practice self-discipline,

you actually like and respect yourself more. And you know, and I know, that how you feel about yourself on a minute-to-minute basis, do you feel that you're a good person? Do you feel that you're a likable person, a successful person? The more you like yourself and respect yourself and value yourself on a minute-to-minute basis, the better is your attitude, the better is your reaction to other people. You just feel happy inside. And wonderfully enough, when you practice self-discipline,

when you exert yourself to do what you know you should, should do, even though there's endless temptations to do something fun and easy, when you discipline yourself to do it, your self-esteem goes up. You actually like yourself more. Your self-image improves. You actually see yourself as a better person. And of course, as you know, your self-image determines your performance. The person you see in your mind will be the person that you will be on the outside. And the wonderful thing is when you practice self-discipline, especially in exercise, for example, but even in hard work, your brain releases endorphins. And endorphins are called nature's happy drug.

And it actually makes you happy to practice self-discipline, to take control of yourself and make yourself do the right thing and complete it. You feel good about yourself in the moment. And, of course, the effect that it has on your future can be tremendous. Now, fortunately, self-discipline is a habit that you can learn with practice and repetition. If you do something over and over again, you eventually develop a habit. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is successful people have success habits. And the most important success habit they have is the ability to make themselves do what they know they should do at this time.

And wonderfully enough, if you practice it over and over again, it finally locks in. Now, many people get into the habit of taking the easy way out, looking for shortcuts, and so on. So they actually get into a comfort zone of doing things that are harmful to their long-term future. And they actually feel uncomfortable completing tasks or starting on their most important jobs. However, when you get into a new comfort zone, it will be easier for you to practice the habit of self-discipline than it would be in the past for you to take the shortcut. Goethe, the German philosopher, once said that everything is hard before it's easy. Everything is hard before it's easy. So developing the habit of self-discipline is hard.

And be patient with yourself because you slip back all the time. All your life, you'll be slipping back. All your life, you have to fight this battle. You never get it to the point where it's locked in forever. Every morning you get up and that alarm goes off and you say, do I sleep a little longer or do I get up? You know, every time you look at a list of things to do, you say, do I start with the most important thing, as they say,

do the worst first? or do I do something that's fun and talk to a friend or make a phone call? You've got to fight this battle every single day, but every time you fight in when you feel better about yourself. It only takes about 21 days, they say, to develop a new habit. So you can lock in the foundation of the habit simply by practicing self-discipline every single day without exception for 21 days. Now, some years ago, a businessman named Herbert Gray did a long time study.

It was kind of his project to find out what he called the common denominator of success. What would be the common denominator of success? And he spent 11 years studying the literature, interviewing people, reflecting on it, and he finally wrote a little pamphlet. And the pamphlet has been handed around for years and years, and you don't need to get it because I'll tell you what's in it. He said, the common denominator of success was quite simple. He said, successful people he found make a habit of doing what unsuccessful people don't like to do.

And of course the logical question is, well, what is it that unsuccessful people don't like to do? Well, it turned out to be the same thing that successful people don't like to do either, but they do it anyway because they recognize that that's the price of success. A simple thing like exercising, going for a run or a walk at the end of the day. Well, do people like to do this? Do we look forward to exertion and perspiration and sweating and straining and everything else? No, we don't look forward to it, but we do it because we recognize that this is the price of looking and feeling fit, trim, living a long life, taking good care of our bodies,

and so on. So remember, the same things that unsuccessful people don't like to do are things you don't like to do either. Many years ago, I met Rich DeVos personally. Rich DeVos is the founder of Amway, started off selling soap from door to door, and now he's worth about $5.3 billion, according to Forbes. And he was asked a question, he said, well, you know, how do you get over the fact that it's hard to prospect, it's hard to recruit, it's hard to build a business, it's hard to come home after work and work on building your business. He said, you just have to understand this. There's lots of things in life that you don't like to do, and you'll never like to do them. There's lots of hard things that contain stress and they contain rejection and potential

failure and hard work and so on. He said, but you do them because you want to do the other things and it is only by doing the things that you don't want to do that you can finally create the opportunity to do all the things that you want to do for yourself and your family and again it comes back to our favorite word sacrifice be willing to pay the price in the present to enjoy the great rewards in the future now there are nine disciplines that you can develop that we'll talk about today there are nine disciplines that you can develop that will improve every area of your life and here's a rule every exercise of discipline

in any area strengthens disciplines in every other area, just as if you work out with your full body that strengthens all your muscles, your heart, your lungs, and so on. Every weakness in discipline also weakens your other disciplines as well. So every time you exert yourself, to discipline yourself, to make yourself do something, to control and master your natural tendency to seek the line of least resistance, every time you master that tendency, you feel stronger and better and you strengthen your ability to discipline yourself in other areas as well. So the first discipline of all is the discipline of clear thinking versus fuzzy thinking. You know, sometimes you've heard me ask, what is the highest paid work in America?

