Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  Second, it appears to be a blinding flash of the obvious. It seems to be so simple and so evident that you often have the “Aha!” experience. You wonder why you hadn’t thought of it before. Of course, the reason you hadn’t thought of it before was either that you weren’t ready or that the timing was not right.

  The third way that you can tell a superconscious solution is that it always comes accompanied by a burst of joy and energy, a feeling of elation that makes you want to take action immediately.

  If you get a superconscious solution in the middle of the night, you will be unable to sleep until you get up and write it down or do something about it.

  There is the famous story of Archimedes taking a bath and suddenly having the superconscious solution that enabled him to determine the proportions of gold and silver in a wreath made for the king. He became so excited that he ran through the streets of Syracuse naked, shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I have found it, I have found it!”)

  When a superconscious solution comes to you, even after a long period of mental and physical effort, you will get a feeling of excitement, joy and enthusiasm. You will have a burst of “free energy.” You will want to implement the solution immediately. You will feel happy and confident and sure that it will work.

  When you have clearly defined goals and detailed plans, backed by a positive mental attitude and a calm, confident expectation of success, you activate your superconscious mind into bringing you virtually anything you could ever want in life. When you affirm positively, visualize clearly and believe absolutely, you will be led irresistibly to do and say the right thing at the right time in every situation. You unlock your full potential for health, happiness and prosperity. You bring yourself into complete alignment with the greatest power of the universe.

  ACTION EXERCISE

  Schedule one solid hour of solitude during which you sit perfectly still for the entire sixty minutes. Discipline yourself to do this as soon as possible. During this period of silence, shut everything else out of your mind. Just push your problems aside for the moment. Let your mind wander. Daydream. Don’t try to think of anything specific. Temporarily step outside of your work and personal life. Turn everything over to your superconscious mind and release all your cares and worries.

  Sometime during this hour, your mind will go calm and clear. You will feel relaxed and happy. And with no effort at all on your part, exactly the answer you need at that moment will come to you.

  At the end of the hour get up and follow your intuition. Do what your superconscious has guided you to do. Don’t worry about whether someone else will approve or agree. The answer will be exactly right, and you’ll probably never make another mistake.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Master Decision

  Everything we’ve talked about in this book up to now will succeed or fail for you depending upon your ability to apply it to your life. The master decision is the key to personal liberation, happiness and high achievement.

  The starting point of personal liberation is for you to accept complete responsibility for who you are and for everything that you become. You must accept, without reservation, that you are where you are and what you are because of yourself. If you want things to change, then you must change first. Your thinking determines your attitude, your conduct and your behavior, and they in turn largely determine your success or failure in life. Because you are always free to choose the content of your conscious mind, you are always fully responsible for the consequences of what you think.

  You can dream big dreams, learn how to control both your conscious and subconscious minds and improve your self-concept and performance. But none of these efforts will give you any lasting benefit until you embrace personal responsibility.

  When I was twenty years old, having failed high school, I was living in a tiny one-room apartment and working as a construction laborer in the middle of a very cold winter. I had almost no money. I was far from whatever home I’d had and I wasn’t planning to go back. One night, as I sat alone at my little kitchen table, it suddenly dawned on me that everything that I would ever become was completely up to me. No one else was going to do it for me. Someone once said, ’True maturity only comes when you finally realize that no one is coming to the rescue.” That revelation suddenly opened my eyes. I was never completely the same again.

  You are programmed from infancy to believe that someone or something else is responsible for much of your life. When you are a child, if you are fortunate, your parents take care of everything. They provide you with food, clothing, shelter, educational opportunities, recreation, money, medical attention and whatever else you need. You are entirely provided for by other people. You are a passive player in the process.

  It is normal and natural that our parents provide for us during our formative years. The problems begin when people come into adulthood with the unconscious expectation that somewhere, somehow, someone else is still responsible for them and for their situation. But from the age of eighteen onward, and sometimes earlier, you are in the driver’s seat. You are the architect of your own destiny. Whether or not your parents have succeeded in raising you as a totally self-reliant individual, from that moment forward there is no looking back. Everything you are, everything you become from then on, is up to you.

  In one of Tolstoy’s short stories, he writes about a group of children who are told that the secret of happiness is hidden in the backyard of their home. They will be able to find it and possess it forever as long as they refrain from doing one thing. They must not think about a white rabbit while they are searching for the secret. Each time the children go out to search for the secret they try not to think about it. But the harder they try, the more they think about a white rabbit, and of course, they never do find the secret of happiness.

  RABBIT HUNTING

  Everyone has a “white rabbit,” and sometimes, many white rabbits. These are the excuses that you use to avoid setting clear goals and making total commitments to the things you really want. Since the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life, you need to become a skilled thinker if you sincerely desire to fulfill your potential. Part of being a skilled thinker is to objectively analyze any mental blocks, or excuses, that you have that you may be using as reasons for not moving ahead.

