You have more potential than you could use in 100 lifetimes. You can learn any skill that you need to learn. And the key is to start small. Make a decision today to become a millionaire. You can hope to be, you can wish to be, you can pray all you want, but you have to make a decision, clear decision, and write it down. The most important quality for success is self discipline. You just say no to every activity. That is not helping you move toward the things that you want.

Today we have a really, really special guest, Brian Tracy. I've been following him for many years. I assume some of you have as well. He worked on personal development before personal development even existed, I think for 40 years. He's the author of 80 books. Yes, I didn't get the number wrong. 80 books. He consulted for over 1000 companies, spoke in front of 5 million people through his talks, traveled to over 107 countries. Brian, I think. But this is far from your beginning. Brian, tell us a little bit about how this started and how you became Brian, that we know today.

I grew up in a good family, but we never had any money. And I didn't do well in school. And I dropped out of high school, and my first job was washing dishes. And then I got fired from that job, and I washed cars with a car lot, and I got fired from that job. And then I washed floors, and I eventually got fired from that. But I thought that washing was going to be in my future. I was going to be a washer of things. So I began traveling in my old car, and the first thing I would do is I'd go to the first hotel I came to and apply for a job washing dishes. To jump ahead a few years, I decided to go off and see the world. And then I got a job in sales, just knocking on doors. And I could only eat if I sold something as I worked on straight commission. And that's a great motivation. The first six months that I was in selling, I remember I lost something like 15 or 20 pounds. I say that selling without sales training is the best weight loss system in the country.

And so I began to study and study selling, and I found that selling is a science. It's a process, it's a methodology. And my sales started to go up and they said, well, you should teach the other people what you're practicing. So I began to recruit other salespeople. When I was 25, I had 95 salespeople working for me. And I was getting overrides, commissions on their commissions. But what I learned, most important thing I learned is that there's a methodology and a system for success in anything. And the most important is you can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. Because every person who is at the top started at the bottom. Every person who is one of the highest paid was once one of the lowest paid. There's a principle called the Pareto principle. It's called the 80 20 rule, and it says that the top 20% of people worldwide in every field, earn 80% of the money that is paid in that field. I was about 24 and struggling when a top salesman told me that. He said, by the way, the top 20% of people in our business are in 80% of the money.

And I said, how is that? I said, oh, it's well known principle, and I never heard it before. And then I did something which changed my life, and I made a decision that I was going to be in the top 20%. That's the turning point. You can want to be, you can hope to be, you can wish to be, you can pray all you want, but you have to make a decision, clear decision, and write it down well. So I made a decision. Then the only question you ask is, how? How? And you ask that question about the skill, what one skill would help me the most? And for me, it was closing sales, closing the sale. I was not afraid to knock on doors because I'd been through a lot of experiences. Knocking on doors did not scare me. But when it came to closing the sale, I didn't know what to say. So I just said, one skill that will help me is closing the sale. And I began to study sales closing techniques over and over again. Books at articles and seminars and audio programs. And surprise, surprise, I became good at closing the sale, but with no pressure, no tricks, no gimmicks, no games, just really honest ways of asking for the sale.

Years later, when I began professional speaking, the first seminar I designed was a half day seminar called 24 techniques for closing the sale. And I guaranteed it so people wouldn't come unless it was guaranteed. So I studied the most popular 24 technique. There's more than 100 techniques. I took the top 24, and I made a three hour seminar of how you begin this process, how you develop it, and the different ways of asking the person to buy. Everybody who went through the seminar doubled their income. It was just phenomenal. And for me, it was phenomenal as well. My income went up in two years. Ten times. Ten times. I never earned so much money in my life. I never dreamed of it. I went from living in a rooming house with a small room. I went to living in a beautiful apartment, my own car, and I had a pocket full of money, and I went out to first class restaurants and all the things that go with that. And it just came because I learned the one skill. So that's the starting point. You say, what is your biggest goal in life? And what one skill would help you the most to achieve that goal and write them down.

And if you'll do that, and you just work on it every day, no, don't expect miracles, but every day, work a little bit on that one skill toward that one goal, and within a very short period of time, usually less than a month, your whole life will change.

And to go from where you been washing things to actually hiring so many salespeople and being the expert is really, really interesting. And then you did another shift that I want to talk about a little bit. So where did you shift from there?

I've worked in 21 different industries, and I started the bottom every time I traveled for about eight or nine years. I've actually been to 125 countries.

125? Wow.

Yeah. I've traveled to countries that I didn't speak in. But as a speaker, I've spoken and given seminars, large seminars, in 84 countries and spoken to millions of people. And the reason why I'm successful as a speaker is because high content is, people say that Brian teaches more good ideas per minute than any other speaker in the world. The reason I do that is because that's what I would like. If I went to a seminar, and I've been to many seminars, I want the person to give me a lot of ideas, not a lot of fluff or entertainment, but ideas that I can use immediately to get better results. Fortunately, I put all my best programs on audio and video. And we had 150 people going into companies around the country and around the world training people, two and three day seminars on my video workbook. And they got extraordinary results. One of the things that I asked my clients if I would ask you or ask someone else, I said, what do the people who are listening want to learn? And I found all over the world, I did a seminar for people in 105 countries last week, 105 countries centered in Europe, but worldwide.

And so I asked them the same thing before. I said, what do they want to learn? And the answer is, always make more money. They want to make more money. They have more money. They can decide how to spend it and everything else. So I found that people's biggest concern is money. They think about it all the time. It's a very emotional subject. It destroys relationships. It makes people grow up feeling poor. It lowers their self esteem. But about 80% of people have money problems, and it's never having too much. It's always having too little. They talk about having too much a month at the end of the money. Too many people have too much month at the end of the money. So they think about money all the time. When they see anything that they want, they say, how much is it? A joke about this is one word. It's much. Is it much? Is it muchizzard? Muchizzard? You know, how much is it? That's all they think about. Not, is it beautiful? Is it attractive? Is it delicious? It's just how much is it? And that's too much. So I say that people want to make more money, and I call this mmm.

