Maximum Achievement

Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
by Brian Tracy | Simon & Schuster © 1995 · 352 pages

As with all of Brian Tracy’s books, this one is ridiculously packed with wisdom. He wrote it 25 years ago (25 years into his journey as a teacher). It’s based on a training program he created called The Psychology of Achievement that he taught to 1 million+ people. It’s a dense, 350-page encyclopedia of Big Ideas to help us jumbo crush it. Big Ideas we explore: the 7 ingredients of success, the Law of Substitution, mining your acres of diamonds, 7 questions that can change your life, moving from positive thinking to positive knowing, treating excusitis, and the secret sauce of achievement (hint: it’s love).

You have to decide what your life would look like if you made it into a masterpiece.
Brian Tracy

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Big Ideas

“The system you are about to learn can change your life. This book contains a unique synthesis of ideas, methods, and techniques brought together in one place for the first time. The individual components, however, are not new; they have been learned and relearned throughout all the ages of man. These principles and practices have been tested and proven by millions of men and women, and all great success is based on them.

By integrating these ideas and methods into your daily life, you will feel happier, healthier, and more self-confident. You will experience a greater sense of power, purpose and self-direction. You will be more positive, more focused and more able to achieve your goals. You will get along better with the important people in your life. You’ll be more successful in your career and you will feel wonderful about yourself.

You will learn how to unlock the great untapped reserves of potential that lie deep within you. By practicing the exercises… you will get results out of all proportion to the effort you put in. You will propel your whole life onto a highroad of success, achievement, and greater happiness than perhaps you’ve ever known.”

~ Brian Tracy from Maximum Achievement

This is the fifth Note we’ve done on Brian Tracy’s great books. (Check out Goals!, No Excuses, Focal Point, and Eat That Frog as well.)

I read this one years ago but hadn’t created a Note on it. In Effortless Healing, Dr. Mercola *highly* recommended it so I bought a new copy and re-read it.

As with all of Brian’s books, this one is ridiculously packed with wisdom. He wrote it 25 years ago (25 years into his journey as a teacher). It’s based on a training program he created called The Psychology of Achievement that he taught to 1 million+ people. It’s a dense, 350-page encyclopedia of Big Ideas to help us jumbo crush it. (Get a copy here.)

I’m excited to share some of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!

How to Make Your Life a Masterpiece

“You must start with your ideal, your vision of a perfect future. You begin unlocking your inner powers by lifting up your eyes and ‘seeing’ your life exactly as if it were already perfect in every respect. Your first job is to create a blueprint, a clear picture of where you are going and what it will look like when you get there. This image will then serve as an organizing principle, a guide, a benchmark, against which you can measure and compare everything you do in the process of turning it into your reality. …

Defining the seven ingredients of success gives you a series of targets to aim at. When you define your life in ideal terms, when you have the courage to decide exactly what you want, you begin the process of unlocking your hidden powers to succeed. … Knowing where you want to end up is the first and most important step.”

That’s from the first chapter: Make Your Life a Masterpiece.

If we want to experience MAXIMUM ACHIEVEMENT, we need to start with a very strong desire to make our life a masterpiece. It helps to have a vision of what that ideal might look like.

Brian tells us there are seven ingredients to success. Here’s a quick look:

  1. Peace of Mind. This is the first and ultimate ingredient. We’ve been talking about my new favorite Greek word euthymia quite a bit lately thanks to Ryan Holiday and his The Daily Stoic + The Ego Is the Enemy. Euthymia is tranquility. Peace of mind. It comes from living in integrity with our highest values, choosing our path, and confidently walking it. This needs to be our highest priority.
  2. Health and Energy. We’re going to have a hard time maximizing our achievement if we have a hard time getting out of bed. Optimizing our health and energy is key. It’s the second ingredient. Imagine yourself enjoying optimal health. How would you feel? What would you eat? How would you move and train? (Now a good time to +1% in that direction?)
  3. Loving Relationships. A key attribute of an optimally functioning human is our ability to create and maintain great relationships. A key indicator of how we’re doing on that front? Laughter. Whether it’s your family or business, Brian tells us how much we’re laughing is a great litmus test. Laugh with your loved ones lately? :)
  4. Financial Freedom. This is the fourth ingredient. Brian tells us we don’t need to be set forever to be financially free, but we do need to get to a place where we have enough money so that we’re not constantly worried about it. Therefore, prioritizing this is wise.
  5. Worthy Goals and Ideals. We’re not going to be happy without a clear sense of direction. As Brian says, “You need a commitment to something bigger and more important than yourself. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to your world.” Purpose 101!
  6. Self-Knowledge and Self-Awareness. Who are you? What’re your strengths, your weaknesses? What triggers you? What do you do when you’re on? When you’re off? Know thyself!
  7. Personal Fulfillment. Our seventh ingredient is a sense that we’re actualizing our full potential—that we are becoming all that we are capable of becoming.

Seven ingredients. How’re you doing with them?

Mix ‘em up to your personal preferences and voilà! Optimized.

A successful life is merely a series of successful days, hours and minutes, minutes during which you think about your goals and your desires, about health and happiness and prosperity, and refuse to dwell on anything that you do not want to see manifested around you.
Brian Tracy

The Law of Substitution

“This is one of the most important mental laws. It is an extension of the Law of Control. It states that your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, and that you can substitute one thought for another. This ‘crowding out’ principle allows you to deliberately replace a negative thought with a positive thought. In so doing, you take control of your emotional life. This law is your key to happiness, to a positive mental attitude and to personal liberation. It can change your relationships, your conversations and the predominant content of your conscious mind. Many people have told me this law alone has changed their lives.

Your conscious mind is never empty; it is always occupied with something. By using the Law of Substitution, you can replace any negative or fearful thought that may be troubling you. You can deliberately substitute a positive thought in its place.”

“The Law of Substitution.” (Brian is all about “Laws.” Like, ALL about Laws. :)

In Rapt we talked about the same idea. Scientists call it “the selective mechanism of biased competition.”

Whatever you want to call our mind’s ability to hold only one thought at a time, this is a REALLY important idea. We want to leverage this feature of our brains to our maximum benefit—deliberately crowding out the disempowering for the empowering.

Feeling upset with someone? Push out all those negative thoughts by thinking about all the ways they’ve been awesome in the past.

Feeling stressed? Get your grateful flow on and think about the little things that are working.

Brian tells us: “In using the Law of Substitution to change your mind from negative to positive, the fastest way is simply to stop talking and thinking about the problem and to start talking and thinking about the solution. Focus your mind on what can be done in the future rather than what has happened in the past.”

In Executive Toughness, Jason Selk calls this a RELENTLESS SOLUTION FOCUS.

You get 60 seconds (max!) to think about the problem, then you flip the switch to solution mode and find at least one little thing you can do to SOLVE the problem rather than complain about it or feel overwhelmed by it.

How can you crowd out a little negativity today? Practice The Law of Substitution!

P.S. This same rule applies to nutrition. If you’re eating a bunch of junk food, you’re “crowding out” the good stuff. You can apply the Law of Substitution there as well and push the bad stuff out with the good—such that there’s simply no room for the junk anymore.

Which makes me think of some wisdom from It Starts with Food who point out one of the hidden costs of eating too many grains: “Another way that a diet high in grains leads to suboptimal nutrition is in terms of opportunity cost: If there are more whole grains on your plate, then there’s probably less of some other food—like vegetables—on your plate. And that lowers the overall micronutrient density in your diet too. In summary:

There is not a single health-promoting substance present in grains that you can’t also get from vegetables and fruit.”

Here is a test for you: For one day, twenty-four hours, see if you can think and talk about only the things you want. Resolve to keep your conversation free of all negativity, doubt, fear, or criticism. Discipline yourself to speak cheerfully and optimistically about each person and each situation in the world around you.
Brian Tracy

Got Any Acres of Diamonds?

