Brian Tracy Interview PDF

Encounter!
Series - Shoulders Of Giants

Jay Abraham Interviews Brian Tracy
JAY ABRAHAM: Hi, everybody!
AUDIENCE: Hi Jay! How are you?
JAY: I’m just fine. Now, theoretically, there should be about 300 of you on this
line representing entrepreneurial and professional achievement from all over the United
States and from other continents. I’m flattered, and honored, and appreciative, and I
don’t want to take a lot of time besides that except to say that our goal today is to move
each and every one of you to a far high level of action, focus and strategic
accomplishment than you’ve ever done in your life, and also than you’ve ever done in
your experiences with this program.
The gentleman who is speaking to you, who is going to share, not just wisdom,
but real, first-hand accomplishment, is Brian Tracy. Brian is THE most successful, and
the most renown author of business and personal achievement audiotape albums in the
world --- sold millions. He travels, I don’t know, probably ¾ of the time speaking to
about 450,000 eager listeners like yourselves around the world, and has influenced and
impacted more people than about anybody else I know.
And he has graciously agreed not to give a difficult, 90-minute soliloquy of

syrupy bromide for you, but to let me interact with him, ask him questions, advocate to
the marketplace, to you for him, and listen to him respond, and take interaction between
you. It should be a fun 90-120 minutes for each and every one of you.
So with no further ado, Brian, I’d like to welcome you. I’d like all of you to give
him a great welcome.
AUDIENCE: Welcome, Brian.
BRIAN TRACY: Thank you, Jay, I’m delighted to be with you.
JAY: Go ahead, Brian. You want to say anything first, before I ---
BRIAN: It’s a delight to be with you. I am an entrepreneur on my own. I have

my own business with 20 people. We do $7 million worth of business a year. We have
operations in 18 countries, 18 languages --- and we sell in 35 countries, actually. And we
probably sell $20- to $30 million worth of programs of retail [AS WELL].
So we started from nothing, booking out of my house with a single desk, and a
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And so what Jay is doing, and what I’ve learned from Jay is some
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of the most extraordinary ideas to help me be more successful in marketing in my life.

It’s a pleasure to be able to help some of you with some of these very things, I think.
JAY: We’re just honored and delighted. OK, now can we start this? There’s
two ways that this will probably flow best, and you tell me what works best for you. I
can ask you if there is a logical sequence that you’d like to start with, or I can give you
some areas, and ask you questions that I personally am most curious of, and I think would
advocate the issues that are of most concern to people. I’m easy --- whichever…
BRIAN: Well, let me begin with the concept that has taken me from rags to non-
rags.
I used to sleep in my car. I sometimes joke with the audiences --- I was homeless
before it was respectable. I worked at laboring jobs. When I was in my 20’s I was an
itinerate farm laborer. I worked on ships in the North Atlantic. I worked digging ditches,
and digging wells, and in factories putting nuts on bolts before I finally got into sales, and
eventually into my own business. So I’m not unfamiliar with where many people started
from.
Now, when I worked in corporations --- and last week I did two full-days of
strategic planning --- one company with $600 million a year in sales, and the other
company, with more than a billion. And I sat down with their senior executives, and I
walked them through a scenario which I’m going to go through now, which is
extraordinarily helpful. As a matter of fact, I think it’s one of the most important things
you can do in life on a go-forward basis. And everything we’ll talk about is go forward.
Just do it on a regular basis, and keep coming back to it. And here’s what it is:
I started off in what I call “idealization.” And idealization is to encourage you to

develop a designed, ideal life in every respect… to stand back and say, “If I had all the
time, and all the money, and all the resources, and all the contacts, and all the everything
that I would need, and I wanted to design my life perfectly, what would it look like?”
And then, avoid the natural weakness that most people have when they say, “Well, I
couldn’t do this, or do that, because of the money, or because of him or her.” No, just
stop. Start with a blank sheet of paper and imagine you could design your life around
you.
By the way, why is that immigrants to the United States succeed and become self-
made millionaires at four times the rate of native-born Americans on a per-capita basis?
And the simplest reason of all, aside from the fact that they had to have more ambition to
leave their home to come here, is that they come here with a blank slate… is they come
here, and they say, “Now, I’m starting all over from nothing.” Many of them come here
penniless, with no friends, no contacts, no ability to speak English. They have no
education. They have no background. They start with nothing but a blank slate. And
what they do is they say, “Now, I’m in the land of dreams. What is my dream?”
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So when I speak with corporations I take this one step further, and I say, “Let us
do an exercise in revision. Let us imagine that five weeks have passed, and that your
company --- this company --- is perfect in every respect. Every goal has been achieved --
- size and volume of sales, cash flow, profitability, money in the bank… people, the kind
of people you have working for you. The reputation is very important. How do people
talk about you, and think about you in the marketplace? When they think about you,
what specifically comes to mind in terms of quality, excellence, character, integrity,
innovation, and so on? So let’s think about these things.” And we start to write them
down.
And what I do is I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] listen to this, and if you have a staff, or

even if you have a spouse. Put down the [WORDS] of your spouse. It’s a great exercise.
My wife Barbara and I do this every year. We plan our lives. We visualize this life.
And it’s absolutely --- it’s amazing how it determines your future.
So we say to them, “OK, now everybody here --- ” and these are people, I was
working with a company with 700 employees, and I had the 17 top executives in the
boardroom. And I said, “Let’s go around the room, and let’s write down what would be
perfect, from your point of view if we achieved all our goals.” And we ended up with 20
different answers.
And once you have the 20 different answers --- which, by the way, nobody in that
room had ever seen before. Many of them had never thought about it before. The
president and owner of the company, one of the richest men in the world, was sitting
there almost thrown back in his chair. He was staggered. He had no idea.
And I said, “Now that we have all of these ideas…” And people had, “In my
department, if my department was perfect we would have a very high level of sales
volume, fewer people, greater use of computers.” Someone else said, “In my department,
we would be the world leader in [SALES].” Someone else said…
In other words, each person defines their ideal in terms of what they were
responsible for. If you’re responsible for your whole business, then you have to define it
in terms of your whole business.
So we looked at all of these, and then we began looking at that almost like
[PLATES]. And you know how you can lay plates down and they overlap? So imagine
circles that overlap. And we kept looking for the overlaps. Where is there a common
vision that links all of these together, all of these life plans, a spike that you throw all the
rings on?
And we eventually came up with an absolutely crystal clear vision of where we’d
be in five years. And if we were there, everybody else’s vision would have been realized,
and the realization of all of those visions would be essential to getting us there. And
suddenly the whole company --- it was almost like the fog lifted. Everybody’s crystal
clear about where you’re going.
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The senior executive said to me afterwards, it was almost like they had just
suffered a bomb blast. They came to me just a little bit staggered, and said, “You know,
we’re going to have to change an awful lot of what we’re doing around here. We’re
going to have to go back to the drawing boards and our strategic plan. This exercise ---
this has changed the future of the organization.”
I’ve done this many times, and every single time people are sort of
[UNINTELLIGLE], like they’ve just been next to a huge explosion, and they’re just
stunned, because until you articulate this vision, you can’t do anything. You’re basically
focused to operate, and operating is the same as climbing a mountain looking at your feet,
as opposed to taking and lifting up your eyes, and seeing clearly the top of the mountain.
One of the most important rules I’ve learned of success in the last couple of years
is this: If you just combine long-term vision --- where you’re going --- with short-term
focus on the most important actions you can take each hour of each day to achieve your
vision. So if you can hold those two ideas in your mind [ALBERT HUXABLE] said the
mark of a superior mind is that they can hold two contradictory ideas in their mind at the
same time, and still continue to function.
So what you do is you say, “OK, what is my long-term vision?” And I will tell
you this --- 80% of our problems in life come from fuzziness, or lack of clarity about
where we’re going, and what we really want to accomplish. 80% of our success, on the
other hand, is accompanied by tremendous clarity about who you are, and what you want
to accomplish.
Now, let’s go back to vision again. Well, what is your vision based on? And
there’s only one answer, is your vision must be based on your values. Your vision must
be based on what is really important to you. And so therefore, now you have to ask,
“What are my values? What do I consider important? What do I care about? What do I
stand for? What would I not stand for? What would I never sacrifice or compromise?”
And when I’ve done this with large corporations it’s amazing, and if ever there’s
been a deviation from this, the company’s been in trouble. Almost every major
organization, with their senior executives, come to the conclusion that their number one
value is integrity. The number one value is integrity. It’s that they will do whatever it
takes to achieve the success of the company, but they will not compromise on their
integrity.
Now, it’s an interesting thing. If you look at the word “integrity,” it comes from
the Greek word meaning “integer.” It means “wholeness, completeness, perfection,
unity, harmony, without flaw, or blemish.”
So you say, all right, integrity means two things. It means, on the inside, it means
complete honesty and truthfulness, not playing games with yourself. You’re perfectly
honest with yourself. And on the outside it means quality and excellence in everything
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that you do. What you do is done with integrity. Your products and services are
excellent. The quality of what you do is the finest. And of course, you know that the
commitment to quality and excellence is a lifelong journey. You never, ever get there.
It’s a series of constantly working at making it better every single day.
The good news is that if your vision is five years from now your customers will
think of you as one of the finest people, and one of the finest companies producing and
offering some of the finest products and services… that your reputation, people say,
“This is my company,” or people say, “That’s your company --- oh, wow! Wow, that is a
good company!”
It’s like the strategy that Lexus had when they came to the U.S. a few years ago,
they decided that they would [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to the upper mid-level luxury
automobile market. They said, “What would be the sign that we had done this well?”
And the answer is that they would have the number one ranking in the J.D. Powers
ratings for customer satisfaction.
So then they took the ratings, and they broke them down, and they said, “What
should the car have to do and be? What would our service have to do and be in order to
achieve that?” And they found these were two things, is that the Toyota Motor Company
has some of the highest ratings for quality of product, but some of the most mediocre
ratings for sales and service satisfaction. So they said, “We cannot sell this car in the
Toyota network. We have to set up a totally separate network and make sure that from
the get-go, from the very beginning, everything is done absolutely perfectly so that we
win the J.D. Powers rating.”
Their second year in the U.S. market they were number one for J.D. Powers, and
they’ve been number one ever since. It’s translated into hundreds of millions, and
billions of dollars’ worth of sales.
If ever you want to see a madhouse, go to a Lexus dealership on Saturday