People want to, mmm, make more money. And whenever I talk to my clients about a seminar, I say, well, let's make sure that it keeps looping back to mmm, because then we'll have everybody's complete attention. And people who have a lot of money want to make more, but people who don't have enough, that's all they think about. So how do you mmm in our world? Well, America, all the free countries are primarily entrepreneurial countries. In other words, people start businesses to produce products and services and sell them to people. So how do you make more money? Well, the people watching this today, the answer is, they sell more stuff. You've got to sell more stuff. Either you sell it or you help people, other people sell it or you cooperate with people selling or you deliver it. But it's always, every single business has to sell more stuff. It's interesting. Apple computer was almost bankrupt in 1997. They had thrown the founder out, Steve Jobs.

Exactly.

And they brought him back in again. They still had shares. So they brought him back in again to just look around the company and see if he could make any suggestions. And they never showed him the books or the accounting. And then they said, well, why don't you come back and take over the company? And they gave him the company back and he found that he has 60 days worth of money to survive. That's all I had was 60 days worth of money. And he had to save the company. And he did. Something was very interesting story. What most people don't know is Steve Jobs was in constant competition with Bill Gates, who founded Microsoft. And Steve was always saying that Bill Gates is old and stodgy and boring technology and everything else, whereas Apple is young and vibrant and bright and interesting and so on. This went back and forth, and they often debated in front of audiences, especially at universities. And Steve was always insulting Bill Gates, whose company was much larger. Anyway, he realized he had 60 days, and he had to have millions of dollars or the company would go broke.

So he only knew one person who had that kind of money, and it was Bill Gates. So he phoned him up and he said, bill. He said, this is Steve. He said, yes, Steve. He said, I've got a problem. I need to borrow some money or my company will go broke. And he said, steve, Apple is too important a company to go broke. He said, I won't give you any money. He said, I will buy shares in Apple, which were not worth very much at that time because everybody knew the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. He said, I'll buy shares and I'll come in with you as a partner. So Bill Gates bought shares. Steve Jobs turned the company around, found the new technology for the iPod, sold 5 million sets of ipods, and saved the company, and then came up with the iPhone. Everybody now has an iPhone. Apple has now hit $2 trillion in value. $2 trillion. It's never happened in the history of man. The only other company is Nvidia and Bill gates, probably $2 trillion. The thing is that what he did was he responded, and they found that they had too many products, so they had to cut back from 104 products to four and then develop new products, and the rest is history.

The point is that everybody starts off and everybody has every conceivable problem, and if they don't solve the problems, then they go broke. So one of the things that I learned from Jess Beavis, also, who I really admire, founder of Amazon, that's the other $2 trillion company, is what he started off. He had to borrow money from his parents to start selling something online. When nobody believed that the Internet could be used for online sales, they believed it was a message exchange, sort of like from Facebook. So he said, no, no, this could be a great way to sell retail products. And he didn't have very much money. He had a small place in Seattle, and he said the only thing that sells books, because he could get books on consignment, he could take orders and then have the publishers fill the orders so he didn't have to carry a lot of stock. And that was the beginning of Apple. Apple did not make any money for ten years. For ten years, he had to struggle and struggle and struggle. But he has two philosophies. One is there's no mistakes here. There's only learning experiences.

And one of the things I try to recommend to everybody is that you don't make mistakes. You have learning experiences. One of the richest men in America, W. Clement Stone, had branches all over the United States and Canada and Australia for insurance. And they had a basic motto as we don't have problems. Whenever there's a problem, you say, that's good, and let's find out what's good about it. That's good. And you know something? They always found something good. So one of the things that you can do, since 70% of your decisions will turn out to be wrong, according to the research, they'll be a little bit wrong, a lot wrong, or a total disaster. What you do is you say, that's good. What can I learn from this? Jeff Bezos said the same thing. That's good. What can we learn? And it was the mistakes that they made at the beginning that made them one of the biggest companies in the world today. So there's three statements that you can learn to use, and these require tremendous strength of character. Weak people cannot use these statements. Strong people can. This comes from a study done at Harvard Business School some years ago.

The three statements are, number one, I was wrong is, if you realize that you made a mistake, admit it quickly, don't wait around. Just say, I was wrong. Number two is, be prepared to say, I made a mistake. And number three is, I changed my mind. Those three, they're almost like the golden triangle of leadership, is leaders are willing to admit that they're not perfect, that they make mistakes. Everybody watching this can relate to these three questions. Every single person has got something, whether they are wrong, and they know it in their heart of hearts, and they made a mistake, and they've changed their mind. And so the rule is, fail fast, learn quickly. Fail fast, and learn quickly. There's a rule that I learned in Asia, sort of a chinese proverb. It said, the person who's going down the wrong road, who turns around first and goes back to where they got off the main road, the person who goes back first, is going forward the fastest. So actually going back, reversing your course, is a way of succeeding faster.

And I love what you just said, Brian, because I think one of the things that we see as a pattern between successful entrepreneurs or successful leaders is that extreme ownership that you're talking about, right? It's looking in the mirror, not looking for blame, not looking for victim mentality, but really looking in the mirror and saying, what can I do to change. What did I do wrong, and how can I course correct? And it's really more about, like you said, we all got to make good decisions. We all got to make bad decisions. But it's about making the faster decisions so that you can continue moving forward versus procrastinate and think of yesterday's decisions again. Again. So these are just such important points, Brian, that you're raising here. And I want to make sure the listeners are, like, getting it. Like, this is so good.

If our listeners were doing everything right, they'd all be rich and happy. So they're not. People are making mistakes. So the sooner you admit a mistake, the sooner you stop going down the wrong road and turn back. The sooner you get onto the right road and become a big success. And every success is built on a mountain of small failures.

I think for a lot of our audience, it's also, what is the right road? I'm trying to get on the right road, but what is the right road? And you are traveling the world. You have some interesting experience in the Sahara. What eventually created Brian Tracy International and the Brian Tracy that we know today?

There's many answers to that, but my philosophy has always been, whatever job I take, I throw my whole heart into doing that job as well as I can. I start early, I work harder, I stay later. I study and prepare on the weekends is I put my whole heart into it. And what I found is, you never know what the right job is until you dedicate yourself to it, and then you can decide, do I love this job? And if you don't love it, that's fine, but you can't decide. Well, I'm not sure if I love it or not. Until you put your heart into it, you've got to be able to risk your energy and your commitment, and I always did. And the people who can help you to control your future, see that. They notice that they open doors for you. The people who just come in at the last minute and leave at the first minute and talk to their friends most of the time, the average working person today in the bottom 80%, wastes 50% of their time talking to their friends, just walking around the office talking to their friends.

