The Resilient Mind - Use Your Mind to Create Success - Brian Tracy

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Brian Tracy is a Canadian-American motivational public speaker and self-development author. He is the author of over 80 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.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Use Your Mind to Create Success with Brian Tracy. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. So what I learned, which changed my life profoundly, is what is called the law of cause and effect. Now, the law of cause and effect is the reason that you're here. It's the reason that explains success and failure. it says basically everything happens for a reason.

For every effect, there's a cause. So the law of cause and effect says that for every effect in your life there's a cause, that everything happens for a reason. Even if you don't know the reason, there's a reason. If somebody's practice twice as large as somebody else's practice, it's not because of you or your genetics or your DNA or your chromosomes or anything else. It's just because they're doing something different. That's all.

So what you do is if you can define the effect that you want in your life, and then what you do is you trace it back to someone who at once. time was earning less than you and who's now earning twice as much. And then you find out what they did. You come here and you ask Ed and his people and they'll tell you. And then you do the same thing. We say success leads tracks. Leaves tracks. So you just do the same thing and you get to the same place. Which brings us to one of the great rules of success is that if you do what other successful people do over and over again until it becomes a habit, nothing in the world can stop you from getting the same results that they do. And if you don't, nothing can help you. Now this is a very important

point to understand is that all success skills are learnable. All practice, development and management skills are learnable. All sales skills are learnable. All public relations skills are learnable. All physical mental skills are learnable. You may not be able to play, you know, a classical violin or dump baskets like Michael Jordan, but all business and sales and management skills are learnable skills. And so therefore you can learn any skill you need to learn in order to achieve any goal that you want. And once you understand that, so for me, that happened to me when I was 23, the dam broke. When I learned this law of cause and in fact, I couldn't believe it.

My God, you mean I could learn to be successful? I was a failure. I had holes in my one pair of shoes. The shoes were given to me. My size is about 10 and a half. These were size 12, so I wore them like swim fins. I had to kind of lean forward into them, so I went to kaflop, kaflop, kaflop, kaflop, kaflop,

I had one clip-on tie and one shirt that was wash and wear. I had to wash it out in my sink each night, it would stink, and I had one pair of pants. I put on my little clip on tie and my little shoes, kaflop, kaflop, and that was beginning of my career. I could tell you within 25 cents how much money I had for the first 10 years of my adult life. And then I learned that you could be in the top 20% of salespeople

who just do what they do. So then I began to ask, what do they do? Well, over time, I learned this, and this is the great principle, is that thoughts are causes. Thoughts are causes. And this is the most important principle of all. this is the great discovery of the great philosophers, the great metaphysicians, the great mystics,

the great mystical and religious and spiritual teachers. It's the foundation of psychology and the foundation of success is it thoughts or causes. Your thoughts, however well put together, as we talked about earlier, determine what happens in your life and conditions, the conditions of your life are effects. So basically, you create your own life with your own thinking.

Now this is one of the hardest things for people, to understand is that their entire outer world is merely a mirror. It reflects back to them in absolute complete accuracy what is going on inside. Now much of what is going on inside is conscious, some of it is unconscious, but basically it's the way we think and see ourselves and feel about ourselves on the inside that determines our external world. And if you want to change anything on the outside, you have to change things on the inside. Now my favorite equation is this, one to one, is what's going on in the inside, determine what's going on in the outside. Now imagine a person looks in the mirror and they don't like the way their makeup is put on, nor they don't like the look

of their face, and they don't like the look, and they start to pound the mirror. They're going to get a hammer, I've got to pound this mirror. You'd say you must be crazy. The mirror is neutral. The mirror just reflects back to you what you're presenting to it. So if you want to change what you're being reflected back, you have to change what you present to the mirror. Once you understand that, by the way, you move into the top 10 or 20 percent. of thinkers in the world. The most important quality for leadership is responsibility, is to accept responsibility and say, I am where I am and what I am because of myself. My brother ain't my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

Which brings us to the greatest discovery of all, which is that you become what you think about most of the time. You become what you think about most of the time. So what do you think about most of the time. What do you think about most of the time? Since your entire world is determined by what you think about, and especially by your thoughts emotionalized. Here is one of the great equations. It goes back two or three thousand years before Christ.

Thought times emotion equals reality. In other words, a thought that is disconnected from emotion has no effect. An emotion that is not guided by thought is just chaos. but a clear thought backed by an emotion. And the emotion can be one of desire. I really want that. Or it can be one of fear. I'm afraid of trying it.

