Brian Tracy says this is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more opportunities for creative and determined people to achieve more of their goals than they can today.
Regardless of short-term ups and downs in the economy and in your life, we are entering into an age of peace and prosperity superior to any previous era in human history. In the year 1900, there were five thousand millionaires in America. By the year 2000, there were more than five million, most of them self-made, in one generation. Experts predict that there will be another ten to twenty million millionaires created in the next two decades. Your goal should be to become one of them.
I left high school without graduating. My first job was as a dishwasher in the back of a small hotel. From there,
I moved on to washing cars, and then washing floors with a janitorial service. For the next few years, I drifted and worked at various labouring jobs, earning my living by the sweat of my brow. Often I slept in my car, or in cheap rooming houses.
When I could no longer find a labouring job, I got a job in straight commission sales, cold calling from office-to-office and from door-to-door. I would often work all day long to make a single sale so that I could pay for my rooming house and have a place to sleep that night.
Then one day, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down an outrageous goal for myself. It was to earn $1,000 per month in door-to-door and office-to-office selling. Thirty days later, my entire life had changed. I discovered a technique for closing sales that tripled my income. Exactly thirty days after I had written down my goal, my boss took me aside and offered me $1,000 per month to head up the sales force and teach the other people what it was that I was did. I accepted his offer and from that day forward, my life was never the same.
I went from personal selling to becoming a sales manager with people selling for me. I recruited and built a 95 person sales force. I went literally from worrying about my next meal to walking around with a pocket full of $20 dollar bills. I began teaching my salespeople how to write out their goals, and how to sell more effectively. In almost no time at all, they doubled and tripled and increased their incomes as much as ten times. Many of them are today millionaires and multi-millionaires. It’s important to note that, since those days in my mid-20s, my life has not been a smooth series of upward steps. It has included many ups and downs, marked by occasional successes and temporary failures. As the result of inexperience, and sometimes sheer stupidity, I have spent or lost everything I made and had to start over again – several times. In every case when this happened, I would begin by sitting down with a piece of paper and laying out a new set of goals for myself. After several years of hit and miss goal setting and goal achieving, I finally decided to collect everything I had learned into a single system. By assembling these ideas and strategies in one place, I developed a goal setting methodology and process, with a beginning, middle and end, and began to follow it every day.
I began teaching my system in workshops and seminars that have now reached more than two million people in 35 countries. I began audiotaping and video taping my courses so that others could use them. We have now trained hundreds of thousands of people in these principles, in multiple languages, all over the world. What I found was that these ideas work everywhere, for everyone, in virtually every country, no matter what your education, experience or background may be when you begin.
Most of all, these ideas have made it possible for me, and many thousands of others, to take complete control over our lives. The regular and systematic practice of goal setting has taken us from poverty to prosperity, from frustration to fulfilment, from underachievement to success and satisfaction. This system will do the same for you. What I learned early on is that any plan is better than no plan at all. And it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. All the answers have already been found. You will find that there are no limits to what you can accomplish except for the limits you place on your own imagination. And since there are no limits to what you can imagine, there are no limits to what you can achieve. This is one of the greatest discoveries of all. Let us begin.
“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step.” – Confucius
This is an excerpt from Brian Tracy’s best-selling book, Goals!
- Introduction to your goals by Brian Tracy - February 11, 2014
