Simplify Your Work and Achieve Financial Independence | Brian Tracy | 319

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April 26, 2021

Brian Tracy is the Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company that specializes in business coaching, personal coaching, and professional development. He has consulted for over 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5,000,000 people in talks and seminars throughout the US, Canada, and 70 other countries worldwide. Brian has also written over 80 books and produced more than 500 audio and video learning programs designed for entrepreneurs, public speakers, sales professionals, and authors.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Brian Tracy shares his top strategies for dealing with a crisis
The “superconscious mind” and how to use it to achieve your goals
Brian’s advice to entrepreneurs: find something that you love to do, then work until it becomes successful
The lessons you can learn from accomplished business leaders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
What do all successful companies have in common?
Why the best investment you can make is in your personal development
How one entrepreneur achieved multimillion-dollar success using Brian’s expert techniques

In this episode…

How can you achieve your personal, professional, and financial goals — quicker and easier than you could have imagined? According to Brian Tracy, if you use your mind properly, you can achieve anything.

So, what are Brian’s strategies for leveraging your “superconscious mind” to achieve success? For one: read voraciously. As Brian says, the entrepreneurs who read every day, like Bill Gates, are the most informed, wealthy, and successful people on the planet. That’s because every entrepreneur is always one idea away from a business breakthrough; you just have to discover the right idea for success.

Brian Tracy, accomplished business coach and best-selling author, joins Dan Kuschell on this episode of Growth to Freedom to share his tried-and-true strategies for achieving personal, professional, and financial success. Brian discusses the vital importance of writing down your goals and explains why the best investment you can make is in yourself. He also reveals the business lessons he’s learned from the top entrepreneurs in the world. Stay tuned for more!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com.

Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall in growing your business? Well, let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. You can do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com. That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com.

In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit. You can get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com.

If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.

Episode Transcript

Dan Kuschell 0:03

Welcome to growthtofreedom.com, the show that brings you inspiration, transformation, and leadership are helping you connect the dots, see the blind spots, and get unstuck. So you can go out and generate more leads, more sales, more profits. More importantly, so you can go out and have a bigger reach, a bigger impact, and make a bigger contribution. I have a question for you. Are you at a point right now, especially in the world that we live in where you’re struggling at some degree with maybe overwhelm or burnout, or feel a little bit of a lack of control? Or maybe you’re concerned about the direction of your career, or maybe your finances? Well, there’s so that we have got an expert who is uniquely qualified, and a living legend in qualified to share with you his insights, his wisdom, on what will work today to help you achieve personal, professional, and your financial goals faster and easier than you ever possibly imagine. I’ve been impacted by his work all the way back in the early 1990s, mid ‘90s. Many programs I mean, I’ve gotten dozens and dozens of programs, Nightingale-Conant, which is no longer around. And I bet you have 15, 20 different core he’s published over approximately 500 audio and video learning programs. He’s written close to 100 books for per year for over 25 years, he’s literally helped over 3 million plus people they can count, there’s probably another couple million they can’t count all over the world. And guess what he can help you as well. His name is Brian Tracy. And Brian, it’s so amazing to have you here with us today. Thank you.

Brian Tracy 1:56

Thank you, Dan. It’s a pleasure. And I’m so happy to hear about your success, you know, I found this sometimes just one idea can change your whole life. If it comes to you at the right time and the right way. It just sort of connects. And you turn you change, like taking it a different road. And you’re never the same again.

Dan Kuschell 2:18

And in fact, that inspired the theme of this segment, we’re celebrating 300 episodes, 30 years in my business, and the theme is one breakthrough away. You’re literally one breakthrough away from that next big breakthrough in your life and a celebration of mentors, of clients and friends that have been joining us on this on this journey. So Brian, I’d love to dive right into it because you’re a wealth of knowledge and proven strategy. Not tactical. I mean, although there is lots of tactics, timeless, that will be good today. It was good yesterday, and it’ll be good in the next 20, 50 years. It’s legacy work that you do, which is so impactful. As you see the world today. I mean, we’ve had a lot of changes right over the last nine months with, you know, the crisis and more. What do you see are some of the biggest mistakes, Brian that most people are making, as they’re trying to navigate what’s going on?

