Successful People Time Management Skills by Brian Tracy (Motivational Video)

There is one thing that all successful people have in common is that they are good time managers. And the reason they are good time managers is because they recognize that time management is life management. It is personal management. I have never seen an example in the hundreds, thousands of biographies and autobiographies I've studied of successful men and women where the individual has not been well organized and efficient and valued and used their times well. Successful people, winners, use their time well. Losers do not. The core of time management, the axle around which the wheel of life turns is goals. What are your goals? What is it that you want to be or to have or to do? What is it that you want to accomplish in the next one, two, three, four, five years? The top 3% in every field have goals. The balance of the population have either very vague goals or no goals at all. So the question you have to ask yourself is, who am I? Where am I going? What do I want to accomplish? And there are three major areas of goals that you have to think about. The first is your personal and your family goals. These are the reasons why you're alive. What do you want to accomplish for yourself and for your family? Write them down. Define them clearly. The second set of goals that you have to ask is your business, your career, your financial, your material goals. What is it that you want to accomplish in the external world? Where do you want to make your contribution? The third type of goals you have to ask about are your self-development goals. And in my estimation, your ability and your willingness and your tenaciousness in developing yourself is the key to accomplishing everything else. So here's three questions that you can ask. The first question is, what would you do? What would you set as a goal for yourself? What would you want to be or have if you just won a million dollars in the lottery? What would you do if you just won a million dollars? If you had all the time and money, you're completely free to decide to do anything you wanted. If you won a million dollars, what would you do differently? Think about that. Hold that in your mind. The second question is, what would you do if you just learned today that you only had six months to live? What if you only had six months to live? What would you stop doing? What would you do more of? Who would you spend time with? Now, the answer to that question is very interesting because what it tells you is what you really value. What is really important to you? And what we have found is that self-esteem, satisfaction, happiness in life comes from getting your goals and your activities congruent with your values, with your priorities, with what you consider to be really important. Now, here's a third question. The third question is, what one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail? If you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that you could not fail, what one thing would you set as a goal for yourself? Because sometimes answering that question will tell you the one thing that you've been put on this earth to accomplish. One final point with regard to goals is that goals must be in writing. You must write them down. You must rewrite them. You must define them. You must redefine them. The top one percent of successful people in every area have very clear, specific, written goals. And most of them carry their goals around with them, plans of action. In an interesting study or a variety of studies that have been done, they've come to the conclusion that organized plans of action are the key to all success. In fact, action without planning is the cause of every failure. Action without planning is the cause of underachievement. Action without planning is the cause of frustration, time wastage, anxiety, stress, and lack of success in life. So, organized plans of action are critical. Now, what is an organized plan of action? An organized plan of action is when you take your objective and you write out every single step that you're going to have to follow in order to accomplish that objective. You write it out and you list all those plans of action, all of those different activities, and you organize them together into a plan that you can then implement on a day-to-day basis. You decide which has to be done first and which has to be done last, which is more important, which is less important. In fact, the ability to set goals and to create plans for their accomplishment is the master skill of success. If all you learned in life, all you learned in school, was the ability to be a continuous goal setter and a continuous planner, day and night, planning, organizing, planning, writing, thinking about what you're trying to accomplish, you'll accomplish more in a year or two years than most people accomplish in 10 years or an entire lifetime. It has nothing whatever to do, by the way, with your intelligence. It hasn't anything to do with your education. You know, half of the best educated people in the country are working for people who didn't finish high school or didn't finish college. I wrote an article for a major publication not long ago which said that if you do not have clear goals for your life, you are condemned forever to work for those who do. You see, in life, it's very simple. Either you are working toward the accomplishment of your goals or you're working toward the accomplishment of other people's goals. The first is analysis. Make a list. In fact, it's been discovered that if you make a list before you begin any task or job, you will immediately improve