No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline (13 page)

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Authors: Brian Tracy

Tags: #Self Help, #Business, #Non-Fiction, #Psychology, #Inspirational

BOOK: No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline
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Three Simple Steps to Become the Best
 
Becoming one of the top people in your field requires discipline and application more than anything else. There are three simple steps that you can follow to become the very best in your field:
1.
Read sixty minutes in your field each day.
Turn off the television and the radio, put aside the newspaper, and read material about your field for one hour each day before you start working.
2.
Listen to educational audio programs in your car.
Start them and stop them as you listen, so you can
reflect
on what you have just heard and
think
about how you can apply the ideas to your work.
3.
Attend courses and seminars in your field regularly.
Seek them out. Take online courses in the convenience of your own home, courses that enable you to upgrade your skills and give you important ideas that you can use to be even more successful.
 
The power of compound learning, like compound interest, is quite amazing. The more you learn, the more you
can
learn. The more you learn, the better your brain functions, and the smarter you get. Your memory and retention rate improve. The more you learn, the more relationships you find between something you learned at one time and something you learn at another time.
 
Never stop learning and growing.
 
The Achievement of Mastery
 
How long does it take to achieve mastery in your field? According to the experts, the acquisition of “mastery” requires about seven years, or 10,000 hours of hard work. It takes seven years to become a master salesperson. It takes seven years to become a successful businessperson. It takes seven years to become an excellent diesel mechanic. It takes seven years to become an excellent brain surgeon. It seems to take seven years, or 10,000 hours of hard work, to get to the top of any field. So you might as well get started. The time is going to pass anyway.
 
The starting point of your achieving mastery is for you to
commit to excellence
. I have never met a person who made a decision to get into the top 20 percent in their field who did not eventually achieve it. And I never met a person who got there having
not
made that decision. Making the decision and then following it up with continuous, purposeful, disciplined action is essential.
 
Talent Is Not Enough
 
As I mentioned earlier, according to Geoffrey Colvin in his bestselling book,
Talent Is Overrated,
most people learn how to do their job in the first year, and then they never get any better. They just coast in their jobs. But the only direction you can coast is
downhill.
 
Many people will work away at a job for many years and never rise above the average. They will do their job from eight to five, but they never lift a finger to upgrade their skills. They will not invest any time learning their craft unless their company pays for the extra training and gives them the time off to take it.
 
The average person does only an average job, and as a result, he earns an average income and worries about money all his life. He never realizes that often there is only a thin veil that separates the average person from the excellent person. The fact is that “if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.” No one stays in the same place for long.
 
Two Hours Each Day Will Get You to the Top
 
It has been calculated that all you need to invest is about two
extra hours
per day to move from the average to the superior. Only two extra hours each day will move you from worrying about money all your life to being one of the highest paid people in your field.
 
People immediately ask, “Where am I going to get an extra two hours each day?”
 
It’s simple: Take a piece of paper and do the following simple calculation:
• Calculate the number of hours in a week: 7 days times 24 hours equals 168 hours.
• If you deduct forty hours for work and fifty-six hours for sleep, you have seventy-two hours left over.
• If you deduct three hours per day (twenty-one hours) for getting ready for and traveling to and from work, that leaves you fifty-one hours of spare time to do with as you please.
• If you invest two hours per day back into yourself, fourteen hours per week, you still have thirty-seven hours left over. That’s an average of more than five hours per day of free time.
 
All you need to do is devote two hours each day to move you from average performance to superior performance at whatever you choose to do.
 
Form the Habit of Continuous Learning
 
The best news is that when you begin reading personal or professional development literature, listening to audio programs in your car, taking additional courses, and upgrading your skills in the evenings and on the weekends rather than watching television, you soon get into the habit of continuous learning. In no time at all, it will become automatic and easy for you to learn, grow, and upgrade your skills every day and every week.
 
The average adult watches about five hours of television each day. For some people, it is seven or eight hours. They turn on the television first thing in the morning and watch it until they leave for work. They turn it back on as soon as they get home from work. They then watch television until 11 or 12 o’clock at night, going to bed without enough time to get a good night’s sleep. They then get up in the morning, drink coffee, and watch television for as long as they can before they go off to work once more.
 
