My Decade in Review | Brian Tracy

Hello, I'm Brian Tracy, and today I want to talk to you about my decade in review. What has happened to me in the last 10 years, which have been 10 of the greatest years of my life. There are no limits to what you can accomplish, except for the limits that you place on your own thinking, which means that there are no limits at all. The past 10 years of my life have had many high points and, and a few low points, but it's something that countless people have experienced in their lives. Well, in the last 10 years, I've had seven grandchildren. I have four children, as you know, two sons and two daughters. And two of the daughters, two of the sons are married and one of the daughters, and two of them have three children each, and one of them has one. So I've had seven grandchildren. So when we have families, we all get together. It's really quite amazing. We have to actually have a table for 16 people to get everybody together at once. And we did. And we had a Thanksgiving a bit earlier this year in Los Angeles, and we had 16 people from our family and then people from other families as well. Grandchildren are an amazing thing. They call you Grandpa or Papa Brian or Grandpapa Brian and so on. In the last 10 years, I've done an enormous amount of travel. In 1994, I decided to expand, as a strategic goal, expand my speaking overseas. And I began going to Europe and giving seminars half day and mostly full days. And then I began to expand from Germany. I learned how to speak German and even give seminars in German. And then I began to speak in all the countries around Germany, because the way it works in Europe is people come to Germany to attend international seminars. And then they bring me back to speak in Sweden and in Finland and in Iceland and in Poland and in Slovakia and in Italy and then all over Russia and then all over the Middle east, and then eventually out to India and Pakistan and Japan and all the countries in Southeast Asia and then down into South America. So I have now spoken in 83 countries around the world, probably more than any other speaker in history during this time, by the way. I also wrote and published 86 books, and some of them in as many as 46 languages. The books that I write are based on hundreds of hours of research and they're very, very detailed. They give you how to, how to, how to. They're on leadership and goals and personal success and relationships. And I'm now the best selling time management author in the world. And I continue that and have been for 10 years. I'm also the best selling author in the world on goals. And one of my best selling books is on self discipline. It's called no Excuses, the Power of Self Discipline and it's been published all over the world. I see it on bookstands in airports whenever I travel in Europe and the Far East. It's quite amazing. And I can tell how many I've sold by the royalty checks that I receive every three or every six months. One of the most important things I've done in the last 10 years is, is working with my partners at Branditize. As you know, I built up my business and we had more than 30 people working and more and more were working on online marketing and sales. And so about three years ago we did a reversal and we created a whole separate company called Branditize which is owned by Eric Berman. And all the people who work online sort of transferred. So now my part of the business is focused on speaking and writing books and Eric and Branditajs are focused on online marketing in the English language and also worldwide. And they've built an extraordinary business. All the programs that we offer, our coaching programs, our online programs, go through Branditize and are profoundly changing the lives of many people. It used to be that people would have to fly across the country and maybe even from Europe or Asia to come to one of my two or three day seminars. Today they could just go online and they can subscribe to one of our online coaching programs and they can go on an hour a week or more often or less often, and they can get the very best training and ideas for personal and business success, especially financial success that's available in the world today. And since that's something that you might look into if you are not currently subscribed to one of our coaching programs, just imagine you can have me sharing the best ideas on personal and business success available to you on a regular basis. You can learn more from an hour with me than you might learn in reading several books or going to several courses. Interestingly enough, if you say, well, I could learn this from reading a book, here's a discovery that we've made is you won't do it is people don't buy books and read them anymore. If they do buy them, they just sit there. Americans especially, but also Europeans are the only creature in the universe that will buy far more books than they'll ever read in their lifetime. You're surrounded with books that you'll never read. However, if you come onto one of our programs, what we do is we distill the Best and always the most practical things. I love the expression from the military, now do this, now do this. And so in our programs, we teach you now do this to increase your sales, to increase your profits, to grow your business, to start a business, to change your market. One of the most important things that we started in the last few years is two programs. One is called the two day mba, which is the condensed practical ideas of an MBA program at a major university. And the other is called the two Day Business Reinvention program, where we take you through every aspect of your business, 10 critical areas, and we make sure that every one of them is correct. Because if it's not, you will struggle with sales and profitability. There are 55 different potential business business models being used in the world today. 