Book Goals! by Brian Tracy

Introduction

This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been

more opportunities for creative and determined people to achieve

more of their goals than they can today. Regardless of short-term ups

and downs in the economy and in your life, we are entering into an

age of peace and prosperity superior to any previous era in human

history.

In the year 1900, there were five thousand millionaires in

America. By the year 2000, there were more than five million, most of

them self-made, in one generation. Experts predict that there will be

another ten to twenty million millionaires created in the next two

decades. Your goal should be to become one of them. This book will

show you how.

A Slow Start

When I was 18, I left high school without graduating. My first

job was as a dishwasher in the back of a small hotel. From there, I

moved on to washing cars, and then washing floors with a janitorial

service. For the next few years, I drifted and worked at various

laboring jobs, earning my living by the sweat of my brow. I worked

in sawmills and factories. I worked on farms and ranches. I worked

in the tall timber with a chain saw and dug wells when the logging

season ended.

I worked as a construction laborer on tall buildings, and as a

seaman on a Norwegian Freighter in the North Atlantic. Often I slept

in my car, or in cheap rooming houses. When I was 23, I was working

as an itinerant farm laborer during the harvest, sleeping on the hay in

the barn and eating with the farmer’s family. I was uneducated,

unskilled, and at the end of the harvest, unemployed once more.

When I could no longer find a laboring job, I got a job in

straight commission sales, cold calling from office-to-office and from

door-to-door. I would often work all day long to make a single sale so

that I could pay for my rooming house and have a place to sleep that

night. This was not a great start at life.

The Day My Life Changed

Then one day, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down an

outrageous goal for myself. It was to earn $1,000 per month in doorto-

door and office-to-office selling. I folded up the piece of paper, put

it away and never found it again.

But 30 days later, my entire life had changed. During that time,

I discovered a technique for closing sales that tripled my income from

the very first day. Meanwhile, the owner of my company sold out to

an entrepreneur who had just moved into town. Exactly thirty days

after I had written down my goal, he took me aside and offered me

$1,000 per month to head up the sales force and teach the other

people what it was that I was doing that enabled me to be selling so

much more than anyone else. I accepted his offer and from that day

forward, my life was never the same.

Within eighteen months, I had moved from that job to another,

and then to another. I went from personal selling to becoming a sales

manager with people selling for me. I recruited and built a 95 person

sales force. I went literally from worrying about my next meal to

walking around with a pocket full of $20 dollar bills.

I began teaching my salespeople how to write out their goals,

and how to sell more effectively. In almost no time at all, they

doubled and tripled and increased their incomes as much as ten

times. Many of them are today millionaires and multi-millionaires.

It’s important to note that, since those days in my mid-20s, my

life has not been a smooth series of upward steps. It has included

many ups and downs, marked by occasional successes and

temporary failures. I have traveled, lived and worked in more than

80 countries, learning French, German and Spanish along the way,

and working in 22 different fields.

As the result of inexperience, and sometimes sheer stupidity, I

have spent or lost everything I made and had to start over again -

several times. In every case when this happened, I would begin by

sitting down with a piece of paper and laying out a new set of goals

for myself, using the methods that I’ll explain in the pages ahead.

After several years of hit and miss goal setting and goal

achieving, I finally decided to collect everything I had learned into a

single system. By assembling these ideas and strategies in one place, I

developed a goal setting methodology and process, with a beginning,

middle and end, and began to follow it every day.

Within one year, following this blueprint for goal achieving, my

life had changed once more. In January of that year, I was living in a

rented apartment with rented furniture. I was $35,000 in debt and

driving a used car that wasn’t paid for. By December, I was living in

my own $100,000 condominium. I had a new Mercedes, had paid off

all my debts and I had $50,000 in the bank.

Then I really got serious about success. I realized that this “goal

setting” stuff was incredibly powerful. I invested hundreds and then

thousands of hours reading and researching on goal setting and goal

achieving, synthesizing the best ideas I could find into a complete

goal setting and achieving process that worked with incredible

effectiveness.

Anyone Can Do It

In 1981, I began teaching my system in workshops and

seminars that have now reached more than two million people in 35

countries. I began audiotaping and video taping my courses so that

others could use them. We have now trained hundreds of thousands

of people in these principles, in multiple languages, all over the

world.

What I found was that these ideas work everywhere, for

everyone, in virtually every country, no matter what your education,

experience or background may be when you begin.

Most of all, these ideas have made it possible for me, and many

thousands of others, to take complete control over our lives. The

regular and systematic practice of goal setting has taken us from

poverty to prosperity, from frustration to fulfillment, from

underachievement to success and satisfaction. This system will do the

same for you.

What I learned early on is that any plan is better than no plan at

all. And it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. All the answers

have already been found. There are hundreds of thousands, and even

millions of men and women who have started with nothing and

achieved great success following these principles. And what others

have done, you can do as well, if you just learn how.

In the pages ahead, you will learn twenty-one of the most

important ideas and strategies ever discovered for achieving

everything that you could ever want in life. You will find that there

are no limits to what you can accomplish except for the limits you

place on your own imagination. And since there are no limits to what

you can imagine, there are no limits to what you can achieve. This is

one of the greatest discoveries of all. Let us begin.

“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step.”

(Confucius)