Million Dollar Habits, by Brian Tracy (Free, Full Book Breakdown)

Hey everyone!

Tonight (well, this morning, I guess!) I’m sharing my complete breakdown of Brian Tracy’s book, Million Dollar Habits. 

Totally free, and ready for you to read right now.

It’s about 9,500 words covering the key ideas and takeaways, and you can finish reading my breakdown in about 36 minutes.

Brian Tracy has been a tremendously positive influence in my own life - ever since I was an overnight security guard at a hospital, living paycheck to paycheck - and his books are a huge part of the reason for my success today.

You can read the full breakdown here, but I’ll give you a little preview in this email so you can decide whether to check it out.

Again, totally free.

I should actually say “free for right NOW,” because it’s going back behind the paywall very shortly.

Then it’s just for members only at the Stairway to Wisdom. 

I’ve also still got about 3 spots open for 1:1 consultations with me, which you can find out more about right here. 

You’ll get to work directly with me and benefit from my years of experience reading more than a thousand books, building two businesses, working as a fitness model, strengthening my mind and my body, etc.

Bring a pen and paper, and spend as much time as you want with me talking about high-performance habits, mental toughness, business strategy, books, fitness and health - we'll cover everything.

You'll leave with dozens of new ideas and updated beliefs that will change the entire course of your life and business.

There’s also an option for a weekly video call and daily texting for extreme accountability.

This is for people who want my personal help tackling their biggest challenges and achieving their highest goals.

We'll smash through mental blocks and optimize your entire life for extreme success, achievement, and happiness.

Working with me is the best option for people who have specific goals they wish to accomplish, and want to gain massive clarity on the best path forward.

That’s all I’m going to say about it tonight, but you can find out more on this page here. 

Now, let’s get into Million Dollar Habits!

This Book is For:

*Everyone who knows that they're currently living well below their full potential, and who wants to discover proven principles that they can employ immediately to upgrade the level of achievement and success they're experiencing in life.

*Business owners and entrepreneurs who want to double or even triple their income by learning essential career strategies from one of the legends of personal development, and someone who's reached the level of income and impact that they want to reach.

*Young people who are just getting started in their lives and careers, and who want to avoid the insidious, dangerous dead ends that trap so many people all over the world in lives of quiet desperation, dissatisfaction, and fear.

*Anyone who is struggling with implementing positive habits in their lives, especially when it comes to their careers, and who wants to learn a multitude of essential principles that, when applied, will take them where they want to go in life, faster than they ever thought possible.

Summary:

Habits can actually be exciting if you start thinking about them in the right way. Most people, and most books, make habits boring, but they certainly don't have to be.

Instead of thinking about all the routine, the deprivation, the mundane repetition of basic actions, think about the freedom and the success that will come into your life as a result of embracing the habits of the world's most successful people. That's what Brian Tracy's book will help you do.

All these simple, seemingly inconsequential things you're going to be doing day to day may seem like they're not having much of an effect, but then the power of compounding takes over, and you start to reap the inevitable results of your great habits, until eventually you're going to wish you started ten years ago.

Don't think about the act of sitting in place for hours on end over the course of several months; think instead of the calm, clarity, and focus that your meditation habit will bring into your life.

Don't think about the deprivation of saving 10% of your income and how you won't be able to afford to buy that 5th drink at the bar on Saturday; think instead about all the money that your money will make in the future, and how, instead of needing that drink now to be happy, your happiness will come from both living in the moment and looking forward to a richer future.

I'm sure you could come up with numerous additional examples yourself, but the main thrust of Tracy's argument here is that there is a direct link between the habits you choose to adopt and the results that you achieve in every single area of your life.

Even more importantly, you have direct control over the habits that you choose to adopt, and you have direct control - or at least a ton of influence - over the future course of your life.

Your past doesn't have to define your present or your future. You can make different choices today, and those choices will directly influence every single one of your tomorrows.

