Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (10 page)

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Technological Advances

The explosion in
technology
and high-speed computers is literally breathtaking. Today, you can e-mail a message around the world to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people simultaneously, in a matter of seconds, at a cost of pennies. The World Wide Web gives you access to tens of millions of other Internet users, as well as to the accumulated knowledge stored in more than 50,000 libraries and research institutes. Instantaneous transmission of data enables the money markets to move a trillion dollars per day, sometimes in seconds, making it impossible for countries to control their currencies, much less their economies.

In the twenty-first century, you will own a laptop computer with a microchip that can process one billion commands per second. It will have a long-life battery and a built-in cellular telephone, connected to cells and satellites that will enable you to communicate instantaneously with almost anyone, almost anywhere in the world.

You will have your own personal telephone number that will enable anyone in the world, anywhere, to telephone you, wherever you are, whether or not they even know what country you are in. And this ccc_tracy_4_52-76.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 54

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telephone technology will probably fit on your wrist like a large digital watch does today.

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Thriving Competition

The third major factor driving our lives is
competition
. Every business organization wants to generate sales and make profits, locally, nationally, and internationally, if possible. To survive and thrive, each person and business must be continually seeking faster, better, newer, cheaper, easier ways to deliver value to their customers.

Every advance in knowledge and technology creates opportunities that fleet-footed competitors can grab and run with to create new products and services to leapfrog each other in their markets.

All three forces—information, technology, and competition—are multiplying times each other to create the greatest rate of change in human history. And if anything, the rate of change is going to increase in the years ahead.

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CHANGE CREATES OPPORTUNITIES

Fully 80 percent of the products and services that you will be using five years from now will be brand-new or completely transformed from today. Probably 80 percent of the jobs being done in five years will be new jobs or jobs that have been completely transformed by the onrush of information, technology, and competition. And the good news is that every single change that takes place opens up more opportunities and possibilities for you to achieve your goals and make greater progress, faster than ever before.

The forces of change impact everything you do. The rate of change is accelerating week by week and month by month. The speed and variety of change is something over which you have no control, and about which you have no choice. The only decision you have to make is whether you are going to be a “master of change” or a “victim of change.” Are you going to be a
creator
of circumstances or a
creature
of circumstances? Are you going to ride the wave and stay ahead of the curve of change, or are you going to be bowled over by it and left in its wake? It will be one or the other, but the impact of change will be forced upon you, whatever you do.

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LEARN FROM THE EXPERTS

If you want to learn how to cook, you study cooking. If you want to be a lawyer, you study law. If you want to be an engineer or an architect, you study engineering or architecture. And if you want to be financially successful, you study others who have become financially successful before you. You find out what they did, and you do the same things, over and over, until you get the same results.

Making money is a
skill
, like riding a bicycle or operating a computer. Because it is a skill, it is therefore learnable by anyone who wants to acquire wealth. If in the past you have accepted the false idea that you cannot make or keep all the money you want, it is now time for you to get rid of that idea. It is a false belief. It is time for you to decide to become financially independent.

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THE GREAT LAW

The Greek philosopher Aristotle first articulated the foundation principle of Western philosophy in about 350 B.C. It became known as the Aristotelian Principle of Causality. Today, we call it the Law of Cause and Effect. This law says that for every effect in your life, there are specific causes. It says that everything happens for a
reason
. Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident, either.

What happens to you is not determined by luck or by coincidence.

It is the result of unchanging law.

My journey from unemployment and poverty to success and financial independence started when I began to study the most successful people in our society. My idea was simple: I would find out what they had done to accomplish so much, and then I would do the same things. Why reinvent the wheel? What I discovered changed my life. It will change yours as well.

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MILLIONS OF MILLIONAIRES

When I began my reading and research in the 1960s, there were seven hundred thousand millionaires in the United States, mostly self-made, having started with nothing. By 1980, according to the IRS, there were 1,800,000 families or individuals with a net worth ccc_tracy_4_52-76.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 56

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of more than one million dollars. Today, there are more than five million millionaires, an increase of 277 percent in 22 years. And most of them are self-made as well. These are men and women who started with little or nothing, often broke or deeply in debt, and who gradually accumulated enough money to become financially independent.

Self-made millionaires come from every walk of life, with every level of education and skill, and with every difficulty, obstacle, handicap, and challenge to overcome that you could ever dream of.

Some are young and some are old. Some are new immigrants who arrived in America unable to speak English, and some are from families that have been in America for generations. Some have excellent educations from the finest universities, and some are high school dropouts. Some have superb physical health and others are in wheelchairs, hard of hearing, blind, or have other physical limitations.

The most important thing to remember is that no matter what difficulties you have, no matter what problems you feel are holding you back, someone else, and probably thousands of other people, have had far greater obstacles to overcome than you could possibly dream of, and they have gone on to become successful nonetheless.

And what others have done, you can do as well.

