Please watch this video on “greed”

At the same time, everyone is motivated by an insatiable desire to achieve safety, security, comfort, leisure, love, respect and fulfillment, manifested by a never ending drive to acquire money and power. What stops the world from devolving into a war of all against all? The answer is to understand how people go about getting the things they want.

The ABC Formula of Human Behavior

Let us divide the way things are done into three parts. We can call the natural instincts that make people lazy, greedy, ambitious, selfish, vain, ignorant and impatient, which are summarized in the E-Factor, driving people toward a never ending search for something for nothing, as “A.”

We can call the natural needs or desires of all people, for safety, security, comfort, leisure, love, respect and fulfillment, “C.” These two elements are fixed factors, hard-wired into the human psyche, immutable parts of human nature and motivation. The only variable in this equation is, “How does one get from A to C?” We can call this interim step, or means, by the letter “B.” Together, we can construct the ABC Formula of human activity.

The Two Basic Ways to Get What You Want

There are two ways that you can get anything: you can earn it or you can take it. There are two ways that you can get someone else to do something: you can force him to do it with threats of punishment, or you can encourage him to want to do it, with promises of rewards and benefits.

The only way that you can stop many people from engaging in harmful behaviors in the process of getting the things they want the fastest and easiest way possible is by making the cost or punishment for expedient behaviors so high they are afraid to do it. To stop people from acting expediently, from seeking their own best interests in destructive or criminal ways, you must make the restraints and constraints so costly and severe that people are forced to either curb their natural desires, or suppress them for fear of punishment.

Throughout all of history, dictatorships and tyrannies have been based on forcing people not to act expediently, or to act contrary to their natural instincts in satisfying their basic needs.

This trampling of people and repressing of their natural desires has been the primary use of power throughout history, and right up to the present day. Human beings are, generally speaking, neither bad nor evil, they are merely expedient. But when people engage in expedient behaviors which hurt others to get something for little or nothing, and then justify their behaviors, they gradually lose their moral bearings and can become very evil indeed.

The Structure of Incentives

In the ABC Formula of explaining human behavior, both the “A” and the “C” are fixed, immutable factors. The only variable is the “B.” You could call the “B” the “Structure of Incentives.” The structure of incentives determines how a person gets from “A” to “C” the fastest and easiest way possible. Any variation in the structure of incentives will immediately change the behaviors of a certain number of people.

Let us organize the various systems of incentives that are available on a scale of 1-10, from the lowest and least productive system of incentives to the highest. A system rated at 10 would be one where the only way to get anything you want would be to either produce it yourself, or to cooperate with others to get it with and through them. It would be totally voluntary, based on merit and on the perception by each person that he would be better off as a result of working within this system. This is the pure free market system.

At the other end of the scale, a system with a rating of one would be a cultural and economic structure where lying, cheating, deceiving, defrauding, stealing, violence and murder are the fastest and easiest way for people to get the things they want.

In criminal societies or organizations, these are the primary ways of acquiring safety, security, comfort, leisure, love, respect and fulfillment, especially money and power. The individuals who are the most ruthless and unprincipled in the use of violent means to acquire the things they want inevitably rise to the top, crushing all competition or opposition on the way. You see this in third world tyrannies, drug cartels and in the aftermath of riots and wars.

Ordering Societies by the Numbers

All groupings of individuals into tribes, societies and nations can be organized along this scale from 1-10. Peaceful, democratic societies, governed by law, cluster at the top of the scale. Despotic, impoverished societies, ruled by force and tyranny, generally cluster at the bottom.

Societies displaying a mixture of the two extremes are arranged along the middle of the scale. Human nature however is like water. It flows downhill, in and through any crack, crevice or hole that it can find. Human nature instinctively, impulsively, reflexively, drives people to continually strive to get the things they want the fastest and easiest way possible, with little concern for the likely consequences.

As soon as there is any way for people to fulfill their desires other than by working and cooperating voluntarily with others, some people, and then more and more, will find that loophole and take advantage of it.

Click Here to gain access to the rest of my video series about “Something For Nothing.”