your productivity by 25%. How do you make a list? Well, you make your list for the week, the Sunday or the Saturday before, and you make your list for each day the evening before, and you always work from a list. Now, why do you make it the evening before? The primary reason is if you make a list the evening before, the subconscious goes to work on your list while you're asleep. And during the night, the subconscious will solve problems and bring insights to you, and you'll wake up in the morning with insights, ideas, intuitions, answers that will make your day more productive. Now, the second reason that you use a list is because if you don't have a list, it's like driving down the street in a car with no steering wheel. You just drift, and every bump, every interruption, everything that happens sets you off in a different direction. A list gives you a track to run on for the entire day. Another reason that you use a list is because with a list, you can analyze where you are. You can tell what is more important and what is less important. You can tell what is irrelevant, what can be delegated, what can be delayed, what can be put off. The most important reason for using a list, though, however, is this, is that when you use a list and you work down the list and you check things off, each time you check something off on a list, it gives you a feeling of accomplishment. It's been well said that happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal, that happiness is the step-by-step accomplishment of the tasks necessary to accomplish a worthy ideal, and a successful life is based on a series of successful days, and a series of successful days is based on working on a list one step at a time, is to set priorities. It's interesting, there are many people who have goals, vague or clear, there are many people who do make plans, but the biggest single problem in human life is setting priorities, determining what is relevant and what is irrelevant. And in setting priorities, an Italian economist named Delfato Pareto, in 1895, came up with a principle which is called the Pareto Principle. We call it the 80-20 rule. It says that 80% of the value of what you do will be contained in 20% of the things that you do. What does this mean? It means that if you make a list of 10 things that you have to do today, you will find that two of those things are worth all of the others put together. Now, the difference between highly effective people, as Delfato Pareto said, was that highly effective people work on the vital few versus the trivial many. The difference between the two is that ineffective people work on the trivial many, they work on things that are fun, they work on things that are easy, they work on little tasks, fun tasks, irrelevant tasks, but they keep putting off and delaying working on their major tasks. So the key to success is always be asking this question, what is the most valuable use of my time right now? What is the most valuable use of your time right now? I'm convinced that if all you did was organize your life and only work on the most valuable use of your time, that alone would be enough to make you an effective, efficient person. That alone would be enough to increase your productivity, your performance, your profitability, your rewards by 10, 20, 30, 40, even 50%. So always before you begin, ask yourself, is this the most important thing I could be doing? Is this my top priority task? Does this give me the highest payoff? Is this the most valuable use of my time? Now here is one simple test with regard to value. Ask yourself, in approaching any task, is what impact will the accomplishment of this task have on my future? The futurity of decisions is the key to measuring the value. Most people spend as much as 80% of their time dealing with the problems and difficulties of the past, and only 20% dealing with the opportunities of the future. But successful people are always saying, what impact will this have on the future? Important tasks will always have an impact on the future. Unimportant tasks will only have an impact on the present and maybe even the past. So I say, what is the most valuable use of my time right now, and what impact will this have on tomorrow, the next day, and the future? It's one of the key ways to keep on track with regard to priorities. Concentration. Concentration. Concentration. Many people come to me in my seminars and they say, well, I never learned how to concentrate. I can't concentrate. How do I learn to concentrate? Now people say, well, if I stay with this task until it's finished, I won't get anything else done. That doesn't matter. If it's the most valuable thing that you have to do, it's the most important thing that you could be working on. But if you work away on low-priority tasks, even if you complete them and do them well, you don't get any bang for the buck. You don't get any excitement or thrill from doing something that's not important. As a matter of fact, most stress, anxiety, frustration in the world of work today comes from working very hard on irrelevant tasks. Benjamin Trigo said, if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right. And I think it was Drucker who said, the very worst thing in the world is to do very well what need not be done at all. So concentrate single-mindedly on one task at a time. Do first things first and do things one at a time. Now psychologists have discovered that 85% of the reason that you or I do anything is because of what we expect to happen as a result. We call this consequences or logical consequences. Tell other people that you're going to finish by this deadline. Promise others that you'll