Successful people have ‘success habits’, and unsuccessful people do not. That's the reality. Yes, we absolutely start off in different places in life, but we can make one hell of a lot of progress, starting from the very day when we decide to consciously direct the course of our own lives by taking full and complete responsibility for the habits we perform on a daily basis.

All habits are learned as the result of practice and repetition, and you can learn any habit that you believe is either necessary or desirable. As Brian Tracy says, just as your good habits are responsible for most of your success and happiness today, your bad habits are responsible for most of your problems and frustrations. The key is to realize that you have learned your bad habits, and that they can be unlearned as well.

As we'll discuss in the Key Ideas section below, a major lever you can pull when it comes to learning good habits and unlearning bad habits is your self-image.

We each have a certain self-image or self-concept that shapes our behavior, and subconsciously tells us what kind of results we "deserve" to experience in our lives. This is malleable, changeable. We can adjust how we feel about ourselves, and raise our standards in every area of life to experience greater results in those areas.

This is a massive key to adopting great habits and achieving success in general.

These habits are easy to do, but they're also easy not to do. That's why we have to be intentional about building great habits and removing negative ones. It's rarely going to happen by accident. Taking responsibility is like placing both hands on the steering wheel of your own life, and that's where successful habit formation begins.

Yes, the details matter too, like doing higher-quality work than that for which you are paid, exercising both your mind and body every day, writing out clear goals and then executing on them, working the whole time you're at work, spending less than you make and then investing the difference...but what it all comes down to is your commitment to performing the success habits that your Future Self will thank you for.

Key Ideas:

#1: Infinite Potential

One of the biggest threats to the actualization of your potential is your tendency to think way too small. Many high achievers ironically struggle with the same thing, thinking that what they've already achieved in life is all they can do. They think that this is the highest they can go, when in reality, that's just not true.

Of course, there's the opposite danger of thinking too big and trying to take on way too much, but I would argue that the greater threat to your potential is the tendency to think small - to play scared.

If we try and take on too much and fail, we can always recalibrate, learn more, and make another effort tomorrow. But if we think too small, we may never even get started in the first place, and we'll die with our potential still inside us.

The problem with a lot of self-help books is that they place a huge emphasis on mindset, and they lead people to believe that massive success is possible just by thinking about it and desiring success. No, you actually have to work. You have to make an effort. You have to get better. You have to improve over time. But the basic idea here is inarguable: you have to realize that you're capable of so much more, before it will ever become real in the external world.

The actualization of your infinite potential (or partial actualization, since we'll likely never reach our true limits) is never accidental. No one steps into their own greatness unintentionally, and it's not just going to "happen" because we read a book about mindset, or you read a breakdown that told you that you possess infinite potential.

Right now, that potential is latent within you - it's quite literally potential achievement and success - and your job is to make it real. To actualize it.

Everyone you admire went through the same thing, and the myth of innate talent is just that: a myth. Sure, some people start out with certain aptitudes and things they're more suited for, but mastery is never an accident.

We look at people like Mozart and think that we could never become that talented ourselves, but you have to realize that his father was a professional musician as well, and that he put the young Mozart through literally thousands and thousands of hours of musical instruction before he was even a teenager. It was no accident, and it was no gift.

When you think of your potential, you have to realize that your absolutely unique combination of 100 billion brain cells has never existed before in the entire history of the universe, and will never be possessed by anyone else who will ever live. Your thoughts, your experiences, your feelings and impulses have literally never been expressed before in all of infinite time.

The potential thoughts you can think are greater than the number of molecules in the known universe(!), and that means that there is a singular contribution to the history of humanity that only you can make. There is something that you can do, that the worlds needs, and that no one could possibly do like you can. And you don't do it, if you don't take intentional steps to actualize your potential in this way, the whole world will be deprived.

So get started. Refuse to believe that this is it for you, and realize that we need you to fully come into your own. There are no extra people on this planet, and the rest of us need you.

