“Your success is unrelated to your educational background…”

—Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy’s one-hour video tape, Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires, describes 21 principles that put one’s life into focus and itching for action. Drawing on numerous polls and surveys of self-made millionaires, he declares that your success is unrelated to your educational background, your grades, or even your intelligence. (Most self-made millionaires are of average intelligence.)

So what are the secrets? Here is a sampling:

Dream big dreams. Our lives are shaped by what we think about.
Do what you love to do. Surveys show that self-made millionaires became wealthy when they started doing the things they enjoyed—they got good at them.

Focus on your unique strengths. Ask yourself: What do I do easily and well that’s difficult for most people?

Never think about failure. Successful people suffer set-backs. But they see them as pointing the way to success.

Set clear goals. Oil billionaire H.L. Hunt put it best: “There are two rules—decide what you want, and decide what you’ll have to do to get it (and start doing it).”

Spend time around the right people. Harvard’s David McClelland has proven that associating with people you want to emulate helps you succeed, whereas being with failures will drag you down.


Do one thing at a time. With your goals, what’s the most valuable use of your time right now? Do first things first and second things not at all.

Be honest with yourself and others. Are you fulfilling 100% of your commitments to those who depend on you? A reputation for integrity will get you help when times are tough.

Be utterly persistent. Your most valuable asset—and sometimes your only one—is your unwillingness to quit.

Discipline yourself. Tracy says self-discipline is the quality that makes the previous tips work. Successful people do what they must do, when they must do it—like it or not.

Now get going!

These same traits and action are necessary for sucess in the barter marketplace:
SUCCESS

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 10:24 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs & Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.