afternoons, and there’s people pouring in with Cadillacs, and Mercedes Benz, and
BMWs, and turning them in and driving away without them. It’s the most amazing
darned thing. You go to another dealership, and you could shoot a cannon across it. You
go to a Lexus dealership and it’s a flurry. Why? There’s too many people saying,
“Lexus? Ah! Wonderful quality, tremendous service and satisfaction.”
By the way, Jay talks about this better than I do, is that people don’t buy your
product or service, according to the University of Chicago studies. They buy how they
expect to feel as a result of patronizing you. They expect, and they buy how they
anticipate feeling… the emotion that they anticipate having --- pride, satisfaction,
happiness, warmth, pleasure, self-esteem, security…
So therefore, the very best organizations sell and concentrate on how you will feel
as a result of dealing with them, and the focus therefore is how you feel at every minute
you’re in the process.
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So we go back to vision, and we say, “Well, what is your vision?” Well, one of
your visions is the people who deal with you really like you. They’re really happy in
their experience with you, so much so that they want to come back and bring their
friends.
Now, I did this exercise with a billion-dollar corporation recently, and after we
had gone through every single conceivable vision statement, and goals, and values, we
said, “What would have to happen for this company to be a major success?” And the
answer is that every person who bought from us would be so happy with not only the
experience, but the product or service, that they would buy from us again and again, and
they would bring their friends to buy from us. Not just tell their friends it’s a good idea.
They would take them by the arm. They’d drive them down, bring them over. They
would feel almost like zealots, almost like prosthetizers. They would be determined to
bring their friends to become customers for it.
I said, “What would happen to your business if every person who buys from you
bought from you again through the course of their buying lifetime, and brought their
friends?” They said, “Well, we’d become one of the biggest and most successful, most
profitable companies in history.” I said, “Good. Now, now how do you achieve it?”
Now, Jay talks about this all time. It’s very important. The attitude that is critical
to your success is the attitude of optimism --- optimism in all the studies has been shown
to be the number one most important single quality that an entrepreneur can have to be
successful. And optimism, in my estimation, is the equivalent of mental fitness.
Now, if I would ask you, “How do you become mentally fit?” Do you read a read
a book on --- Oh, I’m sorry. How do you become physically fit? Do you read a book on
physical fitness? Do you listen to a tape? Do you watch a video? Do you go to a sports
event? Do you watch and cheer for the competitors? No. If you want to become
physically fit, you have to exercise. You have to sweat, and if you do the specific thing,
and as a result, you’ll be physically fit.
So how do you become mentally fit, especially if you’re not? Especially if you’re
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]? Well, it’s very simple. You do the things that optimists do, and
you think the way that optimists think until it becomes a habit.
Now, if you talk to optimistic people, you say to them, “How do you think
positive all the time?” And they look at you with a blank. They say, “I don’t understand
the question.” “I mean, you’re always positive. You’re always optimistic. You’re
always upbeat. You’re always cheerful. How do you do that with all the stuff that’s
going on?” And by the way, don’t ever forget that optimists have as many or more
problems than you or I ever could dream of. It’s not as though they have a blessed life.
They have real, real challenging lives. The only difference is their attitude towards it.
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So, the answer is they say, “Well, I just… I don’t know.” Because they’ve been
doing it so long that it’s become automatic. They are on autopilot… that every hour of
every day, their attitude toward everything is such that they respond to it in a positive,
confident and optimistic way.
So here’s how you do it. Optimists have three or four characteristics, and I’ll give
them to you quickly. And these are just habits, habits of thoughts. This is how you
approach any challenge in your life.
Number one, an optimist always looks for the good. They just --- in every
situation, every setback, every difficulty, every word, they say, “Well, what’s good about
this?” W. Clement Stone, who founded combined insurance company of America, went
from selling papers on the street of Chicago at the age of 12 to a fortune of $800 million
with a very simple mental attitude. His mental attitude was that he was an “inverse
paranoid.” An inverse paranoid is a person who is absolutely convinced that the world is
conspiring to make them successful. So every single time something happens --- and if
you’re in business you’ll have setbacks and difficulties all day, every day for the rest of
your life --- every single time something happened he would say, “That’s good.” And
then he’d start to say, “What is good about this? What can we find in this that we can
benefit from?” So the starting point is to look for the good.
The second point, which follows from that, is to seek the value or lesson in every
difficulty that you have. If you have a setback, “OK, what can I learn from this that will
help me in the future?” And I’ve learned a very interesting thing. When you decide with
a very clear vision of what you want to accomplish, there’s virtually no doubt that you
will achieve it. If your vision is clear enough, and you hold to it long enough, you will
achieve it.
So the optimist says, “OK, every single time something happens, what can I learn
from it? And nature sends you [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Because we’ve found
psychologically that you only learn through the emotions. You only learn if you suffer.
If you don’t suffer, you don’t learn. You disregard the lesson, and very often, you make
the same mistake.
So what nature does, once you start to work towards your goal, is nature will give
you a little kind of a pain here, almost always a financial pain. Often, sometimes, it’s a
people pain. But they’ll give you a pain, and the purpose --- the reason nature gives you
this pain is to teach you a lesson that will save you from even greater pain in the future.
So if you’re suffering pains right now --- which you are, as everyone’s got
challenges in their life --- ask yourself, “What lesson am I meant to learn from this?”
And learn it as quickly as possible, because nature will keep coming back, and keep
raising the cost. If you don’t learn it the first time, it’ll come back again, and you’ll pay
even more dearly. And if you don’t learn it then, it’ll come back again, and it’s going to
cause you real big problems, and real challenges. So therefore, say, “What am I meant to
learn?”
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Now, the third way that you become a professional optimist is you focus on the
future, rather than the past. You keep looking toward the future, and the opportunities of
tomorrow, the things you can do (which we’re coming to in this discussion), rather than
the problems of the past, and maybe the things that you’ve regretted.
A psychiatrist who had worked with people for 25 years said recently that the
most tragic words he ever heard were the words, “If only.” If only I would have gotten
out of the stock market three years ago. If only I had started this business. If only I
hadn’t hired this person. If only I hadn’t spent this money on advertising.
And Robert Blakely says you can take all your “if onlys” and “couldas” and
“shouldas,” and add 50 cents, and get yourself a cup of coffee in a cheap place, because
“if only” has only one value, one purpose to life, and that’s to teach us a lesson so we
don’t do it again next time.
I had lunch recently with a fellow who had been through many ups and downs in
his entrepreneurial career, and I told him something which he said saved his life,
mentally. I said, “Every single experience was sent to you to teach you something
invaluable that would guarantee a failure in the future. Your job is just to make sure that
you derive from it the greatest value.”
And here’s the fourth thing, and this is the most important of all, is optimists are
intensely solution-oriented. If something goes wrong, they say, “OK, what’s the
solution? What do we do? What’s the next step?” They’re always thinking in terms of
solutions. Pessimists, average people who don’t accomplish much, are so bogged down
in the problem of who did it, who’s to blame, and who can you apportion the guilt to?
But the successful person says, “OK, what cannot be cured must be endured. You can’t
cry over spilled milk. That was then. This is now. What’s the solution? What do we
do?” And then they get on it.
And the more busy you are, (and that’s what we’re coming to) in terms of taking
constructive, persistent, continuous action in the direction of your goals --- the busier
you are moving toward the fulfillment of your vision, the more optimistic you become…
the happier you are… the more energy you have… the more creative you are… the more
positive you are.
Sometimes I ask an audience this, as I did to several hundred people yesterday,