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EXHAUSTIVE RESEARCH

Dr. Thomas Stanley of the University of Georgia spent more than 30 years studying self-made millionaires. He interviewed thousands of them and compiled his findings into a variety of books, research studies, and reports, including two best-selling books,
The Millionaire Next Door
and
The Millionaire Mind
. His research shows that every single kind of person, from every walk of life, has been able to start from nothing and pass the magic million-dollar mark by doing certain things in certain ways, over and over again.

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START WHERE YOU ARE

When I began studying self-made millionaires, I was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture. I had a used car that was ccc_tracy_4_52-76.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 57

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not paid for and I was deeply in debt. I was between jobs and living off credit cards.

The first thing I found was that self-made millionaires did things
differently
from average people, and I was tired of being
average
. I therefore decided to stop doing what I was doing, which wasn’t working, and to start doing what they were doing. My life has never been the same since this decision.

It wasn’t easy to change my thinking about money and my financial future, but eventually these efforts began to pay off. Like a large ocean liner changing direction, one degree at a time, my habits began to change. Within five years, I was out of debt and making good money. In another five years, I passed the million-dollar mark.

When I look back, I see that it was no miracle. All I really did was to learn what other successful people had done before me and then do the same things until I got the same results.

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GET RID OF THE MYTHS

There are a great many myths about self-made millionaires. If you want to become a self-made millionaire yourself, you must dispel these myths from your own mind. Remember, as the humorist Josh Billings once said, “It’s not what a man knows that hurts him; it’s what he knows that isn’t true.”

Many people have fixed ideas or beliefs about themselves and money that are holding them back. These ideas may be completely untrue, but they will cut off your chances of success nonetheless.

You must get over them.
To achieve something you’ve never achieved
before, you will have to think in ways that you have never thought before.

One myth is that you have to have a great education to become rich. Another myth is that you have to start off with a lot of money.

Some people are convinced that financial success depends on getting a lucky break of some kind, like picking a hot stock in the stock market.

None of these myths are true. In fact, a survey of members of the Forbes 400, the 400 richest men and women in the United States, found that high school dropouts in the group who made it to the list were worth, on average, $300 million more than university graduates on the list.

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THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

The most successful immigrant group per capita in the United States, in terms of starting and building successful businesses, are Russians. Why is this so? It is because the Russians have come from a system where it has been so extraordinarily difficult to succeed that when they arrive in America, believing that America is the land of opportunity, they find that it is much easier to succeed than they have ever experienced.

As a result, Russians start business after business and achieve successes that the average American continually claims are no longer possible. Because they absolutely believe that it is possible for them, they make their dreams come true. Their beliefs become their realities.

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THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

The past president of General Electric Company, Jack Welch, was considered to be one of the best business executives in the world.

He said that the most important single quality of leadership is what he calls the “reality principle.” The reality principle says that
you
must deal with the world as it is, not as you wish it would be.
You must strive to be completely honest with yourself and your situation. You must refuse to engage in self-delusion and the hope that things will work out whether or not you do anything about them.

Especially when it comes to building wealth, you must be totally honest with yourself. You cannot afford to play games with your own mind if you truly want to be wealthy.You cannot wish and hope and pray that somehow you are going to win the lottery or strike it rich as a result of luck or some remarkable external circumstance.

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YOU CREATE YOUR OWN LUCK

Often people ask me about the role of
luck
in success. They are convinced that luck is a critical factor in achieving anything worthwhile. They feel that some people are just lucky and some are not.

They talk about luck as if it were a matter of fate or destiny, largely inexplicable. They insist that a person gets to the top of his field ccc_tracy_4_52-76.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 59

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largely as the result of getting lucky breaks, which they, of course, did not get.

I have studied the concept of luck for many years. My conclusion is that luck is a word that people use to explain away things that turn out much better than could have been expected. If a person achieves great financial success at a young age, people say he was

“just lucky.”

Some people use luck to describe something remarkably good that happens that is out of the ordinary. But it is not luck at all. The fact is that all so-called lucky outcomes are really the result of
probabilities
. There is no such thing as luck.

The Law of Probabilities says that there is a probability for everything that happens. These probabilities can often be determined with considerable accuracy. The entire insurance and under-writing industry is based on probabilities, which are expressed in actuarial tables.

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BECOMING A MILLIONAIRE

There is a probability that you will become a millionaire in the course of your working lifetime. Today in America, one family in 20 has a net worth of more than one million dollars. This means that your likelihood of acquiring a million dollars is one in 20, or 5 percent.

However, this also means that your likelihood of
not
acquiring one million dollars, should that be your goal, is 95 percent. These are not good odds.Your job must be to improve the odds in your favor.Your aim should be to dramatically increase the probabilities of achieving financial independence by doing more and more of those things that will help you to achieve your goal. This principle applies to anything you want to accomplish.

The more different things you do that are likely to help you to achieve your goal, the more likely it is you will do the right thing at the right time. If you set clear, written goals, make detailed plans, and continually upgrade your skills to increase your income, you increase the probabilities that you will earn a good living.