Human beings, by nature, are lazy, greedy, ambitious, selfish, impatient, vain, and ignorant. These traits are neither good nor bad by themselves; it is only the way in which we manifest these natural traits that make them positive or negative. These natural traits are the fundamental reasons for why people do what they do.

Watch this video on “Laziness”

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The Greatest Miracle

In reality, the free market is the greatest miracle of social cooperation ever conceived of in human society. Because no one can force anyone else to act contrary to their best interests, everyone must voluntarily cooperate with others if they want to satisfy their own personal needs the fastest and easiest way possible.

In the free market, the best rise to the top. Those who are the most skillful at bringing together and producing products and services that people want and are willing to pay for tend to emerge from the competition and become even more successful satisfying customers in more ways. Since every person who controls money or resources wants to earn the highest and best return on those resources, they naturally gravitate towards those people with a proven ability to put those resources to work in the very best way possible. Everyone benefits.

Specialization Becomes Possible

As products and services become more complex, specialization of labor develops. Instead of having to produce everything he needs by himself, people naturally gravitate toward doing those things for which they have a natural facility, which they can do better, and for which they can earn higher pay and greater rewards.

Competition among individuals and businesses to serve even more customers by giving them more of the things they want faster, better and cheaper, drives innovation.

Competition for the seven common desires forces people to become even more creative in producing even more and better products and services for the market. With no intervention, control or involvement by government or any other organized body, the actions of free people in free markets assures the very best and most efficient allocation of capital, resources and labor in the satisfying of customer wants and needs.

The Entrepreneur Takes the Risk

If the entrepreneur guesses wrong and produces a product or service that he cannot sell at a price that yields a sufficient profit to cover the costs of producing it, the losses fall on the shoulders of the entrepreneur and his investors. If the entrepreneur guesses rightly, and brings a product or service to market that customers want in such quantity that he can make a sufficient profit, with which he can invest and produce even more products and services, everyone benefits.

The opportunity to profit in a free market channels the E-Factor into continually seeking better and faster ways to serve customers. This is why profits are the costs of the future. Where there are profits, there is employment, opportunities and hope for the future. Where there are no profits, jobs disappear, companies shut down, and resources move into the hands of people who can use them better.

The Wealth of Nations became a best seller in the American Colonies in the next few years. The ideas of the free market became the bedrock economic principles upon which the American Republic was founded. They still dominate today, even though they are constantly under attack by people and politicians who either do not understand the miracle of voluntary cooperation in open markets, or deliberately choose to ignore it in the pursuit of power and money.

Dislike of Freedom and Free Markets

Since people are naturally expedient, in that they are lazy, greedy, selfish, ambitious, vain, ignorant and impatient, there are always a substantial number who do not like the idea of being rewarded on the basis of their ability to serve their fellow man in a way that he wants to be served. They detest the idea of the free market. They want rewards without working, rewards that are detached from any merit, or any need to satisfy other people. Being human, they want something for nothing.

It is the duty and responsibility of politicians and policy makers at all levels to disallow any route to financial success except by serving other people in some way. No one should be allowed to benefit except by being voluntarily compensated by those people because they value that service. Allowing people to profit without contributing to the well-being of others is the great dilemma of our day, which I’ll talk about later.

Key Purpose

Key Measure

The key measure of business success is customer satisfaction. Your ability to satisfy your customers to such a degree that they buy from you rather than from someone else, that they buy again, and that they bring their friends is the key determinant of growth and profitability.

Key Requirement

The key requirement for wealth building and business success is for you to add value in some way. All wealth comes from adding value. All business growth and profitability come from adding value. Every day, you must be looking for ways to add more and more value to the customer experience.

Key Focus

The most important person in the business is the customer. You must focus on the customer at all times. Customers are fickle, disloyal, changeable, impatient, and demanding-just like you. Nonetheless, the customer must be the central focus of everything you do in business.

Key Word

In life, work, and business, you will always be rewarded in direct proportion to the value of your contribution to others, as they see it. The focus on outward contribution, to your company, your customers, and your community, is the central requirement for you to become an ever more valuable person, in every area.

Key Question

The most important question you ask, to solve any problem, overcome any obstacle, or achieve any business goal is “How?” Top people always ask the question “How?” and then act on the answers that come to them.