have your work done. It's a powerful way to act as what is called a forcing system. A forcing system is something that motivates you to stay at it because if you don't set a deadline and give yourself a forcing system, you fall into the trap of what is called Parkinson's Law. Now, Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time allotted for it. That if you have two hours of work to do and eight hours of time, you will stretch that work over eight hours. Parkinson's Law also says that work contracts to fill the time allotted for it. If you have eight hours of work to do and because of an emergency, you have to have it done in two hours, you will get it done in two hours. Highly effective people are always setting tight, stringent, disciplined deadlines on themselves so they get more work done in a short period of time rather than less work done in a long period of time. This is what is called the time log, which is writing down and keeping track of where your time is going. All effective people know where their time goes. Now, let me tell you an interesting principle with regard to time management. It is this, is the more important you are, the more successful you are, the more you tend to measure out your time in minutes. The less successful you are, the more you tend to measure out your time in hours, days, and weeks. The average person thinks of terms of morning or afternoon. The above average person thinks of hours. The successful person thinks of half hours. The very successful person thinks in terms of minutes. They allocate their time carefully. But the only time where you can do that is what? Is you've got to keep track of what you're spending your time on. 60, 70, 80% of people are not aware of how they spend their time. They think they spend a lot of time in meetings. It turns out they spend a lot of time socializing. They think they spend a lot of time working on reports. It turns out they spend a lot of time on their telephones. They think they spend a lot of time doing important jobs. It turns out they spend a lot of time wasting time. So keep a time log or just keep a sheet and whenever you have a chance to look at your watch, write down what you're doing at the time. Or have somebody else watch what you're doing and feedback to you how you're spending your time. And then you have to ask, is how I'm spending my time consistent with my major goals, my top priorities, my high payoff tasks? And you'll find that it's not. And you'll also find that you feel frustrated and you feel stressed if you are not working your time on the things that you're supposed to do. So keep measuring your time, logging your time, analyzing your time. How am I spending my time? Am I spending my time on the things that are important to me? Am I spending my time on the things that give me a big payoff? And if you're not, keep adjusting and modifying your schedule. A very interesting point with regard to the time log is that self-discipline is critical. You've got to discipline yourself and you've got to measure and analyze your time every single day or you slip off it again. Overcoming procrastination is absolutely critical, but there's two kinds of procrastination. There's positive procrastination and negative procrastination. Positive procrastination is when you procrastinate on doing low priority tasks. It is when you procrastinate on doing things that do not contribute very much to your major goals. Negative procrastination is when you procrastinate on what is called your most important tasks. Now there's an interesting point is that their tasks are either urgent, which means they have to be done now, or they are important, which means they don't have to be done now, but they have very high impact on your future. We have a natural tendency to always do what is urgent rather than what is important. Important tasks are seldom urgent and urgent tasks are seldom important. So you overcome procrastination with a very, very simple method. It was developed by W. Clement Stone when he was a young man. He built a fortune of $500 million and this is one of the central principles of his life. It's simply this. Every morning when you get up, say over and over to yourself, do it now, do it now, do it now, I do it now, do it now. Whenever you have this tendency to procrastinate, program your subconscious mind with this automatic conditioned command, do it now, do it now, do it now. The key to overcoming procrastination is to develop a sense of urgency. Be the kind of person who gets things done quickly. Be the kind of person who launches fast on a task. One of the ways to launch fast on a task is to take the task and break it up, what is called salami slicing it. Slice a piece of salami. Don't try to eat a whole loaf of salami, just eat it one slice at a time. Take your task and break it up into small pieces and do one piece at a time. Say over and over to yourself, do it now, do it now, do it now. Do you know that less than 2% of the population have a sense of urgency? And that there's not an example of a successful person anywhere who does not have a sense of urgency? That if you just develop a sense of urgency when somebody gives you a task, that you get on it and do it fast, that alone will move you into the top ranks in a very short period of time. In a study done amongst 104 chief executive officers two years ago, they asked what would be the qualities that would put a person on the fast track in their career? You know the conclusion they came back to with? Two qualities. Number one, the ability to set priorities, to choose what was relevant over what was irrelevant. And number two was the ability to get