Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  He bought a couple of books on jogging and started running a little each day. He got the right clothes and the right running shoes. He increased his distance each week and soon began doing “fun runs” and mini-marathons. Within one year, he ran his first marathon, 26.4 miles. He fulfilled his vision and became the person he had imagined he could be. Most important, he felt fitter, thinner, stronger and more energetic than he had felt for many years.

  LOVING RELATIONSHIPS

  The third ingredient of success is loving relationships. These are relationships with the people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how well you are doing as a human being. Most of your happiness and unhappiness in life comes from your relationships with others, and it is your relationships with others that make you truly human.

  A key quality of the fully functioning person is that he or she has the ability to enter into and maintain long-term friendships and intimate relationships with other people. The very essence of your personality is demonstrated in the way you get along with others, and the way they get along with you.

  At almost any time, you can measure how well you are doing in your relationships by one simple test: laughter. How much two people, or a family, laugh together is the surest single measure of how well things are going. When a relationship is truly happy, people laugh a lot when they’re together. And when a relationship turns sour, the very first thing that goes is the laughter.

  This is true for companies as well. High-performance, high-profit organizations are those in which people laugh and joke together. They enjoy one another and their work. They function smoothly and happily as teams. They are more optimistic, more open to new ideas, more creative and more flexible.

  I used to think that people were an important part of any business. Then I learned a great truth; people are the business.

  The furniture and fixtures can be replaced. The products, services and customers will change over time. But if you have the right people, the company will continue to prosper.

  The most important single responsibility of the executive is to ensure harmony and happiness among the people he or she is responsible for, to create a climate of optimism, enthusiasm and high morale. This “esprit de corps” is the distinguishing quality of all world class organizations.

  What is your ideal relationship? Who would it be with and what would it look like? If you could design your important relationships in every detail, what would you want more of, or less of? What could you do, starting today, to create these conditions in your own life?

  Without a clear idea of what you really want in a relationship with another person, you will probably find yourself in situations not of your own choosing. Problems in life are almost invariably “people problems.” They come with hair on top, and talk back.

  People problems do more to disrupt your peace of mind and undermine your health than perhaps any other factor. One of your chief aims in life must therefore be to create a human environment in which you can be happy, contented and fulfilled. You must examine your relationships, one by one, and develop a plan to make each of them enjoyable and satisfying.

  Only when you have your relationships under control and functioning harmoniously can you turn your thoughts toward the self-expression and self-actualization that enable you to fulfill your true potential.

  FINANCIAL FREEDOM

  The fourth ingredient of success is financial freedom. To be financially free means that you have enough money so that you don’t worry about it continually, as most people do. It is not money that lies at the root of all evil; it is lack of money. Achieving your own financial freedom is one of the most important goals and responsibilities of your life. It is far too important to be left to chance.

  Fully 80 percent of the population are preoccupied with money problems. They think about and worry about money when they wake up in the morning, while they’re having breakfast, and throughout the day. They talk and think about it during the evening. This is not a happy, healthy way to live. This is not conducive to being the best you can be.

  Money is important. While I put it as number four on the list of ingredients of success, it is an essential factor in the achievement of the first three. Most worry, stress, anxiety and lost peace of mind are caused by money worries. Many health problems are caused by stress and worry about money. Many problems in relationships are caused by money worries, and one of the main causes for divorce is arguments over money. You therefore owe it to yourself to develop your talents and abilities to the point where you know that you can earn enough money so that you don’t have to worry about it.

  A feeling of freedom is essential to the achievement of any other important goal, and you cannot be free until and unless you have enough money so that you are no longer preoccupied with it. One of your main aims in life must be to provide for your own financial independence, without self-delusion, procrastination or trusting to luck.

  Imagine that you had a magic wand and you could wave it to design your financial life in any way you wanted. What would your life look like if you achieved all your financial goals? What difference would it make in your day-to-day activities? What would you be doing more of, or less of?

  How much would you like to be earning one year, five years, ten years from today? What kind of lifestyle would you like to be enjoying? How much would you like to have in the bank? How much would you like to be worth when you retire?

  These are very important questions! Most people never ask and answer them in their entire lives. But if you can be perfectly clear about where you want to go financially, you can learn what you need to know and do to get there. Many graduates of my seminars have gone out and changed their lives from rags to riches. They have become presidents of large corporations. Some have become millionaires. They have started and built their own successful businesses, or been promoted rapidly in their companies or industries, but only after they decided what they wanted.