Key Strategy

In a world of rapid change and continuing aggressive competition, you must practice continuous improvement in every area of your business and personal life. As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, said, “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.”

Key Activity

The heartbeat of your business is sales. Dun & Bradstreet analyzed thousands of companies that had gone broke over the years and concluded that the number-one reason for business failure was “low sales.” When they researched further, they found that the number-one reason for business success was “high sales.” And all else was commentary.

Key Number

The most important number in business is cash flow. Cash flow is to the business as blood and oxygen are to the brain. You can have every activity working efficiently in your business, but if your cash flow is cut off for any reason, the business can die, sometimes overnight.

Key Goal

Every business must have a growth plan. Growth must be the goal of all your business activities. You should have a goal to grow 10 percent, 20 percent, or even 30 percent each year. Some companies grow 50 percent and 100 percent per year, and not by accident. The only real growth is profit growth. Profit growth is always measurable in what is called “free cash flow.” This is the actual amount of money that the business throws off each month, each quarter, and each year, above and beyond the total cost and expense of running a business.

Action Exercise

You should have a growth plan for the number of new leads you attract and for the number of new customers you acquire from those leads. You should have a growth plan for sales, revenues, and profitability. If you do not deliberately plan for continuous growth, you will automatically stagnate and begin to fall behind. Growth is not an accident; so you must plan and map out your growth plan if you want your business to see a bright future.

How to unlock your subconscious brakes and move ahead
rapidly in your life

Do you have any ideas or attitudes about yourself and your abilities that may be holding you back from great success and happiness? As it happens, everyone does.

Feeling Inferior

In her wonderful book You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay says that each one of us has feelings of inferiority that are manifested in the conclusion that we are not good enough.  We think that we are not as good as other people, and we feel that we are not good enough to acquire and enjoy the things that we want in life.  Very often, we feel that we don’t deserve good things.  Even if we do work hard and achieve some worthwhile objectives, we believe that we are not really entitled to our successes, and we often engage in behaviors that sabotage our successes.

The fact is that you deserve every good thing that you are capable of acquiring as the result of the application of your talents.

Ordinary to Extraordinary

You need to develop your beliefs about yourself to the point where they serve you every day in every way.  Men and women who accomplish extraordinary things are just ordinary people who developed themselves mentally to the point where they were able to overcome the obstacles that stood in their way, and they kept on keeping on until the goal was attained.

The most harmful beliefs that you can have are what we call “self-limiting beliefs.” These are beliefs about yourself, most of which are not true; but they hold you back nonetheless.  Sometimes you, or others, will say that you cannot achieve certain goals because you did not get enough education.

The humorist Josh Billings once said, “It ain’t what a man knows what hurts him.  It’s what a man knows what ain’t true.”  It isn’t the actual truth about yourself and your abilities that hurts you; it’s the things that you consider to be true and that have no basis in truth.

Make a Change

The starting point of changing your beliefs is to get up the courage to question them seriously.  Question your basic premises.  Check your assumptions.  Ask yourself, “What assumptions am I making about myself or my situation that might not be true?”

It’s a fact that we fall in love with our excuses and our negative assumptions.  We fall in love with our reasons for not moving ahead.

The author Richard Bach wrote this beautiful line: “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”  Very often, we become the prosecuting attorney in the case against ourselves.  We dispute and argue and attempt to prove to ourselves and others that our limitations are real.  And the less justification these ideas or beliefs have, the more adamant we become in attempting to prove them to others.

Whatever they are, resolve to challenge them. Hold them up to the light. Imagine that you had absolute confidence in yourself in a particular area. Then, act as if it were impossible to fail, and it shall be!

3 Steps to Success

Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, accept that you are as good and as talented in your own way as anyone else you will ever meet. There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you really want it.

Second, challenge a belief or idea about yourself that is holding you back. What if you had extraordinary ability in that area? What difference would that make in your life?

Third, stop making excuses for lack of success. Instead, start making progress. Think and talk about what you want and then get busy making it come true.

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Don’t get caught not listening to your potential customer. This is critical to your sales success.

