Reprogram Your Mind For Success - Brian Tracy

Welcome to the Resilient Mind Podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to reprogramming your mind for success with Brian Tracy. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. - We say all change begins by you taking in new information that changes your self-concept. New information that changes your self-concept. So that you start to see your world and you start to believe about yourself in a different way. If someone were to say to you, "I do this all the time, by the way." David and I used to go into restaurants or various places and the person would be really, really nice and really helpful. And I say to David, I say, "What kind of a future does that person have?" And he'd say, "She has a great future." And then we go into a place where they're rude and indifferent and uncaring. And I say, "What kind of a future does he have?" And David would say, "He has no future at all." And so we divide people into people with future, no future. And you can tell people with future because the way they do their job in the moment is the best predictor of their future. When I go into a place when the person is really, really helpful, I will call them and take them aside. And I will say, "You know something? "You're going to be a big success. "You are going to be a big success later in life." This is my area of specialty and I know that. And they say, "No, well, you don't realize "and they're young people and they're working hard." And I said, "No, no, you have star quality. "You're going to be a big success in life." And I just leave them with that like a big tip. I also leave a tip. I will stop and turn around and I'll go back to people that I've met in passage. And I'll say, "You know, you have credible qualities. "You're going to be a big success in life." And I've always told my children that. They're going to be a big success in life. And sometimes one person who they respect an important person, well-dressed customer, who tells them that, will change their self-concept forever. Now, will it work consistently? Who knows? But you know that you miss every shot you don't take. So whenever I get a chance to take a shot to put in an injection that will change a person's self-concept. And I've had countless people come back to me and say, "Remember this seminar? "I came up to you and I asked you that question. "You told me this to change my life forever." And of course, how can I remember? I've spoken to five million people. I say, "Oh, yes, I remember you well." So changes come with change in your belief system. Now, what if there was a special gene for becoming a millionaire? And this gene could be detected by new DNA testing. Some of these gene tests that you have. And you're working along and you're doing well and you're making a good living, you're struggling, and so on. And you're going for the doctor, doctor, your annual medical comes back with a gene test. Jesus, you got the millionaire gene. I had no idea. You got the millionaire gene. A millionaire gene, yes, you're going to be a millionaire in your adult life, probably in less than five years after you decide to become a millionaire. You see, you must be kidding. No, no, it's been tested. Every single person, every single millionaire who's been tested has this gene. It's a very rare gene. You're going to be a millionaire. You better get going. You're going to find out how you're going to do it. If you walked out of that office, absolutely believing that the gene test was right, you'd become like a house on fire. You'd become like a force of nature. Nothing would stop you. You'd say, "I'm going to do work at this chicken shit job "anymore, I'm a millionaire. "I'm a millionaire. "Excuse me, it's special. "I'm a millionaire in training. "You'd be out looking for opportunities. "You know something? "You set up a force field of net energy. "They would start to attract ideas to you "and people and resources and things like that. "They would change you completely." You start to think that you have a millionaire gene like you are encoded. You're programmed to be a millionaire. It starts to change everything. That means that you're guaranteed to be a millionaire if you'll just get on with it and start to produce value at a high enough level that you can be paid well and you can keep hold onto it. That's not a bad idea. Programming your mind for success, the psychology of becoming says that you are in a constant state of becoming. Each one is in a continuous state of growth and change. And I like to do it like this. It's almost like this is you and you're continuing moving forward and you're growing and changing depending upon the information that you're taking in. Now, the great tragedy is that if you keep, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. So if you're continually taking in the same old information, whether it's frivolousness or television set or TV or Twitter or something else, if you just keep in taking the same thing and keep hanging out with the same people and reading the same papers, then nothing will change. The natural tendencies you just go on forever. But if you start to take in new information and new ideas and read new things and talk to new people, you start to evolve and grow in a different way in a different direction and at a different speed. Remember, the natural tendencies for people not to do this. So we say if you want to evolve and grow more rapidly, you must make your goals clear and describe them in detail. Make your goals clear and describe them in detail. The interesting thing is, soon as you are absolutely