Get Smart!

by Brian Tracy

They are the Law of Unintended Consequences and the Law of Perverse Consequences.

Analyze your life in the four most important areas: (1) business and career, (2) family and relationships, (3) health and fitness, and (4) financial independence.

The superior thinking process is also triggered by stimulus, but between the stimulus and the response there is a moment or more where you think before you respond. Just like your mother told you, "count to ten before you respond, especially when you are upset or angry.”

"There are those who think. There are those who think they think. And then there is the vast majority who would rather die than think.”

Straight and Crooked Thinking by R. H. Thouless and C.

If someone tries to pressure you into making a decision on an important issue, you can say, "If you insist on an answer immediately, the answer is NO. But if you let me think about it for a while, the answer might be different.”

Think on paper. One of the most powerful thinking tools of all is a sheet of paper upon which you write down every detail of the problem or decision. Something amazing happens between the head and the hand when you write things down.

"Those who do not plan for the future cannot have one.”

There is a rule in time management that says, "Every minute spent in planning saves ten minutes in execution.”

Use the GOSPA Thinking Model To help yourself and others to slow down and think with greater precision, use the GOSPA model on a regular basis. The acronym GOSPA stands for "Goals, Objectives, Strategies, Priorities, and Actions.”

Action Exercises Resolve today to put a space where you think slowly between the stimulus, the problem or idea, and your response. Select one important area of your business or personal life and practice the GOSPA model to help you think clearly and at your very best in planning your future. Plan today to take thirty to sixty minutes for solitude, where you sit in complete silence and listen to your intuition. Do this regularly.

"If you are hard on yourself, life will be very easy on you. But if you insist on being easy on yourself, life will be very hard on you.”

Only about three percent of people have clear, specific, written goals and plans that they work on each day. The other 97 percent have hopes, dreams, wishes, and fantasies, but not goals. And the great tragedy is that they don't know the difference.

"The person without goals makes no progress on even the smoothest road. The person with clear goals makes rapid progress on even the roughest road.”

Information Explosion The first factor driving change is information and knowledge explosion. Information and new ideas are expanding, growing, increasing faster and faster. One new piece of knowledge, one new idea or insight, can upset or overturn an entire industry, causing failure and bankruptcy.

The second factor driving change is technology—growing, expanding, and increasing at incredible speeds. Advances in technology can quickly transform entire industries. Think of companies like Nokia and BlackBerry that dominated their industries until the first iPhone was released in 2007. Within five years, both of these companies were virtually gone.

The third factor, perhaps more disruptive than anything else, is competition. Your competitors are fiercer, more aggressive, and more determined than ever before, except for next week and next year. The competition is focused on taking each new potential piece of information and breakthrough in technology to change and shape customer tastes, develop new products and services, and render obsolete whatever you are currently offering.

The equation is SOC = IE x TE x C (the speed of change is equal to information explosion times technology expansion times competition).

"Survival goes not to the strongest or smartest of the species, but to the one most adaptable to change.”

Today, you can be either a master of change or a victim of change.

What do you really, really, really want to do with your life? It seems that when you ask this question, it is the third "really” that helps you to develop absolute clarity about where you want to be sometime in the future. When you ask "really” three times, you drill deeper into what you want more than anything else.

"no one on their deathbed ever said that they wished they had spent more time at the office.”

A major reason for failure in adult life is that most people think they already have goals. But what they have are not goals. They are merely wishes, hopes, and fantasies. A real goal, on the other hand, is something clear and specific.

A goal that is not in writing is merely a wish or a hope. It is said that goals are "dreams with deadlines.” When you write down a goal, you take it out of the air and make it clear and tangible. You can see it, touch it, and read it. It now exists, whereas before it was merely a figment of your imagination, like cigarette smoke in a large room, with no form or substance.

Another major turning point in my life took place in my twenties when I looked around and noticed that there were lots of people my same age who seemed to be doing much better in life and work than I was. They wore nicer clothes, had better jobs, and drove newer cars, and some of them even had homes and families. Meanwhile, I drove an old car, wore old clothes, worked at a sales job, thought about how much everything cost, and worried about money all the time. This is not a great way to live.

Your earning ability is your ability to get results that people will pay you for. It is not your ability to go to work, put in your time, and "play well with the other kids.” It is your ability to get the job done quickly and dependably, on time and on budget. All success in the world of work boils down to one simple result: task completion.

