The Unbreakable Laws of Money and Success with Brian Tracy

So I ask a very simple question. Do you have written goals and plans to achieve those goals? If you don't, then step aside. You can work for someone else who does. If you don't have goals, you have to work for someone else who has goals. People say, well, it's not that important. You cannot even imagine what happens. In this book, what we do is we explain the 12 mental laws of success. And what they are is that when you set a goal and write it down, and review it on a regular basis, you program it deeper and deeper into your subconscious and then into your superconscious mind. And then you begin to attract into your life people, circumstances, ideas that will help you to move faster towards your goal and will start to draw your goal faster toward you.

Mr. Brian Tracy, welcome back to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. We are here to talk about your brand new book, The 32 Unbreakable Laws of Money and Success. So here's my first question. What the heck does MMM and SMS mean? Can you explain that to our listeners?

Yes. Well, what I have found, because I've done these seminars all over the world for people in 105 countries, and the number one goal for everybody is to make more money.

Mmm.

Is everybody wants to have more money. Why? It's because everyone has different reasons for wanting more money, but money gives you freedom. The more money you have, the more things that you can do. 80%, the 80/20 rule, 80% of people think about and worry about money all day long. They go to sleep at night worrying about money. They wake up in the morning, it's their family conversation. They're all worried about money. But the fact is, that everybody who has a lot of money today, including millionaires and billionaires, started with nothing. And then they did something different from the average person. And what I've done over the years is I've done thousands of hours, about 50,000 hours of research. I love this show that you're on because I teach my children, readers are leaders. Readers are leaders. The only way you can get ahead in life is by learning and practicing new things. And you could only get that from primarily from reading. So what I've done is I've put, taken all of these ideas and I've used them myself, by the way. I went from rags to, I say, non-rags. I live in a beautiful 5,000 square foot house in a beautiful neighborhood on a golf course. And things have worked out well because I've practiced the same things that I encourage other people to practice. So that's what we're talking about. The second SMS is that the only way that you can make more money is by creating value. And you create value by selling more stuff, by finding ways to sell more stuff. One of my favorite examples, and don't let me monopolize, but is Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos started off with an idea when the internet was freed up by the government, And made available to everybody. People thought there was just sort of like a Facebook thing. You just, you communicate, you just send messages back and forth. He said, no, no, you could sell stuff on this internet. They said, no, no, it's not for selling stuff. You go to the store to buy stuff. So he came up with this idea of selling books. It was something that he could do. He could farm it out. And he began to sell books at 30% off. Delivered in 7 days, and it took off. And for 10 years, he saved and borrowed and invested money, never made a profit for 10 years. And then at the 10-year point, it turned. And today, he's the third richest man in the world. He's worth billions and billions of dollars. Why? Because he found a way to sell more stuff. And that's your each person's job. Every person who has a website. is in the business of selling stuff to somebody, helping people to achieve their goals better, faster, cheaper, easier than any other alternative that's available. So that's what we do. And our whole, our whole job, your job, my job is to help people to improve their lives, especially financially. And that's what this book does.

Well, you're an absolute legend and that's amazing advice. I mean, it seems so simple, sell more stuff. So the question I have is somebody who is struggling to sell more stuff, what are the first steps they can take to help increase and sell more stuff?

