Maximum Achievement Read online

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS

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  New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1993 by Brian Tracy

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Liney Li Manufactured in the United States of America

  25 27 29 30 28 26

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Tracy, Brian.

  Maximum achievement: strategies and skills

  that will unlock your hidden powers

  to succeed/Brian Tracy.

  p. cm.

  1. Achievement motivation. 2. Success.

  3. Self-actualization (Psychology). 4. Motivation (Psychology).

  I. Title.

  BF503.T73 1993

  158&.1—dc20 93-4534 CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-86518-4

  ISBN-10: 0-671-86518-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-80331-9 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-684-80331-3 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-439-12627-1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  •

  Writing a book is an incredible undertaking, especially if you’ve never done it before. It takes years of research and experience, then months, if not years, of writing and rewriting. This book has emerged from the thousands of hours of seminars I’ve given, and the countless suggestions and observations from the thousands of men and women I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years.

  My life has been one long, continuous process of personal and professional development, including reading thousands of books and articles, listening to thousands of hours of audiocassette recordings and attending innumerable courses and seminars. As Tennyson says in “Ulysses,” “I am a part of all that I have met.” I have been influenced by more people than I can even count but I want to thank some of them for making this book possible.

  First, let me thank the many fine men and women who have attended my seminars and lectures over the years. Their insights, observations and experiences have been invaluable to me and indispensable to the writing of this book. You know who you are, and my gratitude to you is unbounded!

  Specifically, I thank the late John Boyle for opening my eyes to the power of the mind in determining everything that happens to us. I thank Earl Nightingale for his wonderful insights into the potential of the average person and Denis Waitley for summarizing the principles of success in his Psychology of Winning audiocassette program. I’ve been greatly influenced in my thinking by many wonderful thinkers, writers, and speakers such as Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard and Tom Peters, as well as by Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer.

  I am extremely grateful to my friends at Nightingale-Conant Corporation, Vic Conant, Kevin McEneeley, Mike Willbond and Jill Schachter, who have worked with me over the years to assure the quality of the audio recordings of these ideas.

  I’m especially grateful to my seminar sponsors, John Hammond, Dan Bratland, Jim Kaufman and Suanne Sandage, who have made these principles available to many thousands of people by conducting public seminars with me in every major city in North America over the years.

  In my company, past and present, there have been, and are, several people who have helped me immeasurably. My heartfelt thanks to Victor Risling, who worked with me on the road for years, starting early and staying late, and who made a vital contribution to my career in its formative stages. I thank my friend and partner, Michael Wolff, my marketing director, Donna Villerilli, my executive assistants and secretaries, Mavis Hancock and Shirley Whetstone, without whose help in typing and retyping the manuscript, this book might never have been completed.

  I thank my friends at Simon & Schuster, especially my editor Bob Bender, for their support and encouragement in the preparation of the manuscript, and without whom this book would not have been possible. Perhaps the most important person of all in this whole process has been Margaret McBride, my literary agent, whose faith and confidence in me and my work served as the critical spark that ignited the writing of this book in the first place. Thank you, Margaret.

  One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life is that no one ever does it alone. We are all dependent on others for virtually everything. I would like to thank so many people, but I would run out of space, so let me conclude these acknowledgments by thanking my wonderful wife, Barbara, for everything, but especially for patiently putting up with me over the months as I pounded away at this book. And to my dear children, Christina, Michael, David and Catherine, who were continually shortchanged for my time. I promise to make it up to you.

  This book is lovingly dedicated to

  my wonderful wife, Barbara,

  the best friend, wife, mother and partner

  I could ever have dreamed of.

  God bless you and thank you for everything.

  You make me a very lucky man.

  CONTENTS

  •

  Introduction

  1. Make Your Life a Masterpiece

  2. The Seven Laws of Mental Mastery

  3. The Master Program

  4. The Master Mind

  5. The Master Skill

  6. The Master Power

  7. The Master Decision

  8. The Master Goal

  9. Mastering Human Relationships

  10. Mastering Personal Relationships

  11. Mastering the Art of Parenting

  12. Mastery: The Power of Love

  Appendixes

  INTRODUCTION

  •

  The system you are about to learn can change your life. This book contains a unique synthesis of ideas, methods and techniques brought together in one place for the first time. The individual components of this system, however, are not new; they have been learned and relearned throughout all the ages of man. These principles and practices have been tested and proven by millions of men and women, and all great success is based on them.

