Brian Tracy
Laws of Business Success

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my son Michael Tracy. May these timeless truths guide and inspire you to the wonderful life in business that stretches before you

Preface

Once upon a time, I set out on a lifelong journey to find out why the world works the way it does. Like many people on this journey, I found my way into sales, then management, and eventually entrepreneurship and business building. Over time, I began to notice consistent and predictable patterns and principles that seemed to accompany all business success. Listing and explaining them is the purpose of this book.

My mission in life has been the same for more than twenty-five years. It is to liberate individual potential by giving people ideas and strategies they can use to get more of the benefits and rewards they want far faster than they would without these ideas.

I believe that life is the most precious and wonderful of all gifts. With this belief, I have been driven for years to find ways to reduce the amount of life you need to spend to achieve the material and nonmaterial goals you set for yourself. Thus this book on the Laws of Business Success.

This book is written specifically for people working in the business world who want to maximize their personal potentials and get the greatest quality and quantity of business results possible in exchange for the hours, weeks, months, and years of their precious lives that they invest in their careers.

Any one of these laws can save you months and even years of hard work if you have not been living and working consistent with it up to now. And each of these laws is indispensable to your realizing your full potential. The consistent violation of any one of these laws can cost you months and even years of frustration and underachievement.

Here is a question for you: If you could earn $50,000 per year or $100,000 per year, all other things being equal, which would you choose?

The answer is obvious. You would always prefer more to less for the same amount of time and effort. And the fact is that people living by these laws and practicing these principles earn far more in the same period of time than people who do not.

These laws are similar to laws of physics, laws of mathematics, laws of mechanics, or laws of electricity. They are practical, proven laws that apply everywhere to success and business. They do not deal with health or home or love or balance or any of the great factors that make for happiness and personal fulfillment. This book does not attempt to address those issues, only the timeless principles of business success.

The best news of all regarding business success is that nature is neutral. If you do what other successful people do, you will get the results that other successful people get. And if you don’t, you won’t. It is as simple as that.

Some of these laws may seem simplistic or self-evident. Some repeat themselves in different ways in different categories. Don’t be fooled into discounting or dismissing them on that account. Great success and mastery in any field always go to those who are “brilliant on the basics.”

As you read, take a few moments with each law and honestly evaluate your own conduct and behavior with regard to that law. One insight or new idea that you did not have before can be all that it takes to change the direction of your life.

When you apply The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success and you live your business life in harmony with them, you will gain a distinct advantage over those who do not. You will enjoy levels of success and satisfaction you may never have imagined possible. You will accomplish more in a few months or years than many people accomplish in a lifetime!

Brian Tracy

Solana Beach, California

March 2000

About the Author

Brian Tracy started at the bottom and worked his way up, one step at a time. He began his adult life uneducated, unskilled, and unemployed, living in his car and working at odd jobs as they came along.

At an early age, he became intensely curious about the way things work, why things happen the way they do. As he worked and traveled, read, and spoke to people, he began to discover a certain regularity and predictability in human affairs. These insights changed the direction of his life and led ultimately to the laws and ideas in this book.

Like a scientist or researcher, he tested and applied each principle, comparing his conclusions with those of others. As he worked his way from job to job, from position to position, and eventually from failure to success, he used himself as a guinea pig to prove or disprove the validity of his discoveries.

The cumulative effect of learning and applying these universal principles of success and achievement was exactly as he had predicted.

Today, Brian Tracy is one of the top business consultants in the United States and one of the most popular professional speakers in the world. He has worked with more than 500 companies of all sizes, including many in the Fortune 500. He speaks to more than 300,000 people each year worldwide on subjects of personal and corporate effectiveness.

Brian Tracy has written ten books, some of which have been translated into twelve languages. His video and audio learning programs are used worldwide to teach leadership, sales, personal success, and time management.