I've gone into offices where nine out of ten people are not working. They're just talking and drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. So one of the things which I really advocate for our listeners is make a decision today to become a millionaire. Make a decision to become a millionaire. And people are so surprised by that. But I remember I was 35 years old, and I was working away and I was doing reasonably well, but I'd always fantasized about being a millionaire from the time I was 15 and I learned what one was, I realized I had never decided to become a millionaire. I had thought about it and wished about it and hoped for it, and I was jealous of people who were successful and so on, but I had never personally made a decision to become a millionaire. Now, I was talking to someone recently about one of the most important things I teach in my work is called the superconscious mind. And the super conscious mind is a powerful, huge supercomputer that you have complete access to if you know how to access it, just like you have to have your password to get into a particular program.

Now, the super conscious mind, you have the conscious and the subconscious and the superconscious, the super conscious mind will take any instruction that you give it and go to work on it 24 hours a day until it brings it into your life. It's the most incredible thing. And the key is you have to have written goals and plans. You have to write them down, write them down and write them down. Every time you ask your superconscious mind a question, as long as it's clear. And in writing, your superconscious mind answers it. It has no respecter of persons. It's blind. It just simply responds to the stimulus. And the stimulus is a goal, a written goal and plan. And they find this happens. Works with the biggest companies, the richest people in the world today, the multi billionaires, hundred billionaires, people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, all people, clear written goals and plans that they work on every day. Here's the interesting thing. Warren Buffett, the 6th richest man in the world, he's got a net worth of about 36, $37 billion. Started with that. And he reads 5 hours a day in his field.

He reads 5 hours a day. He was asked, what is your secret to success? He said, it's simple. He said, I just say no to everything. That is not the two or three most important things I could be doing. I just say no. You remember when Nancy Reagan was promoting the war on drugs? And she said, just say no. And I asked my kids about that when they were younger. At that time. I said, what do you guys think about drugs? And they said, we say no to drugs. They all said that together. We say no to drugs. Well, do you know how you succeed in life is you just say no to every activity. That is not helping you move toward the things that you want. If you want to be rich, then don't watch television. We say that television can make you rich or make you poor. It'll make you rich if you leave it off. It'll make you poor if you turn it on. And it's amazing. The average television set is on 7 hours a day in the average household. 7 hours. People get up in the morning, first thing they do is turn on the television.

Then they go off to work. When they come in, first thing they do is they fight over the control. They fight over the remote control. Where's the control? I pay the bills around here. Where's the control? And then they turn on the television. And when you turn on the television.

Productivity goes to zero. Right? They actually asked the CEO of Netflix, who is the biggest competition, and he said, sleep. It's incredible. All goals and all aspirations suddenly diminish, and you're just going into that next show or that next thing. But tell me, Brian, because, again, if somebody would have said to me what you just shared about the subconscious mind, etcetera, maybe a few years ago, when I was back in corporate, I would probably think, sorry, no pun intended, but it's a little B's. And when I started going into entrepreneurship, I realized that what you just said is priceless. And first of all, I'm bummed that I didn't know about it for decades. But I want to ask you, because you made that decision to become a millionaire, your focus now is helping you say yes to things and no to the right things. Right? So, some of it is that writing your goals makes it more real. Talk to us a little bit more about what that looks like for you. And then, except for these three things, what can somebody do every single day to actually make that thing happen, and not make it just some kind of a procrastination or a dream, but actually make it a reality?

Well, in 2001, people encouraged me to create a group coaching program that would have 20 or 30 entrepreneurs, and I would work with them one full day every three months. And it was a one year subscription, and I charged them $5,000. They would come to San Diego, and we would spend one day with a structured series of exercises and discussions, and they would leave with a plan to implement what we discussed. So I charged $5,000. And this is 2001. That'd be ten, $15,000 today, with inflation. So people said, that's a lot of money. How can I be sure that I'll get my money's worth? So I created what I call my double guarantee, you will double your income and double your time off with your family. And they had to be earning a minimum of $100,000 a year to attend the program. Most of my clients were between 100 and $500,000. And so if they doubled their income, they were at the bottom level of 100,000, that's $200,000. So I charged them $5,000 to teach them how to increase their income by an extra hundred thousand dollars guaranteed. If you don't double your income and double your time off, I'll give you your money back.

And I'm happy to say that I never had to give a refund in seven years. And more than 1000 entrepreneurs and business owners, every one of them double their income. I'm going to show our friends how to double your income and even more how to become a millionaire. It's so simple, it's embarrassing for me to have to tell you. I have been using this for years. And this is what is known as a spiral notebook. It has pages, it's like a school book. I say, these cost $1.49. If you can't afford it, your mother will buy it for you because she wants you out of the house anyway. And so I say to my clients, this is the first morning of the first day. Now I don't want to have to give the money back, so I want to be sure that they double their income. So I said, I'm going to introduce you today and I'm introducing everybody to your new best friend. You can pick this up at local drugstore anywhere. This is your new best friend, and this is how you're going to use your best friend, right? I sit them down and I said, open up to the first page.

Each one has a copy.

And for those in the podcast, this is just a regular plain notebook, right, that you can buy for a dollar 50 or whatever it is, right? And rite date or Kmart or whatever.

Walmart, this is going to make you rich. Okay, it's a dollar 50. And if it doesn't work for you, we will give you your money back.

Exactly the 150 back write us.

You write down the word goals at the top of the first page and then you write down ten goals that you want to accomplish in the next year. Ten goals. You could write more than ten, but I call this the ten goal exercise. It seems to work really well. And you write them in the present tense as though they were already true. So you don't say, I will earn, you say, I earn x number of dollars and by December 31, 2024. Okay, so the goal in the present tense and the date. And you put that. So, the number and the date. The number and the date. It should be so simple that a six year old child can review your goals and tell you how close you are. Okay, so Einstein said that if you're goals are not clear to a six year old child, it means that they're not clear to you either. So write them down. Now, tomorrow morning, the next thing you do is you turn page over without looking at the previous page, and you write down the ten goals again. And this time you'll write them in a different order.