Well, this book, by the way, I'll show you a picture of it. It's called The Unbreakable Laws of Business, Money and Business Success. It's based on 3,000 years of research How do people go from rags to riches in one generation? And some of the ways are very simple. One is they have very clear goals. And this is the most important thing. I was just talking to one of my Spanish distributors on the phone a few minutes ago, and he was saying that every single person who is successful has clear written goals and plans to achieve them and works on it every day. So I ask a very simple question. Do you have written goals and plans to achieve those goals? If you don't, then step aside. You can work for someone else who does. If you don't have goals, you have to work for someone else who has goals. People say, well, it's not that important. You cannot even imagine what happens in this book. What we do is we explain the 12 mental laws of success. And what they are is that when you set a goal and write it down, and review it on a regular basis, you program it deeper and deeper into your subconscious and then into your superconscious mind. And then you begin to attract into your life people, circumstances, ideas that will help you to move faster towards your goal and will start to draw your goal faster toward you. Without written goals, you haven't got a chance. Especially, you don't, don't have a chance if you're competing with people who have clear written goals and plans that they work on each day. The second thing that we teach was priorities. Successful people set priorities on the use of their time. When you start off in life, you have no money but lots of time. What you do is then is you start to spend more and more time doing things of higher and higher value. And again, This 80/20 rule comes along to bite you in the butt. It says that 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your results. However, these are the hard and difficult things, the things that people procrastinate on and put off. They do the bottom 80% of things because they're fun and easy and friendly, and they go for lunch with their friends and they chat around the office and so on. One of the things I say to people, If you're going to be successful, get out of the office. There are no customers in the office. There's no customers in the office. Get out of the office. If you were in the office, you were officially unemployed. You were basically contributing no value to yourself or anybody else. Get out of the office. There's a very simple formula to double your income is double your face time. Now, what does that mean? It means that your income is determined by how many people you talk to and encourage to buy your product or service. So therefore, if you wanna double your income, double the number of people you talk to each day. I've taught this to thousands of people in my seminars. The average entrepreneur, self-owned business person, sales professional, the people watching this call on maybe 2 new people per day. That's the average. Some are above, some are below. Some don't call on 2 new people in a week. But if the average is 2 and you are the average, then what you do is you call on 4 new potential customers per day. 4. What will happen is because of the law of probabilities, the law of averages, and so on, you'll double your income. And I've had people come back and say, this is a bunch of BS. I've been in my business for 10 years. You can't tell me you could double your income. I said, look, Give it a try. Just try it and see what happens. And they email me and they say, I couldn't believe it. Within a week, I've been earning twice as much as I ever earned in my life. I'm thinking of getting a new house now and a new car. I'm taking my wife on vacation. I mean, they're just shocked at what happens when you just focus on the top priority and ask yourself, of everything that you could do, what is the one thing that will enable you to make more sales and make more money and just do that and become very good at that, become very good at revenue generation. That's why you need to read. And this is what you guys do, which is one of the most important things of all is encourage people to read. We say the key to success is learn from the experts, learn from the experts, learn from the people who have paid years and years to get to the point where they are. And people who are successful love to tell other people how they did it. And they love to write books about it. People always say, why you should write a book about your story. The interesting, the average successful person reads about 1 book a month on success, business success, sales, time management, and so on. The average non-successful person reads less than 1 book per year. If you read one book per month, that's 12 books a year. That's 500 books in the course of your career. You're gonna become one of the highest paid and smartest people in the world. And just by reading an hour a day, you read a book a week. One book a week times 52 weeks is 50 books in a year. You'll get the equivalent of a university education in financial success just by reading. And And what I do all the time is I meet you and I'll probably talk to you offline is I say, what one book would you recommend to me? Basically what you've read recently, what is your one book? And whatever it is, I buy it immediately. I don't hesitate. I turn to my iPhone and I immediately order. I have books stacked up every— I have 6,000 books in my house. I've read most of them, by the way, but not all. I'm planning, we all, they say human beings are the only creature that buy more books than they'll ever be able to read in a lifetime. But the fact is that books are founts of wisdom. One good idea in one book can transform your business, can double your income, can unlock your potential. So this is what successful people do. Anyway, I'm getting excited because I really want our listeners to be more successful financially. And one last thing is associate with winners. Get away from people who are going nowhere with their life because it rubs off on you at an unconscious level. It's associated with people who are going ahead. I remember a gentleman who was in one of my seminars said he joined this company as a salesperson and there were about 20 salespeople. And he, of course, was hanging out with the lower-level salespeople. And he noticed that 3 or 4 of the salespeople were hung out together. They were the top performers in the company. So he sort of moved over to them and began to ask them for advice. And they said, well, you should do this and do that and do this and do that and read this and try this and go to this seminar and so on. And so he did. And they began to embrace him and take him in. Within a year, he was one of the top people in his company. Within 3 years, he was one of the top people in the industry. He earned more money than he ever dreamed possible because he just asked successful people how to be more successful. It's not— it's so simple that you can do it. Today, there are something like 38 million millionaires in America alone. 38 million. That's almost 1%, or is it 10%? Almost 10% of the population are now worth more than $1 million. And almost all of them started with nothing. And if 38 or 40 million people can become millionaires, if you don't become a millionaire, I say you should be taken out behind the barn and beaten with a stick because the fact is it's never been easier and never been more possible. than it is today. And that's what this book does. This book gives you in a condensed form, the people who have read this book in the publishing industry say this is going to be the Think and Grow Rich book of the 21st century. This contains every single idea for making a lot of money sooner, faster. And so there's no tricks, no gimmicks. These are the ideas that I focus on. And it's amazing. I was just talking to one of my clients this morning and he was reminding me of something that people say to me all the time, all over the world, email. They come up to me on the street and they say, you changed my life. You made me rich. You changed my life. You made me rich. And I'm happy to say I've had a lot of compliments over the years, but that one I like the most. And I've heard it 1,000 times. You changed my life, you made me rich. And I say, what was it about my material that was so helpful to you? And they beam, they smile, and they say, it was the goals. It was the goals and the time management. I never understood how important goals were until I read your material. And then I wrote down my goals and it was something like a miracle. It's almost like you create a force field of energy in the universe that starts to attract to you everything that you need to achieve the goal, but you have to write it down. If it's not in writing, it's just like cigarette smoke in a big room. It just disappears.