  Some of the most popular “white rabbits” that people use as excuses are self-limiting ideas, such as “I’m too young,” or “I’m too old,” or “I don’t have any money,” or “I don’t have enough education,” or “I have too many bills,” or “I’m not ready yet,” or “I can’t do it because of my boss, my children, my parents” or some other reason.

  What are your personal “white rabbits”? What are your favorite excuses for not making the changes that you know are necessary if you are going to achieve your goals and fulfill your dreams? Go “rabbit hunting” in your own life. Root them out and run them down. Carefully analyze them to see if they have any validity.

  Here’s a simple way to test your excuses. Ask yourself: “Is there anyone, anywhere with my problem or limitation who has succeeded in spite of it?”

  If the answer is “yes,” you know that your excuse is not valid. It is not a legitimate reason for your failure to make progress. What one person has done, someone else can do as well. The disease of “excusitis,” the inflammation of the excuse-making gland, is invariably fatal to success. If you have it, resolve to get over it right away before it sabotages all your hopes for great success.

  THE WAY OUT

  The acceptance of complete responsibility, the giving up of all your excuses, is not easy. It’s one of the hardest things you ever attempt. That’s why most people never do it. It is like making a parachute jump for the first time: It is both scary and exhilarating. When you cast free from your excuses, as when you leap out of the plane, you suddenly feel completely alone, completely vulnerable. However, in a few moments, you start to feel a rush of excitement, your heart starts pounding faster and you feel rema
rkably happy and free.

  You can never give responsibility away. The only thing that you can give away is control. And you know, from the Law of Control, that you only feel good about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life. If you try to make someone or something else responsible, you end up giving them control over your emotions. You are still completely responsible, but by giving up control, you lose your peace of mind.

  Self-responsibility is the core quality of the fully mature, fully functioning, self-actualizing individual. Superior men and women take both the credit and the blame for everything that happens to them. People who are failures take credit for their successes, but they blame their problems on bad luck, other people or circumstances beyond their control. Successful men and women have a strong sense of internal accountability, which extends to their work and to all of their relationships. Failures try to evade accountability at every turn.

  Sometimes I ask my seminar audiences the question, “How many of you are self-employed?” Usually, fewer than 20 percent of the audience raise their hands. Then I point out to them that this is a trick question. I tell them that the biggest mistake one can ever make is to think that one works for anyone but oneself. We are all self-employed, no matter who signs our paycheck. You are the president of your own personal services corporation. You are in charge.

  The top 3 percent in every field treat their company as if it belonged to them. They see themselves as self-employed. They act as if they own the place. When they refer to their company, they use words like “we” and “our” and “my” and “us.” The average employee, on the other hand, always refers to the company as if it were something separate and apart from him or her, as if it were just a job, with no other meaning or significance.

  There is a direct relationship between how much responsibility you are willing to accept for results and how high you rise in any organization of value. There is a direct relationship between your income, your status, your position, your level of prestige and the recognition you receive, on the one hand, and the amount of responsibility you are willing to accept, without excuses, for achieving the goals and objectives of your organization, on the other.

  Here’s an easy question: If you were an employer and you had two people working for you, one who treated the company as if it belonged to him, and another who treated it as just a job, a place to come from nine to five each day, which one of these two would you be most likely to promote? Which one would you want to invest in? To which of these would you give additional training? For which of the two would you create opportunities for advancement? I think the answer is obvious.

  YOUR STATEMENT ABOUT YOURSELF

  Your attitude toward self-responsibility is one of the most important statements you can make about yourself and the kind of person you are. Everyone can be located somewhere on a scale, from high acceptance of responsibility, all the way down to low acceptance of responsibility, or irresponsibility.

  A highly responsible person tends to be positive, optimistic, self-confident, self-reliant and self-controlled. A person at the lower end of the scale, with an attitude of irresponsibility, will be negative, pessimistic, defeatist and cynical, as well as aimless, fearful, unsure and often neurotic or mentally unstable.

  Thomas Szasz, the controversial psychiatrist, says, “There is no such thing as mental illness; there are merely varying degrees of irresponsibility.”

  Self-responsible individuals tend to be positive and mentally healthy. Irresponsible individuals tend to be negative and mentally ill. This observation brings us to one of the most important discoveries in the history of human psychology and personal performance.