and I said, “If you do something over and over again, repeatedly --- anything --- what do
you eventually develop?” And of course, the bright people, they said, “Well, you
develop a habit.” I said, “So what’s the difference between failures and successes, and
why?” And there’s a pause, and they looked at each other, and they all smiled, and they
said, “Well, successful people have success habits. Failures have failure habits.”
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And what’s the most important of all habits? Well, one of the most important of
all habits is whenever something goes wrong, you look at the solutions. You look for the
answer. You look for the value of the lesson.
One of my favorite points in metaphysics is that every problem you have today ---
and especially your biggest problem --- has been sent to you at this moment because it is
precisely what you need right now for your continued growth and development. It’s been
sent to you as a gift, and your job is to look into it, and to find the gift.
So do you want me to just go on, Jay? Because I’m on a roll.
JAY: Yeah, it’s great. It’s great. No, no, you’re wonderful. I’m thinking about
it myself. I’m lost in reflective thought. Please do.
BRIAN: OK. So now we have a vision, and we have our values. We know that
we will not compromise. What I’ve found is the finest men and women in our society are
men and women who are clearly defined. Leaders are men and women who know who
they are, and they never deviate from it. And if you look, you’ll find a lot of
contradictory stuff in our society, and people don’t care about ethics, and value, and
deceit, and faithfulness, and truthfulness, and so on and so forth.
Right up to the highest level in our country we have people saying that this is
nonsense, and it always has been nonsense. The most important people in your life are
the men and women that you like and trust the most. In fact, it is impossible to build a
life except that you build it with people that you trust, and that you know you can rely on.
And everybody else is the same.
We did a study with one of the organizations I belong to. We spent $50,000
interviewing customers of our industry group. And our industry sells similar products to
similar people. And we asked the customers, “In retrospect, why did you buy from
Company A? What was the most important thing you looked for?” Every single one
said, without exception, “The very first thing we looked for in identifying a decision is
honesty on the part of the person we’re talking to. If there’s the slightest question that the
person lacks perfect integrity, we’ll just take a pass. We’d much rather buy a lesser
product at a higher price than deal with a person or accompany that lacks integrity.”
So once you know who you are and what your visions and your values are, then
you break it down to practical [UNINTELLIGIBLE] effects, and you set goals for
yourself. If your life was perfect in every respect, what would you be doing in terms of
sales, and volume, and profitability five years from now? Just write it down. Don’t
worry about being too precise. And then work it down, back to the present, in the fourth
year, third year, second year, first year. Work it right down to the week. Work it down
to the month, and then to the week, and say, “All right. If our company was perfect in
every respect, then this is the kind of business we would be doing.”
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And here’s the most important question of the optimist, and I’ll repeat this over
and over again. The question is, how? How do we do it? How do we get there? The
question about whether or not we’re going to do it is not on the table. It is moot on the
table. The only question in front of you now, now that you know what you want, is the
question, how? And the only answer is, you need to take specific, continuous, persistent
action, every single day, in the direction of your goal --- knowing that you will fail more
times than you succeed, and every failure is going to teach you something that is
inaccessible to your ultimate success.
Thomas A. Watkins, Sr. was once asked by a young man, “How could I be more
successful faster?” And he said, “That’s very simple.” He said, “You must double your
rate of failure.” Double your rate of failure.
The reason why people don’t try new things, don’t take risks, don’t get out of
their comfort zone, is because, conscious or unconscious, they’re afraid of failure.
They’re afraid of losing money. They’re afraid of losing time. They’re afraid of making
an effort and finding that they get nothing from it.
The reason that people do succeed is that they force themselves out of their
comfort zone, almost like shoving a person from behind with two hands. You must
mentally shove yourself out of the comfort zone, out there, into the area of discomfort,
where you’re doing something you’ve never done before.
Now, here’s a rule for you, and it’s one of the most important rules you’ll ever
learn. It is this: Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly at first --- and often, it’s
worth doing poorly several times.
When I was a young man, I had a revelation. I don’t really remember where it
was, but the question was, “Why is it that Americans don’t speak additional languages?”
I was speaking to a German gentleman yesterday in my seminar, and he was telling me
this little joke which I’ve heard a hundred times, but I’ll pass it on to you. What do you
call a person who speaks several languages? And the answer is, a multilingual. What do
you call a person who speaks a single language? And it’s an American.
Well, the reason that Americans don’t learn other languages --- and by the way, if
you do not yet know Spanish, it’s something that you need to put onto your goals,
because Spanish will be the second language in the United States in a few years. In
California where we live, in the year 2020, Hispanics will pass the 50% mark. If you
don’t speak Spanish, then it’s going to really hurt you in business in a few years.
So, the reason they don’t learn languages is because they try it once, and the other
person doesn’t understand them, and they collapse and fall apart. It’s just so awkward
that they revert back to English. The reason Europeans learn languages quickly is
because they just keep stabbing away at it, and trying every word they have until they
make themselves understood, because they don’t care.
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And that is a very important thing that I learned about taking action in the
direction of your goal, is that you must realize the first couple of times you try it you’ll
feel awkward and clumsy. You won’t do it right. You’ll make mistakes, and forget
obvious things. It’ll cost you more than you expected. It’ll take longer to get results.
But the average person --- and you’re not average. If you’re listening to this
conversation, you’re not average. The above average person forces themselves to stick it
out, and keep doing it until they master it, rather than go running back to a lower level of
performance.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago did a wonderful series of