the job done fast. If all you did was this, set priorities and get the job done fast, that alone would cause you to stand out from 80 to 90% of the people that you work with. Nothing works the first time, okay? Please understand that. Nothing works the first time. What is the average number of times that a person tries with a new goal before they give up? Can you guess? Well, the average is less than one. Because most people give up before they try even once. They say, that's a great goal, I'd love to be financially independent, and then they give up. They don't even try. They say, ah, but I couldn't because of this and because of that and so on. And then they move away to a wonderful place called Someday Isle. You ever heard of Someday Isle? Someday, I'll start saving money. Someday, I'll get out of debt. Someday, I'll lose weight. Someday, I'll start a business. Someday, I'll get serious about my finances. And most people live on Someday Isle. Your job and my job is to vote yourself off the island, right? And we start taking control of our lives. Well, about some years ago, I was called by a major businessman, and he asked me if I would do a talk for his 800 entrepreneurs that own separate franchises within his organization on how to become a self-made millionaire. And I said, sure. When you're a young speaker, you agree to speak on any subject. Sure, I'll speak on that subject. Now, I was just like most people. When I was young, I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. And when I hit 30, I put it off to 35. And as I got to 35, you put it off to 40, and then you kind of just don't look at it anymore. You forget about it and feel the deck is stacked against you. Well, I was about 38, 39 when he called me up and asked me. I said, sure, no problem. And I said, now, what do I know about self-made millionaires? And this is a shocker. I didn't know anything. Oh, I knew that they had more than a million dollars, but that's a real basic piece of knowledge, you know. So I started thinking, what do I know about them? So I began to study them. And that's when I found out that they've been studied so thoroughly. Because we know everything there is to know about them. They are a source of incredible fascination. And there's 50 years of research. So I began to read the studies and find out where they came from and what they did and how they thought and where they started and the decisions they made and the kind of people they were. One of the things that I learned, by the way, is that becoming a self-made millionaire is not the important thing. What is really important is the person you have to become to become a self-made millionaire. You have to become a totally different human being. One of my friends says that in order to achieve something you've never achieved before, you have to become someone you've never been before. And it's a really important insight is the qualities that you need to develop, qualities on the inside to become a self-made millionaire are incredible qualities that make you a vastly better person. Not only better in terms of character, determination, discipline, decision-making, strength and so on, but they make you a far better person. They round out your character in a far better way. So the real payoff of becoming wealthy is not because you can eat more, because how many more meals can you eat? How many more clothes can you wear? Because it's the kind of person that you become and then the kind of person, people that you associate, the kind of life that you have. And so the things that we're going to talk about now, and I know that you're some of the smartest people in our country, so I'm going to give you these ideas very quickly, like dealing cards. What I found in my research is that there's a series of qualities that self-made millionaires have. If you have these qualities, your success is virtually guaranteed. And if you don't have these qualities, the qualities are learnable. Point number one is that all business or sales skills are learnable. All financial skills are learnable. If you can drive a car, you can learn any skill. If you can drive a car, you can learn this skill. Now number two is you're probably only one skill away from doubling your income right now. You're probably only one skill away from setting yourself on the road to becoming a self-made millionaire. That turns out to be the case for almost everyone. And if you don't know what that skill is, maybe over the course of the time we spend together, it'll jump out at you. But whatever it is, you've got to find it out and go to work on it because it is learnable. It's a learnable skill. People say, well, I don't, you know, I've never been very good with money. Well, get over it. The fact of the matter is you can learn what you need to learn to achieve anything that you want to achieve. So the success secrets of self-made millionaires. Give yourself a score of one to ten, and if you are weak on one of these, it can be enough to hold you back. If you're strong on all of these, then there's no limit to what you can accomplish. The first is to dream big dreams. Dream big dreams. Practice what is called back from the future thinking and project forward. Develop a vision of yourself as happy, healthy, wealthy, thin. Practice what top people practice, which is what is called idealization. You project forward several years and you imagine that your life is perfect in every way. Imagine that you have no limitations. Imagine that you have all the time and all the money and all the friends and all the contacts and all the education, all the experience, and that you could be or have or do anything you want