clear that you want to achieve a particular goal, you start to get all kinds of ideas to achieve that goal. You start to see all kinds of possibilities. You activate your particular cortex and you start to see ideas that can help you and whenever we start to run into people and meet people, you start to see things in the newspaper. It's really quite astonishing. I remember reading a story of a serial entrepreneur and he had made many millions of dollars in different businesses. And one day he was reading the Wall Street Journal and there was a little filler, just a little piece about two inches, one column by two inches. And it said sales of an Italian racing bicycle, imports of Italian racing bicycles, increased 37% in the last 12 months. And that's what it was, just a little thing from one of the Department of Trade publications. So he said 37% growth rate, that's pretty good. He said, "I wonder why that is." So he started to do some research and what he found was, this is many years ago, is Italian racing bicycles, which is very popular today. We're almost unknown in the US. And a 37% increase meant that they imported a thousand a year before and they imported 1,370 this year for a bicycle market of maybe 25 million bicycle riders. So he began doing some inquiries. He sent away some information. He got in touch with the major Italian bicycle manufacturers. He opened a store that was a bicycle, he actually went to a bicycle store and agreed to take half the space. He imported the bicycles. He advertised and they started to sell. The time he was finished, he had 32 stores selling Italian bicycles by the ship load and he made something like $15, $20 million before he sold the business. It all came from just noticing that little notice. But the thing is, he was looking for the notice. He was looking for business ideas. My friend Peter Thomas was sitting on a beach and he was, it's an entrepreneur, he was from Canada from Vancouver, sitting on a beach in Hawaii and reading the Wall Street Journal. And he talked about this new franchise for real estate offices that had just started up in Irvine, California, where they were combining Mum and Pop real estate companies into a single company putting the banner on it so they had nationwide exposure. He got up from the beach, he went back to the hotel. He checked out, he flew to Irvine, he had no money, flew to Irvine, walked into the offices of Century 21 and said, "I'd like to buy the franchise for Canada." And they said, "Canada, where's that?" I said, "Big blob of land up to the north." He said, "Well, you can have it, how much is it worth?" He said, "I'll give you $10,000, I'll give you $5,000 now and $5,000 in a year." He said, "Good, you can have it." He signed the agreement right there, exclusive rights for Century 21 for Canada. Today they had like 500 offices in Canada, he's a multi-multimillionaire retired, living in Phoenix, Phoenix. He was well known throughout the country as one of the great entrepreneurs. He made an absolute fortune from one little story but he was looking for the story. So when you start to think that you wanna make a lot of money, you're gonna see, it's almost like opportunity is gonna be way to, "Hey, here I am, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, pay attention to me, read this." And people will come up to you and say, "Here's a great business opportunity." They say, "Nah, nah, nah, I'm waiting to make my first million." No, that's not what that's probably it, anyway. So keep your mind open because once you're clear about it, you're going to start to attract opportunities for everything you could possibly accomplish. Now you must dwell on them most of the time. Remember, you cannot have a goal and think about it once a month. It's just like being married and thinking about your family once a month. It does not really mean you're really committed. It's like the story of the, you heard the story of the chicken and the pig on Farmer Brown's farm. And it's Sunday morning and the chicken comes to the pig and says, "You know, Farmer Brown's been pretty good to us. Let's give him a ham and egg breakfast." What do you say? "I'll provide the eggs and you provide the ham." And the chicken pointed out to me and he said, "Oh, the pig pointed out to the chicken." He said, "Well, for you, it's a donation, but for me, it represents a big commitment." (laughter) Well, they have to make a big commitment in order to achieve a goal. So there are two obstacles to becoming. Everything you are capable of becoming. Obstacle number one is homeostasis. Homeostasis, homeostasis, dependable outside of the country you live in, is called a hard need of the attitudes. It means that you become rigid and fixed in the way that you think. Homeostasis is another rephrasing of the comfort zone. It's a major reason that people don't grow. It's because they get locked into what they've already done in the past and they're very uneasy about doing something new. Whenever someone suggests something new and you use those miraculous words, yes, bud. It means that you're probably trapped into homeostasis for status quo. Yes, but what about this? You could do this or you could do that. But yes, but and it always brings you back to what you were doing before. So we like to maintain the status quo. Human beings love the comfort zone. The second obstacle to change is psychosclerosis. And psychosclerosis is, as I say, the hard need of the attitudes. What that means is that you become very rigid in your thinking and you're not willing to try new things. This is normally caused by low self-esteem and by fear