Transcript of a Brian Tracy video answering Facebook questions about his core values and principles for success. He identifies his foundational values as: family, faith, and freedom; and lists five cardinal principles: accept responsibility, set clear written goals, continuous learning (at least an hour/day), focus on serving customers with high-quality products/services, and persistence (never give up). He emphasizes action—take one specific step based on these ideas.
Chapters
Hi there. Throughout the year I've received a lot of questions from my friends on Facebook. So we've decided to sit down and answer these questions and let me give you my thoughts and insights and experiences and they may be helpful to you. And questions from one person may be a question that you might have asked yourself. So let's get started.
Hua from Facebook asked Brian, thanks to you for being a great resource of inspiration. I love to watch your videos. I would be interested to hear what are the key foundational values that guide your life and affect the decisions you make. Thanks for your response in advance. Best regards, Hua from Finland.
Well, thank you. The question of values is very, very important and there are three day seminars on values clarification. A good friend of mine, a very wise man, says that you can change your life by asking the question what is my most important value in life? Every day for a weekend, for seven days, just ask it over and over again. What is my most important value in life? Because in life everything radiates from the inward outward. So your values are like the axle around which your life turns. So to answer your question, my values are family, faith and freedom. And that sounds like something out of a Reader's Digest book, but it's the result of many, many decades of thinking about it. My family is more important than anything else. Here's the key point is whatever value you place higher takes precedence over all lower order values. That means that my family takes precedence over everything. My family's needs, my family's requirements, the needs of my children, my wife, and so on. Always number one. Everything else is secondary to that. Now second of all is faith is I believe in God and so I do spiritual reading every day. And I believe very much that there is a great power out there that cares about me and that wants me to be successful and happy. So I'm very respectful of anybody's religious beliefs and I'm very thoughtful about my own. And then the third is freedom. My other third greatest value, which I have practiced all my life, which I've been passionate about, is freedom. Freedom for myself, freedom for my children and my spouse, but freedom for people. I think it's not possible for anybody to be too free. There's a lot of confusion about the subject of freedom in the world today. Many people who want to be as free as possible themselves feel that other people should be controlled by government regulations and taxations and legislation and law and so on. So nobody believes in having their own freedom restricted, but they certainly believe that other people's freedom should be restricted. But the rule is simply, this is, whatever you want for yourself, you must also want for other people. Whatever you want for yourself, you must want in equal measure or more for other people. And so that's my family, faith and freedom.
Daniel from Facebook asked, I'd like to know your five cardinal principles which serve as the foundation for your massive success.
Well, that's like asking me to do a seminar. But if there were five principles, number one is to accept responsibility. That was the turning point in my life when I was 20 years old, when I realized that everything that ever happened in my life was going to be up to me and that I was responsible. My life changed dramatically from that point onward. No complaining, no excuses, no blaming other people, no feeling sorry for yourself. But number two is to set goals, is to set very, very clear, specific goals for each part of your life in writing and make plans to accomplish them and then review and work on those goals every day. The third principle is continuous learning. And what I have found over time, by the way, that these are the same principles that all successful people use. Continuous learning means that you dedicate at least an hour a day or more to. To learning. A friend of mine just wrote a book called Rich Habits, and he said one of the differences between rich people and poor people is rich people read and learn an hour to two hours a day, and poor people do no reading or no learning at all. If you go into the homes of rich people, they're full of books. Go into the homes of poor people, there's no books. And so aggressively seeking out additional information and recognizing it today with a rapid rate of change, if you're not continually learning new material, you're falling behind far faster than you can imagine. So the fourth principle would be to, if you're going to be in business, is to focus on your customers, is to realize that you're in this world to serve other people in some way. And the better you can serve other people, the more happy and satisfied you'll be, but also the more money you'll make. When I teach my business seminars, I teach people that 90% of business success is the quality of the product or service you offer and the positive difference it makes in the life of other people. And so always focus on producing quality products and services and also in doing quality work. The most respected, most successful, highest paid people are people who do really good work and produce really good products and services. And probably the fifth principle is persistence. Persistence, tenacity, determination, the decision in advance that you will never give up once you have started to work toward achieving your goals is considered by many to be the most important principle of all. If you have that, you can overcome virtually any obstacle in life. But if you don't have persistence, you can have every advantage and nothing will happen. So those would be my big five Accept responsibility, set goals. Dedicate yourself to continuous learning. Dedicate yourself to serving other people with high quality work and high quality products. And never give up. Now, I've given you a couple of ideas, so the most important thing that you can do is to take action. So what one action are you going to take as a result of these key ideas that I've just given you?
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Whatever it is, jot it down and let me know. Remember, one action that you take that you would not have taken in the absence of this discussion can change your life forever.