Yeah. Brian, for those non-millionaires listening, we need to take them behind the barn and then beat them with your book. I think that's the solution.

Yes.

And so I was recently in Iceland working with an author client of ours and he was telling me a story about how you were doing a seminar in Iceland and he had a chance to get dinner with you. And listen, I'll tell you what, you've sure made him rich. And, uh, he gives all the credit to Mr. Brian Tracy for everything that he learned at your sales seminar. So I know it to be true. I'm curious, uh, why do you think books are such a great way to learn as compared to so many of the other popular mediums these days, like YouTube videos and online courses? And by the way, I'm on your side. I think books are the best way to learn.

Well, books are the best way, but they're not the only way. So therefore, some people, by the way, are much more motivated by hearing someone speak, by what they can see visually as opposed to what they can read. So what I've always done is I've called it the golden triangle is books, audio programs, and seminars. Books, audio programs, and seminars. My life has been totally changed by a single audio program, a single book, or a single seminar. Sometimes you can go to a seminar. For example, I had a friend who's no longer in business now, but he came up with a seminar called Selling Higher Priced Products Against Lower Priced Competition. And what a great subject. So I went to his seminar, And he, that's all he did was he traveled around the country and gave this one seminar on how to position yourself to sell higher priced products against lower priced competition, which is the biggest single obstacle that people say people don't buy because they can get it cheaper. So he explained exactly how to do it. That seminar for the rest of my life was valuable to me. I taught other people these ideas as well. How do you position Your summary. How do you message your product or service? Because nobody buys a product because of the price. Everybody thinks it's the price. I say to my audiences, I'll say, I say, oh, by the way, price is never the reason for buying your products or services. And the whole audience goes, boo, boo, boo, as you don't really understand that all they wanna know is the price and they want the cheapest and so on. I say, okay. Let me prove this statement. Is there a single person in this room, 2,000 people, who has a single item about their person that they bought solely because it was the cheapest available? How many people? Not a single hand in 2,000 people. Price is important if everything else is the same, but price is never the reason for buying something. Your job is to find out What is the reason that people will buy your product or service? And then emphasize that so that a prospective customer knows exactly why they should buy from you and buy it now. If you can do that. When I was in my 20s, I fell in love with advertising and I got a job as an advertising writer, a copywriter with the biggest agency in the city. It's an incredible story. But it taught me how to write good advertising. And today almost everybody sells online. So therefore you don't have a chance to speak, but you do have a chance to write. And writing good copy is phenomenally helpful. One good line, for example, the turning point for Apple, which was almost bankrupt, they came up with this idea. They said, we need a new product. They came up with the idea of the, what do they call it, this little gadget that held songs on it. What was that called?

iPod.

iPod.

iPod. Yes.