studies which he summarized in a book called Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal
Experience. And you don’t need to read the book. If you’re going to read a book, read
my book, Maximum Achievement, because it’s vastly better than that, and much simpler
to understand. But what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, after 30 years of research, found, that
people get into flow, this optimal experience where they feel…[UNINTELLIGIBLE] feel
like, because they consciously, they force themselves out of their comfort zone into the
discomfort zone, where they’re trying something new, and they force themselves to stay
there until they master it, and they develop a comfort zone at a new, higher level of
performance.
So why is it that people don’t take action in the direction of their goals? The
number one reason is they’re not clear about what their goals are. The number two
reason --- their goals are too big. “I want to make a lot of money.” “I want to double my
sales.” “I want to sell a million dollars a year.” “I want to have a nice house, nice life,
nice health…” And so on.
These are wonderful goals, but they really are more like fantasies than goals.
They’re like cigarette smoke, I say. It’s very hard to get your hands around cigarette
smoke, and they dissipate very quickly.
But successful people have very clear, specific, written goals that are broken
down from the macrocosm, “I want to be earning a million dollars a year five years from
now. In order to do that, I’ll have to sell $5 million a year of my product, and make a
20% net profit margin.” And they break it all the way down to today, and where they are
today, and they practice what Peter Drucker calls “intellectual honesty.” They look at
their situation in complete honesty, and then they say, “What will I have to do every hour
of every day to get from where I am to where I want to go?”
And this brings us to one of the most important single principles of business
success. It’s what I call the breakthrough principle. It’s called “The Theory of
Constraints.” The Theory of Constraints is that between where you are and where you
want to go, there’s always a constraint. It’s like a bottleneck, or a choke point. It’s a
thing that determines speed, or how fast you go from where you are to where you want to
go.
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Shoulders Of Giants
So let’s say that your goal is a certain level of sales. This is a real good place to
start. Then you have to say, “OK, what is the constraint? What determines the speed at
which I achieve that level of sales?” So you could say --- it could be several things. You
could say, “Well, it could be the number of qualified prospects that I attract through
advertising, referrals, promotional sales… whatever. The number of qualified prospects I
attract.”
OK. You say, all right. If that is the constraint, then you focus all of your energy
and attention on attracting qualified prospects, and you alleviate that constraint. The
natural tendency for us all is we diffuse our efforts like light, gently across everything we
have to do, and we’re busy, busy, busy all day long. But we don’t focus our efforts like a
laser beam on the constraint, the alleviation of which will lead you towards your goals
faster than any other single thing you can do.
It’s interesting. Pete [TOMPLINGER] says that the job of a leader (and that’s
what you are in your own organization) the job of a leader is to choose the area of effort.
It is to choose the focal point of concentration. It is to choose and discipline not only
himself or herself, but the other people to focus all of their energy single-mindedly on the
single result, the accomplishment of which can help you more than anything else.
And here’s the kick. The kick is that the single result is the hardest darn thing you
can do. It requires tremendous self discipline and will power, concentration. It’s hard,
because the phones are ringing, and people are coming in. There’s a hundred little,
piddly, nit-picking little details. But you’ve got to keep yourself focused on the one big
thing that can make all the difference.
And you’ve got to keep your key people focused. All success comes from
concentrating your very best talents on your very biggest opportunity. And all failure
comes from not doing that, all day, every day. And you, as the key person, are the only
one who can keep people focused. And if you don’t keep them focused, it’s like herding
cats. They’ll all go off in other directions, and they’ll always work on the little, fun, easy,
irrelevant things. They’re working on this, and that, and this, and that, and everybody’s
busy, and happy, happy, happy… And you’re going to find that the big thing, the
constraint, the critical factor, is being ignored.
So you ask yourself, “OK, what’s my constraint?” Now, let’s go back to that
again. If you say it’s attracting qualified prospects, well, maybe you could say, “Maybe
that’s not it. Maybe the answer is writing outstanding advertising so that more qualified
prospects will call.” Or maybe you could say something totally different. “Maybe the
constraint on my growth is converting qualified prospects.”
I worked with a company recently, one of the biggest in the U.S. I sat with their
senior executives in a very expensive hotel in Phoenix, and put them through this
exercise, and I said, “What is the critical constraint to your growth?” And they said,
“Well, it’s conversion of leads or prospects, or suspects into prospects.” I said, “What’s
your conversion rate now?” Well, they had a showroom type of operation. They said,
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Shoulders Of Giants
“Well, about 5% of the people who come into our showrooms buy. The other 95%
don’t.” They had a 1 in 20 hit rate.
I said, “Well what would happen (it was a billion dollar corporation) if you could
increase the conversion rate from 5% to 50%?” They said, “Well, just a minute.” And
their accountant took control there. He just quickly, on paper, he said, “It’d be $100
million a year more in money.” I said, “What would it cost for you to intensively train
every single sales person in your organization so that they had that little, critical edge that
would enable them to make the conversion, so that they could close six out of 100 rather
than five out of 100.” They said, “Well, the total cost would be… if we just blew our
brain on sales training, it’d be less than $1 million.” “Well, what would be the
contribution to the bottom line?” “$100 million.” What’s the downside? Zero. What’s
the upside? 100 times return in the first year.
Well, surprise, surprise. They [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and they did. They flew the
[UNINTELLIGIBLE] come from the United States. Their [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Now,
does that sound very complicated? No, it wasn’t that complicated.
So then, you have to ask yourself, “Well, if the conversion ratio is the key, what
do we have to do to convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers?” Now, the
only question you ask is how? How? How will we do it? You know it’s doable, because
you know other people are doing it. And if someone else is doing it, you can do it.
And if you’re not quite sure how to do it, then what you do is you go to the next
town, or the other side of the city, and you go to your most successful competitor, and
you go up to them and say, “How are you doing it?” And you know what? They’ll tell
you! Ha! They don’t care! They’re so busy with their own work, they won’t keep it a
secret. And I’ll promise you this. A company came from out of town and said, “Look, I
sell the same product or service in my town, and you’re doing great. How do you do it?”
He’ll say, “Let me show you.” And they’ll sit down, and they’ll open up, and they’ll
show you how they’re doing it, and what they learned, and what not to do.
You know, one of the very fastest ways for you to keep score of your success is to
find out somebody else who has extraordinary success and ask them, and they’ll tell you.
It’s a wonderful thing in America. Successful people in America have an abundance
mentality. An abundance mentality means, “Hey, there’s lots.” So if -- and they want to
share their success. Everybody ---
Look at Jay. Jay is extremely successful at what he does, and what he wants to do
more than anything else --- it’s all he thinks about, all day long, because I’ve spoken to
him several times --- “How can I get this idea into the hands of more people? Because
they work.” And every single person who is successful creates more wealth and
abundance, which makes it possible for even more people to be successful. It’s not as if
the pie gets smaller if you slice it up. The pie gets bigger as you become more
successful.
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Shoulders Of Giants
So, how do you convert more qualified prospects? Now, I’m going to give you a
very simple principle that’s been helpful to me throughout my life, and it’s the 80/20
Principle, applied to personal development. It says this: 80% of the constraints that are
holding you back in any part of your life are internal. They’re within yourself. They’re
within your business. They’re within your people in your business. They’re within your
products. They’re under your own control. They’re not the market. It’s not the
competition. It’s not the prices. It’s not the Japanese. It’s not the government. 80% of
all your challenges are inside yourself.
One of the Greek philosophers said that when a man’s fight begins with himself,
that he’s worth something, then he’s worth something. And throughout my life,
whenever I’ve had a temptation to blame my problems on someone else --- which we all
do --- If you’ve been brought up in the Judaic-Christian ethic, which most of us have,
your natural, automatic tendency when something goes wrong is to look for who’s
guilty… is to blame it on someone else. But of course, if you do that too much it
becomes a habit, and you stop looking for where the real reason is, which in 80% of the
cases, it’s in ourselves.
So therefore, you ask yourself, “What’s the critical constraint, and how can I
alleviate this constraint?” And then here’s the most important question of all: What can I
do immediately --- this minute --- that will begin alleviating the constraint?” And then
force yourself to do it.
The American [MINISTRY] Association does studies all the time. They came up
with a study which I’ve seen over the years, and I like to see my best ideas corroborated
by professionals. They followed a series of executives, and they looked at those who
succeeded, and those who failed… those who got onto the fast track in their lives, and
those who were mediocre. And they looked at their backgrounds, and they found they
had pretty much the same education, pretty much the same intelligence. They all
networked. They belonged to the same clubs and associations. They had ten years of
experience. But some were on the fast track, and some were not.
So they looked at their behaviors, and they were looking for a reason for their
success, and they found it was one simple quality. And in this study, they called it “the
quality of initiative.” The quality of initiative, they defined, was the willingness to
initiate action quickly when circumstances called for it. And so they asked the
[UNINTELLIGLE] “What do you mean by ‘initiative’? And they went back to double
check, which is helpful.
They found that the low performing group felt that they had initiative as well.
They felt they had as much initiative as other people. So they said, “Well, how do you
define ‘initiative’?” They said, “Well, when the phone rings I answer it, and when my
customer comes in I talk to them, and when something needs to be deliver it. I mean, I
have initiative. I do what needs to be done.”
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Shoulders Of Giants
So they asked the high performers, “How do you define ‘initiative’ with regard to
what the low performers said?” They said, “Oh, that just goes with the job. That’s not
initiative. That’s just doing the job. Anybody can do that. You can hire a person on the
street to do what they’re required to do. Initiative is going beyond. It’s doing more. It’s
reacting quickly, and responsibly, and creatively. It’s being intensely action-oriented.”
Being action-oriented means ready, fire at will. It’s when something comes up, take
action on it. When somebody’s calling, you don’t take a message. What you do is you
say, “I’ll take care of it right away.” And you take personal responsibility for making
sure that that customer’s satisfied fast. You don’t say, “Hey, somebody called. You take
care of it.” It’s, you do it right away. And so that words “Right away.” Right away.
Right away --- seems to go hand in hand with great success in competitive enterprise.
They take action immediately.
Now, Jay is giving, through this course --- and I’ve been through all of his
material. Not all of it, but almost all of it. I’m going through it now. Is he’s giving idea,
after idea, after idea on how you can build your business. But everybody who is given
these ideas will fall into one of two camps. You might call it the sheep and the goats, if
you like.
The sheep will say, “That’s a good idea. Bah…bah.” And they’ll look at the
idea, and they’ll say, “Geez, I should do that someday. Bah..bah.” And then they’ll go
back, and they’ll watch television, and they’ll go back to what they were doing.
The goats, however, as you know if you’ve ever been around a goat, a goat will
butt you. They see you --- they butt you. No peace for goats! So when you’re talking
with a goat, the goat will take the action and run with it. They attack the new idea. They
will see if it works, because they know that only two things can happen, is you can try it
and it doesn’t work for you, or you can try it, and it does. If you try it and it does, you
now have a new tool that you have for life. From now on, you have a new way of
generating money that you didn’t have before. If it doesn’t work for you, you’ve learned
a valuable lesson, that this is not a good place to allocate your time and money.
And I will take it even further ahead. And if you try it several times, in almost
every single case these ideas will take you closer to your goal, increase your sales, and
become far more [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But the hardest thing of all is to take the first
step. The hardest thing of all is to charge for it, is to be intensely action oriented.
And here’s the truth: If you have an absolutely brilliant person who has the finest
education, a Harvard MBA, with a Ph.D. in Entrepreneurial Studies, who has 70 years of
work with a major corporation, and who is tutored by Jay, happens to be one of the finest,
most creative entrepreneurs in the world, this person is not worth a pinch of you-know-
what --- snuff --- if they won’t take action on what they know.
But on the other hand, if you take a mediocre person, an average person with a
poor education who walked in off the street, but who’s got a very, very focused gaze, and
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will take action on just one idea, that person’s worth 100 times the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
who has the idea, but takes no action.
And I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the biggest killer of all --- it’s procrastination. We

