Brian Tracy argues leadership is a learnable skill built on taking complete responsibility and delivering measurable results. He covers seven core responsibilities: setting goals, marketing, prioritizing tasks, solving problems, and leading by example. Edison's persistence through failure and Occam's Razor for simple solutions anchor the practical framework.
Chapters
So let's talk about session one. It's leadership. We say session one is become a great leader. And we say your personal leadership ability is the major limit on what you can achieve. And that's your ability to take charge. It is basically your ability to accept complete responsibility for yourself and your whole life. If you can do that with no excuses and you know exactly what you want to accomplish, you immediately move to the top. It's interesting, it's not politically correct, but I want to explain this to you. And if we look at animal life on Earth, we start with the plankton, a single cell organism, and then we have amoeba, and then we have multiple cells all the way up to the human being. And we assume that the human being is the highest level of development of organisms on the Earth, the most complex, and it is. However, people then stop without realizing that we have very low levels of human beings as well. Primitive people who live in the jungles and so on. And, and as you move up, you move up through your own effort and the development of your own mind, you move to higher and higher levels of human beings and your evolution is completely under your control. So we have in our society and in this room, people who are developed to a very high level. And worldwide, there are people, nuclear physicists, great scholars, Nobel prize winning mathematicians. These people are a lot higher up than the person in the New guinea woods living on, on pig poop. You know, my point is that we continue to grow and rise amongst human beings to the degree to which we work on ourselves. And working on yourselves means seeing yourself as in charge of your own life and having a very clear goal or purpose and then working toward that on a continuous basis, that moves you up. It makes you a better person, a happier person, a more productive person. It gives you more energy, it strengthens your immune system, it releases endorphins in your brain. So you're happier and more creative by the very fact of taking charge of your life and working towards something that's important to you. You become a leader by deciding to become a leader. So we say that leadership is the most important factor for business success. When the team is losing, they don't fire the team members. They bring in a new coach or a new general manager. Leadership is the ability to get results. Now, I have worked in this subject for years and I've read all the books. I've written. My book, by the way, how the Best Leaders Lead, was ranked in New York as the number one business book of the year last year. So I know the subject a little bit, and people say, well, be a leader and lead, and so on and so forth. But leadership to me can be distilled to a single concept. It's the ability to get results. If you can get the results that are expected of you in your position, you're a leader. And leaders emerge when people need other people to get results. 3. Leaders have a clear vision of the future. They know where they're going. They have a clear major goal for themselves and or for their business. Leaders have the courage to take action with no guarantee of success. This is one of the most important of all success principles, is that there's never any guarantee that you'll be successful. As a matter of fact, there's a very high likelihood that you will fail at least the first few times out. The greatest successes have been the greatest failures over and over again. You know the famous story by Thomas Edison when he had conducted 5,000 experiments seeking for the proper filament for an electric light bulb. They sent a reporter out to his factory in New Jersey from New York, and they said, Mr. Edison, why do you persist after 5,000 failures in this oddball idea? Everybody knows human beings are meant to light their way through life with kerosene lanterns and candles. And he said, you don't understand. He said, I have not failed at all. I have merely identified 5,000 ways that will not work, which puts me 5,000 ways closer to the way that will work. It's just a matter of time. And he had a basic rule. He said, once I have decided to invent something, I will not stop until I am successful. And so he kept sending people back to the drawing boards over and over again. I will not stop until I'm successful. So therefore, whenever you try something and everybody here has failed countless times, it's just realize that you've identified at that time one more way that will not work. And so that puts you one step closer to the way that will. And going back to that concept of three feet from gold, each time you dig a new hole, you could be getting just a little bit closer. And maybe all you got is dirt when you dug that hole. But you could be just a little bit closer to hitting the mother lode. So set and achieve seven responsibilities of leadership. One is to set and achieve business goals and also to set and achieve personal goals. Number two is to market and innovate, to continually seek faster, better, cheaper, easier ways to create and keep customers. This is the primary responsibility of a business, is to create and keep customers. Number three is to Set priorities and work on key tasks. And these are really important to have clear goals. Continuously innovate on the way to the goals and set priorities. Remember, choosing what to do more of and what to do less of determines the entire course of your life. Number four is to focus and concentrate where superior results are possible. And I can spend, by the way, I spent half a day with these seven principals speaking to a group of managers. And we start to expand them out and go different directions and pick top priorities and pick areas of focus and concentration, solve problems and make decisions. Interestingly enough, the only thing that stands between you and I and our goals are problems, obstacles, hindrances, things that hold us back. And so the ability to solve problems is the key to success. And how do you solve problems is you focus on solutions. It's one of the most amazing darn things. If you ask what successful people think about, most of the time they think about their goals and they think about solutions to the obstacles that hold them back. And so whenever you have a problem