  When you decide exactly what you want your financial picture to look like, you will be able to use this system to achieve your goals faster than you might have imagined possible. It all starts with your defining your financial future clearly and then making a plan to realize it. Everything will follow from that, as you’ll learn later in this book.

  WORTHY GOALS AND IDEALS

  The fifth ingredient of success is worthy goals and ideals. Perhaps your deepest subconscious drive, according to Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, is the need for meaning and purpose in life. To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need a commitment to something bigger and more important than yourself. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to your world.

  Happiness has been defined as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” You can only be happy when you are working step by step toward something that is really important to you.

  Think about what sort of activities and accomplishments you most enjoy. What were you doing in the past when you were the happiest? What sort of activities give you your greatest sense of meaning and purpose in life?

  SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-AWARENESS

  The sixth ingredient of success is self-knowledge and self-awareness. Throughout all of history, self-knowledge has gone hand in hand with inner happiness and outer achievement. The phrase “Man, know thyself” goes all the way back to ancient Greece. To perform at your best, you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do. You need to understand the forces and influences that have shaped your character from earliest childhood. You need to know why you react and respond the way you do to the people and situations around you. It is only when you understand and accept yourself that you can begin moving forward in the other areas of your life.

  PERSONAL FULFILLMENT

  The seventh ingredient of success is a sense of personal fulfillment. This is a feeling that you are becoming everyth
ing that you are capable of becoming. It is the sure knowledge that you are moving toward the realization of your full potential as a human being. Psychologist Abraham Maslow called this “self-actualization.” He said it was the primary characteristic of the healthiest, happiest and most successful men and women in our society.

  A major benefit of this book is that it will show you how to be your own psychologist. You will learn how to achieve and maintain a positive, optimistic and cheerful mental attitude under almost all circumstances. You will learn how to develop a fully integrated, fully functioning, fully mature personality.

  Defining the seven ingredients of success gives you a series of targets to aim at. When you define your life in ideal terms, when you have the courage to decide exactly what you want, you begin the process of unlocking your hidden powers to succeed. In the chapters ahead, you will learn a proven system of thought and action you can use to achieve whatever goals you can set for yourself. But knowing where you want to end up is the first and most important step.

  • • •

  In Chapter Two you learn the Seven Laws of Mental Mastery and how to use them to create whatever life you can imagine for yourself. In Chapter Three, you learn about your Master Program and how it controls every aspect of your thoughts and feelings about yourself. You learn how to reprogram it, to bring it into alignment with what you really want in your life.

  In Chapter Four, you learn about your Master Mind and how to harness your mental powers for maximum achievement. You learn methods and techniques practiced by the most successful men and women of our age to achieve their goals.

  In Chapter Five, you learn the Master Skill of success. You learn perhaps the most powerful process of goal-setting and goal-achieving ever organized and presented in one place. This Master Skill will enable you to accomplish more in the next one or two years than many people accomplish in a lifetime.

  In Chapter Six, you learn about the Master Power, the Super-conscious Mind that is always available to you. Proper use of this mind enables you to accomplish virtually any goal you can set for yourself. The discovery and application of the superconscious faculty underlies all great success in the human experience, and you will learn to use it as naturally as breathing in and breathing out.

  In Chapter Seven, you learn the Master Decision you must make before you can activate your higher powers for personal and business success. You learn the critical difference between high achievers and low achievers. You learn how to take complete control over every aspect of your experience and how to make your life into something truly wonderful.

  In Chapter Eight, you learn about the Master Goal, inner peace, and how to organize every aspect of your life to assure the greatest happiness for yourself and the people around you. You learn the root causes of stress and negativity, and how to eliminate them from your life. You learn how to be more positive and optimistic in everything you do.

  In Chapter Nine, you begin drawing together everything you’ve learned in previous chapters into a focus on achieving greater effectiveness with the people in your life. In Mastering Human Relationships, you learn the foundation principles of interpersonal psychology and how to get along better with others in almost any situation.

  In Chapter Ten, Mastering Personal Relationships, you learn how to be happier in your romantic relationships. You learn why relationships succeed and why they fail. You learn a series of simple things you can do, or stop doing, that can transform your relationships overnight, and sometimes even faster.

  In Chapter Eleven, Mastering the Art of Parenting, you learn how to be an excellent parent. You learn how to interact with your children, at any age, in such a way that they grow up happy, healthy and self-confident. You learn how to neutralize mistakes of the past and build loving relationships that endure for the rest of your life.