  There is a direct relationship between how much responsibility you accept in any area of your life and how much control you feel in that area. In turn, there is a direct relationship between how much control you feel in any given area and how much freedom you feel you have in that area. Responsibility, control and a sense of freedom, or autonomy, go hand in hand. The equation looks like this:

  RESPONSIBILITY = CONTROL = FREEDOM

  There is also a direct relationship between responsibility, control and freedom, on the one side, and the number of positive emotions you enjoy, on the other. In other words, there is a direct relationship between the level of responsibility you accept and how positive and happy you are overall. Self-responsibility and mental health go hand in hand. They are always in balance. Here is the equation in its shortened form:

  RESPONSIBILITY = POSITIVE EMOTIONS

  At the lower end of the scale, people with attitudes of irresponsibility, who feel that they are not responsible for their life or what happens to them, also feel they have little control, or feel out of control entirely. They feel that they have little or no ability to make a difference in their life. Nonresponsible people feel that they are controlled by external forces and by other people.

  This feeling of not being in control causes them to feel a lack of freedom, to feel trapped. An attitude of irresponsibility, feeling out of control and feeling trapped triggers negative emotions, such as unhappiness, anger and frustration. Here then is the opposite equation from the above:

  IRRESPONSIBILITY = LACK OF CONTROL = LACK OF FREEDOM

  In its shortened form, the equation looks like this:

  IRRESPONSIBILITY = NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

  THE “ROBBER” EMOTIONS

  Negative emotions are the “robber” emotions of life. They are the primary causes of underachievement and failure. They make people physically and mentally ill, ruin relationships and destroy careers. They cast a shadow over everything a person tries to do. Negative emotions strip out any joy a person might get from any achievement. They are totally harmful and are the great enemies of human happiness.

  The elimination of negative emotions is job one for the person who aspires to great success and achievement. Nothing is more important. Peace of mind is the highest human good, and peace of mind only exists in the absence of negative emotions. You can’t be negative and at peace at the same time. One cancels out the other.

  When I began studying this subject some years ago, I was astonished to discover that virtually all the problems that we have in life are rooted in negative emotions of one kind or another. It became clear to me that if you could find a way to eliminate negative emotions, your life would be wonderful. All the mental laws described earlier would begin to work in your favor. You would accomplish more in a short period of time than the average person accomplishes in years.

  On the other hand, the failure to eliminate negative emotions would undermine all your efforts and take much of the joy and pleasure from anything you managed to accomplish. Negative feelings would cause the mental laws to work against you. Destructive emotions could cause you more grief and heartache in a shorter period of time than any other factor in your life.

  I saw clearly that the elimination of negative emotions was central to the achievement of all lasting health, happiness, freedom and prosperity.

  The insight that changed my life was the discovery that negative emotions are completely unnecessary and unnatural in the life of man. There is no need for them. They serve no good purpose. They are only destructive. They are the major reason men and women fail to grow and evolve to higher levels of consciousness and character. And you do not have to suffer them at all if you consciously choose to get rid of them.

  Up to that time, I had always thought that negative emotions were a normal and natural part of being a human being. I thought that, just as you have positive emotions, you have negative emotions. They were a part of human nature, to be accepted as inevitable, just like the rain or the sunshine.

  Then I learned that no one is born with negative emotions. Have you ever seen a negative baby? Every negative emotion that we experience as adults, we had to learn, starting in childhood, through a process of imitation, practice, repetition and reinforcement. And since negative emotions are learned, like most things, they can be u
nlearned, and you can be free of them.

  Many people have a hard time with this subject. They have been negative for so long that they find it difficult to accept that negative emotions are completely unnecessary. They resist the idea that they can be eliminated. Of course, the Law of Belief states that whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. If you absolutely believe that negative emotions are a necessary part of your life, then they certainly will be, and they will remain so. However, it is easy to prove that negative emotions serve no useful purpose. Realizing this is the first step to getting rid of them.

  THE MOST COMMON NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

  The most common and easily identifiable negative emotions are doubt and fear. There are also guilt and resentment, which usually go around together, like twins. Then there is envy, the root negative emotion of socialism, communism and much political demagoguery. This is followed closely by jealousy, that great destroyer of happiness and relationships.

  More than fifty negative emotions have been identified. But they all eventually boil down to and are expressed in the core negative emotion of anger. Anger is perhaps the worst of all the negative emotions, the most powerful and the most destructive. Anger, once generated, is always expressed, either inwardly or outwardly.

  If it is expressed inwardly, as when you suppress or repress your angry feelings, you make yourself sick. If you express your anger outwardly, you harm your relationships with others. You make them unhappy, and in extreme cases, physically ill.

  How do you feel when you are angry? How do you think or reason? How do you get along with others? How do you sleep or digest your food? When you’re angry, doesn’t it feel as if there was a dark cloud over your mind? Don’t you find that you cannot concentrate or think straight? Doesn’t your mind become totally preoccupied with the object of your anger? Don’t you talk furiously to yourself as you rehash what happened, how you were wronged, and what you’d like to do to even the score?