The idea of the iPod and they came up with one line and the line was iPod, 1,000 songs in your pocket. That turned Apple around, took it from almost bankruptcy to becoming one of the first trillion-dollar companies in history. Now, after that, they added other products and other services, and then the iPhone. Interesting thing about the iPhone is they realized that they had to have something that was really different and really better, something that everybody wanted. And they came up with the idea of the iPhone and they designed the specs and so on. but the complications of the engineering and the software and so on. So they looked around and they found that Nokia, which was the top company for cellular phones in the world, Nokia had developed an iPhone-type product, but they decided that they were doing so well with their simpler cellular phones that they weren't gonna do anything with it. However, when you, when you develop a product in that business, you register your patents. So the patents are available, you can read the patents. So they looked around, looked around and they found that Nokia had developed the fundamental technology for an iPhone and they went to Nokia who now had 50% of the world market. They went to Nokia and they said, could we license your technology? And they said, sure, we're not gonna do anything with it. If we license it, at least we can make something out of it. So they did and they signed it up and that became the foundation for the iPhone. Within 5 years, Apple was the number one company in the world for telephones and Nokia was bankrupt. And the second company that had 50% of the market was BlackBerry. And BlackBerry also went bankrupt. BlackBerry said, this is a nonsense product. Nobody will ever use it. We don't need to compete with these people. And 5 years later, they were gone. And now iPhone, everybody uses an iPhone and for good reason. It's an absolutely incredible tool. I mean, you see people everywhere walking around. If I sometimes ask my audience, I say, have you ever started off for work in the morning and realized that you left your phone at home? And people say, yeah. I said, what did you do? And everybody goes like this. They turn around and they went back home immediately to get their phone. They cannot be away from their phone. And it became a trillion-dollar company. Unbelievable. Well, there's all kinds of products and services that you can bring to the market that help people achieve their goals faster, easier, more economically than ever before. And you can sell them and you can start a fortune. One good idea is all you need to start a fortune. It's like starting an engine, you'll run, run, run. Now, here's what we know is that it takes 4 to 5 runs at a new product or service before you find a way to sell it. What do most people do? They try it once or twice, doesn't work, they quit. What do successful people do? Jeff Bezos again, I like that. He says there's no such thing as failure, there's only feedback. So we don't have any failures in this company. Some things work, some things don't work. If it doesn't work, figure out why it didn't work and move on. And so therefore everybody is encouraged to make as many mistakes as possible because the more mistakes you make, the faster you move towards your goals. That's one of the things that we teach in this, in this book is the importance of taking action continually in the direction of your most important goals. So, goals are everything, but there's one more principle that's so important in this, and it's called the Law of Superconscious Activity, one of the 32 laws. The Law of Superconscious Activity goes back several thousand years into human history. All religions, all philosophies, all technological breakthroughs, all great art, all great music, is based on superconscious stimulation or articulation. And what it says is that if you have a very clear goal in your mind, then you set up a force field of energy in the universe that starts to attract people, circumstances, ideas, money, everything that you need to achieve the goal. And the most important thing is write it down, write it down, write it down. that people who write down their goals earn on average 10 times as much as people who don't. Now, people are skeptical. They say, well, that wouldn't work for me. And they don't understand my market is different, blah. Now, look, what does it cost you to sit down with a pad of paper and write your goals? What I do is I've been doing this for years. This is my pad. And I write down my goals every day, write them and rewrite them and rewrite them and rewrite them every day, every day. It takes how long? Oh, 5 to 6 minutes to write down your goals each morning. You know what happens is like stomping on the accelerator of your success. You start to move rapidly toward achieving your goals in ways that you cannot imagine today. You don't even know what they are, but somebody's gonna walk up to you and say, have you ever thought of doing this or doing that? Like the iPhone, when they said to Steve Jobs, we should have come out with a telephone that has all these features in it. And everybody said it'd never work. People don't wanna take pictures and record things with their telephone. They just wanna make calls. No, no, no. When Jobs took over, went back into Apple, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. It had 2 months left of money and then it would be bust. And he had to do everything possible to save it. He found that they were producing 104 different products and only 4 of them were making money. The others were just costing money to keep alive and so on. But everybody who was producing those products had a vested interest in it. So they fought against canceling the product. So he basically reorganized the company and had them cut all the way down, all the way down to 4 products. Then they had extra money. Here's one of the things that people don't realize. One of the richest men in the world today is Bill Gates. And Bill Gates has built one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft. Anyway, Steve Jobs used to beat up Bill Gates and Microsoft and call them an old stodgy company and they're not original and they're not creative and they're not all these things. And they used to debate in front of college audiences back and forth. And Steve Jobs was always beating up on Microsoft. And then he found himself when he went back in, company was almost broke and he had to have Millions of dollars to keep the company alive. So he called up Bill Gates and he said, Bill, he said, I know we've had a lot of disagreements in the past. He said, but my company's on the verge of going bankrupt and I need some money. He said, would you lend me some money? Because Microsoft is very profitable. And Bill said, Steve, he said, forget the past. He said, your company is too important. To go broke, I will not lend you money. I will buy shares in your company, so there's no no debt. I will just become a shareholder with you in in Apple, and I'll help you in every way possible to be successful, to survive and be successful. And that was the turning point. And it's a most people don't know that. I mean, you can read it in various journals, but Microsoft saved. Apple at the critical moment. And that's what happens when you have a clear idea of what you want and what you need. Things totally unexpected. Imagine Bill Gates after beating him up for 10 or 15 years, Bill Gates turned around and saved the company. It's just, you think, wow, wow, why?