In addition, he has traveled and worked in eighty countries on five continents. He has a master’s degree in business and administration and is an avid reader in history, philosophy, economics, religion, metaphysics, and psychology.

Brian has a wonderful way of synthesizing ideas and insights from several disciplines into practical strategies that work quickly and get fast results.

He is the president of Brian Tracy International, a consulting and training organization based in Solana Beach, California. He is married with four children and is actively involved in his community.

In this book, he shares with you his many years of wisdom distilled from his experience with people and companies across America and throughout the world.

INTRODUCTION
Success Is Predictable

This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more opportunities for more people to accomplish more of their goals, both personally and professionally, than exist today. And if anything, our situation is getting better and better with each passing year.

Why is this happening? The simplest answer is that we know more today about how to achieve better results in more areas of business than we have ever known before. And this information, these ideas and insights, are like water, flowing everywhere and to everyone who is open to them and willing to use them.

The wonderful thing about information and ideas is that they are infinitely divisible. If you have an idea that can help me to be more effective in some part of my business and you share it with me, we are both enriched. If I then share this idea with someone else, and that person shares it with someone else again, everyone who receives the new idea is better off.

And knowledge is cumulative. Once it exists, it does not cease to exist. It becomes available to more and more people and it grows exponentially. Every new piece of knowledge reveals connections and interconnections with other areas of knowledge in a self-reinforcing and accelerating pattern. Each breakthrough in knowledge creates new opportunities that expand and multiply as that knowledge is exploited.

The driving force behind the explosion of knowledge and the expansion of technology is competition. This competition is more aggressive, determined, creative, and ruthless than ever before, and if anything, it will be even tougher in the months and years ahead.

It has been said that “business is war.” Business books, articles, and courses are filled with references to “marketing warfare,” “guerilla tactics,” “counterattacks,” and other military terms. And these are all true with one important distinction: the nature of the type of “war” being fought.

Military warfare is aimed at the conquest of people and territory. Business warfare is aimed at winning customers and markets. Military combat aims at destruction and victory by the use of overwhelming force. Business competition aims at finding better, faster, and cheaper ways of pleasing customers in competition with other companies that are trying to please the same customers.

This business competition is fierce. Many of the finest minds and the most talented people who have ever lived are thinking and working day and night to find ways to satisfy customers with new and better products and services. The race is on. Only those who can learn and apply the very best ideas and methods faster than their competitors will survive.

The “Winning Edge” concept says, “small differences in ability can lead to enormous differences in results.” Small differences in your own personal repertoire of knowledge and skills can lead to major differences in your income and achievements.

Your aim throughout your career, for yourself and your company, should be to acquire and develop the winning edges in your field that can mean all the difference between success and mediocrity.

Today, strategies and techniques for achieving success at every level of business, and in every activity of life, are more widely available and proliferating more rapidly than at any other time in human history. And we can all benefit from them by seizing them and applying them to our lives.

The purpose of this book is to share with you a system of proven principles, or “laws,” that have been discovered and rediscovered, practiced and implemented, by the most successful businesspeople everywhere, in every kind of organization, large and small, throughout the history of business enterprise. The practice of these laws will give you the winning edge.

When you know and understand these timeless truths, you will gain a tremendous advantage over those who do not. When you organize your life and business according to these universal laws and principles, you can start, build, manage, or turn around a business or department faster and easier than perhaps you ever thought possible.

The more you incorporate these principles into your daily thinking and decision making, the more effective you will become. You will attract and keep better people, produce and sell more and better products and services, control costs more intelligently, expand and grow more predictably, and increase your profits with greater consistency.

Some of these laws may sound unusual or even controversial when you first read them. Nonetheless, they are timeless truths. They have always existed. They have always worked. They are natural laws. They are embedded in the universe. In the long run, they are inviolable.

Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in A Liberal Education, “The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”

In the same way, these laws are neutral, neither positive nor negative. They are indifferent to your personal beliefs, preferences, or desires. They have always existed in business and always will. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her she despises and only to the apt, the pure, and true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets.”