Paraphrase Your Customer’s Words

The customer is only sure that you have been listening when you paraphrase what they have said and feed it back in your own words. This is where the rubber meets the road in effective listening. This is where you demonstrate in no uncertain terms to the prospect that your listening has been real and sincere. This is where you show the prospect that you were paying complete attention to what he or she was saying. Paraphrasing is how you prove it.

Question For Clarification

When the prospect has finished explaining his or her situation to you, and you have paused, and then questioned for clarification, you paraphrase the prospects primary thoughts and concerns, and feed them back to him or her in your own words.

Use the Right Words

For example, you might say, “Let me make sure I understand exactly what you are saying. It sounds to me like you are concerned about two things more than anything else and that in the past you have had a couple of experiences that have made you very careful in approaching a decision of this kind.”

Feed It Back Accurately

You then go on to feed back to the prospect exactly what he or she has told you, pausing and questioning for clarification as you go, until the customer says words to the effect of, “Yes, that’s it! You’ve got it exactly.”

Earn the Right to Sell

Only when you and the customer completed a thorough “examination” and have mutually agreed on the “diagnosis” you are in a position to begin talking to the customer about your product or service. In general terms, this means that you can not pull out your brochures and price lists and begin telling the customer how your product or service can solve his problems or achieve his goals until about seventy percent of the way through the sales conversation. Until then, you have not yet earned the right. Until then, you don’t even know enough to begin an intelligent presentation without embarrassing yourself.

Be A Good Listener

The more and better you listen, the more and better people will like you, trust you and want to do business with you. The more they will want to get involved with you as a person and the more popular you will be with them. Excellent listeners are welcome everywhere, in every walk of life, and they eventually and ultimately arrive at the top of their fields.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First: Remember that your first job in the sale is to get the customer to like you and believe that you understand his situation. Paraphrasing is the way you accomplish this.

Second: Be sure that the customer agrees with you completely when you feed back his concerns to him. Only then can you really start selling.

A year later, he came back to take the seminar again. But this time, he was distinctly different. He was calmer and more self-assured. He was still a little shy, but when he shook hands, his grip was firmer, and his eye contact was better. He sat toward the middle of the seminar room, and he interacted quietly with people around him. At the end of the seminar, he told me that he was starting to move up in his sales force and had had his best year ever. He was determined to do even better in the year to come.

About 14 months later, Tim came back to the seminar. This time, he brought five people from his company, all of whom he had convinced to come to the seminar, and he had offered to pay their tuition if they weren’t satisfied. He walked right up to me and shook hands firmly, looking me straight in the eye with a strong, self-confident smile. He asked if I remembered him, and I told him that I remembered him very well. He said that he had brought something that he wanted to show me. He took out of his pocket a letter from the president of a national corporation-one of the biggest companies in the country-personally congratulating him for the outstanding job he had done in sales in his territory in the past year.

It turned out that Tim had gone from number 33 to number one out of 42 salespeople. His income had risen from $26,000 a year to $98,000, and he had increased his sales volume at a faster rate than any other salesperson in the country had. He was still quiet, but he had a wonderful air of power and purposefulness about him. He had taken the steps and paid the price to build himself into a fine young man. He had made the decision to do whatever was necessary to overcome his shyness and to develop the kind of personality that he admired in others. He was, and is, in every sense of the word, a self-made man.

Two Mental Laws

Perhaps the most wonderful result of developing high levels of self-confidence is the positive impact that your personality will have on your relationships. There are two mental laws that are always operating and that determine much of what happens to you in your interactions with people.

Law #1

The first is the law of attraction, which says that you will inevitably attract into your life people who are very much like you.

Law #2

The second law is the law of correspondence, which says that your outer world of relationships will correspond perfectly, like a mirror image, to your inner world of personality and temperament.

In combination, these laws simply say that as you change in a positive direction, you will find yourself surrounded by people who are very much like the new person you are becoming. As you get better, the quality and quantity of your relationships will get better. You will meet nicer, more self-confident, more interesting and enjoyable people. You will find yourself getting along better with members of the opposite sex, including your spouse. You will find yourself doing better at your job, or even in a new job, and getting along better with your boss and your coworkers. Your attitude of confidence and calm assurance will make you more attractive to people. They will want to be around you, to open doors for you, to make opportunities available to you that would not have arisen when you didn’t feel as terrific about yourself as you do now.