Brian Tracy 3:15

Well, I wrote a book a few years ago on crisis management. I spoke to so many companies, and one of the questions they asked is how do you deal with a crisis? How do you deal with problems? How do you solve major problems and so on. So I did enormous research and read and read and read and read and read. And I put together what I call 21. Okay, okay, I’ve got about 21 different books that are 21 ways to do this 21 great ways, 21 years old. And so I wrote down 21 ways to deal with any crisis. And number one step is stay calm, stay calm. And number two is get the facts. And number three is accept responsibility. And it goes on and on. And by the time I get through the first three, my whole hour is up when I’m talking to companies and organizations. But and I’m not trying to sell the book. What I’m saying is that your mind is so powerful, is a wonderful mind if you use it properly. Just like if you have a beautiful car, you can drive in a beautiful car. But if you swerve all over the road, if you’re drunk if the car is broken down, well then it’s not that helpful. So your mind is like a wonderful computer. You have a conscious mind, which is what you do all day long. And you have a subconscious mind. And your subconscious mind is basically a storehouse. It remembers everything that you ever do or think and but it’s but it’s a neutral part of your life. It does not create what creates is what is called the superconscious mind, and this has been talked about for 4000 years. And the superconscious mind is this mind that connects with the entire universe. And when you set a goal for yourself and write it down, it’s taken by the subconscious mind and turn it over. Like a team of computer experts, it’s turned over to this other team. And this superconscious works 24 hours a day, to bring into your life exactly what you want, at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way. And so if you use your mind properly, you can accomplish anything. If you want to become wealthy, if you want to be healthy, if you want to have a successful family or business, just write it down. And it’s very important. goals that are not in writing, have no effect. And so write it down. Only 3% of adults have written goals, and everybody works for them. They are the wealthiest people out there. I mean, you He is a great example. The richest man in the world for many years is Bill Gates. Bill Gates reads two books a week. And then he annotates the books, and writes down underlines. And then he takes what he’s underlined and written down, he puts it into a separate booklet. And then he reviews it. And so Warren Buffett, and the two of them compete back and forth. Warren Buffett has been the richest man in the world several times. And Warren Buffett reads five hours a day, he reads an average of about a book a day, his his assistant, as partner, Charlie Munger, Munger does the same thing. And what they say is if you’re not reading, you really have no chance in today’s world, because things are moving so quickly. One of the things you just mentioned that we are one idea away from great success. And that is true. But you never know what the idea is. So you have to collect lots of ideas. People ask me, how can you write a book every three months? And the answer is, I keep gathering information. And then I set it down, I have a system for book writing. And by the way, if anybody’s thinking about writing a book, go to my website, BrianTracy.com. And there’s a 20 part system for how to write a book and get published, it’s free. Just go and get it. And countless people all over the world have used that system to write a book and get published. So just won’t go into it anymore. But it’s very simple stuff. The great truths, by the way, always very simple.

If you use your mind properly, you can accomplish anything. If you want to become wealthy, if you want to be healthy, if you want to have a successful family or business, just write it down. - Brian Tracy Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 7:43

No, very true. Very true. You know, the great quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, I wouldn’t give a fig to be on this side of complexity. But I’d give my life to be on the other side of simplicity. It’s so so powerful. Now, Brian, in your journey, right? I mean, you have helped millions and millions and millions of people, I want to ask to give context to viewers and listeners who have followed you, as well as those who might be new to your work. Which means they you know, I don’t know how someone would it know, Brian Tracy. Either way, why are you doing what you’re still doing today, when you could have, you know, gone on to other things. I’m just curious, what would you say to that? Why are you doing what you’re doing?