“The merchant picked up the stone and said, ‘This is a diamond of great price and value.’ The new farmer was skeptical, but the merchant insisted that he show him where he had found the diamond. They went out on the farm to where the farmer had been watering the donkey, and as they looked around, they found another diamond, and another, and another. It turned out that the whole farm was covered with acres of diamonds. The old farmer had gone off into Africa seeking for diamonds without ever looking under his own feet.

The moral of this story was that the old farmer did not realize that the diamonds do not look like diamonds in their rough form. They simply look like rocks to an uneducated eye.

A diamond must be cut, faceted, polished and set before it looks like the kind of diamond that you see in the jewelry stores. Likewise, your acres of diamonds probably lie right under your own feet. But they are usually disguised as hard work. ‘Opportunities come dressed in work clothes.’

Your acres of diamonds probably lie in your own talents, your interests, your education, your background and experience, your industry, your city, your contacts. Your acres of diamonds probably lie right under your own feet if you will take the time to recognize them and then go to work on them.”

My hunch is you’re familiar with the Acres of Diamonds story. Farmer sells farm to go hunting for diamonds. Travels around, can’t find any. Dies tragic death. Meanwhile, back at the farm he sold, the new owner stumbles upon jumbo-sized rocks that turn out to be diamonds. Eek.

Our original farmer simply didn’t know that diamonds don’t look like diamonds in their raw state. They’re just funny looking rocks. We’ve got to work at ‘em to bring out there beauty.

SAME THING WITH OUR LIVES. (Of course.)

You have acres of diamonds. You just need to open your eyes and see them.

What diamonds sit within funny looking rocks in your life? (Perhaps draped in work clothes?) Now a good time to get to work revealing their beauty?

7 Questions That Can Change Your Life (+ Bonus ?)

“Whatever you wrote as an answer to any of these questions, including the question, ‘What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?’ you can be, have, or do. The very fact that you could write it means that you can achieve it. Once you’ve identified what it is you want, the only question you have to answer is, ‘Do I want it badly enough, and am I willing to pay the price?’

Take a few minutes to write out your answers to each of these seven questions. Once you have your answers on paper, go over them and select just one as your major definite purpose in life right now.”

Here are seven questions that can change your life.

  1. What are your five most important values in life?
  2. What are your three most important goals in life, right now?
  3. What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned that today you had only six months to live?
  4. What would you do if you won a million dollars cash, tax free, in the lottery tomorrow?
  5. What have you always wanted to do, but been afraid to attempt?
  6. What do you most enjoy doing? What gives you your greatest feeling of self-esteem and personal satisfaction?
  7. What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?

Well, what’re your answers to those questions?

Remember: The wisest among us know themselves best and then craft an authentic life in integrity with their deepest values and desires. At the very least, give a quick 30-second answer to each of those questions. (That 30-second approach is another Brian Tracy technique—he tells us that quick response is typically as accurate as a 30-minute response.)

Out of all those things you noodled, what’s the #1 most important thing you could do? The goal that, if you achieved it, would have THE most positive impact on all your other goals? In our Notes on Goals!, we talk about how Brian calls that your “major definite purpose.”

Bonus question: What’s your #1? Your major definite purpose? Get clear. Do you want it badly enough? If so, determine the price you need to pay to make it happen. And get busy paying it.

Whenever you find great achievement, you find an individual who is absolutely clear about what he or she wants to do, and who is willing to do whatever it takes, for however long it takes, to achieve it.
Brian Tracy

Why Settle For Positive Thinking? (Go for Positive Knowing)

“The most important contribution you can make to your success and happiness is to develop the habit of continuous goal setting. The key to developing this habit is learning how to deliberately set and achieve one clear, challenging goal. When you have set a specific goal for yourself and then achieved it according to your plans, you change from having an attitude of positive thinking to possessing an attitude of positive knowing. You must reach the point in your own mind where you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you can accomplish any goal you set for yourself. From that point on, you are a different person. You are the master of your fate.”

Brian wrote a whole book on Goals! (check out those Notes). In this book, he dedicates a GREAT chapter to unpacking the mechanics of optimal goal setting—echoing much of the science of motivation with his uber-inspiring pom poms.