is we don't want to try something new. What if we lose our money? I remember when I was growing up. By the time I was 15, I was earning more than my father was. I had my own lawnmowering business. And I had to buy my own equipment. I had a beautiful equipment. And I had to get them to sign for it because I was only 15. And I cannot tell you how hard it was. They said, but what if you lose your money and what if you lose the machine and what if you lose this? And they always talked about what would happen if you lose, if you lose, if it doesn't work out. And because my parents had gone through the depression and were just hypersensitive about losing. And as a result, the only thing my father ever bought was penny stocks. And you know something? Every one of those penny stocks ended up worth how much? Up penny, you know. And so we'll be alert to these natural tendency to slip into a comfort zone and fight to stay there. And the natural tendency to resist new ideas. So both of these lead to getting stuck in the comfort zone, great enemy of success. In order to get yourself out of the comfort zone, they found that if I use an example like this, when Warren Venice did his study called "Leaders," which was one of the best-selling book on leadership of the '90s, they studied 93 leaders and they studied them for five years to find out what qualities they had that made them different. And they were completely different industries and they found they were five. And one of them was they refused to get stuck in a comfort zone. And so what they did is they would get into a comfort zone, we say the only difference between a comfort zone and a rut is the depth. Now between a rut and a grade is the depth. And where they would get into this comfort zone very quickly, and the only way they could get out is by using a grappling hook, if you like, and throwing a grappling hook up to pull themselves out of the comfort zone, and it was always a big goal. Now they have another word for this now, and they call it a beehog, be hairy, audacious goal. And so what you do is by creating beehogs you're forced out of your comfort zone because you cannot stay at your current level of performance and set a big goal for yourself. The goal forces you to think bigger, which is why we talked about putting a zero at the end of your income goal. It forces you, there's no way that you can achieve that, doing what you're now doing. You're going to have to do something different and you're going to have to do it in a different place in a different way. So the bigger the goals you have, the more likely it is you break out of the hold of homeostasis and psychosclerosis. So we say there are two great powers that control everything that happens to you. The first is the power of love. The power of love is the greatest power in our lives. It's been said that everything we do is either to get love or to compensate for lack of love. From the time we are children, moving from discomfort toward comfort, from me from pain toward pleasure, we're always striving to get the unconditional love and affection and respect of the people who are most important to us. And remember I said earlier that we strive for all of our adult life to compensate for what we felt we were deprived of as children. And so you can see, I came from a family that had no money, so I've always strived to be financially successful. Striven, I think is the word, striven. Reminds me of a story in terms of past tense of this woman from Boston, Mrs. Woman, is on it, trip, business trip, and she gets to Halifax. And there is a dish in Boston, it's very popular. It's called Boston Scrawd. And it's a dish that comes from the fish and they're caught off the waters of the Northeast. So she checks into this hotel in Halifax. Should I tell this story? Probably not tell this story. She checks into this hotel in Halifax and she's been traveling all day. And she says, I've been traveling all day, is there any place around here that I can get scrawd? And the guest clerk says, well, yes madam, there's several places, but I've never heard it asked for in the past pluperfect subjunctive before. Everything we do is either to get lover to compensate for the lack of love. And it's love, it's approval. People who have an extremely high need for love are driven into politics, into show business, during the areas. Do you remember that wonderful line from Sally Fields when she got the Academy Award? You like me, you really like me? I mean, this was the greatest thing in her life is that the people who were her peers in Hollywood, they really liked her and they gave her the Academy Award because all her life, she has been striving for love and acceptance from her peers. The second great power that controls everything that happens to is the power of suggestion. And you and I are inordinately suggestive in that we are constantly affected by the suggested elements in our world. Everything counts. Every single word we hear, every conversation we have, every song we listen to or new story, everything we read has an effect on us and it's helping us or hurting us. Everything counts, everything counts. If I were to say to you, cheese, there's some great research. It says that if you eat really, really healthy foods, you're going to feel much better and have more energy and sleep better and your skin will be better and your digestion will be better and everything else. If you eat really, really good foods, did you know that? It's like, come on, give us a break. We know that for 50 years. We know what we should eat. We just don't eat it because we like delicious things and