What's the most important work in any job or any company? And the answer is thinking. And you know the old saying that some people think, some people think they think, and the great majority would rather die than think. But the discipline of clear thinking is the most important because the way you think, the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your decisions and choices. Your decisions and choices determine the actions you take. The actions you take determine your results. Your results determine the quality of your life.

And it all starts with your thinking clearly. Thomas Edison once said that thinking is the hardest discipline of all. It requires real effort to think because especially today we are so, surrounded with distractions. I'm always amazed when I go down the street or fly or drive as people seem totally immersed in listening to things. They've got devices in their ears and stuff on their cell phone and they're listening to music in their car and they're watching television. They simply cannot stop bombarding their mind with sensory input. And of course, when you're doing that, it is impossible for you to think well. To think well requires that you practice a couple of

techniques. Now, first of all, as Peter Drucker said, you need to take time to think. You need to create long, unbroken chunks of time. The rule is that fast decisions are usually wrong decisions, especially fast decisions involving people or money are usually wrong decisions. So if you're going to make a decision that has long-term consequences, then you have to give it a lot of thought. You have to sort of look at it like a beautiful piece of porcelain. You look at it from every single side and think about it carefully. And the more carefully you think about a decision, the better the quality of that decision will be when you finally make it. How many times have you said, you know, if I just thought about that a little bit more, I wouldn't have done it? Or if I just

thought a bit better or I'd just taken time to think? Well, superior people through experience and through painful experience, learn to take their time in making important decisions. So one of the very best ways that you can develop the discipline of clear thinking is to sit in solitude for 30 to 60 minutes when you have a major problem or a major issue in your life. Solitude has been discovered and rediscovered throughout all the history of man as the most powerful of all thinking tools. You see, if you can imagine a bucket of water with silt in it and it's all churned up and you can't see anything, but if you leave the bucket of water to sit for a while, all the silt will drop to the bottom, and the water will become perfectly clear.

This is what happens for you in solitude. If you sit calmly by yourself with no noise, no distractions, nothing to read, just sit quietly, which takes tremendous discipline the first few times you do it. At about 25 or 26 minutes, your mind goes clear. And any problem that you've been working on, the solution just pops into your mind. Any issue that you've been dealing with,

the answer just comes to you. It's almost like a miracle. When you practice solitude, you actually activate your super conscious mind and your intuition. And something that you've been having trouble with or wrestling with suddenly becomes clear and you know exactly what to do. Now here's the wonderful thing about solitude. Everybody who practices it will tell you it's incredible. And if you've never done it before, just practice it once. Sometime today, take 25, 30 minutes, take an hour if you can, and just sit there.

quietly by yourself and allow your mind to calm. Sometimes it's called mind calming and just allow yourself to calm down and think. And the most amazing things will happen. You'll start to make better decisions. You'll start to hear what is called the still small voice within. And this still small voice, sometimes will shout at you so loudly, you will be amazed. Now here's another way to think better. When you're dealing with any kind of a situation, write down every detail of the problem or situation. Take a sheet of paper, and the rule is think on paper, think on paper, and write down every detail, how it happened, what's going on, the problems, the concerns, the cost, who's involved. Just write it down, write it down, write it down. And the most amazing thing happens

between the head and the hand. As you're writing out all the details, sometimes exactly the right choice pops out at you. It becomes clear, but you would not have triggered that super conscious solution if you hadn't taken the time to think on paper. You know, Aristotle once said that wisdom, which is the greatest of all human desires, wisdom is the ability to make good decisions, is a combination of experience plus reflection. Experience plus reflection. In other words, you have an experience and then you reflect on the experience and you think about what does that experience mean to me? How can I use that? What can I learn from it? So reflecting on your experience,

and the best way to do that is to go for a walk. Just going for a walk where you can't listen to anything, don't take an iPod or anything. Just go for a walk, 30 or 60 minutes, and just walk. And while you're talking and reflecting upon something that's going on at work or at home, you'll be amazed at the quality of ideas that will come into your mind. To improve your thinking, talk it over with someone else who you like and trust, and give them the details, and ask them to give you their feedback,

give you their perspective. Sometimes, especially if you're in a great relationship, the other person can give you a perspective that completely changes your ideas. A good way to think better is to ask, especially if you're frustrated or having difficulties, ask, what are my assumptions? What am I assuming about this situation that may not be correct? What if my basic assumptions about this relationship, about this job, about this product or service or this investment? What if my assumptions were wrong?

