The Laws of Success

06. The Law of Control
07. The Law of Accident
08. The Law of Responsibility
09. The Law of Direction
10. The Law of Compensation
11. The Law of Service
12. The Law of Applied Effort
13. The Law of Overcompensation
14. The Law of Preparation
15. The Law of Forced Efficiency
16. The Law of Decision
17. The Law of Creativity
18. The Law of Flexibility
19. The Law of Persistence

What is success? Success can be defined as "being happy with what you’ve got." Success is not necessarily determined by material possessions or accomplishments. You can enjoy success simply by reaching the point where you are perfectly content with your life in every respect and you feel no dissatisfaction or pressing need for anything else. In this sense, you can be a success sitting by yourself in a quiet place contemplating the world.

Achievement is different from success. Achievement refers to "getting what you want." Achievement requires the ability to set goals and objectives, to make plans of action, and then to implement those plans. Achievement requires that you overcome obstacles and difficulties in reaching the goals that you have set for yourself.

In both cases, success and achievement, the starting point of great accomplishment is for you to decide exactly what you want in every part of your personal and business life. Motivation requires "motive," and the clearer you are about your true motives, the more you will achieve and the faster you will achieve it.

The basic principle of human action is that everything you do is aimed at improving your life in some way. Every action of yours is guided by a purpose of some kind, whether clear or unclear. As Aristotle wrote, all behavior is "teleological" or purposeful-aimed at a goal. And the one factor that governs each of your actions is your desire to be better off than you would be in the absence of your action.

The remarkable truth is that you always seem to achieve the goals that you set for yourself. If your goal is a small one, for example, to get home at night and watch television, you will certainly achieve it. If your goal is a large one-to achieve financial success, prosperity, and prestige among the people you live and work with-you will achieve that as well.

Your mind contains a cybernetic, goal-seeking mechanism. Once you have programmed a target or a desire into your subconscious mind, your subconscious and your superconscious minds take on a power of their own that seems to both drive and steer you inevitably toward the attainment of your goal, whatever it is.

In this sense, goal achieving seems to happen almost automatically. This goal-seeking capacity is as natural to you as breathing in and breathing out. The difficulty always lies in your ability to set clear goals in the first place. When you learn and practice this critical skill, you will begin to achieve at a higher level almost immediately. You will begin to achieve your goals faster and with greater predictability.

The key to activating the Laws of Success is for you to become perfectly clear about what it is you want and exactly what it will look like when you have achieved it. Just as you wouldn’t attempt to build a house without a plan, you wouldn’t think of building a great life without a clear list of the goals you wish to attain and a written plan of action for the attainment of each of those goals.

Unfortunately, according to virtually every study, less than 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals and detailed plans to achieve them. According to Mark McCormack in his book What They Still Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, this top 3 percent of goal setters are earning, on average, ten times as much in the same period as those people with no written goals at all.

You can move yourself into the top rank of people living today by the simple act of sitting down with a pad of paper and a pen and making a list of the things you want. Most people have never done this. The very act of writing out a description of what you want to accomplish and what you intend to do to accomplish it over the next three to five years will change your life.

When you write down your goals, you immediately become a different person. Your attitude toward yourself and your future changes in a very positive way. You feel more confident and optimistic. You feel more in control and in command of your life. Best of all, when your goals and plans are in writing, the probability of your accomplishing them increases ten times, or by about 1,000 percent.

A Simple Exercise to Change Your Life

Here is a simple but powerful exercise. Take out a piece of paper and make a list of ten goals that you want to achieve over the next twelve months. Write out these goals in the present tense, as though a year has passed and you have already achieved them.

Use the word "I" before each goal to personalize it, as in "I earn X number of dollars per year." "I achieve such and such level of sales (or profits)." Your subconscious mind accepts only commands that are personal, positive, and in the present tense.

This is an amazing exercise, almost magical. If all you do is write down ten goals on a sheet of paper and then put it away for a year, at the end of twelve months, when you take it out, you will be astonished. When you reread the list after one year, you will find that eight of your ten goals have been achieved, sometimes in the most remarkable of ways. Often your goals will materialize much faster.

An insurance executive from Houston took this recommendation from me at a seminar in Phoenix on a Saturday morning. That afternoon on the flight home, he made a list of ten things he wanted to accomplish within the next twelve months.

The following evening, Sunday, he reviewed the list and found, to his astonishment, that he had already accomplished five of his ten one-year goals. He quickly wrote down five more goals, bringing his list back up to ten. By the following Thursday evening, he had accomplished five more of the goals on his new list. He wrote and told me that he had achieved more in five days with written goals than he had expected to accomplish in an entire year of hard work.

The following laws of success will work for you when you work with them. They are universal principles that have been discovered, tested, and proven over the centuries. When you begin to apply them to your business and your life, you will be amazed at the things you accomplish and how much easier you accomplish them.

Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).