You Can Be Rich or Poor: It’s Your Decision
 
Your television set can make you rich or poor. If you watch it all the time, it will make you poor. Psychologists have shown that the more television you watch, the lower are your levels of energy and self-esteem. At an unconscious level, you don’t like or respect yourself as much if you sit there hour after hour watching television. People who watch too much television also gain weight and become physically unfit from sitting around too much.
 
Your television can also make you
rich
—but only if you turn it off. When you turn off your television, you free up time that you can then
use
to invest in becoming a better, smarter, and more competent person. When you leave your television off when you are with your family, you will find yourself talking, sharing, communicating, and laughing more often. When you leave your television off for extended periods of time, you break the habit of watching television—and you will hardly miss it at all. Your television can be an excellent servant, but it’s a terrible master. The choice is yours.
 
Increase Your Income 1,000 Percent
 
There is a simple seven-step formula you can use in order to increase your productivity, performance, output, and income by 1,000 percent over the next ten years. It works for everyone who tries it. It is simple:
 
First, answer this question: Is it possible for you to increase your overall productivity, performance, and output by 1/10 of 1 percent (1/1000th) in an entire working day? Your answer will probably be “yes.” If you were to manage your time a little better, and work on more valuable tasks, you would quite easily increase your output by 1/1000th in a day.
 
Having done this for the first day, could you increase your output by 1/10 of 1 percent the second day? And the answer, of course, is “yes.”
 
Having increased your performance by 1/10 of 1 percent on Monday and Tuesday, could you continue to do it for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday? And again, the answer is “yes.”
 
One Half of 1 Percent Per Week
 
One tenth of 1 percent times five days per week equals one half of 1 percent per week. Is it possible for a normal, intelligent, hard-working individual to increase his or her output by one half of 1 percent (1/200th) in a single week? Of course it is!
 
Having done this for the first week, could you keep up the same pace of personal improvement the second week? Of course you could!
 
Could you get one one-thousandth of 1 percent better five days a week for an entire month? If you could, this means that you would be one half of 1 percent better per week multiplied times four, or 2 percent more productive in an entire month.
 
There are thirteen four-week months in a year (4 × 13 = 52). Having become 2 percent better in a month, could you repeat that in the second month? In the third month? The fourth month? And so on?
 
26 Percent Better Each Year
 
Of course you could! By working on yourself a little bit each day—learning new skills, getting better at your key tasks, setting priorities, and focusing on higher-value activities—you can become 26 percent more productive over the course of an entire year.
 
Having achieved this goal for the first year, could you do it for the second year, and then the third? Could you keep it up for ten years? And the answer, of course, is yes. And the best news is that when you continue to work on yourself, it becomes easier and easier for you to get better and better as the weeks and months go by.
 
By the Law of Accumulation, or the Law of Incremental Improvement, by the end of twelve months, you would be 26 percent better. If you continued to improve at 26 percent per year, by the end of ten years, with compounding, you would be 1,004 percent more productive. Your income would increase at the same rate. This formula works—if you do.
 
Seven Steps to the Top
 
Here are the seven steps in the 1,000 percent formula:
 
 
Step 1: Arise Two Hours Before Your First Appointment,
or before you have to be at work. Invest the first hour in yourself by
reading
something educational, motivational, or spiritual. As Henry Ward Beecher once said, “The first hour is the rudder of the day.”
 
When you get up and invest the first hour in yourself, you set yourself up mentally to have an excellent day. You will be more positive, alert, creative, and productive all day long when you start your day by investing the first hour in yourself.
 
If you read in your field one hour per day, that will translate into about one book per week. One book per week will translate into about fifty books per year. Since the average adult reads less than one nonfiction book per year, if you were to read fifty books in your field each year, do you think that would give you an edge in your profession? Do you think that it would move you ahead of virtually everyone else in your business? Of course it would!
 
If you read fifty books per year for ten years, this would be 500 books that would help you improve your productivity, performance, and income. At the very least, you would need a bigger house just to hold your books. And you would be able to afford it!
 
Reading one hour per day in your field will make you a national authority in three to five years. This alone can give you your 1,000 percent increase over the course of your career.
 
 
Step 2: Rewrite Your Goals, Every Day.
Get a spiral notebook and rewrite your major goals in the present tense every morning before you start out, without looking back at what you wrote the previous day. This writing and rewriting is the process of programming instructions into the guidance mechanism of your mind.

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