Then what would I do? And here's the key to good thinking. Be open to doing something completely different. Be open to admitting the possibility that you could be wrong and doing something completely different. And what that does is it opens up your mind and your perspective so you can see all kinds of possibilities that you may not have seen before. So clear thinking is the first discipline. It is the discipline practiced by the most successful, happiest, and wealthiest people in our society.

Now, the second major discipline, my old friend, is the discipline of a daily goal setting. The discipline of daily goal setting will change your life. life. Why is what we know that focus and concentration are essential to success. There are some skills that are helpful to success, but focus and concentration are indispensable. If you cannot focus and you cannot concentrate, then you have to work for someone else who will make you focus and concentrate, who will supervise you. The ability to focus, to be clear about what you want, and then to concentrate single-mindedly on achieving it are both habits or disciplines that you can learn through practice. So you start off in the discipline of daily goal setting. You start off and you

ask this question. This is the big question. What do I really want to do with my life? What do I really, really, really want to do with my life? Why am I here? If I could do anything at all, what would I want to do with my life? And there's a great question that you can use to clarify this. Most people think in a very fuzzy way about what they want to do with their life because they're preoccupied with all of their problems in life. So what you do is you remove all your problems by asking yourself this question. Imagine that I receive $10 million cash today, tax-free in the bank. But at the same time, I got a diagnosis from the doctor that said that you're going to die in 10 years. You'll have superb physical health for 10 years, but you're going to die in 10 years. So if you had 10 million

dollars in the bank, which means you had no financial worries, and you had 10 years to live, what would you really want to do with your life. What would you do more of or less of? What would you start up or what would you stop completely? What would you get into or get out of if you had $10 million and 10 years to live? Just imagine that for the moment because most people, as I said, become preoccupied with their limitations with what they don't have and it holds them back from deciding what they really, really want. Now, the next thing you do is take a spiral notebook and I carry a spiral notebook around with me all the time. Take a spiral notebook and write down 10 goals that you'd like to accomplish in the next 12 months or so. Write your goals in the present tense as though they already

existed. Don't say I will earn X number of dollars in the next 12 months. Write them down as though you are already earning it. Say I earn X number of dollars in this year. I always write the words buy at the end of every goal. I earn X number of dollars by December 31st, 2007. I achieved this goal by June 30, 2008. So when you give your subconscious mind a deadline, it works on it 24 hours a day. When you write down a goal, make sure it's positive. Don't say, I will quit smoking. Say, I am a non-smoker.

Don't say I will lose weight. Say, I weigh X number of pounds. And when you give your subconscious mind a command in the present tense that is contrary to your current situation, your subconscious mind goes to work to resolve this dynamic tension and make your external reality consistent with your new orders, your new commands, your new goals. And finally, always write your goals in the personal tense. Use the word I, because only you in the whole universe can use the word I relative to yourself.

You use the word I. You say, I earn, I drive, I achieve, I acquire, I accumulate, I live in. In other words, always follow the word I plus an action verb. Then you take a spiral notebook and you write down at least ten goals. You can work on 10 to 15 goals at a time, but never less than 10. Your subconscious, super conscious minds of incredible power, so give them lots of stuff to work on. And then what you do is every single day, you write down and rewrite your goals. Every single day, you take out your spiral notebook and write down your goals once more.

And I get out every morning before I start off, I plan my day, and then I write out my 10 goals. Every morning before you start out, you reprogram your subconscious mind and then start your day. My promise to you is this. If you will do this for one month, actually, 21 days is good enough. Your whole life will change. You'll see changes that are astonishing. People come up to me at every single seminar and say, it was incredible. I started to write my goals every day.

I accomplished eight of them in six months. I accomplished five in a week. I accomplished most of them within 12 months. It's transformed my life. So all I ask you to do, if you're not already doing it, is give it a try. Now, the third discipline is the discipline of daily time management. And of course, we know that. The rule is that every minute spent in planning saves 10 minutes in execution.

So disciplining yourself to plan your day thoroughly before you begin will save you at least 10 minutes for every minute you spend in planning. And according to the research, it will increase your productivity by 25 to 50 percent, maybe even double your productivity for every day that you plan. You see, if you're not working from a plan, then you just respond and react to whatever's going on. Somebody comes in, phone rings as an interruption or a problem, and you're off and running. If you have a plan, you just keep working the plan. It gives you a track to run on, so you just keep working your plan. Begin the discipline of daily time management by making a list. Start off with a sheet of paper, again, think on paper, and write down everything you have to do in the course of the day.