in life. If you could, what would it be? If your life were perfect in five years, what would it look like? How much would you be earning? How much would you be worth? What kind of a family life would you have? What kind of health would you have? What kind of car would you be driving? What would your life be like if you could wave a magic wand and make it perfect in every way? Now, what we have found is this is the starting point of great riches, and it's the starting point of great success in life, is for you to have a dream or a vision of a wonderful future. Here's an exercise that we give people in our audiences, is take a sheet of paper and make up what is called a dream list. Now, imagine this is kind of like a kid's Christmas list, and that it just allows you to just run wild and just write down everything that you could think of that you could possibly want. I had a friend who I taught this to, and he got so excited about it, he bought a spiral notebook, and he began writing. And he'd go through the newspaper, and every single thing he saw in the newspaper that was nice, he wrote it down in his goal. He ended up first time through with 330 goals. By the end of the month, he had 500 things that he wanted. The interesting thing was that his life exploded. He activated the law of attraction, and he began to attract into his life people, circumstances, ideas, resources, insights, that began to move him toward the accomplishment of the goals, and began to move the goals toward him. Number two is to do what you love to do. Whenever you find people who are really successful in life, they're people who do what they love to do. They love their work. The great rule for success in life is to find something that you love to do, and then find a way to make a living doing it. Now, when you find what you love to do, it'll be something that gives you energy, it motivates you, it enthuses you. It's probably something that you were meant to do from the time you were born. And when you ask self-made millionaires, what sort of work do you do, they'll often say, I've never worked a day in my life. I just do what I like to do. I had a graduate in my course once who came up to me and said, you know, that's interesting. He said, when I was a little boy, I loved to study airplanes. He said, I got airplane books, and I had airplane models, and I had toy planes, and then I got into competitions with remote-controlled planes. He said, when I grew up and went to school, I studied aeronautical engineering. He said, today, he said, I'm 35. He said, I own three companies. One builds small aircraft. Another one repairs and services small aircraft. Another one is in leasing and chartering small aircraft. He said, I've never worked a day in my life. He said, I've just played with planes since the time I was a kid. So one of the things that you can do is go back to the time when you were young, as a child, between the ages of 7 and 14, before you discovered boys or girls, and what is it that you really love to do? And you'll often find that within that is something you're supposed to do as an adult. Number three is commit to excellence. Now, this is really, really important, and I had a hard time with this as a young man because I was never good at anything. I was never picked for any team, and if I was picked, I was the first person cut. I got lousy grades in every class. I got fired from multiple jobs. I even got fired from a job pumping gas once. Imagine that, being fired for pumping gas because you're no good. They came out and said, you're no good at pumping gas. How can you be no good? Little old ladies can pump gas, and here I was. I was no good at pumping gas. Anyway, so I got fired. I went from job to job, and then I discovered that all people who are successful are excellent at what they do. You know the old question they asked Willie Sutton, the bank robber, why do you rob banks? He said, well, that's where the money is. Well, being in the top 10% is where the money is. So what you have to do is you have to pay any price and make any sacrifice to get into the top 10% in your field. Now, here's the good news. If you're doing what you love to do, you will want to be in the top 10% in your field. If you don't want to be excellent at what you're doing, it means you're in the wrong field. It just means that you're marking time. You're treading water. And there's a lot of people who are in their field, and they do their job, and they go home at night, and they don't think about their work, and so on. And this kind of an attitude means that you have no future. You have a very shaky present. That crackling sound you hear is the ice breaking under your feet. And you have no future because if you're not doing what you love to do and throwing your whole heart into it, you're just marking time. But everybody is designed so that there is something that you love to do that you can do well. And the fact that you love it means that you probably have the ability to excel at it. So make this decision to get into the top 10%. And let me tell you what changed my life. Here I was struggling in my late 20s, and I learned this. It was a breakthrough thought. It's that everybody who's in the top 10% started in the bottom 10%. Everybody who's doing well was once doing poorly. Everybody who is at the top of your field today was once not even in your field at all and didn't even know it existed. What that means is that if you're willing to pay the price and work hard and make the sacrifices, you can get into the top 10%. Now how long does it take? It doesn't take a week or a month. Most people are really impatient. To achieve mastery in