Brian Tracy 8:29

Well, it’s a combination. I’ve been asked that many times. And it’s a combination. First of all, I love my work. And I learned decades ago, decades ago, that if you find something that you love, and you put your whole heart into it, you’ll never work another day in your life. That’s Napoleon Hill’s advice. So therefore, your job, your main job in life, is to find something that you love to do. And then put your whole heart into doing that really, really well. And it takes I learned this many years ago, I was building my business and professional speaking. And I’ve been speaking for about three years and my audiences were growing. And a friend of mine woman who is the head of the National Speakers Association, Patricia Fripp said, it takes five to seven years for you to be successful in this business or in any business, five to seven years. And that’s interesting because I’d started reading Peter Drucker and Peter Drucker said the same thing. It’s about seven years is he two years to when you start a business, it takes you two years to turn the corner and start to earn more than you’re putting out. Most businesses are in a race against time, in the first two years like a plane, never hurtling toward the earth. And if you learn and apply and learn and apply it You pull the plane out of a dive, and you start to earn more than it’s costing you. So the first two years are where you learn the next few years where you pay back, all the money that you invested or borrowed in the first three years, and the next three years, is what it takes for you to become successful. So it’s two years, four years, seven years. And I said, Oh, that’s not going to work for me. No way, I’m going to spend that much time I’m going to be successful faster. And no matter how hard I work, it took seven years. And so that’s one of the great lessons of life. And Peter Drucker, the great management consultant, thought it as sort of like a throwaway comment, oh, by the way, it takes seven years for a business to be successful. And if you look at the whether it’s Microsoft, or Apple or any of the business, it’s seven years, and sometimes Apple, very interesting. Apple got into a real problem and almost went bankrupt in the late ‘90s. And so you get be successful, but then it went back into a dive. And you had it was on the verge of bankruptcy when they gave the business back to Steve Jobs. They they pushed him out because of his particular personality. And so he went off and started. I think his picture, he said, returned a couple of other companies that turned into multi billion dollar companies. And finally, they asked him, would you come back to Apple and just take a look around and you know, the company or the major shareholders still? Would you help us out? So he walked around and just ask questions, how’s it going? What are you doing? How’s it going? What are you doing and so on? And then finally, they said, Well, why don’t you just take over the company, take it back, basically, and and we will step down. So the executives running the company said, Okay, so we went in and got the numbers, and said, Oh, my guys, but two and a half months before bankruptcy, the the company was on the verge of collapse. And he had no money. He was he was at a really tight situation. It’s a great story. It’s been published. So what did he do? Well, he needed a enormous amount of money, and he needed $100 million dollars to save the company. And so he had been from the time he started, he had been sort of attacking and insulting Bill Gates. And Microsoft is a little old company, stodgy and not not creative, and so on. And got the wrong business model. Microsoft’s business model was an open system, so that anybody could write programs for Microsoft, Apple’s business model was a closed system is all secret is nobody could work on Microsoft or an Apple program. So now they’ve been on stage in universities debating each other went back and forth. And Apple, Steve Jobs are always insulting Bill Gates, well, now he said, Where am I going to get $100 million? The only person he knew that had that kind of money was Bill Gates. So he called him up and said, I need some help, because I’m on the verge of bankruptcy. And I know I’ve said some unkind things to you and about you in the past. But now I need $100 million. And will you lend it to me? And Bill Gates said, Steve, Apple is too important to company to go broke. And not only will I give you the 100 million, but I’ll just I won’t buy stock in your company. So it’s not a loan, as to be paid back. I’ll just become a shareholder. And I’ll provide you with the money. Yeah, two and a half months before he was bankrupt. And he gave him $100 million. And the rest is the rest is history. Wonderful story. Wonderful. So even though we’d been insulting him and attacking him everything year after year after year, and he said, No, your company’s too important. And I’ll invest in your company. And now you saw what happened. The world will imagine this everybody list on a on an iPhone. I sometimes I’ll ask my audience, because one of the most important things in marketing is what role does your product play in the life of your customer? Is it a large role, a small role? I said for example, today, the iPhone plays an important role. Everybody uses an iPhone. It’s plays an important role. I said, Have you ever had the experience where you got in your car you drove to work and halfway to work, you realize you left your home Hmm, what did you do? People, and they’ll all say they all make the same book, they turned around and went back and got their iPhone. Because this place has an important role in a person’s life. They asked their survey last year, they asked their customers, how many of you are going to buy another iPhone in the future? Answer: 90%. If 90% of your current customers are going to buy from you again, it means that Apple is the first company to have a trillion dollars of profit in the bank. This year hit 2 trillion, and it’s the most profitable company in the history of the world. Why? It’s because it has made their products essential to their customers. You cannot think of not having an iPhone, most remarkable thing. And so therefore, if you’re in business, one of the things that you have to do is you have to create a product or offer a product is really important to your customers. So they so they want it and need it. And it plays an important role in their lives, other than you becoming you become dispensable. They can buy from you or buy from someone else or buy from someone else. So it’s very, very important. All the companies that are successful are companies that have made themselves really important to their customers.