really good foods are not always delicious. So of course we know that, but if I were to say that everything that you take into your mind affects your personality and your temperament and your self-confidence and your goals and your clarity and your intelligence and has a profound transforming effect, it's a, wow, that's an interesting thought. Everything you take into your physical body affects you physically. Everything you take into your mind affects you mentally and emotionally and it affects the results that you're getting live. For example, when Barbara and I found that Christina was on her way, we went out and bought more than 30 books on child raising and we read them back and forth and discussed them for nine months. We read thousands and tens of thousands of words on child raising. And after our children were born, we read babies first three months of lives, baby first six months, babies first year, baby first and second year and so on, so that we were keeping current with everything that we possibly could so that we knew what we were doing. Do you think that that had an effect on what kind of parents we were? Flutting our mind with hours and hours of reading on how to raise happy, healthy children and an enormous impact on our parenting because we flooded our mind with it. I then meet people who have children and have never read a book, never taken a course, never read an article, never talked to anybody. They say, oh, you just do it naturally. You wonder why your kids are wearing their pants down to their ankles and they've got, you know, earrings in their nose and woolhawk haircuts and smoking dope and drinking and they're nine years old, aren't you? (audience laughing) Number six, the law of habit has an ordered impact. The law of habit or inertia says that in the absence, the law of inertia says in the absence of a specific decision on your part to change some aspect of your life that natural tendency will to go on the same way indefinitely. In other words, inertia says that a body in motion tends to remain in motion indefinitely in the same direction and a body at rest tends to remain at rest. And unless you make a decision to do something different, you remain at rest. Einstein had a wonderful line. He said, nothing happens until something moves. Nothing happens until something moves. So it's really important that you think of moving. So number, I say 95% of everything we do is by habit and 95% of your success or failure will be determined by your habits, either good or bad. I've written a book on this called Million Dollar Habits which is a great book and it takes 12 critical categories of life, health, money, technology, learning, growth, family, relationships and so on and it gives the habits that the top people have in each of those areas. The interesting thing is that no one is born with any habits is all habits that we have. We have learned through practice and repetition over time and we can override bad habits with good habits. Sometimes people have a smoking habit. How do you get over the smoking habit? You develop habits that override that habit. Exercise, self-discipline, not putting yourself in harm's way, not going to places where they smoke. You do everything possible to develop a new habit until you have the non-smoking habit. There's some people who have been chronic smokers, now they're chronic non-smokers. They're religious about not smoking. So you can develop any habit you need to develop and 95% of what you do is habit. From the time you get up and brush your teeth in the morning to the way you mix your coffee, to the way you drive your car or park it, to the way you dress, everything's a habit. Now there's some habits that are good to have because they make things automatic and easy, you don't even have to think about them. There are other habits that can be very, very harmful and need to be challenged if they are not serving you. My friend Ed Foreman said the rule of success, he said he said good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form, but hard to live with. And the rule is to form good habits and make them your masters. And so what you say to yourself, if I had a habit of this, being punctual, a habit of planning everyday in advance, a habit of exercising for 30 to 60 minutes each morning when I get up, a habit of going to bed by Chanuklok, if I had these habits, would they serve my life? Well, surprise, surprise, you look around and find really successful people, they have these habits and nobody had them to start with. So good to say with regard to habits, everything is hard before it's easy. The reason that people do not develop good habits is because they're lazy and undisciplined. They just simply cannot stick to it under the habit, locks in and becomes automatic and easy. But here's the good deal is that once the habit is locked in, it's easier to do it than not to do it because it becomes your new comfort zone. And you are only comfortable when you are performing with that new habit in that new range. So developing new habits is important. Now, how do you develop habits? Well, the biggest mistake that a person makes is that well, I want to develop all of these habits. No, develop one a month for the next year. Pick the habits, say, well, if I went early to bed, early to rise, that would really help me because I'd get a good night's sleep and I'd be up. I could plan my day and I'd be able to start early. Or if I did all of my shopping at one time, so I didn't have to shop during the week. Or if I was punctual for every appointment. Or if I spent an hour a day studying my craft. Whatever happens