The very best time to make this list is the night before. If you do this, then your subconscious mind works on your plan all night long, and you often wake up in the morning with great ideas to implement your plan. Then you organize your list by priority before you begin. You don't just jump into it. Use the 80-20 rule that says that 20% of the items on your list will account for 80% of the value, which are the most valuable. This is the hardest of all disciplines to learn. It's the essence of my teaching worldwide. It is the key to supercharging the quality of your life and your results. If you can start every morning with a list organized by priority and start on your number one task and stay with it until it's done,

you will supercharge your life. You will release endorphins in your brain that causes you to feel great. You will motivate yourself and energize yourself and propel yourself into all your other tasks. You'll get twice as much done on any day where you start and complete your major task first thing than any other day. The discipline of time management will then spread to all your other disciplines. When you can demonstrate each morning that you have the self-control, self-mastery, self-discipline to start and complete your most important task, you just feel fabulous about yourself. Now, the fourth discipline is the discipline of courage. And it goes back to what we said earlier. Force yourself to do what you know you should do, especially in the area of courage.

The biggest obstacle to success in my estimation, the estimation of the psychologist, is the fear of failure. It's the fear that it won't work out. It's the fear of loss of time or money or emotion. It's fear that goes back to early childhood. And the only way we can succeed is by overcoming this fear. And this fear is captured in the words, I can't. I can't. What about this? What about that? What about this? Fully 80% of the population is paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. And why? Because in growing up, you make lots of mistakes and dim like the feel of it. So eventually you become conditioned to avoid taking any risk at all. So we have to overcome this in order to realize your potential. But what we know is that courage, the courage to face fears, is a habit

and it's developed with practice. Just like typing with a typewriter or riding a bicycle, you can actually develop the habit of courage by practicing courage whenever courage is required. Aristotle wrote about this in his necumachian ethics in 350 BC. He, He said, if you desire to have a quality that you don't have, act in every instance where the quality is called for as though you already had it, and you will have it. So as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. What he said was to confront your fears. The natural human tendency is to avoid a fear-causing or fear-inducing situation.

Most of our fear problems seem to be bundled up with other people, by the way. confronting a boss, it's confronting a bad relationship. Sometimes it's confronting a prospect, cold calling, going out and calling on customers and facing rejection and failure and embarrassment and so on. But confronting that fear, instead of avoiding it, just do it. So the reason you want to confront your fears is not because of the incident. Specifically, it's because of what it does for your character. You want to demonstrate to yourself that you can face down a fear and look at square in the eye. And suddenly, surprise, surprise, it goes away. And you realize that the fear was in your own mind. Now, here's the most wonderful thing about overcoming fears. If the fear of failure is summarized with the feeling, I can't. I can't. Psychologists have found you can actually short-circuit or override the fear

by saying to yourself very strongly, I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. So whenever you're afraid of anything, talking to somebody, confronting someone, dealing with something, say to yourself over and over again, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, and then just do it. And you'll be amazed, the fear disappears. It's almost like, poof, it's gone. So the key is, you're looking at that telephone, to pick up the phone, to cold call, to prospect, just say to yourself, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, pick it up and dial.

And suddenly the fear disappears. And you do this repeatedly, and eventually you develop the habit of courage. So here's an exercise for you. Identify one fear situation in your life today and use that as your challenge. Use that as your test case. You say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to face this fear down.

I'm going to hammer it. I'm going to look it right in the eye. I'm going to deal with it direct head on like a car hitting a wall until the fear is gone. And once you've done that, you'll look up and you'll be a different person. For the rest of your life, you'll know that nothing that you're afraid of can stop you.

Now the fifth discipline is the discipline of excellent health habits. Your goal should be to live to be 100 in sound physical health. Today the average lifespan in America is approaching 80, which means 50% of people will die above that and 50% of people will die below. Since you are smarter than the average, you're more knowledgeable, you're better informed, you're probably going to smash that average and live to be 90, 95, 100 years old. So set 100 is your goal and say to yourself, okay, I want to live to be 100 in great shape. what would I have to do? What kind of shape would I have to be? And what kind of life would I have to live physically in order to get there?

So, first of all, design your ideal body. If your ideal body was perfect, in other words, weight, fitness, tone, stretch, flexibility and everything. If your body was perfect, what would it look like? And make a list of all the things. Remember, when you were a child, your body was perfect. And if your body's not perfect now, it just means it maybe you've forgotten to do a few things or you've done a few things you shouldn't have done. So start off with a clear picture of your perfect body and recognize that that is possible for you. Now, the key to physical health has always been contained in the five-word formula. Eat less and exercise more. Eat less and exercise more. Every single person who studies the subject and now more and more people realize that the key to success is to eat less and exercise more.