  Finally, in Chapter Twelve, Mastery: The Power of Love, you learn the “secret of the ages,” the most powerful force in the universe, the shaper of character and destiny, and the one thing that really matters. You learn the key to becoming fully human, to nil-filling your potential. You learn how to incorporate the principles of love into everything you do and into everything you are.

  When you begin to practice what you learn in this book, you’ll enjoy greater peace of mind, better health and energy, more and better loving relationships, greater financial freedom, exciting goals and ideals to which you can commit yourself, enhanced self-knowledge and self-awareness, and a wonderful feeling of personal fulfillment and personal achievement.

  The ideas, insights and practical guidance contained in the pages ahead will bring you greater health, happiness and prosperity than you have ever experienced. As you apply these principles to your life, you will see improvements in yourself, your situation and the people around you that will appear amazing. Your whole life will open up and expand toward the horizon of your possibilities as you move onto the high road of Maximum Achievement.

  APPLICATION EXERCISE

  This system is intensely practical. Each chapter contains exercises for you to do. They are designed to empower you with the tools you need to take complete control of your life, and for these tools to work, you must practice with them. You must discipline yourself to do the exercises in sequence so you receive the full benefit of their cumulative effect.

  Your first exercise has been described throughout this chapter. It is for you to take the brush of your imagination and begin painting a masterpiece on the canvas of your life. It is for you to decide clearly what would make you the happiest in everything you are doing.

  Decide what’s right for you before you decide what’s possible. Create your ideal life in every detail. Don’t be concerned about the process of getting from where you are to where you want to go. For now, just focus on creating a vision of your perfect future. In the chapters ahead, you will learn how to turn your visions into your realities.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Seven Laws of Mental Mastery

  There is more practical information available today on how to achieve success in any field than there has ever been at any time. Yet, only 5 percent of the population are financially independent at the end of their working lives. Fully 80 percent of people working today would rather be doing something else, and 84 percent of them, by their own admission, feel that they are working below, even far below, their potential. Only 5 percent feel that they are producing at their full capacity in their jobs.

  More people are sick, overweight, unfit and unhealthy than ever before. The United States spends more of its gross national product on health care than any other nation, and the costs are increasing. Today, we know that an enormous amount of illness and disease is caused by negative mental attitudes and unhappiness of various kinds. People actually make themselves sick and poison their relationships with their own thinking.

  America is a free society. All choices are open to the individual. People can do anything, be anything, go anywhere, change any part of their lives for the better, whenever they want. Why is it then that so many people persist in their negativity and pessimism when they are free to think anything they want? Why is it that so few people are living up to their potential?

  THE SEARCH

  When I was growing up, it never occurred to me that if you wanted to be good at something, you had to study it thoroughly and practice it diligently. I had the idea that things just happen. Health, happiness, peace, prosperity and high achievement just occur in the course of human destiny if you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

  Living with this idea, as the great majority do, puts a person under the Law of Accident. This law, which becomes a law to the degree to which it is accepted by default, is the governing principle for most people. In its simplest terms, it says that failing to plan is planning to fail.

  If you want to be a doctor, you study and practice medicine. If you want to be a good cook, you study cooking by getting cookbooks and using proven recipes. If you want to live a life full of joy
, happiness and self-fulfillment, you study the happiest and most successful people you can find and then do what they do until you get the same results in your own life.

  This was an amazing thought to me. It seemed so simple! Surely it couldn’t be as easy as that. And of course, it’s not. Nothing really worthwhile is easy. It’s an erroneous belief that, if a thing is right, it should be easy, like a relationship. If you have to really work at it, some people say, then there’s probably something wrong with it. This kind of thinking is fatal to happiness.

  As I began my quest for the holy grail of the good life, I formulated three basic operating principles that helped me immeasurably.

  First, life is hard. It always has been and it always will be. It’s never been any different for you or me or anyone else. The good thing is that if you accept this basic truth, life somehow becomes a little easier because you don’t suffer so much from feelings of frustration and injustice.

  Second, everything you are or ever will be is up to you. You are where you are today because that is where you have chosen to be. You are always free to choose your actions, or inactions, and your life today is the sum total of your choices, good and bad. If you want your future to be different, you have to make better choices.

  Third, and perhaps most important, you can learn anything you need to learn to become anyone you want to become, to achieve anything you want to achieve. There are very few limitations and most of them are on the inside, not on the outside.

  If necessity is the mother of invention, then pain seems to be the father of learning. We seem to need the prod of frustration and distress before we open ourselves up to new ideas and ways of doing things. This was certainly true for me in my early twenties.