to be, pick one habit and do that for a month. And don't make exceptions to it every single day for a month until it locks in. At the end of a month, it's locked in and then develop a second habit. And say, what would be a good habit for me to have? And plan all my finances carefully and review all my expenditures every single day. So I'm really clear about how much in, how much out, where it's going, and so on, as opposed to the way I do it today. Well, if you develop one habit a month for a year, you'll have developed 12 new habits. If you develop 12 new habits, you'll have reprogrammed yourself completely in 12 different areas of performance. Do you think that would have an effect on your life? Do you know what a profound effect 12 new self-chosen good habits could have? It could so profoundly change your life as to be unbelievable. Barbara and I developed a habit. We both wanted to lose some weight. Developed a habit of what we call salads at six. So we have a salad at six o'clock with protein. Fish, meat, chicken. Just a nice salad at six o'clock. It's early, and it's too early to drink, so you don't drink. So you have salads at six, and that last you all the way through to the next day, because you don't need to eat again for 12 hours after you've eaten dinner. And if you have salads at six and no dessert, you know what happens? You have more energy, you're fresher, you're brighter, you sleep less, you wake up more refreshed, and you lose weight from the first day. You have salads at six, and you do that for 30 days. You totally transform your way of eating. And at the end of 30 days, physically, the difference will be people will stop you stopping you in the street and saying, what are you doing? Because you look so different, and you feel so different. Now, since you have more energy, what are you going to do with that energy? You're probably going to get up in the morning and exercise. So now you have salads at six, and morning exercise. OMG, OMG. Do you see what I'm saying? And then you're sounding like a plant every day in advance, and set priorities on my day and start with my most important task. Now, we're starting to double and triple, because each of these new habits is having a multiplier effect against the other habits. In what seems to be a very short period of time, you will know a week a month, a year can go by, like a blink. In one year, you'd be a totally different person. And here's the wonderful thing. Each time you engage in a behavior that leads to a better habit, your self-esteem goes up, and your self-confidence goes up, you get a backflow of an endorphins, which gives you a feeling of happiness and well-being. So you not only get paid off as a result of achieving the habit, and the results of the habit, you get paid off every step you take to develop a new positive habit. Makes you happy, gives you positive feedback, gives you ideas, makes you more creative. You literally start to transform your personality by taking one step at a time, developing one habit a month. It's just an aside, no extra charge for that. Number seven is the law of emotions. We say every decision that you make is based on emotion of some kind. The stronger emotion will dominate a weaker emotion, and we'll determine what you do. In other words, if you have an emotion of desire to become successful in your work, but you have an emotion of fear and insecurity, you don't want to lose your security, which every emotion is the most intense, is the one that will dominate the other. There's a story of the old Indian chief, and he was asked, he said, "I have two wolves." He said, "On either shoulder, the black wolf on one shoulder is always luring to do things that are not good for me." And he said, "The white wolf on the other shoulders always encourage me to things that are good for me." And the person he was talking to said, "Which is the wolf that dominates?" And he said, "The one I feed." The one that I pay the most attention to is the one that dominates my thinking. So you can actually, by continually thinking, about what you desire, you actually caused that to become more intense, and you caused the fear that's holding you back to become less and less. And so pretty soon, the desire for success, happiness, achievement is much greater than the fears that hold most people back. And you do it little by little, just by dwelling on it over and over. And so that eventually becomes your stronger emotion. The law of emotion says, "Every decision you make is based on emotion," ta-da-da. Okay, the two major emotions that constantly wrestle within us are fear versus desire. You know that our fears come from our early childhood. No child is born with any fear. So if we have fears as adults, we learn them. By the way, some fears are good. Fears across in the street in busy traffic. That's good fear to have. Fears of driving carefully, parking your car, in lighted areas, locking your doors, property insuring. These are good fears to have because what they do is they create a cocoon of safety around you. It's the other fears that act as breaks that hold you back and that trip you up that are fears that we need to get rid of. So we say the law of expression says, "Whatever is impressed is expressed." This comes from Aristotle, by the way, the law of expression. In other words, whatever you take in to yourself, you read, listen to, talk, and so on, you express in your life and your conversation. You can always tell what's going on inside a person by listening to their conversation, because they're always expressing what they're thinking about. In Freudian analysis, they call