say, “[UNINTELLIGIBLE] action --- just not yet.” However, let’s go back to the
question I ask my audience. If you do anything --- or fail to do anything --- over and over
again, what do you develop? And the answer is, you develop a habit. And a habit of
procrastination, which sneaks up on you… You never meant it to. It’s just like that
middle age paunch, where you start to develop that spare tire. You never meant for that
to happen, but there it is. That habit of procrastination that sneaks up on you is very, very
insidious. It sneaks up on you from behind, and then it traps you.
If you remember the book Gulliver’s Travels, where he talks about falling asleep
in the land of the Lilliputians, and the Lilliputs, the little people, come and they tie him
down with thousands of little strings. That book was a paradigm. It was a metaphor. It
was a political/philosophical/psychological book, and he was trying to make a point
without directly attacking some of the mediocre people in his society, the bureaucrats and
the people in government reacting stupidly. Those little lines that they developed which
tied down Gulliver with… But Gulliver was huge and powerful. But with thousands of
little lines, made him completely helpless.
The repetition of acts of procrastination form into steel cables of habits that
destroy the likelihood of success of even the most extraordinary person. And what you
have to do is you have to, one by one, throw them off. You have to say, “All right. I get
an idea. I’m going to act --- now. I’m going to take action immediately. I’m going to do
it this minute. I’m not going to wait. I’m not going to delay, because I know that if I do
it’s going to kill me in the long term. Sounds like a person who says, “I’m not going to
do a dessert anymore, because I know if I do the ramifications will be tremendous.”
So, what you do is you decide what your vision is, and your values, and you set
your goals, and you break your goals down, and say, “Of all the things that I could do,
what would be the most helpful to do now? What is the one thing that I could do that
could help me the most? What is the one thing that sets the speed at which I achieve my
goals?” And then discipline yourself to do nothing else but that until you’ve mastered it.
Jay, would you like to jump in here for a second?
JAY: Yeah, sure. Can I ask a couple of clarifying questions?
BRIAN: Sure.
JAY: OK. So you’re saying something much more eloquently than I. I’ve
always suggested that the only way anybody can achieve their goals is, first and foremost,
know what they are, and the specific manner, and then reverse engineering them. And it
sounds pretty much like what you’re saying.
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Shoulders Of Giants
BRIAN: Exactly.
JAY: And what I’d like to have you help us with, and I want you to really grab
me with… We have people on this phone, 100, 200 of them, who’ve achieved some
really remarkable accomplishments in their life. And I’m very flattered. A lot of them
have accomplished it through the utilization of my principles.
However, they seem to hit a false ceiling. They seem to hit a wall. They seem to
not be able to break through and get more yield, more performance, more expansion,
more experimentation out of their day, out of their people, out of their line, out of their
whole set of possibility-based… whatever. Can you help us there?
BRIAN: OK. The most important thing that I’ve ever learned is that the quality
of your thinking determines the quality of your life. And if people start to stop in terms
of getting more, our natural tendency when we were younger, the old paradigm, is you
work longer and harder. You work longer hours. You work harder. You do more things.
You throw more mud against the wall, and hope some of it will stick.
Today, however, the whole paradigm has shifted. And whether we see how it’s
shifted --- today, what we do is we use our minds to apply ourselves with much greater
effectiveness. And there’s two principles which I repeat over and over again. They are
the principles of leverage and acceleration.
One of the things that you can do to give you the greatest leverage that enables
you to maximize your output per unit energy or input. And the second is, what can you
do to accelerate or increase the speed at which you achieve your goals? Usually, we’re
saying, “I’m out of resources.” And let me give you a thinking tool that comes from
Harvard Business School. It’s called “The Principle Of Critical Success Factors.”
The Principle Of Critical Success Factors is based on the fact that there are
hundreds of things going on in your business. However, only a small number of them are
critical. Now, “critical” means if a person has been in a car accident and rushed to the
hospital, and someone said they are in critical condition, what does that mean? Well, the
answer is it means that they could live or die. It’s critical. It’s the determination of
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
In your business there are critical success factors. If you do them, you live. If
you don’t, the business dies. You’re developing your business. You do customer
generation if you want. Some people have satisfactory products and services that they’re
happy with, it ends up they keep, is two. Proper selling methodology is three. Proper
accounting and financing is four.
In every business, and in every position in your business, there are critical success
factors. And the interesting thing is there’s seldom more than five to seven critical
success factors. So when you talk about reverse engineering, the critical thing about re-
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Shoulders Of Giants
engineering is to identify the factors. What are the five to seven factors that determine
the survival or death of your business?
Now, here’s what we learned. Norman Augustine talked about this. He said ten
years writing Augustine’s Laws he was asked again by one of the national journals,
“What have you learned in the last ten years?” He said, “The most important single thing
I’ve learned --- I’m surprised I never saw it before --- was that your weakest critical
success factor determines the height at which you can use all your other skills.”
And I sat back in my chair like I had just been thrown by an explosion, and
thought, “Wow! Wow, that is an idea!” Think about it. You can do great on six of the
seven critical factors in your business, but all of your problems will come from a
weakness in the seventh.
So if we want to get leverage, where do you get the most leverage? We get the
most leverage by identifying the major problem area --- our greatest weakness, the
greatest (going back to constraints) the greatest weakness that we have, and then focusing
all of our energy on bringing that up. Sometimes we can outsource it. Sometimes we can
bring in someone else who has the skill.
By the way, just to make a quick shift, but with regard to skill, one of the things
we know is that good people are free. And it’s a very important thing to understand. No
matter how much you pay good people, they’re free.
The second thing about that is that your company’s growth is totally constrained
by your ability to get and keep good people. And 80% of the reason for that is in
yourself.
The reason good people are free (to go back to the beginning) is that good people
contribute vastly more than they cost. In fact, all companies are successful to the degree
to which they can get and keep good people who contribute more than they cost. Poor
people are very expensive. Poor people can [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But good people are
free.
So therefore, your job --- People come in and say, “I want to make $100,000 a
year working here.” I say, “That’s fine. Just show me how you can justify that kind of
income, and you’ll make your job contingent on it.” I don’t mind paying $100,000. I’ve
even hired people, and I paid them more than I make. I know a person in my company
that makes twice as much as the president of the company, and everybody in the
company is very happy he’s making that kind of money because he’s so productive, he
generates so much revenue to the company that it underwrites everybody else’s salaries.
And so good people are free, poor people are expensive. Your job is --- It’s
amazing how people quibble over nickels and dimes when they’re hiring people. They
say, “Maybe I can get them really, really cheap.” Well, of course, your job is to pay the
very least for the very most. It’s a factor of production. But nevertheless, remember,
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Shoulders Of Giants
good people are free. And you want as many as you can get, the faster you can build
your business. That may be the greatest accelerator of all.
Maybe your greatest weakness is that you do not have a key person in a key place.
And there are two things that you can do with regard to that. You can say, “Do I need to
hire a key person, or can I outsource this entire function and have somebody else do it?”
JAY: Brian, let me…
BRIAN: Sure.
JAY: Sorry. But in that question, I’m thinking I have somebody who is an
expert… somebody who is many times better skilled in understanding, in facilitating, in
managing, in dealing with that issue, day in and day out, so that I don’t have to be
mediocre, or I don’t have to manage, or I don’t have to try to bring that expertise internal.
BRIAN: What we know is this: Entrepreneurs [CHARGE], and are successful in