  By integrating these ideas and methods into your daily life, you will feel happier, healthier and more self-confident. You will experience a greater sense of power, purpose and self-direction. You will be more positive, more focused and more able to achieve your goals. You will get along better with the important people in your life. You’ll be more successful in your career and you will feel wonderful about yourself.

  You will learn how to unlock the great untapped reserves of potential that lie deep within you. By practicing the exercises that accompany each chapter, you’ll get results out of all proportion to the effort you put in. You will propel your whole life onto a highroad of success, achievement and greater happiness than perhaps you’ve ever known.

  To use a simple analogy, life is like a combination lock, only with more numbers. If you turn to the right numbers in the right sequence, the lock will open for you. It’s not a miracle, nor does it depend on luck. It doesn’t even matter who you are as long as you have the right numbers. By the same token, there is a proper combination of thoughts and actions that will enable you to accomplish almost anything you really want, and you can find that combination if you search for it.

  Health, wealth, happiness, success and peace of mind are all amenable to the same principle. If you do the right things in the right way, you’ll get the results you desire. If you can determine exactly what it is you want, you can find out how others have achieved it before you. If you then do the same things they have done, you’ll achieve the same results they have.

  This “secret of success” is so si
mple that it is overlooked by most people. Whatever you want you can have, if you want it badly enough, and if you are willing to persist long enough and hard enough in doing what others have done to accomplish similar things before you.

  It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, male or female, black or white. It doesn’t matter if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or if you came from a deprived background. Nature is neutral. She is no respecter of persons. She plays no favorites. She gives you back what you put in, no more and no less. And you can determine what you put in.

  Goethe once wrote, “Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her, she despises and only to the apt, the pure, and the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets.”

  Unsuccessful people have a hard time with this idea because they are so accustomed to looking for the reasons for their lives outside themselves. But the proof is all around us. Everywhere you look, you see men and women from every background—young and old, black and white, educated and uneducated—accomplishing great things and making valuable contributions to the societies they live in.

  At the same time, you see men and women with every advantage of background and education who seem to be going nowhere with their lives. They are working at jobs they don’t like, staying in relationships they don’t enjoy and functioning far below their potential for achievement and happiness.

  The way for you to be happy and successful, to get more of the things you really want in life, is to get the combinations to the locks. Instead of spinning the dials of life hoping for a lucky break, as if you were playing a slot machine, you must instead study and emulate those who have already done what you want to do and achieved the results you want to achieve.

  That’s what this book is about. It contains the very best that has ever been discovered about individual achievement, in one place, free of jargon or complexity, ready to be put into action. This system gives you the combinations to the locks in virtually every area of your life.

  I know these ideas work for two major reasons. First, I’ve tested and proven them by trial and error for many years. Second, I’ve taught this system to more than a million people and it has worked for every single person who has seriously applied these ideas in his or her life.

  Some people study law and some people study engineering. Some read the sports pages and become authorities on football, baseball or basketball. Others invest many hours learning about cooking, history, stamps, computers or a thousand other subjects. I studied success in all its many forms.

  From a young age, I wanted to know why it was that some people were more successful than others. I was mystified by the disparities of wealth, happiness and influence I saw all around me. Something deep inside me said that there must be reasons for this apparent inequality, and I was determined to find out what they were.

  I came from a poor family and I didn’t like it. My father was not always regularly employed and we never seemed to have enough money for anything but the bare necessities. For my first ten years, most of my clothes were from the Goodwill and the St. Vincent de Paul charities.

  I was a behavior problem when I was growing up. I was always in trouble of some kind, angry and lashing back at life without knowing why. I was suspended several times and expelled from two high schools. I got more detentions than any other kid in any school I attended from the seventh to the twelfth grades.

  I failed high school, dropping six out of seven courses in my last year. My first real job was washing dishes in the kitchen of a small hotel. After that, I drifted from laboring job to laboring job, living in boarding houses, small hotels or one-room apartments, and occasionally sleeping in my car, or on the ground next to it.

  I worked in sawmills stacking lumber and on logging crews slashing brush with a chain saw. For a while, I dug wells. I worked as a construction laborer, and in a factory on the assembly line. When I was twenty-one, I got a job as a galley boy on a Norwegian freighter and went off to see the world. For the next few years, I traveled until I ran out of money, then worked until I could afford to travel again.