#2: The Single Greatest Obstacle to Improved Performance

In life, we rise or fall to the level of our standards and our expectations. Our self-concept directly influences what kind of success that we believe is possible for us, and so our main duty when it comes to actualizing our potential is to raise our self-concept.

There's an excellent book called Psycho-Cybernetics which talks about this idea of the self-concept, or self-image, in considerable depth. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety, but the important point to take away is that if we are comfortable with earning a certain amount of money, or dating a certain type of person, or living a certain type of life, that's exactly what we'll go on doing, unless we make a significant effort to raise our standards.

Your comfort zone is so insidious, because, by definition, you feel at home there, even if it's far below what you're capable of experiencing. We don't feel ourselves stagnating while we're stuck within our comfort zone, but that's exactly what we're doing.

It's like that apocryphal story of the frog in the pot of lukewarm water. As the water starts to boil and get hotter and hotter, the frog doesn't even notice because it's so accustomed to staying there. The pot of boiling water - the comfort zone - is killing it, but they don't realize it until it's too late.

A better approach to life is to aggressively expand our comfort zone and resolve to go through life world-class, as Robin Sharma says in the book, The 5AM Club. Human beings can get used to virtually anything, even if it doesn't serve their best interests, and so we need to be constantly on guard against sliding expectations and reduced standards.

The resolution to live life at a world-class level inspires us to raise our standards and elevate the amount of effort we put forth into building the life we want to live. It all starts with our mind, and our decision to become greater than we are, but it doesn't end there.

It doesn't end at all, actually, but instead is a circling, upward process of continual and never-ending self-improvement across time. It's a process, not an end state, and it's the process itself that makes life worth living. Stagnation, in any form, is anti-life, and you don't deserve to experience a life of stagnation and mediocre comfort. No one does.

It might sound difficult and complicated, but Brian Tracy gives you a simpler way of looking at it:

#3: Confident Expectation

I'll preface this by saying, as I've said many times, that mindset isn't enough. The scammers and charlatans of the world will keep trying to tell you that "positive thinking" is the ultimate key to success, but what they don't tell you is that there's more to the story.

Confident expectation - believing that good things are coming to you and that your future will be much better than your past - is an extremely important habit to develop, but it doesn't take place completely inside your own mind. Confident expectation must change our behaviors in the external world if we're going to see the full effects of our change in thinking.

How it happens in real time is that our beliefs and expectations about what we can accomplish and what will happen in every situation subtly influence our subconscious mind, causing us to then adopt behaviors that are more likely to produce the results we expect. I'll give you an example to make this clearer.

Say that you expect that most people are kind and decent, and that they will respond to you positively whenever you engage with them in social settings. Just having this belief causes you to adopt more non-threatening body language, to smile more, and to adopt similar behaviors of people who get along well with others. You having the expectation that you will be positively received causes you to behave like someone who people respond well to, which will then cause you to receive a positive response! It's that simple, that easy, and yet also that profound!

I'm not saying that it works every single time, but that's the rule.

What we expect to happen influences how we behave, which works to create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby we experience the exact result that we expect. It's why people who expect that other people will be attracted to them are likely to get more dates, and why people who expect to achieve success in other areas of their life generally do as well.

I’ll give the last word again to Brian Tracy himself:

READ THE REST OF THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Action Steps:

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Raise Your Self-Concept

It's virtually impossible to act differently than you believe yourself capable of acting. That is, to act against the idea that you have of yourself internally.

This being the case, one of the first and most important steps you can take on any self-improvement project is to raise your self-concept, to raise your standards.

We don't rise to the level of our dreams but rather we fall to the level of our standards and our habits. Raise them. Install good ones. Your life will never be the same.

It's helpful in the beginning to start with just one area of your life in which you'd like to raise your self-concept.

We have a separate self-concept for every area of life, and it can be overwhelming to try and change them all at once. So instead of trying to raise your standards in the areas of fitness, relationships, finances, career, etc., all at once, what you might consider is picking one of those areas to attack first.