business because they can sell the product or service. They love the product. They really
have a passion for it, and they believe that it’s good, and they go out there, and they can
sell it.
I had a very good friend who was a superb, superb salesman --- $3-, $4-,
$500,000 a year, and he decided, “Geez, I should have my own company.” So he did.
He started a company and decided to be a manager. And the company began to fall apart.
And he said, “This is ridiculous.” So he brought in a president. He said, “A good
executive can run the company. That’s cheaper than the amount of money I’m losing by
not being in the field.”
So he brought in a crackerjack executive to come in and run his company, and he

went back in the field and sold. And he sat in the sales meetings as a salesperson, and he
came to work as a salesperson, and he was just a salesperson. He owned the whole
darned company, but he could generate more business for his company by being in sales
than he could on the outside.
So sometimes you can say, “Our weakest problem is our sales. I can’t get good
salespeople.” Oh, you poor darling! Nobody can get good salespeople. Give yourself a
shake. If there was a formula for that, we’d all be rich! The reason you’re successful in
your business is that you can sell.
And by the way, I will say this: If you cannot sell, don’t go into business. Work
for somebody else. But I’ll also say this: Selling is something you can learn. I’ve
worked for a whole [UNINTELLIGIBLE] accountants, and as you know, the joke is that
accountants become accountants because they lack the charisma of engineers
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
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Shoulders Of Giants
So I worked with accountants which now have been told by their companies that
“You must go out and make rain. You must go out and generate business, as well as
doing books.” And they’re absolutely paralyzed with fear. The very idea of going out
and asking people for business traumatizes them. Some of them become alcoholics.
They [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Anyway…
So I say, “Look. Let’s look at what selling involves. Selling involves finding
people who you can help to improve their life or work, and then showing them that
whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish, whatever their goals are, you can help them
achieve their goals faster and easier, and in a very cost-effective way.
So what people have to do is say, “What is my weakest key area?” And in almost
every entrepreneurial business, the weakest key area is selling --- your ability to go out
and generate new business. And the weakness is in the inability to apply your ideas, Jay,
but it’s also the weakness to just get face to face with people who can and will buy, and
to ask them to buy. And of all the skills, this is one of the skills that can be brought up
very, very fast with proper books, proper tapes, proper course.
And this may be such a constraint that if it’s your constraint, those who are
listening, then what you should do is say, “OK. This is 1998. This is the year I’ll
become superb in selling. This year I’m going to think day and night, day and night, how
I can sell more… how my company can sell more… how to advertise… how to
promote… how to get referrals… how to get repeats and resales… how to sell more to
the same customer… how to get the same customer buying more often. It’s all I’m going
to think about all day long, is how to sell more.”
Here’s an interesting statistic. It’s been repeated over the years, by the way.
They asked small entrepreneurs, they say, “How important is sales and marketing to you
in your business?” Do you know what entrepreneurs say? “It’s very important! It’s the
most important. If we didn’t have the sales… It’s the blood to the brain. We’d die.”
Good. Now why don’t you do a time and motion study and sort of track your
time for awhile. And every 15 minutes, write down what you’re doing, and we’ll do this
for about six weeks. And then we do it, and I do an analysis of the person’s time.
And you know what they find? Surprise, surprise --- the average entrepreneur, if
they’re not careful, is spending 11% of their time in sales and marketing. 11%. The
critical thing that determines the whole future of their business, but they get so bogged
down in minutiae that they lose sight of the most important thing they should be doing.
Peter Drucker talks about the fact that most companies, when they have a good-
selling product, they will take their best sales people off of their best-selling products,
and put them on their worst-selling products in order to try to get the sales going up so
the person who’s idea the product was will not be embarrassed. So instead of
concentrating on the opportunities, the big opportunity areas, we spend a lot of our time
on things that no one will remember when you get [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
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Shoulders Of Giants
So that’s the first thinking tool, and you need to apply it to every stressful part of
your life. And if the answer is no, then how do you get out of it, and how fast? How do
you deal with it? And the way to deal with it is straightforward, straight on.
Now, the second thing is to understand that all human lives, businesses, careers,
products, services and companies go in cycles. It’s called the segment curve. The
segment curve is like an “S” laying down with the tail on the left sort of up in the air, and
then it slopes down, and then it goes up much higher, and then it slopes down again.
The segment curve is the basis of all the work done at UCLA by
[UNINTELLIGIBLE] in his work in corporate life cycles. It’s taught all over the world,
and 99% of business people have never heard of it. Whenever I show this curve to any
business person, people just go, “Wow!” because it explains their situation perfectly.
Let me explain the beginning of the S. It’s high. This is where the good company
starts, and it immediately goes into a down cycle, where you’re learning how to run the
business before you run out of money. You’re scrambling to make sales. If you can
figure out how to make money faster than you lose it, then the company starts to come
out of the dive and begins to move up, that second part of the S.
It goes through adolescence, into growth, and the company starts to grow, and you
sell a lot of products and services, and then you reach a point of stability where the S
levels off again, and begins to go into decline.
Now, all products go through that cycle. They start off, go through the learning
period, begin to grow, level off and decline. All careers, all marriages, all friendships, all
companies, all advertising campaigns… everything goes through the S curve. And if you
can understand that, when you go and you reach stability at the top of the curve and begin
to decline, what this means is that you’ve changed, the market has changed, the
customers have changed, the products have changed, the competition has changed… It
doesn’t really matter what it is. It’s that cycle or season. You don’t say, “Why on earth
are we having winter?” It just happens.
And so you can reach a point where you’re working harder and harder, and
getting less sales... you’re selling harder and harder, but making less profit… you’re
working harder and harder, but getting less satisfaction. And what you have to recognize
is that you’ve gotten to the downside of the curve. And what will happen is the harder
you work, the smaller the margins will become, the less money you’ll make.
So the question that you’ve talked about is you have to ask, “What is my next
miracle going to be?” You have to say, “OK, when things are going really, really great,
now is the time to plan for the curve. What do we do now? We’ve got money. We’ve
got sales. We’ve got the forward motion. We have the energy. We have the reserves
now. We have to plan the next curve.”
21
Shoulders Of Giants
So a good company is a series of climbing curves, like a series of S’s, linked in