You'll describe them differently. Some will. New ones will come on, old ones will fall. And every morning you get up and. And you write down your ten goals without looking back. If you do this for 30 days, you'll probably do it for the rest of your life. Because within 30 days, your life will change in ways that you cannot imagine. Today you are programming every one of these goals into your super conscious mind. You are activating your conscious mind so that you see more possibilities to achieve the goals. And you write them down. You'll think of new goals, and then you think of something that you really wanted, like a beautiful house. I spoke to some people recently. Their number one goal was this beautiful house. And they knew the house because somebody else was living in it, and they'd seen it and they'd dreamed about it and everything else, and they were almost on the verge of acquiring that house. But they weren't clear before. I love a nice house. Well, what is a nice house? Well, you have to be clear. Your super conscious mind can do everything for you, but it can't decide for you.

Only you can decide what you want. Many of the people on this program are single. So when you're single, your main goal in life, emotionally is to meet the right person. And so I learned this many years ago, to meet the right person, take out a piece of paper and say, the perfect person for me would be colon. And then you write down a description. All the qualities based on your experience. Everything you want, everything you don't want, everything, just write it down, write it up. It'll be between 30 and 40 things. You'll be astonished how fussy you are, but you've had different experiences with different people, and you don't want those ever again. So the person will be this. The person will be that. The first time I did this, I wrote it down, and I met this beautiful girl very shortly thereafter, which is what happened but I've forgotten one thing. I didn't write normal. She would be normal. She was neurotic. She was literally out of her brain. And she made my life miserable for about two years. I mean, still to this day, I look back, so the next time I did this exercise, I wrote normal.

Very normal. Anyway, I was taking courses at the university. I'm now 34 years old, and I met a young woman there, and she was also taking courses. And we talked, and she said, how do you meet the right person? I said, it was very simple. Just write out a list like this. Write down perfect person for me and describe the person. And if you think of new things, go back and add it to the list. Well, about two months later, we saw each other at the university. About two months later, she called me up and she said, I need to talk to you about that exercise. I said, sure. So we got together for coffee, and she said, well, I've thought over everything that you said. I said, yes. She said, it's you. I said, what? I wrote down description of the perfect person for me, and it's you. And I thought, geez. And I looked at my list, and I. She was the perfect person that I had written down. And we celebrated our 45th anniversary last week.

Oh, that's so beautiful.

Isn't that a neat story? We have four children, eight grandchildren, nice house, and a golf course and everything. But does it work? I've given this exercise to other people, and if you want to meet the perfect person, take out a piece of paper and write down the perfect person for me. Call it and describe it how people think, no, you can't do that. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. And it works. So many people have told me it's like a miracle. It's like a miracle. They've been single and unhappy and bad relationships, and then they did this, and they met the perfect person at work, or they met them at a bus stop or something like that. So they downside of this is, it may not work, but it's not working now for most people.

Well, I love this, Brian. The truth is, we use it for hiring. So when I initially was trying to find the first people into leap academy and even my previous startups, but here I think it became more prominent. But I literally wrote down, what is my ideal coo looking like? What is my ideal head of sales looking like? It's incredible, because when I wrote it, it's like, this is impossible. I would never be able to hire somebody like this. I don't have enough capital for this, whatever. Like, I had all these excuses and I suddenly wrote it down and they appeared. I don't know how this happened, but this. They appeared. It's incredible.

Brian, if you were thinking, I want to meet the ideal person, you don't compromise and say, well, I don't mind if he has no front teeth or is 100 pounds overweight or anything. No, you decide on the perfect person. By the way, many of the people watching this are entrepreneurs who have to hire people. This has been my specialty. I've done strategic planning for a thousand companies. I've trained a million managers. How do you hire the right people? Well, it's 3333. Okay, four threes. Number first. Three is three people always interview at least three different people before you settle on one. Even if the first person looks like God Almighty, interview three people. Only then do you get a picture of what you're looking for. Some companies interview ten people for a single job. Numbers two, three. Interview the person you like three times. If the person looks good, the first time will look average. The second time will sometimes look awful the third time. The best that a human being will ever look in their life is at the first job interview they look at, sound it, they'll never be better in their lives after that.

They often start to fall apart like a radioactive substance that disintegrates. Number three. Three is interview them three places. People actually take on different personality characteristics. And you move them around very much like a chameleon changes color under different lights. So what you do, the first interview you have in your office. Second interview is down the hallway in another office or the coffee room. Third, you take them across the street and have lunch. One of the companies I worked with was Hewlett Packard. And their hiring process, they had seven interviews. The 7th interview was they took the person out for dinner. The hiring person plus his wife took the person plus their significant other out for dinner to a restaurant. And the person figure, I've got the job. This is, you know, this is the celebration. I've got the job. No, it's the 7th interview. And then they would just have dinner, whine and ask questions. And so. And they watch the dynamic between the two. They watch how they behave toward the waiter and so on. And that was the final interview. And they very often found that a person that had looked good up to this time started to drink too much and was rude to their wife or husband and treated the waiter like a slave.

I mean, it was terrible. So that's another thing. But in this three is once in your office once nearby and once across the street for lunch. Very simple, inexpensive. You will be astonished. In every single case where I've done this, I find that at lunch, after lunch, I wouldn't hire that person in a thousand years because they act differently. Now the last three is three people. You interview them, have somebody else interview them, have somebody else interview them. Now if you don't, you have the staff now to do that. But often you just have a friend do it. You have a friend, can I send this person over and you tell them what the job is and you tell me how you feel. And sometimes I've had this case with my staff where I would have them interview with two of my staff will come to me and say, no, absolutely nothing. And I thought the person was a good, ideal person. But my staff, when they let, they let their hair down with the staff, with you, they're. Anyway, so those are the 3333. You reduce your mistakes to less than 10%. The worst thing you can do is hire the wrong person because it's so difficult, it's so painful and so costly.

And it's interesting because now in the remote work, what we've done is also like a group setting. To just see what they look like in a group setting, what they look like in a one on one setting. You're absolutely right. The three places, a lot of it is virtual, but we want to see the dynamics. We want to see what they do. When somebody else talks, how do you look? Are you interactive or are you just watching your phone? When somebody else talks, there's so much that we can learn. That's brilliant. I didn't hear this three through three thing, Brian, but that's also cool.