Often, people lack self-confidence in their relationships with others because they judge themselves poorly in comparison. Sometimes you become self-conscious of what you are doing and saying, and sometimes you are afraid that people will not like you or accept you the way you want them to. Well, there is an important mindset that you can adopt to improve your ability to get along well with others in a more relaxed and confident fashion.

Practice Detachment

It’s important to remember that no one can affect your thoughts or feelings unless there is something that you want from him, or something that you want him to refrain from doing. As soon as you begin to practice detachment and decide in your own mind that there is nothing that you want or expect from another person, you will find that his ability to shake your self-confidence is greatly reduced. The people who are the most successful in human relationships are those who practice a calm, healthy detachment from others, and although they are friendly and engaged in the conversation, they don’t allow the behaviors of others to determine how they think and feel about themselves.

As you can see, it is our fears and doubts that, more than anything else, undermine our self-esteem and self-confidence and cause us to think in negative terms about ourselves and our possibilities. As Maslow said, we begin to “sell ourselves short” and see all the reasons why something might not be possible for us. We magnify the difficulties and minimize the opportunities. We become preoccupied with the possible losses we might suffer and the possible criticisms we might endure. Our fears and doubts paralyze us, preventing us from acting boldly, lowering our self-confidence and causing us to think and talk in negative terms. In fact, this probably describes the great majority of mankind. Most people are so preoccupied with their fears that they have time for little else, and this preoccupation manifests itself in much of what they say and do.

The only real antidote to doubt and worry and fear and all the other negative emotions that sabotage our self-confidence is action. Your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, positive or negative. When you engage in systematic, purposeful action, using and stretching your abilities to the maximum, you cannot help but feel positive and confident about yourself.

Act as though it were impossible to fail. Act as though you already had a high level of self-confidence. And continually ask yourself, “What one great thing would I dare to achieve if I knew I could not fail?” Whatever your answer, you can have it if you can dream it, and if you have the self-confidence to go out and get it.

Most of us are like this for most of our lives. There are many things that we want to be, and have and do, but we hold back. We are unsure because we lack the confidence necessary to step out in faith in the direction of our dreams.

Don’t Underestimate Yourself

Abraham Maslow said that the story of the human race is the story of men and women “selling themselves short.” Alfred Adler, the great psychotherapist, said that men and women have a natural tendency toward feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Because we lack confidence, we don’t think we have the ability to do the kind of things that others have done, and in many cases, we don’t even try.

Just think: What difference would it make in your life if you had an absolutely unshakable confidence in your ability to achieve anything you really put your mind to? What would you want and wish and hope for? What would you dare to dream if you believed in yourself with such deep conviction that you had no fears of failure whatsoever?

Most people start off with little or no self-confidence, but as a result of their own efforts, they become bold and brave and outgoing. And we’ve discovered that if you do the same things that other self-confident men and women do, you, too, will experience the same feelings and get the same results.

Discover Yourself

The key is to be true to yourself, to be true to the very best that is in you, and to live your life consistent with your highest values and aspirations.

Take some time to think about who you are and what you believe in and what is important to you. Decide that you will never compromise your integrity by trying to be or say or feel something that is not true for you. Have the courage to accept yourself as you really are-not as you might be, or as someone else thinks you should be-and know that, taking everything into consideration, you are a pretty good person.

After all, we all have our own talents, skills and abilities that make us extraordinary. No one, including yourself, has any idea of your capabilities or of what you might ultimately do or become. Perhaps the hardest thing to do in life is to accept how extraordinary you really can be, and then to incorporate this awareness into your attitude and personality.

Know Yourself and Your Potential

In developing unshakable levels of self-confidence, your self-esteem, and self-regard are important starting points, but they are not enough. People have tried positive thinking and wishing and hoping for years, with only mixed results. To develop the deep-down kind of self-confidence that leads to victory, you need positive knowing, not just positive thinking.