your field takes 5 to 7 years. People say, 5 to 7 years? Geez, I'll be 5 to 7 years older before I start enjoying the big rewards. Well, how much older will you be in 5 to 7 years anyway? Now here's an important point. Are you ready? The time is going to pass anyway. The time is going to pass. 5 to 7 years from now, 5 to 7 years will have passed. The only question is are you going to be at the top of your field or are you still going to be down there with the mediocre 80%? And the wonderful thing is this is nobody's better than you and nobody's smarter than you. If anybody else is at the top of their field, it means that you can be at the top of your field. Just go to them and find out how they got there because they started at the bottom. Now it may take longer for some people and less for others, but everybody who puts one foot in front of the other and keeps moving eventually gets there. And that's where all the rewards are. Not only that, that's where all the joy in life is. When you're really good at what you do, you feel wonderful about yourself. You're respected and esteemed by everybody around you. You can write your own ticket. You can open any door when you're good at what you do because you get up in the morning and you know you're good. And that is more important than the rewards that go with it. To develop a clear sense of direction. Developing a clear sense of direction means that you need to become intensely goal-oriented. We find that all successful people are goal-oriented. There's an old saying, you can't hit a target that you can't see. You've got to know what you want in every area of your life. Some years ago, I worked with the Hunt Oil Company in Texas. The Hunt Oil Company was founded by H.L. Hunt, who became the wealthiest, self-made, multi-jillionaire billionaire in the world. At his peak, he owned 200 companies and had a royalty income of $3 million a day. Most phenomenal man, by the way. And he was interviewed by a friend of mine on television before he died in the early 70s. And he was asked, what are the secrets to success? He said, the keys to success have only been two through all my life, and I will tell you what they are. He said, number one, he said, decide exactly what it is you want and write it down and make a plan to achieve it. And number two is determine the price you're going to have to pay to get it and then resolve to pay that price. Now, where the law of sowing and reaping cause and effect, I learned an additional point to that. I learned that your current life today is the result of the price you've sown up to now. It is whatever you've put in, you get out. So whatever you're getting out today is a result of what you've put in. If you don't like what you're getting out, what you have to do is you have to put in something different. What I found is this, is that life is always just in the long run. So therefore, life says this, is there's a price you have to pay and there's two qualities. First of all, you have to pay the price in full for your success, of study, preparation, hard work and so on. And second of all, you have to pay the price in advance. You don't get it afterwards. The way the world works is first you put in what you need to put in and then you get out the rewards. So you have to ask yourself, what is the price that you have to pay to achieve the success that you desire? And you have to write it down and make a plan and work on it every day. Now let me give you a quick exercise, which is my only take-home or homework exercise for our time together. I want you to take a piece of paper like this and write down 10 goals that you'd like to accomplish in the next 12 months. Write the word goals and today's date at the top of the page. Write down 10 goals you'd like to accomplish and then ask yourself this great question. If you could only accomplish one goal on this list, but you could accomplish it within 24 hours, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on your life? Now this is a great question because it'll usually jump out at you. You'll say, that's the one. If I had this, that would have more of an impact on my life than anything else. Sometimes it's a financial goal, sometimes it's a health goal, sometimes it's a relationship goal. But whatever it is, put a circle around that goal and then turn the page over and write it at the top of the page. Set a deadline on the goal. Make a list of everything that you could think of to do to achieve the goal and then begin working on your list. And here's the kicker, do something every day. Do something every day that moves you one step forward towards your major goal. I promise to you that this exercise, selecting your most important goal, making a plan and working on it every day will change your life in ways that you cannot imagine. They say that people begin to become great when they determine their major definite purpose, their number one goal, and work on it every day. It is the secret to becoming a self-made millionaire. It's the secret to great success in life. My promise to you is a week, a month, a year from now, you'll look back and you'll be absolutely staggered at the difference it makes. I was giving a seminar not long ago and a gentleman came up to me. He said, you know that goal setting exercise? It changed my life 10 years ago. He said, I was broke, I was divorced. He says, I was an alcoholic and somebody dragged me to one of your seminars. He said, and I did that exercise and I picked my major goal. He said, it changed my life. I said, in what way? He said, today, he said, I'm worth $40 million. I said, wow. He said, yes, and I owe it to that lesson. Next is refuse to