When a business starts, they will have at least 200% turnover in the first year. You'll be hiring and firing and hiring and firing in the first year. It's a skill and it takes time for you to learn it. So here's one of the rules. Hire slow and fire fast. Hire slow and fire fast. Now, when do you fire someone? Here's the rule. The first time it crosses your mind. The first time it crosses your mind, that's telling you you made a bad choice. Don't have to think about it and hope that things will get better and everything else. The best time to fire anyone is the first time you think about it. Because it'll only get worse after that. People don't, are not willing to say, I made a mistake, I was wrong, I changed my mind. But don't be afraid to do that. Large businesses can make mistakes because they have lots of cash reserves. Small businesses cannot. One bad hire can be destructive to a business. One of the qualities for success in business is decisiveness, is having the strength to make the decision necessary for the good of the company. Remember, there's nothing is more important than your cash flow, than the people delivering on their promises.

Hire slow, fire fast, and fire them. The first time you think about it and then ask afterwards, what did you learn? What did you learn from this, by the way? My last company, I had 35 staff. I'm semi retired now, and all those people are still working in different businesses. But I had a basic rule is, we don't make mistakes here. We have learning experiences. So if you've made a mistake, then you could come to me with them and say, but I want you to write down what happened, what you learned from it, and what you're going to do differently. So they would come in and they would say, I made a mistake. I am responsible. Those are the three magic words that eliminate most of the problems in life. Just say, I am responsible. And so the staff member would come to me and say, I am responsible. I made this mistake, and this is what I learned, and this is what I'm going to do next time I say, great, they'd get up and leave. In other words, they were never afraid of admitting that they'd made a mistake or they'd broken a dish or something, because they knew that all that mattered was you accept responsibility, you identify what you learn from it and get on.

I used to work for the client manager, who spending all of his time working with problems with his staff. And all of a sudden he said, what can I do? He said, I can't ignore these problems, but they're in my office all day long, one after another. I said, well, here's a very simple idea. Take a form and have everybody fill this form out if they have a problem. And the first question is, what is the problem? Exactly. Okay, what's the problem? Second question is, what are all the solutions to this problem? The third question is, what solution do you recommend? And the fourth question, if you still need to come to me, give me a call and we'll talk about it. 90% of the people coming to his office disappeared once they've written it down. Here's my problem, and written up the solutions, and it's chosen a solution. They didn't need to come to the boss anymore.

And to me, that's such an important leadership thing. Don't come only with the problems, comes with the solutions. And by the way, if you already have the solutions, you probably eliminate it, because the leader wants somebody that will co lead wisdom. They don't want some leech that will just come to them for everything, right? So to me, that's such an important distinction. But, Brian, one of the things that scare a lot of our audience that want to explore maybe entrepreneurship, maybe they want to stay in corporate. They're still debating. And one of the things that scared them the most is the whole money thing, like you said. But what if I don't have money? What if my business fail? What if I can't get clients? How do you build that money belief or that money confidence in yourself in order to create that big thing that you want for yourself?

The answer is start small. Most people, and I know hundreds, thousands of people all over the world who started with an MLM business on the side because they had their main jobs, and then they found a product or service to sell in the evenings and weekends. Sometimes they sold them online. Today, everyone's working online. And so your cost is very, very low. You can actually find a product that is a great product and then sell it at a small markup where you make a profit and you don't have to pay for it until you have made the sale. So you could start with almost nothing. There is a disease that runs through the great population. It's called excusitis. Excusitis, which is an inflammation of the excuse making gland. Everybody's got an excuse. And then, you know, they say, he said it couldn't be done until he was passed by, by someone who was doing it. The fact is that you have more potential than you could use in 100 lifetimes. Again, that's an Einstein quote. You have more potential than you could use in 100 lifetimes. You can learn any skill that you need to learn.

And the key is to start small. New immigrants to the US from different countries, whether they're the eastern bloc, countries like Russia or african countries, or new immigrants succeed and become millionaires at five times the rate of the average born American. Why? It's because when they arrive here, they think, my God, this is. The streets are paved with gold because there's so much opportunity here. Holy smokes. There's the great story of two. I've spoken in Russia, all over Russia, for 1015 years. I'm the most popular speaker outside of non Russian in the entire country. And there's this story about two russian immigrants who arrive in New York, and they finally get to New York, and they're walking down the streets of New York, and one of them sees a $20 bill on the sidewalk. And he said, look, look, there's a $20 bill. He said, well, pick it up. It's yours. You saw it first. And he. Ben's always, well, I'm not sure. No, go grab it. He said, well, I'm not sure. Well, why are you hesitating? He said, well, I don't know if I want to work my first day in America picking up money off the street.

I mean, he doesn't. Well, that's why we have a lot of immigrants without proper licensing. That's how they see America, is that it's money in the streets, things that we take for granted in third world countries. I've lived and worked and spent time in third world countries. They're so difficult to earn the smallest amount of money. You come to America, it's like a fantasy land, and people just walk past it. They don't want to bend over and pick up the money on the street. If you make a decision, I come back to this, and I've written a book, by the way, you can read the book. It's called the success secrets of self made millionaires, and it's based on years of research into how people become millionaires, starting with nothing and all the different ways in different directions and so on. If you're really serious about becoming a millionaire, you will become a millionaire. And is it going to be easy? No, it's going to be very hard. But I can promise you, big smile on my face, it's very nice to earn a lot of money and have a lot of money. You know, at the end of your lifetime, the time will be gone.

The question is, will you be financially independent? Will you have enough money so that you never have to worry about money again? And that has to be your main goal. You have to move this goal into the center instead of watching television or wasting time. This, during your prime earning years, has got to be a major goal that you focus on and you focus on. I've met millionaires. I have three billionaires who started with zero with my material and became billionaires. They told me. I remember one of them owned the biggest condominium in Monte Carlo, and he invited me to spend a day with him, giving him advice. And he had started off pushing a cart in a hospital in St. Petersburg and was now one of the richest men in the world. I mean, unbelievable. And he said, what you did is you opened my eyes to what was possible. And once I saw that there was just no stopping. He opened his eyes. And so I'm hoping we, you and I are hoping that the people watching, we're opening their eyes is if someone else can do it, you can do it that someone else has done.