Lasting self-confidence really comes from a sense of control. When you feel very much in control of yourself and your life, you feel confident enough to do and say the things that are consistent with your highest values. Psychologists today agree that a feeling of being “out of control” is the primary reason for stress and negativity and for feelings of inferiority and low self-confidence. And the way for you to get a solid sense of control over every part of your life is to set clear goals or objectives, to establish a sense of direction based on purposeful behavior aimed at predetermined ends.

Being true to yourself means knowing exactly what you want and having a plan to achieve it.  Lasting self-confidence comes when you absolutely know that you have the capacity to get from where you are to wherever you want to go.  You are behind the wheel of your life.  You are the architect of your destiny and the master of your fate.

Instead of being preoccupied with the fear of failure and loss, as most people are, you focus on the opportunity and the possible gains of achievement.  With a clearly defined track to run on, you become success-oriented, and you gradually build your confidence up to the stage where there is very little you will not take on.

Positive Thinking vs. Positive Knowing

Another essential way to build your self-confidence, through positive knowing rather than just positive thinking, is to become very good at what you do. The flip side of self-confidence is “self-efficacy,” or the ability to perform effectively in your chosen area.

You can raise your self-confidence instantly by the simple act of committing yourself to becoming excellent in your chosen field. You immediately separate yourself from the average individual who drifts from job to job and accepts mediocrity as the adequate standard.

Please stay tuned to my blog, as I will be posting Forging Your Self-Confidence Part 2 at the end of this week.

Until next time,

Brian Tracy

“Concentrate your strengths against your competitor’s relative weakness.”

—Bruce Henderson

There is a military adage that says, “No strategy ever survives first contact with the enemy.” No business strategy ever survives first contact with the marketplace, as well. It must always be adjusted to deal with the realities of the moment.

You have probably heard it said, “Business is war.” What this means is that there is vigorous and never ending competition to conquer the market, win the customer and achieve the sale. Just as you are eager to succeed by selling your product or service and earn a profit, so is your competitor. He wants your business and, if possible, all of it. To achieve this, your competitor will do or offer almost anything to take your customers away from you.

Know Your Enemy

Here then is a question for you: Who is your competition? Exactly? Your choice of competitor determines almost everything you do in your market, just as the choice of an adversary determines everything a general does in the process of conducting military operations.
Your competitor determines what you offer and where you offer it. Your competitor determines your prices and how you charge. Your competitor determines your levels of profitability and how consistently you earn them. Your competitor determines your rate of growth and your very survival. Everything you do must be done with a view toward your existing or potential competitor, and his or her likely responses to your actions.

Determine Their Buying Motives

Once you have determined why it is that people buy from you, you must then ask and answer, “Why do people buy from my competitors?” What value or benefits are your potential customers convinced that they receive when buying from your competitor rather than from you?
What are your competitor’s key strengths? What are his areas of specialization, differentiation, segmentation, and concentration? What does your competitor have that you don’t have? What does he offer that you don’t offer? What is he doing more of or better than you? What is his unique selling proposition?

Marketing Myopia

Many people dismiss or ignore their major competitors. They criticize or belittle them when their names come up. Often they think and say that customers who prefer competitive offerings are simply ignorant or misled. As a result of this self-inflicted myopia, they fail to observe and learn how to outdo their competitors in tough markets.

One of the most effective business strategies you can implement is to always admire your successful competitors. Never dismiss them out of hand. Study them. Learn from them. Respect what they are doing well, and look for ways to improve upon their best features.

Offset Their Advantages

As you study your competitors, look for ways to offset or neutralize the advantages their customers perceive them to have. What are your competitor’s weaknesses? How can you exploit these weaknesses? What do you do better than they do? In what ways are your products or services superior to their offerings? In what areas do you have a distinct advantage over your competitors? What can you do to offset your competitor’s strengths and maximize your advantages? How can you better position yourself against your competitors in a tough market?

The more time you take to study and understand why and how your competitors are successful in selling to your customers, the more likely it is that you will find an opportunity to take away their market share. As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War, “If you know both yourself and your enemy, you will prevail in a hundred battles.”