Your main job in life is to find something that you love to do. And then put your whole heart into doing that really, really well. - Brian Tracy Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 16:23

And if you’re listening, or you’re watching right now, how would your business change if you became an essential, right on necessity, if you will, or created a pain of disconnect or created this cell phone stick rate? Or how would you be impacted if you just took the three of 21 strategies that Brian shared with you on dealing with crisis right now at home and in your business? From staying calm, getting the facts, accepting responsibility or tapping into the superconscious mind going beyond the conscious going beyond the subconscious to the superconscious will transform your life, your business, your career? And Brian talked about loving what you do. It’ll never be a day of work the rest of your life now, Brian, out of respect to time, do we still have a couple minutes? Sure. All right, you brought up the story about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, right. And I will do it as an investment in the company. I heard you this is an obscure fact. And hopefully, you can remember this. You used to share a sales training, I attended one of your sales trainings, many moons ago, probably almost two decades ago, 20 years ago, and you talked about a study I believe that you or your team had done about executives at IBM, and how when they invested $1 in their personal development or education or investing in themselves for personal growth. You had cited a number as far as the translated growth that they’d gotten versus those who didn’t invest in themselves. Do you happen to remember that I’d love you to share that because, you know, the best investment we have is ourselves. Right? And there’s nobody better to share that than you as a legend in this industry for people to really pay attention to this.

Brian Tracy 18:14

Well, the the it’s a great point, because I’ll tell you a great story to what I said is that for every dollar you invest in yourself, you get $10 back in income. And in personal value, it’s just astonishing, is you do not know where it’s going to come from or when it will come from. But if you read just read a good book and underline it and think about it, what will happen is that you attract almost like the law of attraction. Now, the fact another $10. And I was giving a talk giving a three day seminar in Dallas about three years ago, and in the audience was very, very successful and well known businessman, and bestselling author, wealthy. And he was in the audience, a good friend of mine. And he stood up when I was talking about the importance of investing in yourself. And he stood up and everybody knew him and I knew him. And it was kind of like we’re talking from the audience. And he said, I’d like to say something about that comment. He said, when I was 18 years old, I said that he said that man is wrong. He said, what Brian told you is false. It’s not true. It’s not going to give you a $10 back. It’s going to give you $50 or $100. Back when I first went to a Brian Tracy seminar, I was 18 years old, and I had to be forced to go because I had never heard about personal development. He said and you talked about investing in yourself. It is so I started to do it. He said within he said by the time I was 24 I was a millionaire. He said today I’m 35 and I have more money than I could spend in the rest of my life. And it’s all because of this man, all because of what he told me is, the more you invest in yourself, the more ideas connect and interconnect with others. And the more you see, the more alert you are, and you activate this superconscious mind. And the superconscious mind will bring you exactly what you need, exactly when you’re ready for it. And so therefore, what you have to do is get ready, you get ready by learning and practicing and studying and so on. And if you’ll do that, so anyways, he said, I have an area and everybody cheered and applauded and so on. So I’ve had wonderful, wonderful stories of people who just took these ideas and apply them. And I don’t get I consider myself to be a synthesizer, rather than an originator, come up like Einstein, and so on. What I do is I take all of these ideas, and I put them together, and I synthesize them into a new synthesis. And that’s what I do. I’ll give you a wonderful story. I just love the story. I was doing my big seminar here in San Diego a few years ago. And we got a call from someone in New Zealand. And they wanted to come to this seminar, and it was a businessman, and he wanted to bring his key people. And what we did is we insisted that everybody should have different tables, so that instead of exceeding the same table and talking to the same people, you talk to different people. And so, and he said, but we’d like to stay and sit together at the same table. Would that be okay? Because if this was eight people, and we were charging, I think $1,000 a person? And we said yes, we just were business people. So he and his team flew up, flew up to from San Fran from New Zealand. And they came to my seminar and we were three day seminar. But the second day, the wife of the head of the company, came to me and said, Would it be possible for my husband to have a personal chat with you? And I said, Sure. It’s a good, good customer. So we went off to the side, and we sat down and he told me, he said, He’s built a trucking, a trucking company. He said he’d been driving a truck for years, he had two boys and a wife in a small house. And they spent everything that they earned, stay alive and so on. And then one day, he got my book Maximum Achievement. And he began to read the book. And it totally changed his life. It totally changed the way he thought especially writing down goals, and then working on it. Well, he said, the first goal he had, he said he wanted to be wealthy, he had to own his own truck. Because the way it works in the trucking business, is that there’s 1/3 of the revenue from the people who use your login business, goes to the driver. 1/3 goes to the owner of the truck, and 1/3 goes to the trucking company, and a lot of trucking. A lot of truck drivers are independent, they own their own trucks. They are my money. So he said the first thing he’d have to do his own his own truck. So he’s out his wife and his kids. And he said, Look, we’re gonna have to read cut down on our expenses so we can save enough money. So we can buy a truck, rather than my working just for someone else who owns the truck. And Surprise, surprise, they earned enough money within a year to buy their own truck. So now he’s earning twice as much as he was before. And they decided they would keep on saving money. Keep on building up me bought a second truck and a third truck. Now he’s the biggest freight hauler. In New Zealand. They have 300 trucks that they work with everywhere is a multi multimillionaire. Anyway, he would read this book and under and underline it and read it and underlining His will. And his wife said, Why do you keep reading that book? Is it because it’s really had a major impact on my life? She said that I should read it as well. He said okay, but you have to write underline it with a different colored pen. And so he under will end it with a red pen. She underlined it with a blue patch. Okay, see what she wrote down. And then the boys they’re now 12 years old, 12 and 14 years old. They noticed the impact of this book. So they said could they read it? So they read it and they use a different color black and somebody else wrote green. And this was the family book. And you could open the book and the book was like a rainbow. As cut every single line was underlined and notes in the side and everything else as they built their business into the biggest trucking company in New Zealand and he’s just an ordinary guy. He’s just a working guy is a guy who didn’t have any education or no great advantages. But somehow because of this superconscious ability, he and his kids, they lived in a beautiful home. I mean, it was just an absolutely wonderful story. And I never forget it my whole life is what they do is whenever they got an idea, they would apply the idea. And that’s the key is if you want to be successful at anything, write it down, set it as a goal. And then you’ll start to attract ideas that will make it possible. But you have to then take action. And that’s the same thing that Drucker said, he said, the purpose of strategic planning, the purpose of marketing, the person, everything is action. Now, action this day, and this is one of the great models is action this day, actually now take action immediately. And will wait until somebody, you see somebody else doing it. When you get an idea, move immediately. And I guarantee you, I can guarantee you that, that you will eventually be a big success.