And exercise every day. So discipline yourself to exercise daily. The very best time, of course, is in the morning. If you get up in the morning and exercise immediately, even if it's just stretching or going for a walk or riding a life cycle or walking on a treadmill, it doesn't matter what it is. If you get up in the morning and exercise immediately, not only will your body continue to burn calories all day, not only will you be more alert because you'll have highly oxygenated blood flooding your brain, first thing in the morning, but you'll develop the discipline of starting on something

that you would normally not want to do and getting it done, getting it out of the way. The more times I read about wealthy people, successful people, top business people, it's amazing how many of them get up at 5 o'clock and work out for an hour. It's absolutely astonishing. Over and over again, you see their daily routine as they get up at 5 or 5.30 and they work out for an hour before they start planning and organizing their day. If you can discipline yourself to do that, to have an enormous impact on your life. Also, when you exercise first thing in the morning for 30 to 60 minutes,

your brain releases endorphins, which, as I said, make you happy. They make you feel exhilarated. Make you feel more creative, more positive. You'll feel more personable. You're more eager to get to work and so on. So morning exercise just starts you off in fantastic mental and physical condition. Now, to get rid of any extra weight that you might have, just eliminate the three white poisons. The three white poisons are anything that has flour in it, white flour, wheat flour, any kind of flour,

makes you overweight. It sticks to your gut, to your hips, and to your thighs. Eliminate sugar and any sugar products. Eliminate desserts. Eliminate donuts. Eliminate soft drinks. Don't eat things for sugar and eliminate salt. Don't put any salts on your food. There's plenty of salt and everything you do. I've ran into a friend of mine recently who had lost 20 pounds. I looked at him. He was just swaying. His suit jacket was swaying back and forth like a tent on a tent peg in the wind. I said, Jesus, you've lost a lot of of weight. I said, how did you do it? He said, I tried everything. He said, I walked, I tried everything. He said, I finally stopped eating anything white. I stopped eating flour, foods, sugar, and salt. He said, dropped 22 pounds in 60 days, never came back. And I've had people tell me that all over the world. So if you can discipline yourself to only eat fruits, vegetables, and proteins, no pasta,

no bread, no rolls, no cakes, no desserts, no coax, no coas, and no salt, if you can just do that, you'll see yourself losing weight from the first day. Some people will lose three or four pounds in the first week that they stop adding salt to anything. And then, of course, drink lots of water. Drink eight glasses of water a day. And what that does is it washes all the impurities out of your system. Very simple process. Eat more salads. And here's a real kicker. Eat before 6 p.m. at night. Eat salad. Eat light and eat before 6 p.m. Everything you eat after 6 p.m. you accumulate. Everything you eat before 6 p.m. burns up before you go to bed. Don't eat within three hours of going to bed.

Just eat a light or medium, light at dinner, salad with a little bit of protein before 6 p.m. or at 6 p.m. And you'll be astonished the next morning, you'll be thinner. It's absolutely remarkable. Two more things, by the way, with regard to health. First of all, get regular medical and dental checkups. People often don't go to the dentist or the doctor until they need to. I find that it's false economy. Especially if you're over 40, you should have a complete medical every single year.

and you should have regular dental checkups at least twice a year. If you're in business of any kind, you should have four visits to the orthodotist to clean your teeth every single year so that your teeth are really clean. They found there's a direct relationship between gum health and the health of your whole body. So with regard to self-discipline,

just remember the Michael Jordan motto, just do it. If you think it's a good idea, do it. Get on with it. Don't waste time. Don't make excuses. Now, the sixth discipline is the discipline of regular saving and investing. One of the greatest goals that we have in life is to be financially independent. One of the greatest worries we have in life is our bills and our debts. The greatest fear we have

in life is poverty or ending up our life with no money. So the very act of starting to provide for yourself financially transforms your thinking about yourself in your life. It makes you a happy person. So set a goal of financial independence. Decide that by gum I'm going to become financially independent. and resolve to get out of debt and stay out of debt. I've worked with countless people who have become financially independent, starting from nothing. And one of the things that they had was an aversion to debt. They hated debt. They avoided debt.

The only debt that would accept would maybe be debt on a mortgage on the house that they live in. Maybe debt on a car. But even then, they don't like debt. And other than that, they avoid debt like the plague. So to get out of debt and stay out of debt, you have to discipline yourself. Now, here's an interesting point, and I learned this from one of the smartest money managers I ever met. He said, when we're young, we associate money with pleasure. We get our first allowance, and we go, and we spend it on candy.