Right?

He wrote a goal, he set a goal, he determined exactly how much money he needed. And then instead of having to borrow the money, which would you have a huge load on a small company. You just simply took in Bill Gates as a shareholder, which means that money was not repayable and was not a debt and so on. So I just say over and over again, rule after rule in terms of finance and business and like the law of attraction is one of the great laws is that basically if you have a very clear idea, you attract into your life Everything you need to achieve the goal. And people say, well, they're skeptical, but they're skeptical in a way about themselves. They say, no, it wouldn't work for me. Well, why wouldn't it work for you? Why are you judging yourself negatively before you even try it? Because it doesn't cost anything except a few moments and a written spiral notebook. Just write out your goals. And see what happens. I used to give a coaching program and I charged $5,000 per year and you would come to my, it was a group coaching. You'd come to my offices and we have 20 or 30 people per session. They would come in and they would work with me for a full day every 3 months. So it was 4 days, $5,000. And people said, that's a lot of money to charge. I said, well, I'll give you what I call my double-double guarantee. And my double-double guarantee is I will guarantee that you'll double your income and double your time off with your family within 12 months, or I'll give you your money back. Now, the minimum income you had to have to come to this program was $100,000. It'd probably be a quarter of a million today. But I said, so therefore, if $100,000, that means you'll get at least $100,000 more than you expected. And people said, well, on that basis, I'll sign up for the program. And then what I would do on the first day, just to make sure I never had to give the money back, I would give them a spiral notebook and I say, I want to introduce you to your new best friend, spiral notebook. And what we're going to do is we're going to write down our goals. I put them through a goal writing exercise. And then I said, what I want you to do, and I'm saying this for the people watching this, is every day open up your spiral notebook to a clean page without looking back, without looking back, just from memory, and write out 10 goals. Write down 10 goals. And then next day, tomorrow, 10 more goals, 10 goals without looking back so that you will start to write different goals. You'll start to write bigger goals. You'll drop off certain goals and so on. Do that for 30 days and I promise you, you double your income. I had 1,000 business owners earning between $100,000 and $500,000 who came through my program over 7 years and not one person ever asked for their money back. Most of them doubled and tripled their income within 30 or 60 days. They just couldn't believe it when they came back from the first session. Came back to the second session. I'll tell you, remember that song, There's a Party Here Tonight? Everybody came back and they were all happy and laughing and high-fiving each other. They never earned so much money in their lives. And God gave them lots of other ideas too. But one was just write down your goals every day, first thing in the morning, takes 3 to 5 minutes, and just watch what happens. And it works. If people watching this would just do that, then everyone would double their income. And people say, well, that's not possible. Well, why do you judge yourself negatively before you've even given it a try? Just give it a try. If you hear a good idea from anybody for the rest of your life, give it a shot. The only thing that can happen is, as Jeff Bezos said, there's no such thing as failure. There's only feedback. And the only way that you succeed is by failing. You succeed, you will fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, huge success. Everybody who was successful today has failed over and over again. And so this is really important. And these are some of the things that we teach in this book, one after another after another. And it'll really pay off for you.

Brian, I'm loving, I'm loving everything that you're saying, man. Time flies when you're having fun. We've only got a couple of minutes left. So I want to turn it over to Luke to kind of wrap things up here, but we definitely will include a link to the book in the caption and we'll be posting about it on our social media. I love that you're calling it the Think and Grow Rich of this next generation, which is so cool. But Luke, maybe you can bring us home here.

Absolutely, Brian. This has been such a blast. I always love to ask this question to all of our guests who come on, and this is the last question. It's this: you pass away and all the information, all the books, the 80+ books that you've put out, and all the courses and all the resources disappears, but you can leave the world with a single piece of advice. What would it be?

It would be that you have unlimited potential in what you can do, have, and be, and only limited by your own imagination. If you can think it, if you can believe it, you can achieve it. And that's the greatest of all discoveries is there are no limits in the outside world. All the limits are on the inside world.

Oh, absolutely. If only people took that advice to heart. This has been so amazing, Brian. Thank you so much for your time. I could listen to you probably for hours just talking. You give so much wisdom and value. Thank you so much for coming on today. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you. And I hope that the next time I see anybody on this show, They say to me, you changed my life. You made me rich. I love it. Well, that's what you guys are doing. You're helping to change people's lives and make them rich. Yes.