In either case, the thought times the emotion equals the reality. So if you can think of doubling your income and think of all the reasons why you'd like to do it and all the difference it would make in your life and your practice and what you could do for your family, and you get really excited about that. Thought times that emotion is very healthy.

And it begins to materialize, almost like a Polaroid photograph used to develop, begins to materialize in your reality. So thought, at times emotion equals reality. So you become what you think about most of the time. So what do you think about most of the time? By the way, this is a universal principle, but it's not always true because it was always true

every young man would turn into a young woman by the age of 20. And, of course, fat people would turn into pizzas and alcoholics were turning into liquor bottles. However, I've worked with Tom Stanley and Bill Danko. And Tom Stanley and Bill Danko are the ones who wrote the millionaire next door. And Bill Danko did most of the heavy left-dated, 25 years of detailed research, surveys, analysis, attending meetings, and so on, to find out how self-made millionaires think most of the time with regard to money.

And do you know what they think about most of the time with regard to money? They think in terms of financial independence. And whenever they have to make an expenditure or a decision with regard to money, they say, does this help or hurt? Does this add up or take away? Because everything counts. Now what most Americans do is they want to spend, spend, spend, until their daddy takes their T-bird away.

They want to have fun, fun, fun, and put it on credit cards and so on. So the average American, the bottom 80% lives on 110% of their income. And now, unfortunately, the chickens are all coming home to roost, and the income was built on an inflated home value, and that is collapsed, and so now the whole house of cards is collapsing. The wealthiest Americans save 10 to 20% of their income from their first paycheck. They cut it off the top and they put it away and they save it. And they build up cash reserves.

The wealthiest Americans have 6 to 12 months in cash reserves that they never, never touch. Now you can say, well, that's an awful lot and I can't afford it. And I go, okay, I'm just telling you, that's how self-made millionaires think. Their net worth goes up at a rate of about 7 to 8% a year on their capital base. They don't try to make a killing in the stock market or in dot-coms and things like, like that is they save their money and they grow it carefully and safely. They're very attentive and thoughtful about their money. They're very frugal in their decisions. But what do they think about most of the time? They think about achieving financial independence. Tom Stanley talks about

going to a conference of entrepreneurs that had been addressed by an economist the year before. And it was at the reception. And he heard people saying, what's yours? And he said, eight and four, what's yours? Ten and two. What's yours? Six and three. What's yours? 18 and two? And he said, eight and four. What's yours? 18 and 2, what's yours? Made it in April. And he was asking people, what is this? What's yours? What's yours? What's yours? He said, well, last year we were taught by the economist to think in terms of how long we could survive financially if our income was cut off based on months and years. And so the first thing we have to do is calculate how much would it cost me to survive for one month if I had no income at all. And then you multiply that times 12, and that's how much you would require to take one year off. Now, one of your great goals in life is to work by choice

if you work at all. You want to have enough money so that you never have to work again. You won't ever stop working, by the way, because knowledge workers never stop working, they just do different things. If you stop working with your brain, you start to deteriorate very rapidly. But if you keep working actively with your mind, you can live until your 90s. Anyway, so then you calculate, and this is what self-made millionaires do, is they calculate their monthly rate, all right? times 12 to get their annual rate, I'll just write annual, and then they multiply that times 20, the number of years that they are planning to live after they retire,

and that gives them what is called the number. Now, every person here is one of your responsibilities as an adult has to know your number. What is my number? And the number is the amount with which you could retire and ever work again. And the interesting thing is knowing your number, calculating your number will increase your likelihood of achieving it by about 10 times. The likelihood of achieving it just soars astronomically because most Americans don't know what it is.

Now, you guys are young and you're in your 20s and 30s and 40s and so on. You don't think about this, but self-made millionaires start to think about it at a very early age. And they hit millionaire status by the time they're 45. Others, making a fabulous living, end up at the age of 55 or 60 and they're broke. Because they just went to the island every weekend, never thought about it. So, do you want to be financially independence? Say yes. Then think about financial independence.

Self-made millionaires never buy new cars. I can't say this in a public audience because there's always car salespeople and they beat me up afterwards. But they buy cars that are two years old. All the depreciation has been driven out of them so that the prices come down. They buy expensive cars and they get them recertified so they've got another five-year warranty and they drive them 10 years until they fall apart. And all the extra money that people are out there buying cars every year and so on, all that extra money, what do they do with it?