And we think that when we have money, we go and we spend it on candy or things that make us feel good. Now, when we become adults, whenever we think of getting a lot of money, our first thought is spending it on something that makes us happy. If you go to a tourist resort where people are on vacation and having a good time, They're just lying the street after street after street of knickknacks and gadgets and junk because people, when they're happy, associate going out and buying stuff. However, what this does is it keeps you broke all your life. So what you do, and this is what he told me, is you rewire yourself. You kind of pull out one wire and we plug it in and you say, instead of saying, I like spending money, you say, I like saving money.

And you begin to think of how much you enjoy having money in the bank. How much you enjoy saving? How much you enjoy delayed gratification? How much you enjoy the idea of moving toward financial independence. And when you develop the habit of being happy about saving money, you start to find yourself more and more careful with your expenditures. Now, you know the rule for financial independence is to save 10, 15, 20% of your income throughout your life. And as your income grows, keep saving more and more and investing it, putting it away.

As Albert Einstein said, compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. So putting your money away and well-chosen mutual funds, money market funds, index funds, and just letting it grow over time. And don't worry about the stock market going up and down. Average increase in the U.S. stock market for the last 100 years has been 8 to 10% each year, taking good years and bad years into consideration. So your job is to save 10, 15, 20% of your income. Now, for most people, because they're in debt, they just discard that completely. Their mind shuts down. So here's what I say is develop the habit of saving 1% of your income.

If you make $2,000 a month, that means you save $20. You go down to the bank and you open up a financial freedom account. And you put in $20 from the first paycheck you get that month. And then you discipline yourself to live on the other 99%. Once you're comfortable living on 99%, then you increase it to 2%, and 3% and 4%. Within a year, you'll have developed the habit of living on 85 to 90% of your income and automatically saving the balance. You can even have the amount deducted from your paycheck, so it disappears and you never see it.

Your paycheck goes into the bank, and the amount is automatically deducted into your savings account or into an investment account. Soon you develop the habit of living on less than you earn, and you change your thinking from I enjoy spending to I enjoy saving. A key way to save your money is to delay and to defer major purchase decisions. You'll find that if you think about buying a car or a washing machine or a stereo set or a new computer, if you think about it for 30 days, in many cases you won't do it at all, or if you do do it, you'll make a better decision.

One of the smartest things of all is to buy things that are used rather than things that are new. Do you know that millionaires never buy new cars? Millionaires never buy new cars, according to the studies by Stanley and Danko and the millionaire next door, is they wait and they buy a car that's two years old. It's coming off lease or that's been driven for two years and somebody's trading it in. And it's still under warranty for three years. And you can even get extended warranties on many cars where they'll go back and clean it all up and give you another five years on a two-year-old car. But what have you done?

You say, $10,000 or $20,000 on a car. And what do you do with that money? You put it away and let it grow with compound interest. If all you did was buy a used car every five to eight years, drive it until it falls apart and then buy another one, the money you'd save from buying new cars can make you rich. It can accumulate with compound interest into hundreds of thousands of dollars by the end of your working lifetime. If you're going to invest, the rule is investigate before you invest.

My friend Ken Fisher, a Fisher investment, says that two-thirds of all investing is avoiding making mistakes. Let me repeat that. Two-thirds of all success in investing or business is avoiding making mistakes by making the wrong decisions. or by making decisions too quickly. So if you're going to invest in anything, the rule is spend as much time investigating the investment

as you spent making the money. You'll find that quick investment decisions are invariably poor investment decisions. Only invest in things that you know and understand. Don't invest in somebody else's idea or scheme or business. Only invest in things that you know. Number one rule is don't lose money. Whatever you do, don't lose money.

If there's a possibility of losing a little bit of money, and you do it, you're probably going to lose a lot. So be very careful. Once you earn the money, hold on to it. There's a Japanese proverb that says, Making money is like digging in the sand with a pin. Losing money is like pouring water on the sand. It's easy to lose money,

but it's hard to make it and keep it, and it's the most important discipline of all. Another discipline is to pay cash as often as possible and for as much as possible. Get rid of all your credit cards except for one and only use that one when you have to. The very act of paying cash really hypersensitizes you

to how much it's costing and causes you to spend less money. W. Clement Stone once said, If you cannot save money, the seeds of greatness are not in you. The primary reason why you save your money and accumulate it carefully

is because it gives you two things. First of all, it gives you freedom. You know you've got money in the bank. If you don't like your job, you can walk away from it because you've got money in the bank. But the second thing it gives you is opportunity. If an opportunity comes along, you're prepared to take advantage of it.