80% of all companies of all sizes, including Fortune 500 companies, have the wrong business model. It may have been the right business model at one time, but it's not anymore. And so you need to be sure that your business model is working. And Peter Drucker said those wonderful words. He said, the only question you ask is, does it work? Does it work? You can tell if your business model is working, if your business skills are working, because your sales and profitability are growing steadily and predictably every week and every month. If your sales are volatile, they're going up and down and up and down. That means you might be using the wrong business model or you might be missing one of the critical factors that they teach you in an mba. If your sales are flat or if your sales are declining, it means that there's a very good chance you're on your way out of business. There's a very good chance that you are earning a fraction of what you're truly capable of earning. If you had the information that we teach on our coaching programs. Some years ago, I wrote a book and I hired a PR person to promote the book. And after three months, they came back to me and said, radio, television, newspaper are not interested in promoting your book anymore. They're not interested in interviewing you. And I said, why is that? They said, well, because they have an enormous number of books. So they'll only promote a book or interview the author in the three months prior to release and the three months after the release. And then they go on to other books. You know, they're publishing 200,000 books a year with major publishers and maybe 2 million with minor publishers and self publishing. So I said, well, how can I get interviews? How can I promote? And they said, we don't know because you only have a 90 minute window that opens and closes. So I decided something completely preposterous. I decided that I would write a book every 90 days. And I did. And I did that for 26 years. And as I came up with a book idea, I would give the book idea to different publishers. And I now am published by several of the biggest publishers in the world. And I would send them out a proposal on the book and always one of them would say, that's a good idea. I like that. They like the book on self discipline, they like the book on time management, they like the book on goals, they like the book on leadership. And so it would be published by a major publishing house and then they would roll it out and publish it in multiple languages worldwide. So I published a total of 86 books over the course of my career. And I still have a sort of a backlog of 4, 5, 6 requests from publishers. Please, please give us a book. Because some of my books sell 10,000 copies and some sell, sell 10 million, believe it or not. And publishers like it when your books sell a lot. It's like a grocer that sells a lot of products off the shelves. So that's what I've done in reading. And I'm working on a couple of books now that have to do with our social and political and economic situation. But what that means for me is I don't travel as much. I had some medical problems about two years ago. I started to feel really tired and I would be traveling out to Europe and the middle, Middle east. And then I traveling out to Japan and China and middle and Southeast Asia. And I started to get really tired and I thought maybe I was overworking. Once I became so tired, I actually fell out of bed in Dubai and had to be flown back nine days later with a sort of a medical evacuation flight. And I just sort of sat around and rested here at my home for a month and then I went back out again. Well, I went to see my doctors and the doctors took some tests and they said, there's something wrong with you. What you're experiencing is not normal. And they said we need to do some really in depth tests. And what they found was that in one of my surgeries on one of my hips, an infection had gotten in. An infection could be just one cell of bacteria or virus that had gotten in. And it started to grow and grow and grow. And when they started to give me injections, they found that my whole system was poisoned, if you like, it was infected. So they said, well, we're going to have to give you six weeks of shots. So you'll have to cancel six weeks of speaking and go to the clinic every day, seven days a week for six weeks. And that should do it. Well, it didn't and they had to do it again. It ended up them having me into the clinic every day for seven months and only then could they go back in and do major operations and replace the hips and replace the spines and replace amazing darn thing. And then it takes about a year to be able to walk again. So right now I walk around with a walker because your legs atrophy and they get weaker and weaker. As you can see, my mind is clear, but my physical body is tired. So that forces me to travel less and to do more online, which is probably a good idea. I can spend more time with my wife, more time with my children, more time with my grandchildren. And you know, there's always something good in anything that happens. One of my favorite one liners is difficulties come not to obstruct but to instruct. And that within every difficulty that you face, there's an equal or opposite benefit or advantage. So always look for the good. Always look for the good. And so my main takeaway is that life is wonderful. In my programs, I ask everybody, I say complete the sentence, life is blank, blank, blank. And it's absolutely amazing. Especially in my intensive programs on speaking, my speaking academy, everybody writes, life is wonderful, life is interesting, life is fascinating, life is challenging, life is different. But it's amazing how many people describe life as being a wonderful experience. And I absolutely agree with them. And I hope that for you in the next year that life is a wonderful experience for you. And I wish that next year will be the best year of your life to date until next year. Now I'd love to hear from you. So my question today is how can you reflect on everything you've done in the past decade? How will this help you to move forward into the next decade? What have been the biggest problems you've had and what lessons did you learn? What have you been your biggest successes and how can you repeat them? Leave a comment below and I'll be sure to follow up with you. You. Thanks for watching. And remember, if you want to change your future, take action and take action now. If you enjoyed this video and feel it was valuable in teaching you about self reflection, subscribe to my channel like this video and share this video with your friends. Don't forget to click the button on the screen for a free gift. Thanks again for watching.