Yeah, they save it, carefully, put it away, and so on, and as a result, they become financially independent. If all you did was buy one car every 10 years and took all the rest of that money and invested it, that alone would buy you three, four, five years of retirement. I mean, think about that because of the miracle of compound interest. Anyway, that's not my subject. So the University of Pennsylvania was commissioned by several large companies

to try to find out the profile of high-performing men and women. Over a period of 22 years, they interviewed 350,000 people. They gave them psychographic profiles to find out basically how they thought in a variety of different areas, qualities, characteristics, virtues, values, and so on. And then they followed them for as long as two years and asked them, what do you think about most of the time? What do you think about most of the time? And what they would do is they would say, sir, what is your name?

Skip. They would say, skip, we're doing this research at the university. Would you participate with us? And Skip would say, well, I'm pretty big. busy, what's involved. You say it's all only just 10 seconds a week. And someone will call you randomly, you'll never know the time. And they just ask you, hello, Skip, what do you think about right now? What do you think about this very minute? And you can say, well, I'm thinking about this implant, I'm thinking about accounting, I'm thinking about playing golf on the weekend.

It doesn't matter what the answer is. Just tell them exactly your top of mind thought. And then they tracked these, and they found that they began to break down in different ways. And then they began to slice and dice them by deciles. The bottom 10% next 10% all the way up to the top 10%. And they found the people in the top 10% think very differently from people in the bottom 80% or 90%. Now, can you guess what top people, since you are in the top 10% in your profession, can you guess what top people think about most of the time? Well, the answer is they think about what they want and how to get it most of the time.

They think about what they want and how to get it most of the time. So I'm going to teach you a go-forward word, and this is the word that you're going to use for the rest of your career, this is the word that will guarantee that you'll get onto the fast track in life. You'll increase your income at a more rapid rate than the average person, and you take complete control of your life. And the word is, how? Say how. Okay, from now on, you want to double your income, the only question you ask is how. You want to double the number of patients coming to your practice? The question is how. You want to double your profitability, the question is how. You want to solve a problem, the question is how. Now, whenever you ask the question how, which is what

leaders do. Leaders are all how people. How do we resolve this? What do we do? What is our next step? What's our action? Non-leaders, followers are passive people. Who did it? Oh, my God. What's going to happen? What should we do now? They're like the little sheep running around in a circle. Wea, we, we, we.

Whereas leaders say, all right, what's going on? Let's go. Let's make a decision. What's happened here? Get the information. And so on. Now, when you ask the question how, it's like stepping on the accelerator of your own creative mind. You step up and run, run. And you throws off ideas, like those little lightning strikes in the cartoons or the light bulbs. And every idea is for an action that you can take when?

Now. It's for an action that you would take now. Whenever you ask the question, how, you get ideas. And the interesting thing is they did a study at Harvard. They found that the greatest single predictor of success, especially financial success in life, is creativity. And creativity is designed by the number of ideas you come up with. And you'll find that the more ideas you come up with because of the law of probabilities, the more likely is you'll come up with a great idea. One of the most important

things that you get with Ed is that you get exposed to a lot of ideas. Now, when you look at all the ideas that Ed gives you, there's no way a human being could apply them all when they get back on Monday, is there? So what you have to do is you have to pick and choose. The reason that Ed teaches you so many ideas, and I know, I understand this, is because you never know which idea is going to be the right one for you at this time. So what you do is you get a lot of choices. It's sort of like going to a beautiful buffet. You're not going to eat everything, but you're going to look at the buffet

and you're going to pick the things that you want or need or can use at this moment. So what we do here is try to give you a buffet of ideas that you can pick and you can fill your plate and a year from now. You may come back and fill your plate completely differently. But it's the number of ideas that you have that largely determines, we say it's the quantity

that determines the quality. And so the more things that you do that trigger ideas, the more words you know and the more word concepts the more business concepts you know, the richer is your inner vocabulary, the more and the better ideas you come up with. So it's really important. Every time I ask the question how, you get ideas for action. Wow.