You don't have to say, I'm sorry, I don't have any money, I can't afford it, I'm broke, and people just shake their head in pity and walk away. As an adult, you should always have opportunity money put aside, and when you have it, you feel great about yourself. The difference between a person with a little money and a person with no money is night and day. A person with a little money feels great. A person with no money always feels inferior, anxious, worried, concerned, irritable, short-tempered. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Now, the seventh discipline is the discipline of hard work. There's nothing that will help you more than for you to develop a reputation as a hard worker. In the studies of self-made millionaires, again, they said, I didn't have better education, better talent, better knowledge, but I was willing to work harder than anyone else. Most self-made millionaires work 60 and 70 hours per week for 5, 10, 15 years before they break through. Most other people are trying to get by on five days a week, and then during those five days a week, they don't work very hard at all. The interesting thing, Thomas Jefferson once said, do you believe in luck? He was asked.

He said, yes. He said, I believe in luck. He said, and the harder I work, the more of it I have. So the harder you work, the luckier you get. the harder you work, the more opportunities you have, the more doors open up to you, the more opportunities you see. So in America, the average work week is 32 hours. As you know, in France, legally, the average work week is 35 hours, but then most people waste about half their time at work. According to Robert Half International, the average person wastes 50% of their time

in idle chit-chat with coworkers, coffee breaks, lunches, reading the paper, surfing the internet, at doing all kinds of things that don't contribute anything to the work. So here's the rule that will make you successful, happy, and rich. And it's this, work all the time you work. Work all the time you work. When you go to work, work, put your head down and go to work. Don't waste a single minute. Put your head down and work all day long.

If somebody comes up to you and says, hi, how are you doing? You say, fine, but right now I've got to get back to work, back to work. Have you got a minute to chat? Yes, but not now. Let's talk after work. Right now I've got to get my job done. And nobody will ever stop you when you say, I've got to get back to work. I've got a job, I've got to get out. I've got something I have to get done. They'll go away and they'll ruin someone else's career. Remember, the greatest time wasters in the world of work are other people who take up your time with idle chit-chat and worthless gossip. You've got to avoid the time wasters. In every single company, these people go around and they're like a virus.

They go around and they infect everybody they talk to. Stay away from time, oysters. Now, here's a way to double your productivity, performance, output, and income. Here's a way to put yourself on the fast track, increase your income, and become one of the most valuable people in your industry. It's very simple. Start one hour earlier. And when you start, get to work.

If the starting time in your company is 8.30, start at 7.30 or 7. Now, you say, where are you going to get the time? Get up a little earlier and get going. Remember, all you do is beat the traffic if you get in there. early and get in there, plan your day, get going, get organized, get started. What other people come in, you are already running. You're already on your way. Work through lunch. There's no law that says you have to go out and kill an hour, an hour and a half at lunch. Eat at your desk. Eat quickly. Eat on the go. Use that time to work.

Don't use that time to hang around. There's a thing sweeping America today about having fun at work. No, work is not fun time. Work is not the playpen or the sandbox. Work is not school. Work is work. What you do is you go to work and you work all the time. Don't worry about fun. Have your fun later knowing that you've done a fantastic job and you've gotten a lot done. And finally, work one hour later. Be the last one to leave.

Be the person who turns off the lights. Interesting, if you look at an entrepreneurial startup, a business that's being run by somebody who's really driving it forward, you'll find that the business owner is usually the first one there, works through the whole day, usually the last one to leave. Business owner usually works on Saturday and Sunday. At the end of the day, the business owner's got a beautiful home, house on the hill, beautiful cars, beautiful life, vacations, a boat in the yacht basin,

and everybody says, boy, she is sure lucky. No, they're not lucky. They just worked all the time they work. If you work three extra hours, start earlier, work harder, stay later, you'll add six hours of productive work to your day. Every hour of uninterrupted work when nobody's there, translates into three hours of productivity when there's people around interrupting you. So keep asking at work, what is the most valuable use of my teaching? time right now. What is the most valuable use of my time right now and then do only that? And keep saying, back to work, back to work, whenever you get distracted or you start to follow the path of least resistance and major and minor, say, wait a minute, got to get back to work, back to work. Now,

the eighth discipline is the discipline of continuous learning. The rule is to earn more. You must learn more. If you want to earn more than you're earning today, you've got to learn new knowledge and skills that make it possible. Jim Rohn once said, very famously, said, work at least as hard on yourself as you do on your work. Work at least as hard on yourself as you do on your work. So how do you do this? Well, you read in your field daily. If you read 60 minutes a day in your field, little in the morning, little in the evening, it'll translate into one book a week. One book a week will translate into 50 books a year. The average adult reads less than one book a year. And most nonfiction books are never read past the first chapter. If you read 50 books a year, it's the equivalent of getting