with each other. So just at the point where you’re at what [UNINTELLIGIBLE] calls
“prime,” --- the company’s in the very best condition of its life --- just at that time you
know that you’re reaching stability and decline. So you have to pull back and begin
finding new products, new processes, new markets which entail new risks, and new
thinking, and really, out of the comfort zone --- trying something new and different.
You’ll notice that if a restaurant does not change its menu, no matter how well it’s
doing, it’ll go into decline. If a restaurant doesn’t change the décor --- sometimes you go
into a restaurant, and they’ve remodeled. Well, geez, it’s expensive to remodel. Why did
they do that? Because people, even if the food is good, if they don’t add dishes, delete
dishes, change the décor, right when they’re selling, people will stop going there.
You notice how restaurants and nightclubs go through cycles where they’re the
hot spot, and the next year, they’re dead? What’s changed? Nothing changed --- that’s
why. People have gone on to something else.
So in your business and in your career, keep asking, is there a product or process,
or a service that you’re doing, using, selling, that knowing what you know now, you
wouldn’t get into? Is there a person working with you, for you, or you’re in a
relationship of any kind, that knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into? Is
there any commitment of time or money or emotion that knowing what you now know,
you wouldn’t embark upon? If the answer is no, then how do you get out of it, and how
fast?
And sometimes, just pulling that plug which is the major stressor and fatiguer in
life, suddenly ignites things. Suddenly, you’re happy again. Suddenly, you’re elated.
Suddenly, you’ve got ideas and possibilities, and you can recharge yourself with that
simple exercise.
JAY: That’s great. What I’d like to do, if it pleases you, (and if it doesn’t, you
don’t have to)… we have about ten, fifteen minutes left in this session. You’ve given
unhedgingly, and I think you’ve given in a really remarkable way. You have a very, very
impactful delivery style, and I’m delighted to experience it firsthand, even if it’s
vicariously by phone. I appreciate it on behalf of everybody.
What I’d like to do is we have… I don’t know how many people are on the phone.
Let’s see if any of them have the wherewithal, the interest, the capacity to pose to you
either general, or more preferably, a specific question or challenge scenario that they
might be eager to get one or two little gems of either strategic or tactical help on. In other
words, that they have a question, a problem, a challenge that is grappling with them, or
vice versa in the field of focusing, goal-setting, and helping them --- or hampering them -
-- from accomplishing what I want, which is for them to progressively take one little baby
step every couple of weeks by taking a new concept and implementing it. So are you up
for that challenge?
22
Shoulders Of Giants
BRIAN: Absolutely.
JAY: Great, OK. Let’s do it. Operator, are you there?
OPERATOR: Yes, sir.
JAY: Here’s what I want you to do. I’m going to put you back on speaker,
because I want to make some notes. I want you to put us into a guest queuing mode so
that people can push --- what do I push? *0, or something?
OPERATOR: Sir, they’ll have to push “1” on their touch tone phone, and they’ll
be placed into queue.
JAY: If you are on this call, and you would like to pose a specific or a general
question to Brian that has to do with the subjects we just covered, and specifically, with
your more effective ability to set and achieve specific goals… to use your time, and your
opportunity, and your ability more effectively… to grapple with, and to remove once and
for all the demon procrastination, deviation and non-forward motion from your life, push
1, and what? *1? Or 1? What did you say?
OPERATOR: 1, sir, and they will be placed in the queue.
JAY: Do it now, please. And Operator?
OPERATOR: Yes, sir.
JAY: As they occur… and the nice, wonderful thing, participant, that you don’t
have a volunteer, I will volunteer different people for it.
OPERATOR: Joseph Janisec is online with a question. Please state your

question.
OPERATOR: Hi, Brian. I have a financial advisor business, so I’m fully

familiar with the planning process, and do that pretty well. In my own business I tend to
set a plan, get motivated, and when we’re in the action mode and taking action on it,
there’s times when I tend to get in a cycle of losing track of the plan, and the momentum,
and rather than focusing on the action repeatedly, I start regrouping and getting lost on
the plan. So as a cycle I’ve recognized it in my life for quite a long time, and I was
wondering if you have any hints how I can help get out of that cycle.
BRIAN: Well, remember we said that --- it’s a great question. Remember, we
said that life is the center of attention. And that’s why it’s so important to plan each day
in terms of specific actions that you can take, and then take the first action as early as you
can in the morning. And instead of trying to change your week or your month,
concentrate on changing your hour, and force yourself to take action this hour.
23
Shoulders Of Giants
Winston Churchill was very famous in his time management skills, and he put at
the top of his list every day, he said, “Action this day,” and a big exclamation point.
Action this day. And that’s what he worked on --- action this day.
So don’t try to change the world, because you’re going against a lot of
psychological inertia. Just try to change each day, and then try to change each hour of
the day. And you have to force yourself. And I mentally use the picture of pushing
myself with my own hands, and my own back --- pushing myself into the fray. And if
you keep doing that to yourself, eventually you will develop a new habit.
OPERATOR: Thank you.
BRIAN: Thank you, Joseph.
JAY: OK. Next, Operator?
OPERATOR: Tony Bass is online with a question. Please state your question.
TONY: Yes, thank you, and hello, Brian.
BRIAN: Hi, Tony.
TONY: The question I have revolves around my sales process. I’m a landscape
contractor company, and our sales process goes like this: The client calls. We set up a
time to go see them, their lawn, and take a look around, come up with ideas, generate a
plan, and present those plans, price this work, and finally get to do the work one day.
We have like a 60-day time that it takes us from initial call until job completion.
My thought is if I brought this thing down, it’d make a big difference, and I’m just kind
of stuck. It’s been this way for a few years now.
BRIAN: What is the major objection that you get to going ahead?
TONY: Well, it’s the sales process that we have, I believe, is the… Kind of like
you said earlier, it’s kind of like what we’ve been doing, I guess, for so long, it’s just the
same way we’ve always done it. And…
BRIAN: OK, remember that there are some things in life, Tony… One is fact,
and one is a problem. A fact is how long it takes a plant to grow.
TONY: Mm hmm.
BRIAN: And you can’t accelerate that, except marginally with fertilizers and
chemicals. You can’t say, “Grow faster.” It’s a fact. It’s not a problem. It’s not
amenable to a solution. And there are some buying cycles, and I think in terms of
landscape architecture --- my brother’s a landscape architect, and I used to be a gardener -
24
Shoulders Of Giants
-- similar to interior decorating, is that no matter how brilliant you are, you cannot get the
homeowner to make a decision faster than they’re going to make it, and to proceed any
sooner than they’re going to do it.
So maybe what you’re frustrated about is something that is not amenable to a

solution. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but think of it a different way. Maybe what you
need to do is you need to have more prospective clients in the pipeline.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE], but make sure that the pipeline’s absolutely full so that the ones
coming out of the pipeline are coming out on a regular basis, and at a higher rate, and
that’s your critical concern --- that there’s more clients, more profit.
TONY: We’re very fortunate to have been benefiting from all the ideas that Jay
has brought, and we have the extraordinary time basis that we’re able to keep our crews
booked beyond our capacity for [UNINTELLIGIBLE], so the frustration is I get that
critical nature of Spring, then Winter. That’s a bit of a challenge in this business.
BRIAN: Well, you know, the risk reversal concept is the only thing that I ever
found that really works for accelerating the customer making a decision, is to
unconditionally guarantee complete satisfaction so there’s really no risk in going ahead
immediately. And I think if you can really hammer that home, and if you can offer some
kind of incentive, or premium, or bonus for making a decision immediately…
Many professional services firms will say, “We have some slow time here which
enables us to make you a better offer with a guarantee and more bonus if you would take
advantage of this slack time that we have within our system.”
And even if you don’t have slack time within your system, by saying that, by
giving them a reason for going ahead now, very often they’ll take advantage. If there’s
no difference whether they go ahead now or in 60 days in terms of the final price and the
delivery of the finished landscaping, then there’s a rule that says, “No urgency, no sales.”
If there’s no reason for them to make a decision sooner, then why should they? But if
you can give them some kind of a reason, that if you will go ahead faster, in 30 days
rather than 60 days, then here’s a real bonus for you. And that is often very successful.
JAY: That’s great. We’ll take one more, if there’s another one. Is there one
more online?
OPERATOR: [BEFOW] Coller is online with a question. Please state your