All right. Now, this brings me to a quick story I wanted to tell you. Once upon a time, there was a nuclear power plant that was suffering severe mechanical difficulties. And this power generation was down by about 40. I had a nuclear engineer in one of my courses. He said, based on what you told me, the plant would be losing about $1.2 to $1.3 million a day in electricity generation if it was off 40%. So that's kind of the numbers that the plant management was dealing with, and they couldn't find it. They had, did everything possible to find. Why is the plant slowing down? It was just running like sludge, if you like. And finally, they bit the bullet. They got a cold of their ego, and they called MIT and had them sent down one of the foremost, nuclear power plant experts in the country. MIT and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They came down, he came down, drove out to the plant, put on a white smock, nice gentleman, professor, professorial, picked up a clipboard, and he began walking around this massive

control room, taking notes and looking at the gauges and the barometers and amp meters and so on and making calculations. And after about two days of this, afternoon of the second day, he said, uh-huh, that's the problem. him and he got up in a chair and he took a big black marker out of his pocket and he put a big black X on the gauge. He said, replace this apparatus on the whole planet and we back up to full power.

Thank you very much. He put down his clipboard, took off his smock, thanked them for their time, drove back to the airport, caught his plane back to MIT. Well, they were all waiting. The engineering crew was waiting like runners at the gate for his judgment. Once he gave his judgment, wham, they all went

together, they stripped it all down. And lo and behold, deep within this apparatus was a major mechanical malfunction that was not detectable from the outside. So they immediately went to work. They replaced it with all new equipment, put it all back together again, and assembled it, and then through the switches, and the whole plant went up to full power. And they were so happy, they were high-fiving and cheering and patting each other in the back and so on. They were all happy. They were walking around with smiles so wide. You think they'd swallowed a banana sideways. And they're all happy like this for another week

until they received a bill from the consultant for services rendered, $10,000. Well, the chairman of plant manager calls in the senior maintenance engineer, says, look at that. The guy comes out here, stands around for a couple of days, writes one X on one gauge, and sends us the bill for $10,000. Jeez, that's almost as bad as dentistry. So he said, yeah, the guy comes out here and sees that's as much we make in a month or two. Yeah, I mean, with minutes worth of work, climbs up on the ladder, writes an X charge, and says $10,000. I mean, that's outrageous. Yeah, we should make him itemize his account.

Yeah, let's make him itemize his account. So the plan manager wrote back, said, dear sir, you know, with all due respect, all you did was write one X on one gauge. $10,000 seems like an awful lot of money for that little amount of work. Could you please itemize your account in a little more detail? So about 10 days later, they got a new bill back. It said, for writing X on gauge, $1,000. for knowing which gauge do right X on $9,99. In other words, it wasn't the amount of physical labor, and this certainly applies to your profession.

It wasn't the amount of physical labor. It's the amount of brainwork that went into doing this, the precision brainwork. And that introduced me to what we call the X factor. Now, the X factor is one of the most important things I ever learned. The X factor is the key to your success. The X factor is what's going to make you rich. It's made me and a whole lot of other people rich.

The X factor is what is going to enable you to double your income and double your time off. Now the X factor, sometimes we call this the focal point, is to determine where you are going to write the X in each area of your life. What is your X factor? Where do you create what is called the point of intensity? And what we know is that an X factor can be one of three things. It can be a goal. You can have a clear goal.

Let's call this the fourth. focal point, or it can be a measure. It can be a number, or it can be an activity. Now, in building our business, it has to be one of the three, but sometimes it can be a goal, double our personal income, and the measure is to either double the number of patients we have or double the profitability per patient, or double the number of referrals we get, or it can be an activity. It's the way we treat the patient, what we do from the first phone call all the way through, which leads to the goal. But in any one of these three cases or all of them, the critical word is clarity. In my experience, 95% of success is based on how clear you are about the goal that you're aiming at,

how clear you are about the measure that you're going to use, or how clear you are with regard to the activity that you're going to engage in to achieve a particular goal. So always think of those. And what are they? Now, when we look at successful people, we find the successful people have focal points in the four critical areas of life. And the first critical area of life that I need to talk about is what it has to do with income. This is really important to understand

is the average person who works for a living thinks about their income in terms of how much they earn in a year or a month. That's because when they first got a job, they were paid by the year and the month. This is a $25,000 a year job, $2,100 a month and so on. So people at the very beginning, first impression, is they think in terms of annual income.

Maybe they think in terms of how much they get per month. They're, of course, focused on how much they get every two weeks and so on. But that's how they think. Now, if you think like that, it's very easy to waste time. Because what the heck, you're getting paid by the year. So if you waste time on Monday, catch up on Tuesday, you don't do it on Tuesday, Wednesday's still there. Wednesday, you know, hump day.