for the rest of your life, the way that you neutralize the negativity involved in a problem is you merely say, all right, what's the solution? Instead of focusing on the problem and who did it and who's to blame, focus on the solution and the actions that you can take immediately become intensely solution oriented. It's the characteristic of leaders. Leadership is the ability to solve problems. Success is the ability to solve problems. The only thing between you and anything you want is a problem or an obstacle. Number six, lead by example. Now, this is one of the great characteristics of leaders, is that leaders always realize that everyone's looking at them. And so they carry themselves as though if everyone behaved like me, then this would be a better world. This goes back to the great philosophers. And here's the question. What kind of a business would my business be if everybody in it was just like me? And that is a great question. What kind of a family would my family be if everyone in it was just like me? What kind of a country would my country be if everybody in it was just like me? This is called the. There's an expression that explains this, but it's the great question from Immanuel Kant, which you use to judge every behavior. If more people did what I'm doing, would this be a better world? Would this be a better company, better family, better relationship? And if you ask this question, you'll find that most of the things that are socially accepted are socially disastrous. Because if everybody went on welfare and everybody rioted and Everybody took food stamps and everybody stayed on unemployment for two or three years. And if everybody lived off the government, what kind of society would we have? And the answer is unsustainable. It would be unsustainable. And number six, perform and get results. This is the great job you perform and get results. So this brings us to our exercise and what I want you to do here is answer questions revolving around these seven. We say leadership is action, not position. Leadership is not a title. It's what you do physically. When you act like a leader, you become one. So when you take the behaviors, take the actions of a leader, you become a leader at that moment. Number all leadership skills are learnable with practice. So please answer these questions. What are your three most important business goals right now? It's a bit of a repetition, but write them down because they may even have changed since earlier this morning. What are three ways that you could market your products and services faster, better, cheaper? What are your three top priorities for yourself and your business or your financial life right now? In what areas should you focus and concentrate your time and resources? Remember, you can only do one thing at a time. If you can only do one thing or two things or three things, what should they be? What are the three biggest problems or obstacles you are facing right now? And six, what is the simplest way to solve each of the problems in number five, I have to tell you something that's really important. It's about what is called Occam's Razor. Anybody heard of Occam's razor? Occam's razor is a principle developed by William of Ockham in 1242 in England. He's a philosopher. And what he basically said, kind of springboarding off of Socrates. Now, Socrates said that the simplest, the correct solution to any problem is usually the simplest solution. And so therefore, instead of looking for complicated solutions, look for simple solutions. What William of Ockham did is he said the correct solution to any problem is usually the ones that has the fewest number of steps, which is again, the simplest solution. So therefore, you always look for something that's very simple before you look for something that's complicated. I was working with some friends and they were brainstorming, mindstorming to sell 1 million copies of a book that they were writing. And Bob Allen and Mark Victor Hansen and they wanted called the One Minute Millionaire. And they were looking for how could we sell a million copies of the book? And set a world record for selling a million copies of a book immediately upon release? And they brought about 30 or 40 people together in a big table, big, round, circular square table to brainstorm this question. And so I asked them all, have you ever heard of Occam's Razor? Nobody had heard of it. I said, well, Occam's Razor says to seek the simplest solution. And what is the simplest solution is sell 1 million copies to one customer. And they say, well, who's going to buy 1 million copies? Well, what if you didn't say, not talking about price, what if you went to a company that has millions of customers that gives them gifts every year? And so they say, what companies would that be? American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Instaprint. There's a lot of companies that have millions of customers. What if they were to buy it, Customize every book in conjunction or in cooperation with American Express, sent out with a letter from American Express and the president in the front with American Express Services in the back, and they would buy and send out a million copies. Now, other than that, find two who will send out 500, who will buy 500,000 each. Find 10 companies who will buy 100,000 each. Well, that just totally transformed the whole dialogue. And they went out and did it and sold a million copies. Now, they didn't use it the same way. They finally came out to find. Likes to find what is. It was because I was one of them, find, I think 10,000 people buy 100 copies each. And so they went to all of their friends everywhere, gave them fabulous discounts and everything else. And we all bought 100 copies and gave it to our friends as gifts, and they sold a million copies. In other words, Occam's Razor. So when you look at the solutions, what is the simplest, easiest solution of all? And sometimes it's do something different. Sometimes it's just stop doing what you're doing. It's stop, start, more or less. Stop, start, more or less. So look for a simple solution rather than a complex solution. Number seven. What are your three biggest and best opportunities right now? This is a great question. Number eight. What step could you take immediately to take advantage of these opportunities? What three behaviors of yours are most important in setting a good example to others? Ooh, ooh. Number 10. And what are the most important results that are expected of you? What one action are you going to take immediately as a result of your answers to these questions? So, please begin.