And it's a success thing since someone else has done this. Proof that you can do it as well. You don't have to be envious of other people, but you have to say, what? How do they do it? And almost everybody who has been successful has written a book about it or.

Been interviewed in an article, or 80 in your case. Brian, I've read eat the frog. And by the way, I'll tell the listeners, it's so interesting to hear you talk about freedom, because what you're creating basically with that money is freedom of choice.

Yes. And this is called the 32 unbreakable laws of money and success. Many people are saying that this is the think and grow rich of the 21st century. What I've done is I've taken 32 laws. Now, the interesting thing about a law is that a law is always true. So, for example, you have the law of exchange, which is an economic law. And the law, exchange says that all success comes from exchanging your services, your work, your sweat and or your products for more than they cost you, and then reinvest into the balance. There's twelve laws, metal laws, including the law of superconscious activity. And what this does is it just shows you the laws that are always true for all people. And many people will be transformed by these laws. Because I've spent 50 years researching this. I've read more than 6000 books. You can see behind me. I have walls and walls of books like this. And I've read most of these books. Believe it or not, I've read about 150,000 hours in total over the course of my lifetime. I'm taking notes. I've written them down anyway. It's possible there are no limits, except the limits you place on your own thinking.

So just say, I have no limits. Anything anyone else has done, within reason, you can do. There are thousands and thousands and now millions of people in America who started with nothing, who are now millionaires and multimillionaires. And what they did, you can do. And the speed at which people are becoming millionaires today is faster than ever before. We have so many of them. It takes a long time to become a millionaire. Most of them don't reach it till their forties, because it takes them that long to become smart, to save their money, to learn how to invest it properly. But a book like this, and there's lots and lots of wonderful books, can save you years of hard work and mistakes. It's the mistakes that set us back. And they don't just set us back money. They set us back years. You always have to think, how much time does it take me to earn this amount of money? And if I lose it, I've lost how much time? Two years, three years, five years, can never get the time back. So therefore, everything that you learn, what they found, by the way, one of the great rules of success, maybe the greatest, is 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? And successful people think about success. People who are financially well off think about how to earn and keep money, and they study it. So here's an interesting discovery, that the average wealthy person spends about 10 hours a month studying money. They read books and articles. They read the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine. They immerse themselves in the understanding of money, just like learning how to cook a beautiful dish at a cooking school. And the average person who has money problems spends 1 hour a month, usually spend around bill paying time. They occasionally glance at something, but they spend 1 hour a month, and they worry about money all the time. Successful people spend about 10 hours a month studying how they can earn and keep more money. And as a result, they're vastly superior. And you don't see the difference at the beginning. What happens is it takes time. And then the miracle of compounding your knowledge compounds on other knowledge, which compounds on other knowledge. And soon you develop this mass of knowledge, almost like the ability to speak fluently and well.

They say that every word that you learn of your vocabulary, every word you learn, introduces you to between ten and 15 other words. The more words you know, the more money you make, the more you earn. So one of the smartest things you can do, and I used to carry a big but right here, a big dictionary around with me, what you can do now is just simply look it up on your iPhone. But the thing is, and then write down the name of the word. The more words you learn, the smarter you become. Thinking is to the mind as exercise is to the body. So if you want to become physically fit, put strain on your muscles. If you want to become mentally fit, then you read things that challenge you, and you look up the new words and you write them down. And it's quite astonishing. You actually get smarter, and you actually start to attract into your life, more money, start to keep it. You start to have better ideas on how to invest it or how to deploy. It's the most amazing darn thing. So there's this wonderful line that says, it's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

It's me, o Lord, standing in the need of prayer. It's you who is the biggest single obstacle to your success or the biggest single help to your success.

Let me ask you something, because you said something super critical, which is learning about money, learning about finances. It's something we don't learn in school. We don't learn this anywhere. Where do you even learn about it? Because again, I agree with you. I think it's never been easier to become a millionaire. We were just named by Inc. As one of the fastest growing companies in America. It is easy, relatively, to what it was when you did it, Brian. But it also means that if I can do it as an immigrant from across the country, anybody can do it, right? English, second language. I have all the excuses. Anybody can do it. So the question is, but where do you learn about money or about any of that?

Well, you just take your spiral notebook and you say, I am an expert on earning and investing money. Write it down as a goal. I am an expert. And what will happen is opportunities, books, articles. I mean, it'll be almost like flock of birds. The different sources of information will come to you from everywhere. You have so many, they say at the beginning, when you start working, every single step forward is very difficult. You make every mistake, it costs you every amount of money, but it starts to get easier. But you have to persist. Think of the law in my book of accelerating acceleration. As you start to move towards your goal, imagine. Imagine the world. It's like this. So as you start to move towards your goal, you're going up around the world, and here's your goal over here. And it's starting to move toward you, and you're moving toward it, and it's moving toward you, and you can't see it. And it can't see you until the last few minutes. The last 20% of activities is suddenly you achieve the goal and the goal comes to you. So what happens is the first 80% of time, you don't see anything.

And it's amazing how many people quit. They work and work and work, and it's really hard and difficult. They don't realize that they're moving toward the goal faster and faster. They just can't see it. But if they just keep doing and suddenly everything starts to come together as people invest in them. They say, the first million is hard, but the second million is inevitable. Once you have demonstrated that you can earn and invest money, well, people will give you money from throw it at you as you drive down the street. Every person. There's never any shortage of money. There's only shortage of opportunity. And so your job is just to work and work and work, and never stop until you break through. And you will break through. You're talking about people who work for a living and so on. I have worked as an entrepreneur on my own for most of my lifetime. But once I developed a shopping center from nothing, I knew nothing about anything. But I had this idea that real estate development was a good idea. So I went out and I got books from the library written by successful real estate entrepreneurs.