it the talk cure. The talk cure is the person lays down comfortably and the psychoanalyst asks them questions to get them talking, stream of consciousness. And what they are looking for is what is called the Freudian slip, which you're familiar with, which is what slips out. The word slips out. Well, tell me a little bit about your childhood. Well, I was raised in a wonderful home, and my parents were just the most wonderful people, and very supportive in everything else, and I always hated my father. And Bingbing, excuse me, this is not an uncommon situation, where the person feels that I have to love my parents. And in reality, they hate one or more of their parents for what their parents did to them when they were growing up, but they've been taught that they have to love their parents. If they're a good son or a good daughter, I'd be self-ideal, they have to love their parents. So they keep repressing the fact that they hate one of their parents, and they keep talking about how much they love their parents. I've seen this happen. As a matter of fact, the last person I saw this with actually went out after this great monstrous preion of tribute to his father went out and blew his brains out. He actually killed himself. He used to work for me. Why? It's because he was living in this lie. And this lie caused so much turmoil within himself. He kept saying, oh, what a wonderful father he had. But once when he had not been paying attention, he told us how this father was a drunken brute, who'd brutalized him and his whole family, physically, mentally, and emotionally. And then later on, I never said that. I never said that. And yet, he'd gone into great detail. So it was not just a one-liner. Got into great deal to the years of turmoil that he experienced at his father's hands. And later he said, no, my father was loving and kind. And one could just could not deal with it. So whatever is impressed is expressed. So be very careful that you impress into your mind only really positive things, because those are what will be expressed. And you only want to be expressing really positive, healthy thoughts. So number nine, the law of reversibility. This is one of the great laws. And what it says is this, is if you achieve a certain level of success or good health or happy relationships, then that accomplishment will create a subjective state or a feeling or emotional state that goes with it. In other words, if you win something, you feel like a winner. And you act like a winner. You get the emotion of winning from the act itself. But what happens is the objective reality, the fact of success, creates the subjective state or the emotion. And this is what we say, so that if you are a winner, you feel like a winner. But if you are not, haven't been a winner, if you create the feeling, just think how you would feel if you succeeded in this area. And you start to think and create a visual picture of yourself succeeding. I remember Mary Lou Reddon had this visual picture in her mind for 10 years of being on the top stand at the Olympics and getting the gold medal in Women's Gymnastics. She had that picture for 10 years. And she trained toward it and trained toward it. And she could see it. And every single person she ever saw in the Olympics on there, she could see herself. And the Olympics, until it became her reality. And Anne, the thought of being up there, grow her in, motivate her in, since inspired her. So she trained and trained and trained, and so on. And then the most amazing damn thing happened. Here's Mary Lou Reddon, working as the hardest can be doing well in local gymnastic competitions, but realizing she'd reached a ceiling. I think she was living in Chicago. And the greatest trainer of Young Women Gymnastics in history, Bella Carole, who had trained-- Mary trained, Nadia Komenewski, trained her, defected from Romania, and set up a school in Florida. Just when she was about to hit her peak of training, and so she told her parents she's got to train with this man. And her parents shut down their business, sold her house, and moved her and the whole family to the city in Florida where Bella Carole's studio was. And she worked under Bella Carole straight through to gold medals on the Olympics. I mean, it's just a great story. And what she had, though, is this very clear picture of winning and the visual picture of winning created the objective reality. So the principal of reversibility says, if you really feel great about yourself, you'll behave in a great way. But if you don't feel in a great way, you can create the feeling within yourself, or you can act your way into feeling. You can act like you're already successful, and you create the feeling. Or you can feel that you're already successful, and it will create the action. Are you with me so far? So it's really important. This law of reversibility goes back and forth. What William James of Harvard says that if you do not have an emotion, but pretend as if you already do have the emotion, you'll experience the emotion that would go along with the success. So we imagine that you have your goal already. Imagine that you're already at your goal. One of the great exercises, if what you want to do is have a big beautiful ideal home for yourself, is to go to open houses on a regular basis and the kind of neighborhoods that you dream of living in. Barbara and I did that at a young age, and walk through these houses that are far beyond anything you can afford. Just walk through the houses. Just walk through the houses and think about living there. And as you do that for a while, it's sort of like those webcams