Brian Tracy explains what separates winners from losers: winners take the first step while losers make excuses. He identifies the two biggest time-wasters as staying in the wrong job and wrong relationship, and argues that taking action is what generates everything that follows.
Do you know what the difference between winners and losers is? One of the differences. Winners take the first step. Losers always have an excuse. Winners say, okay, I'm going to do it. And they do it. They take the first step. That doesn't mean they jump off a cliff. It just means they take the first step. And if you take the first step, the second step will appear and the third step will appear. It's almost like those lights that light up as you walk along. Well, what happens is you take the first step, every subsequent step will appear, and surprise, surprise, you'll turn around a week, a month, a year, or some years later, look back, and you'll have accomplished extraordinary things. People say, well, you're sure lucky, Sherlock wasn't luck at all. I worked at it and worked at it and worked at it. So it's really important. And with regard to achievement, one of the things that I'm adamant about is every person, as I said this morning, has to commit to being in the top 10% of their field. If you don't want to be in the top 10% of your field, if you don't care enough to be in the top 10% of your field, what that tells you is that you're in the wrong field and that you're in great danger of wasting your life. Because the greatest regrets that people have is they turn around when they're 40 or 50 and say, I don't know why I stayed in that job for 20 years. I hated it from the time I got in it. So the greatest time wasters in life, the two major time wasters in life, can you guess what they are? Number one is staying in the wrong job. And the wrong job is one you don't want to be excellent at. Because if you want to, if it's the right job, you want to be good at it and you're willing to make the efforts. The second is to stay in the wrong relationship. Staying in the wrong relationship for years and years, because at the end of the day, it's all gone. Everything you invested is gone. You've had a couple of experiences. Great. It's like being run over by a car. You've had some experiences, but what happens is you spend all that time at the engine, you got nothing. You start over. So it's really important that you look at the great time wasters.