You Must Be Clear

The greater clarity you develop, and the more accurate you are, with regard to your competitors and why your potential customers buy from them, the better able you will be to counter them and compete effectively. Rigorous competitive analysis can be a vital key to business success. In its absence, you will always be at a disadvantage.

Analyze Your Competition:

1. Who is your competition for what you sell, with the exact customers you are trying to attract?
2. What would happen if you changed your offerings in such a way that you targeted a different group of customers, one that would be easier to sell to?
3. Why do your potential customers buy from your competitors? What advantages do they perceive?
4. What is your competitor’s unique selling proposition? What special feature or benefit does his product or service have that yours does not?
5. In what ways are you superior to your competitors? What can you offer that they cannot? How can you emphasize this advantage in your sales and marketing efforts?
6. Where is your competitor vulnerable? How could you exploit this to your advantage?
7. How could you alter your marketing strategy in such a way that you could achieve dominance in a particular area, with a specific customer or market segment?

As a wise man once said, “You must dream big dreams, for only big dreams have the power to move the minds of men.” When you begin to dream big dreams, your levels of self-esteem and self-confidence will go up immediately. You will feel more powerful about yourself and your ability to deal with what happens to you. The reason so many people accomplish so little is because they never allow themselves to lean back and imagine the kind of life that is possible for them.

Theory of Constraints

A powerful principle that you can use to dream big dreams and live without limits is contained in what Elihu Goldratt calls the “Theory of Constraints.” This is one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern thinking. What Goldratt has found is that in every process, in accomplishing any goal, there is a bottleneck or choke cord that serves as a constraint on the process. This constraint then sets the speed at which you achieve any particular goal.

What Goldratt found is that if you concentrate all of your creative energies and attention on alleviating the constraint, you can speed up the process faster than by doing any other single thing.

Let me give you an example. Let us say that you want to double your income. What is the critical constraint or the limiting factor that holds you back? Well, you know that your income is a direct reward for the quality and quantity of the services you render to your world. Whatever field you are in, if you want to double your income, you simply have to double the quality and quantity of what you do for that income. Or you have to change activities and occupations so that what you are doing is worth twice as much. But you must always ask yourself, “What is the critical constraint that holds me back or sets the speed on how fast I double my income?”

The 80/20 Rule in Action

A friend of mine is one of the highest-paid commission professionals in the United States. One of his goals was to double his income over the next three to five years. He applied the 80/20 rule to his client base. He found that 20 percent of his clients contributed 80 percent of his profits, and that the amount of time spent on a high-profit client was pretty much the same amount of time spent on a low-profit client. In other words, he was dividing his time equally over the number of tasks that he does while only 20 percent of those items contributes 80 percent of his results.

So he drew a line on his list of clients under those who represented the top 20 percent and then called in other professionals in his industry and very carefully, politely, and strategically handed off the 80 percent of his clients that only represented 20 percent of his business. He then put together a profile of his top clients and began looking in the marketplace exclusively for the type of client who fit the profile; in other words, one who could become a major profit contributor to his organization, and whom he in turn could serve with the level of excellence that his clients were accustomed to. And instead of doubling his income in three to five years, he doubled it in the first year!

What Are Your Constraints?

So what is holding you back? Is it your level of education or skill? Is it your current occupation or job? Is it your current environment or level of health? Is it the situations that you are in today? What is setting the speed for you achieving your goal?

Remember, whatever you have learned, you can unlearn. Whatever situation you have gotten yourself into, you can probably get yourself out of. If your real goal is to dream big dreams and to live without limits, you can set this as your standard and compare everything that you do against it.

Three Keys

The three keys to living without limits have always been the same. They are clarity, competence, and concentration.

#1: Clarity

Clarity means that you are absolutely clear about who you are, what you want, and where you’re going. You write down your goals and you make plans to accomplish them. You set very careful priorities and you do something every day to move you toward your goals. And the more progress you make toward accomplishing things that are important to you, the greater self-confidence and self-belief you have, and the more convinced you become that there are no limits on what you can achieve.