Here’s the deal: As we discuss in Goals 101 and throughout these Notes, we need to set goals that are meaningful + challenging AND doable! If we’re constantly setting goals that are too hard for us to hit, we’re going to DEmotivate ourselves. Not good.

Brian offer a 12-step process to crushing our goals. Step 1: “Develop desire—intense, burning desire.” Step 2: “Develop belief.”

You need to start with a REALLY strong desire to achieve something. You need to dial up your activation energy to that magical tipping point of 451/212 degrees.

AND… (VERY IMPORTANT AND!!!)

You need to believe you can achieve it. If you really really really want it but you don’t think you can actually achieve it, you need to either dial up your belief by creating a plan you can get behind or trim your goal back to a level where you can believe in it.

That’s *exactly* the numerator in Piers Steel’s motivation equation (from The Procrastination Equation). He says it all starts with “Value” (aka “desire”) + ‘Expectancy” (belief) and he won the equivalent of psychology’s Nobel Prize for distilling TONS of research on motivation into a handy dandy equation.

It ALL starts with really strong desire matched with really strong belief. How’s yours?

P.S. You remember the denominator in his equation? It’s “Impulsivity” + “Delay.” The more you allow things to distract you from your goal and the further away your goals are, the faster you diminish your motivation. So… Reduce distractions (hello, Deep Work!) and create a ton of short-term mini goals to crush it. #repeat and go from positive thinking to positive knowing.

You can earn a university degree in our society... and never once receive an hour’s worth of instruction on goal setting, even though goal setting is more important to long-term happiness than any other single subject you could ever learn.
Brian Tracy

Got Excusitis? (A Simple Way to Test Your Excuses.)

“Here’s a simple way to test your excuses. Ask yourself: ‘Is there anyone, anywhere with my problem or limitation who has succeeded in spite of it?’

If the answer is ‘yes,’ you know that your excuse is not valid. It is not a legitimate reason for your failure to make progress. What one person has done, someone else can do as well. The disease of ‘excusitis,’ the inflammation of the excuse-making gland, is invariably fatal to success. If you have it, resolve to get over it right away before it sabotages all your hopes for great success.”

Excusitis.

Hmmm… Interesting… Let me consult my medical textbook for a definition. Ah, yes. Here it is. “The inflammation of your excuse-making gland. WARNING: Fatal to success.” (Hah.)

Remember: If it’s been done, you can get it done.

Quit making excuses.

Brian wrote a whole book on this called No Excuses. Check out those Notes. For now, know that Marcus Aurelius was reflecting on this wisdom 2,000 years ago: “Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for a man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.”

First, decide exactly what it is you want. Most people never do that. Second, determine the price you’re going to have to pay to get it, and then resolve to pay that price.
H. L. Hunt

Love: The Secret Sauce

“Love is the beginning and the end. Your purpose in life is to become a totally loving person. Life is a study of attention. It is a matter of priorities, of choice. Your life is what you make it by the priorities you set and the things you choose to focus your attention upon. Your job is to live joyously, and this is only possible by filling your mind with thoughts of love, compassion and forgiveness.

Only one life that soon is past;
Only what’s done with love will last.

This is the secret of the ages, the true foundation of all human greatness. It is the core value and the most essential unifying principle of truly exceptional people. And the most wonderful thing about love is that you can fill your life with it by deciding to do so. The choice is yours. It always has been. I wish you luck. I wish you success and happiness. And above all, I wish you love.”

Those are the last words of the book.

The Leadership Challenge guys echoe this wisdom in one of my favorite passages, telling us: “Of all the things that sustain a leader over time, love is the most lasting. It’s hard to imagine leaders getting up day after day, putting in the long hours and hard work it takes to get extraordinary things done, without having their hearts in it. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its products and services. Leadership is not an a air of the head. Leadership is an a air of the heart.”

Ultimately, what we want to “maximally achieve” is the capacity to LOVE. Let’s do that.

Love is the total commitment to the full development of the potential of the other.
W. Scott Peck

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Brian Tracy

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