For every dollar you invest in yourself, you get $10 back in income and in personal value. - Brian Tracy Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 26:08

And speaking of taking action, Brian, you know, if someone’s been inspired about tapping into the superconscious, in, you know, breaking free from overwhelm burnout to uplevel, their financial impact their business, their career, and a lot more, deal with uncertainty in the world at a lot better way. Where can people go to connect with you, tap into your amazing resources, and tools?

Brian Tracy 26:31

Well, all my stuff is available worldwide. I’ve written 90 books now. Today, I’ll be working on completing number 91. So this is available worldwide, go to my website, but but even better people say do you sell books? No. There’s no profit in books. So therefore go to go to Amazon and buy it you can get it 30% off and delivered almost overnight. So if you if you want to get any of this material, it’s all available worldwide, as you know.

Dan Kuschell 27:08

So I want to encourage you to go to BrianTracy.com to check out the resources he talked about if you want to learn how to write a book. I mean, any you know, Jim Rohn, the great Jim Rohn said any life worth living his life we’re recording, and recording, ideally, your mastery. And a book gives you an ability to do that to take your 1000s and 1000s maybe 10s of 1000s of hours and condense it into a guidebook that can become a transformational tool for others, including yourself through the process. So go to BrianTracy.com, that’s BrianTracy.com, get his resources on Amazon. Brian. What’s one last thing that I should have asked you that we didn’t get a chance to cover before we wrap up?

Brian Tracy 27:52

Well, I think you did a very good job. Thank you very much. We could sit and we could sit and talk all day long.

Dan Kuschell 27:59

Yes, we could.

Brian Tracy 28:00

If you behind me, I have about 6000 books in my home all my bookshelves are double booked. And I’ve read most of them and some of them more than once. And I still read about three hours a day. And what it does, it keeps you safe. It’s like physical exercise. If you’re exercising 30 to 60 minutes a day, you’ll be one of the fittest people in the world. If you read two to three hours a day, you’ll be one of the best informed and ultimately one of the most financially successful people. There’s no limit to what you can accomplish except for the limits that you place on your own mind.

There's no limit to what you can accomplish except for the limits that you place on your own mind. - Brian Tracy Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 28:43

And there you have it, readers are leaders and leaders are readers. Brian Tracy is living proof. I encourage you to take action with what you’ve shared today. Tapping into your superconscious being able to tap in and get through crisis with is three of 21 steps to be able to realize that there’s simplicity on the other side of complexity that there’s something to be had about investing in yourself and getting an ROI on that and a whole lot more by the way you can come back to this episode. This series at growthtofreedom.com/300, that’s growthtofreedom.com/300. If you never want to miss an episode, go to growthtofreedom.com/subscribe, seize the day. See you next time. another segment of growthtofreedom.com. And thanks for watching. Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com. Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall and growing your business? Let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. Do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com, that’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way To implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit. You get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com. If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.

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