# 2: Competence

Competence means that you begin to become very, very good in the key result areas of your chosen field. You apply the 80/20 rule to everything you do and you focus on becoming outstanding in the 20 percent of tasks that contribute to 80 percent of your results. You dedicate yourself to continuous learning. You never stop growing. You realize that excellence is a moving target. And you commit yourself to doing something every day that enables you to become better and better at doing the most important things in your field.

# 3: Concentration

Concentration is having the self-discipline to force yourself to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing, and stay with it until it’s complete.

The two key words for success have always been focus and concentration.

Focus is knowing exactly what you want to be, have, and do. Concentration is persevering, without diversion or distraction, in a straight line toward accomplishing the things that can make a real difference in your life.

When you allow yourself to begin to dream big dreams, creatively abandon the activities that are taking up too much of your time, and focus your inward energies on alleviating your main constraints, you start to feel an incredible sense of power and confidence. As you focus on doing what you love to do and becoming excellent in those few areas that can make a real difference in your life, you begin to think in terms of possibilities rather than impossibilities, and you move ever closer toward the realization of your full potential.

What is your current level of sales? Break them down by product, product line, service, market, and distribution channel. What exactly are you selling, to which customers, at what prices, and with what level of profitability?

Compare your current sales with your assumptions, your expectations, and your projections. Are you on track? Compare your level of sales with last year. What are the trends? Are they up or down? Are they temporary or permanent? What do the trends suggest for the future of your business? What could you do to respond more effectively to them?

Cash Flow is Everything

Look at your cash flow and levels of profitability for each product, service, and area of activity. Are your profits going up or down? Are they on budget or going sideways? Look at the percentages. Analyze your return-on-equity, return-on-investment, and return-on-sales. Are they increasing or decreasing?

Jim Collins says, in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap -And Others Don’t, that you must be willing to ask the “brutal questions” about your business if you are going to solve your problems and achieve your goals. If your goal is to build a great company, why isn’t your company already great?

Which of your products or services is selling well today? Which of your products and services are the most profitable? Which ones are doing poorly? Which ones do you lose money on?

Is your current business situation, positive or negative, in any area, temporary, or is it part of a long-term trend? How can you know for sure? How can you find out? What should you do next?

Clarity is the Key

Perhaps the most important word in strategic planning is “clarity.” You must be absolutely clear about the answers to each of these questions. Vagueness or fuzziness in any area can lead to problems, difficulties, and even disasters.

Why has your business been successful in the past? What have you done well in the past that has been responsible for your success to date? What are the most important skills and competencies that your company possesses today? What are the very best products and services that you offer right now?

Look at the people around you. Who are your most valuable people? Who is no longer as valuable as before? Who even represents a net loss or detriment to your business? Be prepared to ask and answer the brutal questions.

The Customer is the King

Who are your best customers today? What and where are your best markets? What do your customers like most about what you do for them? What do they compliment the most of what you offer or do for them? What is your number-one area of customer satisfaction?

What do your customers like least about what you do? What do they complain about most? What is it that you sell that your customers and potential customers prefer to buy somewhere else rather than from you?

Question Your Assumptions

Time management expert Alex McKenzie once wrote, “Errant assumptions lie at the root of every failure.” Everything you do in your business is based on certain assumptions. Some of those assumptions could be wrong. The answers may have changed, and what was correct in the past may not be correct today. Check every assumption and ask, “What if this assumption were not true?”

If you found that you were operating on the basis of a false assumption, what changes would you have to make, especially with regard to your key people, key customers, key products and services, and key projections?

Strategic planning requires that you begin with a realistic and honest assessment of exactly where you are and what you are today. This becomes your starting point for strategic planning and strategic thinking. It becomes the foundation upon which all future decisions are made.

Action Strategies:

1. What is working best in your business today? What parts of your business make you happiest?
2. What is not working in your business? What causes you the most aggravation and frustration?
3. What are your most important products and markets? What accounts for the largest portion of your revenues?
4. Who are your most important people? Who are the people who account for most of your results?
5. What are your special talents and skills? What is it you do that accounts for most of your success?
6. What are the major changes taking place in your market? What changes should you make to compensate for them?
7. What are your most treasured assumptions about your people, customers, markets, products, services, and yourself? What if one of them weren’t true? What would you do then?