And I read the books, and I read the books. What to look for in a piece of property, what to look for in terms of tenants and leasing and agreements and everything else. And then I went and asked people questions, and the most amazing damn thing happened. And in one year, I was able to buy a piece of property. It was very complicated. And build a $3 million shopping center and lease it out 100% and sell it to a major real estate conglomerate. It was the most incredible damn thing. And people say, how could you do such a thing? You never underneath it like that in your life. I said, I read the books. I just read the books. The books said, number one, do the number two. Number three. Then you read a second book, and it gives you a different number, three or three. Well, so the president of this $750 million company, who bought the shopping center for me, when it was complete, he offered me a job to work for him, with him as his personal assistant. So I took it, and I worked with him for about 18 months, and then he sold the whole business for a fortune.

But I learned so much from him. But now it's a corporate environment. I'm coming to a point. It's a corporate environment, and the top executives would all meet around the big boardroom table to take assignments and to talk about projects that they're working on and share ideas and so on. And I learned, because I didn't know anything about corporate life. One strategy, which we'll share with our friends, and it is, raise your hand, raise your hand. Raise your hand. We find out that in businesses, most people are dodging work. When somebody talks about something that needs to be done, they look away and they look down. But what I would do is whenever there was a discussion I would say, I'll do that, I'll do that, I'll do that. As I raise my hand until they tell my boss, look on the big boss. The big boss said, you've volunteered for too much already. And I said, well, I can do all these things. He said, well, all right, let's see. In the next meeting, I'll do that. And so this is the great secret of success, is keep volunteering for more work. I want more work.

I would go and see me at the end of the day, I want more work. And I would work on nights and weekends. Pretty soon, if he wanted something done, he could give it to one of the other executives and they would do it in a week or two. If he gave it to me, I would do it in a day or two. I would work all day, all evening, all night, all weekend, and deliver it. And so I got the reputation, if you want something done fast, give it to Brian. If you want it done, the others can do it. And soon I had the biggest office in that complex, that conglomerate, except for the boss's office, the big boss. And I had my own office, I had my own staff. Eventually had three divisions of people working for me and that I had start and build and everything else. Because whenever somebody threw him a pass, he would say, Brian, you want to take this new business? And I said, absolutely. Raise your hand. It's the greatest strategy. I've shared this with MBA students at the university. They say, what should I do when I leave here?

I said, raise your hand. Just keep raising your hand. Come in a little earlier. Come in before the boss comes in. Stay most of the day. Don't go out for lunch for an hour or 2 hours, and keep working until the boss leaves. So every time the boss comes in, you're already there. You're already there. And then raise your hand. That strategy is so simple. If people did this to you, you think jesus is a good person.

Yeah. What I say to my team is, there's no traffic jam in the extra mile. If you're in the extra mile, you will be noticed. So be in the extra mile. It's always going to be worth it. So, brian, I can probably talk to you another hour or two, but, but kind of last things that you would say to maybe your younger self or people who are listening. What would be one of the things that you wish you knew when you were traveling and trying to figure out what on earth brian is going to do next or how to make money or what would be some of the things you wish you knew.

Just throw yourself at life. Don't ever hold back, because what I would do, I'm going to give you two ideas because we're running out of time. I'm going to show everybody here how to double their income, guaranteed. Because it works for everybody everywhere, all over the world. One of the things that I've learned is that the most powerful principle in mathematics is called the compound principle. It's in my book, it's the principle of compounding. Einstein said that compounding is the 8th wonder of the world. And what it means is that every effort you put in, every dollar you put in, starts to compound and grow on itself, then grow on itself. They say that a dollar invested at the time of Christ would be worth most of the money in the world today if it was compounded at 3%, just 3%. So how do you double your income? Well, I was thinking about that. I still remember walking down the street thinking, how could I double my income? Using a system, a simple system. So I came up with a system with seven steps. And the seven steps are very simple. The goal is to earn twice as much as you're earning today.

So using the law of compounding, what you would do is say, okay, how can I contribute, how can I increase my value, my productivity, and then my income by 25% a year? The answer is, if you increase your productivity, time management skills, start earlier, work harder, stay later, finish your tasks, and so on by 2% per month. Now, 2% per month is so small, you don't even know. Most people could increase their productivity by 50% tomorrow just simply by starting earlier on the most important task and working nonstop on only that until they're complete. The Warren Buffett idea, just say no to anything except the there's two or three tasks. I call this the law of three. In another place, my publisher said that the law of three is so powerful, it should be a separate chapter. And it is. And basically it says that there's only three things that you do that account for 90% of your value, 90% of your worth, 90% of your income. There's only three things. As you go through life, you must continue identifying those three things. One big thing, and then two and three. Everything else is in the bottom 10%.

Now, what do most people do? They do everything else in the bottom 10% before they do the big things. And then the big things don't get done, or they get done too quickly, in a rush, make mistakes and so on. Anyway, so the law of compound is that if you could increase your income 2%. This is most my thinking when I was designing this system, that 2% per month, that would be 25% in one year, 25% in per year with compounding would double your income in two years and seven months. So then you just start multiplying 1.25 times one times 1.25. And if you keep doing that, in ten years, you'll increase your income 1004%. Anybody can figure that out on a piece of paper. 1004%. That's ten times. So I would ask my audiences, how many people here would like to increase their income ten times. Everybody. Double your income. Triple your income. How about ten times? All right, I'm going to show you how to do it, but you have to do it consistently. You can't invest your money compound and then take it out and spend it, and then you have to start over again.

So you have to do this consistently. All right, so here's the seven ways to compound your time and your productivity. Number one, arise early. What you've found, and I've got piles and piles of information on research into millionaires and billionaires, self made millionaires and billionaires. Number one, they all get up early. They all get up by 06:00 a.m. and since I started my research, the numbers moving to 05:00 a.m. more and more wealthy people get up at 05:00 a.m. now, what does that mean? It means you have to go to bed earlier, which means you don't watch as much television. Holy smokes. But fortunately, with streaming television, you can stop and start on your schedule. So get up early. That's number one. If you don't do that, then it's not possible. Number two, oh, by the way, the most important quality for success which applies here, is self discipline, is your ability to make a decision. To do something, then hold yourself to that decision is to make yourself do it, even if you don't feel like it. So, number one, get up early. Number two is read 60 minutes each day in your field.