Then there's Thursday. Then there's, thank God it's Friday. Oh, what the heck, you haven't got it done by Friday. Just punt it into next week. And this becomes a habit. It becomes a habit. So in the world of work today, if you're running your own practice, 50% of working time is wasted in general.

It's wasted mostly with idle chit-chat with coworkers, chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat, that has nothing whatever to do with the work. It's wasted in personal business, personal phone calls, extended lunches, extended coffee breaks, reading the paper, surfing the Internet, personal business, going shopping during the daytime. It's the most amazing darn thing. 50% of working time is wasted. Now, if working time is wasted, it's not the fault of the employee, because they think in terms of annual income, what does it matter?

They'll get caught up later. It's usually the fault of the boss, because the boss has not organized the work so that people are working all the time. They've enabled the work to be so sloppy that people can kill a lot of time. Many companies, when times get tough, what they do is they cut back, and they cut back on staff, and they double up. And people say, geez, I'm working hard. now that we let so-and-so go. No, he's just working normal. He's just working all the time.

And if people have time to sit around and idly chit-chat, it means your practice isn't busy enough or you have too many people. So just keep cutting back and loading up the work. And surprise, surprise, people will take it on. So what top people think about is not annual, but hourly. They think, how much do I earn per hour? And how much do I want to earn per hour?

So let's say today you earn $100,000 a year, all right? If you take home $100,000 a year, then you divide that by the 2,000 hours that you work in your practice, and it works out to about how much per hour? Maybe your teacher told you, cross off the zeros? How much is it? Come on. Quick, quick, quick. All right, use the calculator.

That's right, $50. Jeez, several different answers. Wow. Got a very creative crowd here. All right. So, if you are $100,000 of your person, you have to earn $50,000. per hour. You have to be doing work that pays $50 per hour or more. $50 per hour or more. Now, if you want to double your income to $200,000 per year, using the same equation working

2,000 hours, how much do you want to earn now per hour? $100 an hour. So here's what top people do. In terms of income, they think in terms of their hourly rate. And they focus on doing the things that pay them their highest hourly rate, which brings us to a great great, great breakthrough concept is called the law of three. And the law of three is the key to doubling your income. The law of three says that in your practice, in any field, there's only three things. Whoops. There's only three things that account for 90% of your income, three activities.

You can make a list of everything you do in the course of your practice, especially working with patients, but you'll find there's only three things that pay you 90% of your income. If you make a list of 10 or 20 or 30 things that you do in the course of a week or a month, then you ask this question. And this is the great question, because you might. You must help every person who is responsible to you, who answers to you, answer this question as well. The question is, if I could only do one thing all day long, what one thing would contribute the most to my practice or to my income? If I could do one thing all day long, what one thing would it be?

And in your case, it's probably actually working on patients. Second, if I could only do two things all day long, what would be number two? If I could only do three things all day long, what would be number three? And whenever we put people from any profession through this exercise, they're astonished to find that there's three things go pop, pop, pop, off the list. And everything else is a support task, an enjoyable task, a complimentary task, a task that can be delegated, outsourced, downsized, or eliminated altogether.

And it takes tremendous discipline to do this. I was reading an article by a fortune journalist, and he interviewed the head of the Palo Alto Research Labs. Let's go to Palo Alto Research Center, P-A-R-C called Park. It's the most famous think tank in the United States. It was founded by Xerox when they were literally printing jillions of dollars because of the only company in the world that owned the Xerography process, you could either type it yourself or use a Xerox, and they were selling machines by the tens of thousands worldwide.

They had 2,000 sales offices worldwide, Zoroxed. And they made so much money. They decided they would fund a research institute, a think tank, out in a little place called Santa Clara. Santa Clara is right in the heart, the bomb center heart of the Silicon Valley. It became basically the heart of Silicon Valley was the devices and ideas that were spun off

from Palo Alto Research Center. And he was asked recently with these people, they're all top academics, Nobel Prize winners, top engineers, university professors, published authors, some of the brightest brains in the world. And there's about a hundred of them. They all get together there, and they think and talk and kickover ideas, and they have the freedom to create.

And they came up with a mouse, and they came up with a monitor, and they came up with a keyboard, and they came up with so many breakthroughs. So he was asked by the journalist, is there a difference in productivity? I mean, these are the top people in the world in their fields. Is there a difference in productivity? He said, yes, the 80-20 rule applies. He said the 80-20 rule applies. He said, yes.

He said, 20% of these people's smartest brains in the country or the world are vastly more productive than the other 80%. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.