The Roots of Poor Performance Why is this? 1t is largely the result of habits formed early in life. The first exposure to "work” is when the child goes to school for the first time. The child is surrounded by other children of his or her same age. What do you do with children of your same age? You play! From the age of five or six, school becomes the primary play place for the child. Over the years, the child evolves through the school system, primarily focused on social interaction and playing with the other kids, before school, during school, after school, and on weekends. Then the young adult finishes school and goes to work for the first time. The first thing he sees when he looks around at his new job is other people his same age. What do you do with other people your same age? You play!

What am I trying to do? How am I trying to do it? How is this working for me? Am I getting the kinds of results I want?

What are my assumptions? What if my assumptions in this area are wrong? Could there be a better way to achieve the results that I want? If I was starting this work over again, what would I do differently?

Think before you act. A = Must do—there are serious potential consequences for doing or not doing this task. Put an A next to each of the most important items on your list. B = Should do—there are mild consequences for doing or not doing this, but it is not as important as your A tasks. C = Nice to do—but there are no consequences one way or another if you have a coffee break, chat with a coworker, or check your social media. D = Delegate—you should delegate everything that you possibly can, even tasks that you like and enjoy, to free up your time for doing only those few things that you can do best and are most important. E = Eliminate—deliberately stop doing all low-value/no- value tasks and activities. Once you have put a letter next to each task, go through and put A-1, A-2, A-3 next to your most important A tasks. Then do the same thing with B-1, B-2, B-3, and so on.

"Most people are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

"When you turn toward the sunshine, the shadows fall behind you.”

"1f you're not getting better, you're getting worse.”

In Warren Bennis's book Leaders, he describes how the top people in his study resisted the pull of the comfort zone by setting bigger and bigger goals for themselves and their organizations, goals that would be impossible to achieve without major changes and improvements.

In Peter Diamandis's 2015 book, Bold, he urges mold breakers and earth shakers to set goals to achieve ten times

all.” The rule is to change when you can, not when you have to or have no other choice.

What activities or processes can you simplify and streamline so they can be done faster and with less time and money? What activities can you delegate to others or outsource to specialist companies? What activities could you eliminate altogether with no real loss of productivity, sales, or profitability?

They practice the CANEI principle, which stands for "Continuous and Never-Ending Improvement.”

First, they approach every problem or situation with an open mind, almost a childlike attitude of exploration and discovery.

Atul Gawande, in his book The Checklist Manifesto, tells the story of two investment experts, both successful, but one far more successful than the other.

Whatever title is written on your business card, your true job description is "problem solver.” From the time you start work in the morning until the time you quit for the day, and afterward, you are solving problems, small and large, all day long.

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great,, tells the story of the fox and the hedgehog,

Be prepared to fail over and over again when you are developing or introducing new products, services, methods, or strategies. Nothing ever works out the way you think it will. You will experience constant frustrations, difficulties, setbacks, and temporary failures on the way to success.

Tom Peters wrote in the book In Search of Excellence that the single most important quality of successful businesses was "an obsession with customer service.”

Corporate thinkers are preoccupied with doing their jobs, pleasing their superiors, following the rules, and doing the minimum necessary to avoid being fired or laid off. Corporate types, employees, use the pronouns "them, they, their, and the company” to describe the company and the people in charge.

What value does your product offer? What job does your product do for your customer? What problem does it solve? What benefits does it deliver? What pain does it take away? What goals does it enable your customers to achieve? And especially, how important are your key benefits to your customers? Your ability to ask and answer these questions accurately will largely determine the future of your business.

Who is your customer? Who are the customers who can most benefit from the products or services you offer? What are their demographics? What are their ages, incomes, education levels, genders, occupations, and type of family formation? What are their psychographics? What are their hopes, dreams, fears, ambitions, and aspirations relative to what you sell? Especially, what are their ethnographics? How do they use your product or service? What role does it play in their lives or work? How important is it to them in comparison with other things?

What are the most effective ways that you can market (attract new customers), sell (convert them into buyers), and distribute (get your pro...

How could you attract more and better-paying customers? How could you sell faster and more effectively to the prospects you attract? How could you distribute your product faster and more efficiently? (Think Amazon.com!) The rule is that whatever you are doing today, you will have to be much, much better a year from now just to stay even in your current market. How do you give such good customer service that your happy customers buy from you again and again and tell others to buy from you as well? What is the cost structure of your business, and how could you change it to achieve greater profitability...

Tony Robbins, in his 2014 book, Money: Master the Game, emphasizes what Einstein said, "Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe.”