If you want to cook, you study cooking and you follow the rules and principles regarding the combining of ingredients and preparation that have been found to work successfully in the past. You would not think to add or subtract key ingredients and expect the dish you are preparing to taste the same as if you followed the proven recipe.

By the same token, you would not expect to achieve the same business results accomplished by successful businesspeople by violating the essential laws and principles that they practice year after year.

There is a story of a man who decides to commit suicide by jumping off a thirty-story building. As he plunges toward the ground, someone leans out of a fifteenth-story window and shouts, “How’s it going?”

The falling man shouts back, “So far, so good!”

Many people are living their business lives with this kind of philosophy, “So far, so good!” They are violating natural laws and principles that apply to business life, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. Nonetheless, these truths are immutable and unavoidable. You violate them at your peril. And even if you think you are escaping their consequences in the short term, you will ultimately pay the full price that they demand.

The good news is that when you organize your life and business activities around The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, you are virtually guaranteed to enjoy success and prosperity in your business activities. Just as you reap what you sow, when you put good things in, you get good things out.

Perhaps the most important quality of a successful businessperson is pragmatism. You are pragmatic when you are not necessarily concerned about the origin of an idea. You don’t ask where it comes from or who thought of it first. You ask only one question: Does it work?

You are successful in business and in life to the degree to which you find out what works and then apply that principle wherever and whenever it is appropriate to get a particular result. This book is aimed at giving you ideas and strategies that have been proven, over and over, to work.

Universal laws and principles are similar to telephone numbers in that if you dial the right number, you get through to the desired party. But even if you are brilliant, well educated, sincere, determined, and intelligent, if you dial the wrong number, you won’t get through.

Year after year, thousands of companies underperform or even go out of business because either the key decision makers in those companies did not know these universal laws or they attempted to violate them and succeed anyway. Even more hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of companies fail to achieve their true potentials in sales and profitability every year because of their violation of one or more of these laws.

Remember that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Even if you do not know the laws, you are not excused from obedience to them. Even if your violation of these laws and principles is unintentional, you will still pay the full penalty in failure, frustration, and underachievement.

My Own Story

My background was not very inspiring. My family never had any money, and I paid my own way with odd jobs from the age of eleven. I left high school without graduating. After working at laboring jobs for some years, I stumbled into sales. I struggled in selling for many months until I began asking the question that changed my life: Why is it that some people are more successful than others?

The Bible says, “Seek and ye shall find, for all who seek findeth.” When I began looking for the reasons why some people were doing better than I was, I began to find the answers everywhere. And when I applied the answers I found, I began to get the same results that other successful people were getting.

There is a “10/90 Rule” in life. This rule says that the first 10 percent of time that you invest in finding out the underlying laws, principles, rules, methods, and techniques of successful action in any field will save you 90 percent of the time and effort required to achieve your goals in that area.

Over the years, I have found that the smartest people are those who take the time to find out the rules of success in any area before they attempt to get results in that area. They do their homework in advance.

In my thirties, I caught up on my formal education. I participated in an Executive MBA program at a major university and received a master’s degree in business and administration. I invested about 4,000 hours of my time studying business subjects and business principles. Over the years, I read hundreds of additional books and articles in my search for the so-called Secrets of Success.

When I was given an opportunity to build a sales force covering six countries, I asked the experts, read the books, listened to the audio programs, and attended the courses on recruiting and building sales organizations. Then I applied what I had learned and practiced the laws and principles that seemed to be the most effective.

In one year, I went from walking the streets, selling on straight commission, living from hand to mouth, to building a ninety-five-person sales force covering six countries and generating millions of dollars per year in revenue.

Later, when I got into real estate development, I followed the same procedure. I borrowed all the books the library had on real estate development and studied them, long into the night. I spent hours with other real estate developers, plying them with questions. Then I optioned a piece of land for $100, put together the necessary financial analyses and proposals, found a financial partner with the strength to underwrite the project, and went on to build and completely lease out a $3 million shopping center in the next twelve months.