that take a look at the whole house that you can watch online. You can actually visit a house online. Well, you become a webcam. What you do is you just take a moving picture of the kind of house, and you file it away. And then you go to another house, and you say, I like this staircase, and I love that backyard. This kitchen is beautiful. And you start to create a composite by going and looking at all these beautiful, expensive homes. And what happens is your subconscious mind begins to believe that you live in a big, expensive home and begins to adjust your behavior so that you become the kind of person who can afford to live in that kind of a house. Now, you say to me, oh, yeah, but what if it doesn't work? No, you will. That's the wrong question. The question is, what if it does work? It doesn't cost you anything. I'm not saying cut off your arm or your leg to see if it works. I'm just saying, go and feed your mind with beautiful pictures of the kind of homes that you like to live in, and see what happens, because I tell you that every person, I've ever spoken to, who did that, ended up in their dream home within three years, including us. They ended up within their dream home. In some of the most incredible ways. Do anybody see the movie with Kirk Douglas, and that Kirk Douglas piece? Anyway, it's called The World of the Roses. Remember that movie where they go looking through homes in the most expensive neighborhoods, and it turns out this woman has to leave this house and they get the house for nothing. You remember that? They dreamed of that. They couldn't afford it. They didn't have the money, but they ended up in the house, anyway. That's a wonderful little metaphor for how it works. They went in there, and they said they fell in love with the house, and they spoke to the owner, and they ended up in the house. So imagine that you have your goal already. Get the feeling. Create the feeling as though you were already a big success. As though you're already successful. As though you already were achieved and what you achieved, and then replay and recreate that feeling over and over again. I had a friend named Bryce some years ago, and he went through my course in January, and he was working at a crummy job, and he was driving a junker. And his goal was to have a brand new BMW. And he set that down as a goal, and he went down to the BMW dealership, and he took a BMW for a test drive. And he sat in there, and he sniffed it, and he thought about it, and he felt it, and he touched the leather. And every week or two, he'd go and take a BMW for a test drive. And so they got sick of seeing him. I can tell you. And the meantime, he lost his job, and he got another job. And he was fired from that job, and he got another job. And this job was in straight commission with a very fast-growing company. And he started to make more money than ever made in his life. And December 15, he walked in, and he bought that BMW and drove it away. Throughout the year, he had pictures of that BMW from the brochures on his wheel of his car. When he drove around, he felt like he was driving a BMW. He had pictures in his wallet. He had pictures on his refrigerator. Pictures in his bathroom, or everywhere he looked. He saw pictures of that BMW. And within a year, he literally gone from rags to non-rags, and he went and bought and drove that BMW off the lot. And they were very happy to see him go. [LAUGHTER] Does it work? We play and just recreate the feeling. And the way you get the feeling is going to it. Test drive the car. Drive the perfect car for you. Go and test drive it so that you actually have a feeling. You know what it's like to drive a car like this. And then see what happens. Just see what happens. And the law of practice says that whatever you do over and over again, often enough becomes a new habit. So you can develop new habit patterns of thought and action just simply by repetition. Every habit you have today was by repetition so you can cancel the old habits and start new ones. A new habit takes about 21 days to develop. So follow a 21-day positive mental attitude diet. And resolve this for 21 days. You're only going to think and talk about what you want. And you're not going to think and talk about things that you don't want. Your goal is to become a purely positive person, what we call a PPP, so that you're just positive all the time. And if you do have a setback or an obstacle that causes you to become upset or angry, you bounce back quickly. My friend Charlie Jones used to say, it's not far you fall about how high you bounce that counts. And so what you do is you just pre-program yourself. And this is one of the great, pre-programms that I learned is that no matter what happens, I will respond to it in a positive way. Just file that in. How do you want to handle for things when they go wrong? Well, when something goes wrong, I just handle it in a positive way. I look for the good and I remain positive and cheerful. Program it in. And what happens is the next time you have a reversal, your natural tendency may be to become angry. And then you'll-- wait a minute. I always respond in a positive way to new information. And so you do. You need four qualities to make great changes in your personality and your character. Quality number one is desire. The only real limit on what you can accomplish is the question, how badly do you want it? Many people think, well, I want to be this and I want to be that. And I want to be rich and I want to be thin. And I want to be successful and I want to be happy. And I want to have a great relationship or marriage. But people in