a Ph.D. in your field every single year. Just reading every day will make you one of the most proficient, most skilled, and ultimately highest paid people in your field. Listen to CDs in your car like this. The average person drives 500 to 1,000 hours a year. That's the equivalent of 3 to 6 months, a 40-hour week. That's the equivalent of 1 to 2 full-time university semesters. Just listening to educational CDs in your car will make you one of the best informed people in your field. And finally, in continuous learning, attend seminars, take courses, take structured courses given by experts, given by authorities. You can learn more in a half day or a day from an expert than you might learn on your own in years. I've had many people walk out of my courses with

one new idea and increase their income five times within 30 days. One new technique for getting new clients, prospecting. One new technique for presenting. overcoming objections. One new technique for closing sales or getting referrals and their income has exploded. They have never learned it. They call me. They come to me. They say it was incredible. It changed my life, that one idea. Now, the average income in America increases about 3% a year. With additional knowledge and skill, you increase the rate at which your income goes up. If you get new knowledge and skill, you learn more. Your income goes up 10% per annum. You'll double your income in 7.2 years. If your income goes up 25% per year, he'll double your income in two years

and eight months. In other words, the more you learn, the more you learn. The benefits of continuous learning are life-changing. And here's the final discipline. Number nine, the discipline of persistence. Now, the discipline of persistence says that the greatest test of self-discipline is when you persist in the face of adversity and you drive yourself forward to complete your tasks 100%. The test of self-discipline is when you can drive yourself to keep on keeping on, even when everyone around you feels like quitting and you feel like quitting as well. You know, we say that courage has two parts. The first part of courage is the courage to begin.

It's the courage to start. It's the courage to launch in the face of failure with no guarantees of success. But the second part of courage is the courage to endure, the courage to persist and to keep on going when you're tired and you're disappointed and nothing's working and there's no guarantee of success and maybe even a very large likelihood of failure. So it's really important.

We say that your persistence is your measure of your belief in yourself and what you are doing. If you truly believe in the goodness and rightness and value of what you're doing, you will persist regardless of what's happening on the outside. And the more you believe in the goodness and rightness of what you're doing, the more you will persist. And wonderfully enough, the more you persist, the more you believe in yourself, the more you believe in the value of your work.

Persistence seems to change your character. In reality, persistence is self-discipline in action. In the final analysis, your persistence is your measure of self-discipline. Self-discipline leads to self-esteem. Every time you practice self-esteem, you feel better about yourself, which leads to greater persistence, which leads to even greater self-discipline. and you get onto an upward spiral in life. That's why Napoleon Hill said that persistence is to the character of a man or woman as carbon is to steal. You actually make yourself, you shape yourself, you form yourself,

you build yourself into a superior human being, a better and stronger person by persisting when you feel like quitting. Well, every time you have the tendency to quit, every time you feel like giving up or cutting corners or stopping before you finished your task, say, wait a minute, this is a test. This is a test of my character. This is a test to see what I'm made of. And it's not what I'm working on that counts. It's the person I am becoming by either persisting or quitting. So always persist until you have completed the task. And as you do, you burst through and your brain floods with endorphins and you feel wonderful about yourself. Eventually, you develop a habit of persistence and you become unstoppable. Well, here are the seven benefits of practicing self-discipline in every area of your life. Number one, the habit of self-discipline guarantees your success.

Every single successful person has that fundamental quality of persistence and tenacity, that fundamental quality of self-discipline to make themselves do what they should do, whether they feel like it or not. Number two is when you practice self-discipline, you'll get more done faster and better than other people. You'll get more results. you'll be more productive. You'll have higher levels of performance. You'll bring yourself to the attention of people who can help you and support you and move you forward. Number three, you'll be paid more and promoted faster at any job in any situation. The people with high levels of self-discipline who get the results are the ones who are immediately moved to the front of the line of life.

Number four, you'll have a greater sense of self-control, self-reliance, and personal power. You'll feel that you could do anything that you put your mind to because you have the ability to make your yourself to discipline yourself to do it anyway. Number five, self-discipline is the key to self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride. Every time you discipline yourself, you like yourself more. Every time you discipline yourself, you see yourself as a better person. Every time you discipline yourself, you feel great about yourself. You feel personally proud of yourself.

It affects your personality in a very positive way. Number six, the greater your self-discipline, the greater your self-confidence and the lower your fears of failure and rejection. Eventually, you develop self-confidence so that you can walk through walls. And number seven, with self-discipline, you'll have the strength of character to persist over all obstacles until you succeed. With self-discipline, you achieve personal greatness.