consider the possibility of failure. It's the most amazing darn thing is that the fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. And it's not failure itself because each one of you is a professional failure. Each one of you has failed over and over and over again. Isn't that true? All of us fail. All human beings fail over and over. Nine out of 10 things that we try don't work out the way we expect it. We have failures in relationships and in jobs and in careers and investments and everything. It's not the failure that holds you back. The failure makes you smarter. We say that it is the fear of failure, not failure, that holds you back. And the way that you overcome failure is you never consider the possibility of failure. The rule is this. There's no such thing as failure. There's only feedback. When you try something that doesn't work, you get feedback, not failure. And recognize that most things you try aren't going to work the first few times. So what you do is you say, oh, that's an interesting bit of feedback. And you pick yourself up and you move forward and you have more feedback and you move forward. To become a self-made millionaire, you're going to fail over and over again, year after year after year. But your brain has a cybernetic mechanism, which means that every time you try something, you get feedback, which makes you smarter. And when you try something else, you get feedback, which makes you smarter. And eventually you reach the point where you're too smart and you stop making mistakes. You start to do more and more things right and fewer and fewer things wrong. But you can't get there unless you have experienced the failures. Henry Ford once said that failure is merely an opportunity to more intelligently begin again. Now let me pass on one great rule to you, which has been discovered in interviewing self-made millionaires. Self-made millionaires look into every failure for something good. They say there's got to be something good in this that I can benefit from, and surprise, surprise, they always find it. Second is self-made millionaires always seek the valuable lesson in every setback or obstacle or temporary failure, and they always find the lesson. Now, what do failures do? Failures whine and cry and think about what they've lost and blame their problems on someone else. Successful people say, what can I learn from this that will make me smarter next time? And my promise to you, those who seek fine, is if you go looking for a valuable lesson in the biggest problem that you're facing today, you'll always find the lesson. Here's another possibility. Your biggest problem today could be the biggest gift that you have ever received, because it may contain within it the lesson that will make you successful. If you stop thinking about what happened and who's to blame and you start looking for the gift within your problem, sometimes it can transform your life. The next key is to dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. Now, what takes you from rags to riches is personal development, personal and professional development. In the 21st century, as Peter Grucker says, knowledge and skill are the keys to the 21st century. And the only thing that will be relevant, the only skill that will be relevant in the 21st century is the ability to learn new skills, because virtually everything you know is becoming obsolete at a rapid rate. Stephen Covey says that your current knowledge base has a half-life of two years, which means that half of everything you know will be irrelevant within two years, and two years from now, half more. So if you're not continually learning and upgrading your knowledge and skills, you're not staying in the same place. As Pat Riley says, the basketball coach says, if you're not getting better, you're getting worse. If you're not constantly learning, you're actually falling behind. So here are the three keys to continuous learning. Number one is read in your field 30 to 60 minutes each day. In other words, turn off the television, turn off the radio, put aside the newspaper, and just read in your field. The very best places to read, by the way, are books. Read books, the best-selling books written by the most successful people in your field, because books contain a wealth of riches that can enable you to function at a far higher level, to get much better results than you could before. So read 30 to 60 minutes a day. I've had people tell me, countless people over the years, that reading an hour a day has doubled and tripled their income within a year. The second thing you do is take every course that you possibly can. The courses and seminars that are available to you in your field, that are given by professionals, are courses that have been developed over years and years and years. They have been tested and tested and tested. The person who is talking to you for several hours has spent thousands of hours learning their subject. They have dry-tested this or done test runs with thousands of other people. When you take a course, you can learn enough information in one or two days, more than you could learn in two or three years or maybe even a lifetime, all distilled and put together. People say, I can't afford a course. You cannot afford not to buy books. You cannot afford not to go to courses. Some years ago, I had a dentist, and he was a very successful dentist. He was recommended to me by a friend. And this dentist retired at the age of 53. And just before he retired, he sold his practice for about $2 million. Just before he retired, he told me why. He said about eight years before, he had attended a dental congress in Hong Kong. This is from