question.
BEFOW: Yes, Brian, I want to ask you regarding, you mentioned how your wife
have you lawn cut, and then when you came home, that one day. But was it something
you enjoy doing? Surely, there are certain things in life that we do that we cannot put a
price tag on. There are certain things that we enjoy doing, no matter how long they take
us, just love doing those things. And sometimes successful people, we need to be doing
something we enjoy without before we put a price tag.
25
Shoulders Of Giants
BRIAN: Yes, that is true. However, we enjoy many things, and this is what I’ve
found, is that there are some things that give us far more return for the enjoyable
activities in others. And maybe we enjoy gardening, but maybe we would be much better
off going for a walk, or playing with our kids. Maybe we would get much more pleasure
out of doing something else.
And the other thing is this: If I didn’t get somebody else to mow the lawn, I’d
have to do it. Now it becomes a job that I have to do because I don’t have a choice. Now
the lawn owns me. I don’t own the lawn anymore. So that’s really the question, that you
want to expand your options. And you want to do the things that give you the greatest
amount of pleasure. Many things give you pleasure. Think of the things that give you
the very most. And that’s how I’ve organized my life.
BEFOW: Thank you.
BRIAN: Thank you.
JAY: All right. Now Brian, I would like to ask one more question of you, and
then I’d like to thank you, and to have everybody on this call, I would say that the two
hours that we’ve shared will have a profound impact on the rest of their business careers,
and correspondingly, the impact they can make on not only their customers or clients, but
on their staff, families, communities and industries. And that’s a very wonderful kind of
a leverage.
In parting, if you never talk to him again… if you paid $2 million and were
successful for the request I’m about to make, what were the one, or two, or three
concluding, either points, or actions, or insights, or applications, or recommendations you
would like to conclude with, B), that would have the highest probability of having a very
meaningful, immediate and continual impact on these people per activity-wise, and sense
of future accomplishments.
BRIAN: OK. Pretty good question, very good answer, and here it is: Number
one, the most important thing is everybody listening who is either a millionaire or who
wants to be one, so the very best way to find out how to be one is to interview, test
thousands of others, and find out how they think and feel. And here it is:
Find out what you like to do. Do what you love. Do something that you know
really makes a difference. Do something that makes you happy in the doing, as well as in
the accomplishing. Do something that when you are doing it, time stands still. When
you’re doing it, you’re so busy doing it, you sometimes even forget to eat. You can
hardly wait to get there, and you hate to leave. If what you’re doing doesn’t grab you…
if what you’re doing does not intrinsically motivate you and drive you… you just want it,
and you really love it… and especially, you’d love to do it successfully… That’s the first
thing. If it doesn’t hold your heart, you’ll never be successful at it. As Mark Twain said,
“You’ll always make the most money doing what you most enjoy.”
26
Shoulders Of Giants
And here’s the second principle. The second principle is to ask yourself, “Out of
all the things that I could do, what is the one thing that if I did it really, really well, would
contribute more to my success than anything else? What one skill, if I developed and did
it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my work and my
career?”
And identify it. Ask questions. Look around. Interview others. And once
you’ve become crystal clear about that skill, set it as a goal, and then write it down and
set a deadline, and make a plan to achieve it. And then work on becoming really
excellent at that every single day until people tell you how good you are at that.
And I promise you this: The clarity of doing what you love to do, and then
focusing all of your energies on becoming really good at the one thing that could help
you the most, which --- surprise, surprise! --- will be your critical constraint. It’ll be your
weakest critical success factor. It will be the one thing that the lack of competence in is
holding you back.
When you go to work on that, you’ll start to get results out of all proportion to
your efforts. You’ll start to feel like a winner every day. You’ll start to feel happy about
your work. You’ll start to do more and more with less effort. You’ll start to be more and
more successful, and get paid more and more. You’ll start to feel wonderful about
yourself and your work. You’ll have this wonderful endorphin rush, as you can hardly
wait to get there, and you hate to leave.
And the final principle is this: Is that successful people --- optimists --- have two
qualities: It’s that they are more willing to begin with no guarantee of success. They’re
more willing to take action on a neat idea, without anybody guaranteeing that this will
work. They don’t ever ask the question, “What if it doesn’t work?” When they hear a
new idea from Jay Abraham, they say, “What if it does? What if it does work?” And
that’s the only question.
And the final part of being an optimist is that they’re more persistent. They’re
more persistent than anyone else. They have unreal levels of optimism in the beginning,
and unreal levels of optimism in persisting. And they make a decision in advance that
“No matter what happens, I’ll never give up. I’ll never quit. I’ll never stop. I’ll keep
going. I’ll try something new and different.” The only question they ask is the question,
“How? How do I get from where I am to where I want to go?”
And if you remember that wonderful line from the movie “Apollo 13,” they
remind themselves that failure is not an option. Failure is not an option, and that’s the
mark of the most successful person. And once you reach the point where you’re doing
what you love to do, and you’re doing it well, and you don’t even consider the possibility
of failure, you’re absolutely guaranteed to be a big success.
JAY: That’s wonderful. Brian, wait just one second. Operator, are you there?
27
Shoulders Of Giants
OPERATOR: Yes, sir.
JAY: Would you open all the lines? I would like to thank you personally, and
I’d like to have everyone thank you personally. You’ve been very gracious. Everybody,
if you’ll thank Brian real quick, then I want to have a few minutes privately with you, and
sort of…
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Brian. Really fantastic.
JAY: Thank you, Brian. You’ve been a gracious contributor, and you’ve been
enormously helpful. I really appreciate it.
BRIAN: I’ll talk to you again soon, Jay.
JAY: Thank you.
PARTICIPANT: Jay, would it be possible to get a copy of this?
JAY: Yes, I’m going to get you a copy, and I’m also probably going to transcribe
it for you, and I’ll publish it for you.
PARTICIPANTS: That would be great. Very helpful. Thanks, Jay. Thanks,

Brian.
JAY: What do you think is the thanks I want?
PARTICIPANT: Action.
JAY: One focal point. I want you to do stuff. I want you to do stuff every single
week. I want you to do stuff and share it with us. I want you to try stuff, and if it doesn’t
work, try something else, and have fun doing it.
So this was really good. We also --- I’m trying to invest back in you. [AUDIO
INTERFERENCE] Somebody’s got me on speaker phone, trying to record it. Move
your tape player. We’ll let you know what we’re going to do as far as trying to get a tape
deal, and I’ll ask you what it costs, but we’ll either give it to you or let you pay us the
hard cost of it. I’ve got to see what the timing and everything is on it. But we’ll let you
know. But I would encourage you to listen to it and take repetitive notes.
[UNRELATED INFORMATION]
The last thing I want to say is, those of you who have already accomplished some
great successes, my congratulations. Those of you who are each and every week making
progress, my congratulations. Those of you who have been diverted, detoured, impeded,
I hope this has helped get you back on track and inspire you. I’m more inspired. I hope
28
Shoulders Of Giants
you are also, and I hope this was a very worthwhile investment of two hours of your
valuable time. I thank you all, and I’ll talk to you very soon.
END
29

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Encounter!

Series - Shoulders Of Giants

JAY ABRAHAM: Hi, everybody!

AUDIENCE: Hi Jay! How are you?

And he has graciously agreed not to give a difficult, 90-minute soliloquy of

AUDIENCE: Welcome, Brian.

BRIAN TRACY: Thank you, Jay, I’m delighted to be with you.

BRIAN: It’s a delight to be with you. I am an entrepreneur on my own. I have

of the most extraordinary ideas to help me be more successful in marketing in my life.

I started off in what I call “idealization.” And idealization is to encourage you to

And what I do is I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] listen to this, and if you have a staff, or

If ever you want to see a madhouse, go to a Lexus dealership on Saturday

Sometimes I ask an audience this, as I did to several hundred people yesterday,

So do you want me to just go on, Jay? Because I’m on a roll.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago did a wonderful series of

And I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the biggest killer of all --- it’s procrastination. We

Jay, would you like to jump in here for a second?

JAY: Yeah, sure. Can I ask a couple of clarifying questions?

JAY: Brian, let me…

BRIAN: What we know is this: Entrepreneurs [CHARGE], and are successful in

So he brought in a crackerjack executive to come in and run his company, and he

So a good company is a series of climbing curves, like a series of S’s, linked in

JAY: Great, OK. Let’s do it. Operator, are you there?

OPERATOR: Yes, sir.

OPERATOR: 1, sir, and they will be placed in the queue.

JAY: Do it now, please. And Operator?

OPERATOR: Yes, sir.

OPERATOR: Joseph Janisec is online with a question. Please state your

OPERATOR: Hi, Brian. I have a financial advisor business, so I’m fully

OPERATOR: Thank you.

BRIAN: Thank you, Joseph.

JAY: OK. Next, Operator?

TONY: Yes, thank you, and hello, Brian.

BRIAN: Hi, Tony.

So maybe what you’re frustrated about is something that is not amenable to a

OPERATOR: [BEFOW] Coller is online with a question. Please state your

BEFOW: Thank you.

BRIAN: Thank you.

OPERATOR: Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Brian. Really fantastic.

BRIAN: I’ll talk to you again soon, Jay.

JAY: Thank you.

PARTICIPANT: Jay, would it be possible to get a copy of this?

PARTICIPANTS: That would be great. Very helpful. Thanks, Jay. Thanks,

JAY: What do you think is the thanks I want?

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