  When I was twenty-three, I was still working as an itinerant farm laborer during the day and sleeping on the hay in the farmer’s barn at night. When I could no longer get a laboring job, I got into sales, working on straight commission, getting paid every night so I could eat and pay for my rooming house, one day at a time.

  Throughout these early experiences, which taught me a lot about life, I continued to seek the answer to the question, “Why are some people more successful than others?”

  I was a voracious reader. I had a passion to know, to understand. I read everything I could find that would give meaning and order to what I saw going on around me. It was like a quest for me, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but with one big difference.

  I am intensely practical. I was looking for clear explanations of specific things that I could do immediately to get better results. I had no patience for grand theory or abstract principles. My only question of each new idea was, “Does it work?”

  When I got into sales, I spun my wheels for several months until I began asking, “Why is it that some salespeople are more successful than others?” I attacked the question wholeheartedly, reading everything I could find on selling, listening to every audiotape available and attending every training seminar that came along. I asked top salespeople how they sold and what they did to deal with the constant problems that salespeople face.

  I tried everything that made sense and improved on it as I went along. My sales started to increase, bit by bit. In six months, I was the top salesperson in my company. I was soon teaching others what had worked for me, and many of them went on to be top salespeople as well.

  When I got into management, I read everything I could find that could help me to be more effective at getting results through others. I used what I learned to build a sales organization with ninety-five people in six countries producing millions of dollars in new business each month.

  When I decided to get into real estate development, I hit the books once more. I got a real estate license and read everything I could find on the subject. For my first project, having never developed anything before, I optioned, financed, leased out, built and sold a three-million-dollar shopping center. And I learned everything I needed to know by studying and by asking questions of other successful developers.

  Over the next five years, I was responsible for buying, annexing, planning, developing, building, leasing and selling millions of dollars worth of commercial, industrial and residential property.

  I went from a tiny one-bedroom apartment with rented furniture to my own condominium, then to a house, then to an even bigger house with a swimming pool and a three-car garage.

  I studied sales, management and business so I could learn how to make a good living. I completed high school at night and by taking correspondence courses. Based on my life experiences, and a high score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, I gained admittance to an executive MBA program and spent three years studying business theory, majoring in strategic planning and marketing.

  I subsequently became a management consultant and used my knowledge and experience to earn or save my clients millions of dollars.

  I had always been fascinated with the subject of happiness, and why it was that some people were obviously happier and more fulfilled than others. To find the answers, I studied psychology, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, motivation and personal achievement.

  To deal with my personality problems, I studied relationships, interpersonal psychology, communications and personality styles. When I got married, I read and listened to everything I could find on parenting and childraising. To improve the way I got along with people, I read books that helped me to better understand myself and the reasons I felt and acted the way I did.

  I studied history, ec
onomics and politics to understand more about the past and present, and to learn why it is that some countries, and parts of countries, are more affluent than others.

  In all, I probably put in more than twenty thousand hours of study over a period of twenty-five years. Many of these studies went on concurrently. Some took intense periods of two and three years, almost like obsessions. But these studies had one thing in common: They were all aimed at practical understanding. They were a continuous search for tested and proven ideas, insights and methods that could be applied to bring about improved results immediately.

  And I made a great discovery. I found that I could learn anything I needed to know to become successful at anything that I really cared about. Knowledge made all things possible.

  It took me twenty years to escape from poverty and from worrying about money all the time. I then concluded that if I put what I had learned about success together into a system of ideas that anyone could use, I could provide people with tools that would save them thousands of dollars and years of hard work.

  In 1981, I sat down and assembled a “success system” for others to use. I designed it as a two-day seminar called The Inner Game of Success, and then offered it via direct mail and newspaper advertising.

  I was on fire with the ideas in the seminar. I had an intense desire to share them with others. I knew these ideas worked and I was convinced that anyone who would apply even a small part of this system could bring about rapid, positive changes in his or her life.

  Everything worthwhile takes time. The seminar took three years to catch on. During that time, I spent everything I owned fine-tuning the content and presentation of the course. Gradually, as I worked out the bugs, the seminar began to grow in popularity. More and more people attended, from farther and farther away.

  From the beginning, people described the seminar with words like, “This is like getting a brand-new chance at life,” or, “This seminar is like a blank check on the future.” We eventually changed the name of the course to the Phoenix Seminar, naming it after the mythical symbol of transformation and new life.