California. He'd flown all the way to Hong Kong to attend this international dental congress because there were specialists giving private lectures, sort of plenary sessions on the side. And he attended this session, and it was on a particular technique of cosmetic surgery that this dentist had developed that no one else knew, where you could basically straighten out a person's entire front jaw so they'd look beautiful at a very low cost, at a very high level of effectiveness. He came back, and he began implementing this in his practice. People began flying from 500 to 1,000 miles away. Every dentist sent their family members and themselves to this dentist. He was able to charge whatever he wanted to charge. He said eight years later, he retired as a self-made millionaire at the age of 53 to enjoy his money for the rest of his life from what he learned from one session at one convention at one course. Now, that is a true story, and maybe it's an exception, but you can never tell where the information is going to come from. The third way that you can upgrade your skills is listen to audio programs in your car. The average driver drives 500 to 1,000 hours a year, 25,000 to 50,000 miles. If you listen to audio programs in your car, according to the University of Southern California, you will get the equivalent of almost full-time university attendance just listening to learning material as you drive around. It can totally and profoundly change your life. Very, very important. Here's an interesting point. The more you commit yourself to becoming the best person you can be, the more you like yourself and respect yourself. The more energy you have, the bigger goals you set for yourself, the more you persist. When you invest in yourself and you read and learn and upgrade your skills, you're telling yourself, wow, I am a person with a great future, and it's up to me to maximize my potential. And your self-esteem goes up, your self-respect goes up, your sense of personal pride goes up, and you start to get promoted more and paid more in every part of your life. Well, the next is to develop a workaholic mentality. In our society today, you have all these people talking about take it easy, have balance in your life, relax, lean back, have fun at work, happy, happy, get along with your coworkers. This is loser talk. Loser, loser, loser. Now, there's a time in your life when you can back off, all right? You can take it easy. But that's when you've made it, not before you've made it. Because before you've made it, you're in a competition with hundreds of thousands of millions of other people like at the Olympics who also want to make it. And in order for you to win, you are going to have to work harder and work better and work smarter than they do. So the rule is to develop a workaholic mentality. What does this mean? It means that you start a little earlier, you work a little harder, and you stay a little later. Use what I call the 40-plus formula. The 40-plus formula says that working 40 hours a week gets you survival. And that's all. You work 40 hours a week, you survive. You make no progress. You don't go ahead. You just barely hang on. Every hour that you invest in your work or yourself over 40 is an investment in your future. So you can tell what your future is going to be with unerring accuracy by looking at how many hours over 40 you put in. Now, how many hours does the average self-made millionaire in America work until he passes the million-dollar mark? 59. Some of them work 70, 80, 90. The average is 59 hours. How much does the average top executive work? 59 hours. So that's rule number one, is the hours you put in over 40. If people say, well, my office is locked, and I can't get in more than 40 hours a week, then good. Then spend the rest of the time investing in yourself, getting better at your work when you do do it. Now, here's my second principle, and this principle changes your life. It is this. Is work all the time you work. When you work, work. Don't play. Fully 50% of working time today is wasted, and it's wasted in idle conversation, personal business, family phone calls, surfing the Internet, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, long lunch times, coming in late and leaving early. And then the other 50%, you're scrambling because now you're behind because you wasted so much time fooling around. Now you start to work, and you don't work on high-priority tasks. You try to get rid of all the little stuff. So what happens is the big tasks begin to build up like an avalanche overhang, and they cause enormous stress. And you go home at night, and you're thinking, well, it's this job. I've got to get this project finished. But I can't discipline myself to stop talking to my coworkers. Every time one of them comes in, like automatic, like a conditioned response, it's blah, blah time. Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. No. What you have to do is work all the time you work. If someone comes in and says, hey, you got a minute to talk? You say, yes, but not now. Why don't we talk after work? Meanwhile, I've got to get back to work. I'll tell you what. Why don't you go down the hall and ruin his career? But don't stand here and ruin mine. It's really important. There's a great story of a little girl who goes to her mother and says, Mommy, why is it Daddy always brings his briefcase home, and he works in the evenings, and he works on the weekends, and he doesn't spend any time with the family? And she says, well, honey, you have to understand, Daddy can't get all his work done at work, so he has to bring it home. She said, why don't they put him in a slower class?