When I began importing Japanese automobiles, I followed the same procedure. Within one year, I built a sixty-five-dealer network through which I eventually sold more than $25 million worth of vehicles.

When I became the chief operating officer of a $265 million development company, I applied to my new position the proven, tested laws, principles, and techniques that I had gathered. I completely restaffed, reorganized, and refocused the company, turning it from confusion to profitability in less than a year.

Businesspeople began to hire me as a consultant and as a troubleshooter. In company after company, I used the same procedure. I immersed myself in the business until I had ascertained the underlying “success principles” of that industry or field, and then I applied them. As a result, I was able to save or make my clients millions of dollars time after time.

I then began organizing these ideas and principles into talks and seminars for public and private audiences. Eventually, I created an entire series of seminars and training programs for individuals and businesses, many of which have now been recorded on video and audio. They are taught to businesses across America and throughout the world, in twenty languages and in thirty-one countries.

The reason that these principles, and the seminars and programs based on them, are so successful is simple. They are built around practical, proven techniques that save people years of hard work in achieving the same results. My graduates have applied the ideas they have learned toward generating hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars of increased sales, reduced costs, or improved profits.

Over the years, working with hundreds of businesses and thousands of businesspeople, I have found that all the successful, happy, dynamic, prosperous, and growing enterprises practice these principles consistently in virtually everything they do. And when you do the same things they do, you will begin almost immediately to get the same results.

Most success in business can be easily explained by the consistent practice of these laws. Most failure can be explained by the violation or ignorance of these laws. When you align your activities with these universal principles, you will find yourself getting more and better results with less effort. You will be more relaxed and confident. You will be more optimistic and cheerful. You will be more efficient and effective.

Instead of working yourself into a state of exhaustion, only to feel frustrated and overwhelmed, you will go through enormous quantities of work quickly and easily and get far better results than other people who may be working twice as hard.

There is a simple analogy for the use of these principles that I sometimes share with my seminar audiences. I ask the question, “If you purchased a treadmill and took it home, what would determine how much benefit you got from that treadmill?” Quite quickly, the businesspeople in my audiences reply that the amount of benefit they would receive from a treadmill would be in direct proportion to how often they used it and how long they stayed on it each time.

Here is the point: There is never any question of whether or not the treadmill would help make a person fitter and healthier. Everyone knows that this is a given. The treadmill is a tested and proven device for physical fitness. This has long since been settled.

It is the same when you begin to use these tested and proven laws and principles in your own business life. The question is not whether or not they will work. The only question is how faithfully and consistently you apply them to your activities. And like a treadmill, the more often and the more consistently you apply these laws, the better they will work and the greater and easier results you will achieve.

One final point before we begin. The most common quality of successful people is they are intensely action oriented. They are proactive rather than reactive. They take initiative. When they hear a good idea, they act on it immediately. By taking action quickly, they immediately get feedback that enables them to self-correct and move ahead. They learn and grow from every experience. And they keep trying new things.

When you see a good idea in the pages ahead that you can apply to your work, resolve to take action on it immediately. Don’t delay. One decisive action or decision to do something different can change your whole life.

The only question that should concern you is, Does it work? And these ideas work. They work virtually everywhere, under virtually all circumstances in our business system. And the more you use them, the better they will work for you. The more you align your life with these laws and principles, the happier and more successful you will be. There are no limits.

CHAPTER ONE
The Laws of Life

Why are some people and organizations more successful than others? Why do some people have wonderful careers, moving from position to position, onward and upward, earning far more money, being consistently paid more and promoted faster?

And why is it that others go from job to job, continually worrying about money and feeling that they are unappreciated for their hard work and their contributions? Why do so many people, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “live lives of quiet desperation"?

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