Read 60 minutes each day in your field. 60 minutes a day will translate into about one book per week. One book per week will translate into 50 books a year. 50 books a year will translate into 500 books in ten years. When you start to read 1 hour a day, one book a week, you will soon, within a year or two, be one of the best educated people in the world. In your field, you'll have the equivalent of a doctorate degree in your field of financial success. So that's number two. Read 1 hour a day. Number three is plan every day in advance, and I always suggest you plan it. The night before is make a list of everything that you have to do that day in business. Plan every week on the Sunday before, so your whole week is laid out in front of you. And then every night, the last thing you do is make a list of everything you have to do. Tomorrow, when something new comes up, write it on the list before you do it. Natural tendency of people, if something new comes up, they abandon their list and they just run off and do the new task.

And without realizing it's not as important as some of the other things. So write down everything you have to do. And then number four, set priorities is organize the list by priority. What is number? We call it the ABCDE method. You write a next to all of your must dos, b next to all of your should dos, c next to all of your nice to dos and de delegate, and e, eliminate ABCDE. This forces you to think in an organized form, and it gives you tremendous power over your time and your life. And then what you do is you go a one, a two, a three. What is your most important task? This is so important. Your ability to start and complete your most important task will determine if you'll be successful in life. If you cannot do that, then you won't be successful. You will struggle, you will worry about money, you won't get promoted. It's black and white. If you can start and complete your most important task, the whole world is yours. I demonstrated that and everything I did and all the people that have followed my advice, set priorities and then start with number one most important thing, and discipline yourself to work on it.

No talking to your friends, no phone calls, no checking email and phone and everything else. Just start with number one and work on it nonstop until it's complete. Then you take a deep breath, walk around the office, say hello to people. Three minutes later, you're back and you start with number two. You make sure that number two is still number two. Number five is to listen to audio programs in your car. Listen to audio programs in your car. When I started off, I was one of the first listeners of cassettes. But now you can download anything that you want from audible in a couple of seconds. And you can listen to this with earphones or without earphones. But never let your car be moving without your audio program or audio player on. So you can learn some of the greatest information in the world. Most of it is condensed. Many people have become rich just listening to audio programs. They're not great readers, but they love to listen. Now, how do you multiply your learning ability? The answer is, all learning is done at the pauses. So therefore, if you read something and you come across something that's really interesting, stop and always have a red pen with you and underline the creep and think about them before.

If you just read without pausing, you don't remember anything. But if you read pause, underline, make notes. On the side is you will double, triple, ten times the amount of material that you will remember in audio listening. Pause the audio player. Just pause it and think about what you just learned. Turn it over in your mind like you're ahead examining a beautiful piece of porcelain. Just turn it over in your mind and think about it. And then go on. I used to teach super learning, but I wanted to learn as much as possible. And it's not just learning, it's retaining. Retain, retain, retain. You only retain by pausing and thinking about what you learned. And maybe think about how to apply it. So you can speed read a novel, but you cannot speed read valuable material because you can't absorb it unless you can claws. That's number five. Number six is ask two questions after every situation. And the two questions are, what did I do right? And what would I do differently next time? In other words, extract the very most learning from every experience, what did I do right? And you'll find that even if you did a disaster, in the military, they call this an after action report.

So whenever they do any kind of a military exercise, when it's over, they stop and they do an after action report, and they ask this question, what did we do right? What will we do differently next time? And this is like stomping on the accelerator of your learning ability. If you don't take the time to evaluate, what did we do right, what would you learn? And then you make the same darn mistake again. Number seven is treat every person you meet like a million dollar customer. Treat every person you meet like the ability to buy a million dollars worth of your product or service. And start at home. Start with the most important people in your life. When you come home at night, the rule is leave things off. Don't come home at night. And turn on the television for the first hour, which is called the hour of power. When your family comes back together in the evening, just leave things off and just ask questions and talk. But don't watch television. That alone will transform your life. But those are the big seven. Now, if you do this, what happens is you will increase your productivity performance and up well over 25%.

But 25% per year times ten years is ten times your income. And when I started this, I was making this idea, I earned $14,400. You can tell what your income was by what you declare on your tax return. Nobody brags or boasts or exaggerates on their tax return. So I earned $14,400.05. Years later, I earned $140,000. Actually, $144,000.05 years later, I made $1.4 million income that year. Increased my income ten times in ten years. And once you get there, you don't go back down. I was at a seminar, and this gentleman came up to me. His name was Chris, and I'd known him from other seminars, and he said, brian, he said, you know that system? Double your income, increase your income ten times. He said, it doesn't work. I said, how do you mean? And he said, it only took six. I increased my income ten times in six years. He said, all my friends who did it, they're all earning ten times as much as they were earning when they came to the seminar. Does it work? It worked for me. I increased my income ten times in five years. I couldn't not believe it.

And it's this law of compounding, as you do get a little bit better every day. Every day. Every day. Never stop. Never stop learning. Growing, getting up early, working harder, focusing on top priorities, and learning from every experience. And it works seven steps. You have unlimited ability. And I've worked with now millions of people, millions of people all over the world. I'm one of my clients now is working in Kazakhstan, in Kazakhstan, which is a poor ex russian country. In the six, he's teaching people how to become self made millionaires by starting and building their own successful business. And he's now got 130 millionaires, one of the most backward, difficult countries in the world. I mean, does it work? Yes, it works.

This was incredible, Brian. I was taking so many notes. I don't know if you saw that, but I was just like, frantically, this is so, so, so good. And it's coming from so much of what you created and created for others, and it's tangible, real hands on things that anybody can actually do. And thank you, Brian. This was so incredibly inspiring and just so many priceless tips. Thank you.

Well, I wish everybody the very best of success. I really hope that you will do some of the things we recommended. I have probably about 40 days of seminars full of ideas like this. And what I've given you guys is the best material. So easy to apply immediately and it always works. And that's kind of scary. That's kind of scary. So if you don't succeed with this because you didn't try it, and I.

Love that, let me challenge the people who are listening.

That's a dollar 49.

Money back if it didn't work. But seriously, write us. There's nothing that makes us feel better than hearing your success, hearing how this impacted you. Write us and we're going to have the information in the podcast and the YouTube. Write us. Let us know how it goes. This was incredible. Brian, thank you so much for the time and the value.

Thank you, my friends. God bless. Good luck.