mental institutions have the same wishes. These are not goals. So just fleeting wishes. I call them cigarette smoke goals. They just disappear in the air. Because then they want to go party and then want to go drinking, they want to go have fun with their friends, and they want to tweet, and they want to waste time at work, and so on. So they want all of these conflicting things. The achievement of one, the time oysters, makes it impossible to achieve the others that are worthwhile. They want to eat whatever they can eat. They want to live without exercising and so on. So the question is, how badly do you want it? And if you really want it badly enough, then what happens is you stop doing the things that are contradictory to it. Decision, you must be willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve your goal. Now, I have to give you a word. And this is one of the great words. And it comes from about 30 years study. And I said, what is the difference between successful people and failures, and the conclusion was willingness. Now, willingness means that successful people are willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve the goal. They said, unsuccessful people are willing to do many things, but just not everything. They're willing to work hard, but not stay late. And they're willing to work during the week, but not on the weekends. And they're willing to upgrade their skills, but they don't want to take time away from reading the sports pages and watching the football game. And they're willing to exercise, but they don't really like to sweat too much. So they're really gentle exercises, like getting up from the couch and getting back down again. Things like that. In other words, they're even willing to do this, but they're not willing to move to a new city. I've met people who decided the only way they could be successful is moving to LA, and they moved to Los Angeles, from Iowa, from Indiana. They've got to move to Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or New York. In other words, they were willing to do. It's Mary Lou Renton, who was willing to uproot her whole family and move to Florida to train under Bella Corolley. And as a result, there's no question at all, as a result, she became the most respected gymnast in the world. I've met her on a couple of occasions, by the way. She's short, she's a little girl. And she's one of the loveliest women you'll ever meet. She's married now, she's got two children. Happiness can be, and she's just a lovely person. And you think, isn't that great? She deserves her success, just that's a good person. So decision, make a decision, and then be willing to do whatever is necessary within law. I'm not saying, be dishonest, but be willing to pay the price. Be willing to pay the price. Number three is determination. Back your plan with iron willpower. Remember, when you start working on a new plan, as Confucius says, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. It's hard at the beginning. It's hard to get started. It's hard to keep going. It's easy to quit. But once you get going, you start to develop momentum. It becomes easier and easier for you to get up and get going. If you decide I want to get up and exercise every morning, first time you do it, it's going to be very hard. Second time, not so hard. Third time, not so hard. After you've done it for three weeks, you can hardly wait to get up tomorrow morning and exercise. Because after you've exercised, you feel pumped. You feel high. You've got an endorphins in your brain. You're energized. You feel good about yourself. You can hardly wait for what it's called the exercise effect after you've done it for two or three weeks. After that, you start to feel real, irritable and antsy if you don't exercise. Most people who are into exercising just cannot not exercise because they start to feel really irritable. Discipline is the master key to riches. And this is really the most important key of all is the ability to discipline yourself to do it whether you feel like it or not, to just keep on keeping on until it becomes a habit. But remember this, wherever you are today, you've gotten here by the things you have done or failed to do in the past. Wherever you want to go in the future, there's no limit because you can control it. And when you start to practice self-discipline, which Napoleon Hill called the master key to riches, when you start to practice self-discipline, it becomes easier and easier. And here is the great discovery. Is that every act of self-discipline raises your self-esteem and your self-confidence. Every act of self-discipline deepens your persistence and your determination. Every act of self-discipline makes you stronger and more confident in yourself. When you practice self-discipline, you actually build yourself as a person. And that's why you find that the greatest men and women in history have worked on themselves like working out with weights to become very disciplined and focused in doing the things that they need to do to be successful. So every step you take toward becoming more disciplined actually raises your self-esteem and self-confidence and makes it easier for you to take the next step. So self-discipline is really the master key to riches. It's the foundation skill that makes everything possible. If you develop discipline, which is a learnable skill, you can accomplish anything in life. You can achieve any physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual goal. And especially you can achieve any financial goal, if you just simply develop the disciplines that are necessary to achieve it.