MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I just came back from a 3-day conference in Los Angeles, and because I learned a lot from the long 16hour, 7am-10pm days, I’ll have a lot to share over the next few weeks…

Brian Tracy is a personal development coach; his talks and seminar topics include leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy. In short, he helps people become successful.

He dropped by our conference en route to his own presentation, and Jay Abraham took the opportunity to ask him what he’s observed as traits of the most successful entrepreneurs. Brian Tracy shared 3 of the most important things he sees successful entrepreneurs do, and because he’s a pretty smart guy, I’d like to share his thoughts with you because I think you might just be interested in knowing what he had to say.

The 3 Most Important Things Successful Entrepreneurs Do.

1. Learn more things

The world is always changing, so you should always keep learning. It’s pretty simple. If you look at all the successful people out there, they are the people who didn’t just accept the status quo. They were never idle, and they didn’t just keep doing the same things they were already doing.

2. Try more things

Successful people, beyond learning more things, try more things. Now, this is not rocket science so far. But, Brian Tracy says, sometimes it’s not just about knowing common sense, but also doing it.

We buy many success books, and one thing I’ve noticed is that they don’t contain anything really new. They continually rehash the things that have been said before. They go down to fundamentals, but there isn’t much really new.

The Successful Entrepreneur’s Flight Plan

Brian Tracy gave an analogy I really liked. He said that the most successful entrepreneurs have a flight plan, and in a moment, I’ll describe what it looks like. Think about an air flight.

The first thing you need to know is the destination. I’d bet that most people don’t get onto a flight not knowing where it’s heading, though there are always a few crazy ones. If you want to be successful you must begin with a destination in mind –don’t take a flight to nowhere. Before you start going anywhere, know where you’re going.

The second part, take off, is incredibly important. This is where most entrepreneurs fail. In MindValley, this isn’t really our biggest problem…in fact, we more likely have a bias towards taking action. However, most entrepreneurs never start. They get busy planning, and it’s like planning for a trip that they never take.

Thirdly, and this is why the analogy of the airplane is so important –every pilot will tell you that 99% of the flight, you are actually off course. If you think that a plane is always on course, you are actually wrong. A plane is almost never on course –it runs on autopilot, constantly adjusting because there are different jet streams, different winds, and different flow of traffic of other airplanes –there are many things changing and altering the course.

Therefore, a pilot is always adjusting and getting back on course. And how do they do that? By knowing where they want to go, and getting back on course. That’s what’s happening all the time.

You are not always going to be on track, so you must accept that as a fact.

In a way, it’s good because many of us often feel bad and chastise ourselves because we are off track but the good news is, everyone is off track! This means that, in order to be able to get back on track, you really must learn and try more things. I found this quite an interesting analogy.

3. Be persistent.

The top entrepreneurs do those first two things, and just refuse to give up. If you know where you want to go, keep learning and trying new things and you constantly adjust the course, but you will get there. It might take longer, and it might be a lot harder, but you’re gonna get there.

And that’s Brian Tracy’s recipe for success. The flight plan analogy was especially instructive because it’s a different lens of looking at what it means to be successful.

People give up all the time, and that’s because it is really hard. I’ve noticed that the way of success is an emotional rollercoaster, and many people don’t have the stomach for the rises and dips. When you just get started, you’re excited –but any time you start going downhill, you doubt yourself. It happens once, you pick yourself up…, and then it happens again. And sometimes, you dip far lower than you ever have been.

But that’s the way it happens –you get thrown off course, and you get kicked in the face.

I think that’s really the way it happens because it’s happened to me. Before I came and started MindValley with Vishen, I was the golden child, and anything I did was crazily successful. I got promoted, I got into Stanford, I had business school paid for, I was doing new venture strategy at eBay …anything I touched turned to gold.

In a corporate environment, that’s pretty easy. At least, it’s a lot easier than in a start-up environment,  because reality hits you a lot faster when you’re in a startup environment. It’s bad, but you have got to accept the fact that failure is going to be part of it. A lot of people are too afraid of the constant getting-kicked-in-the-face part.

If you watched the movie The Secret, you realize that a lot of people get close but give up just before reaching their breakthrough. If you study a lot of successful people, when they hit rock bottom, although they want to give up, they persist and get their breakthrough. In a way, you need to put your ego aside and be passionate, think about the end destination and enjoy the process.

In MindValley, we look at things differently and we have a different attitude for failure. Although not everything we do works, when we do something and it turns out a disaster, we don’t put shame on it. We celebrate it and say ‘thank you’ because we’ve learned how NOT to do it, and we’re going to change course.

If something doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, we don’t throw it out completely –we improve on it and find other uses for it. When we get off course, we use it as important input to help us change direction and get back on track. Once you have completely adopted that mindset, you don’t look at it as failure anymore.

We look at our growth as constantly going upwards, and so we feel that we’ve gone side-ways and not down –which makes it a lot easier. Here, we don’t constantly beat each other up about failure but constantly share learnings that help each other get closer to our goals.

I hope you find Brian Tracy’s words as instructive and motivating as I did. If you have any questions, I can’t answer them the way Brian Tracy would answer, but I will give you my two cents worth.

I’ll end with 2 quotes from Brian Tracy. Firstly, "Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor." And, "Successful people are simply those with successful habits."

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike

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