What are you willing to settle for in that area? What are you not willing to tolerate? Those are the kinds of questions you need to be asking when you decide to get serious about making a big change to your self-concept.

To take the area of your finances, because that's easier to put a number on, what are you worth in terms of salary and net worth? To be perfectly clear, your self-worth has absolutely nothing to do with your net worth - we're simply raising your self-concept in this important area.

Decide: How much money do you deserve to make this year? What level of net worth are you "comfortable" with? What can you do today to move yourself closer to this level, to be in accordance with your new self-belief?

#2: Practice Writing Out Your Goals

I write out my goals literally every single day, and it's been nothing less than transformational for me. You don't have to get crazy like I do, but I actually have a 100-year plan for how I want my life to unfold.

Obviously, at that distance in time, it's not helpful to get too specific. A lot can happen in 100 years, but it forces me to make long-term moves, and to get serious about maximizing my opportunities today.

All I know is that in 100 years I want to own a large part of a space exploration company, and be intimately involved in travel to other planets and maybe even to other solar systems.

But I also get extremely practical when it comes to the next ten years, the next five years...even the next week. I have written plans for all of these timescales and I can highly recommend doing so yourself. It will give you massive clarity on what's important now, what's not important, and what you should be focusing on.

If you're starting with a 10-year plan, which is what I suggest starting with, simply write out everything you'd like to experience and accomplish in the next ten years.

Then, think about what would have to happen in the next five years to make your 10-year plan a reality. What kind of connections would you have to form? How much money would you have to earn? How much time freedom would you need?

Then, get serious about ruthless execution on both a daily level, and at the yearly level as well. I have specific, actionable plans for the day, the week, the month, the year, the next five years, the next ten years, and the next hundred years, and then I attack them single-mindedly and with extreme prejudice until I accomplish my objective. 

I'm serious: write out your goals and watch your entire life transform before your very eyes.

READ THE REST OF THE ACTION STEPS HERE

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Brian Tracy is Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations.

Brian's goal is to help you achieve your personal and business goals faster and easier than you ever imagined.

Brian Tracy has consulted for more than 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5,000,000 people in 5,000 talks and seminars throughout the US, Canada, and 55 other countries worldwide. As a Keynote speaker and seminar leader, he addresses more than 250,000 people each year.

He has studied, researched, written, and spoken for 30 years in the fields of economics, history, business, philosophy, and psychology. He is the top-selling author of over 45 books that have been translated into dozens of languages.

He has written and produced more than 300 audio and video learning programs, including the worldwide, best-selling Psychology of Achievement, which has been translated into more than 20 languages.

He speaks to corporate and public audiences on the subjects of Personal and Professional Development, including the executives and staff of many of America's largest corporations. His exciting talks and seminars on Leadership, Selling, Self-Esteem, Goals, Strategy, Creativity, and Success Psychology bring about immediate changes and long-term results.

Prior to founding his company, Brian Tracy International, Brian was the Chief Operating Officer of a $265 million dollar development company. He has had successful careers in sales and marketing, investments, real estate development and syndication, importation, distribution, and management consulting. He has conducted high-level consulting assignments with several billion-dollar-plus corporations in strategic planning and organizational development.

He has traveled and worked in over 80 countries on six continents and speaks four languages. Brian is happily married and has four children.

Additional Resources:

Brian-Tracy.com | Main Website

Brian Tracy University | Trainings

Complimentary Coaching Session

The Competitive Advantage

This Book on Amazon:

Million Dollar Habits, by Brian Tracy

If You Liked This Book:

Maximum Achievement, by Brian Tracy

The Science of Money, by Brian Tracy

Focal Point, by Brian Tracy

Eat That Frog!, by Brian Tracy

The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson

The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg

The 10 Pillars of Wealth, by Alex Becker

Doing the Impossible, by Patrick Bet-David

Die with Zero, by Bill Perkins

Ok, that’s it for now!

Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free, and you can find it right here.

What you see in this email is less than half of what you get at the Stairway to Wisdom. I left out the Book Notes, Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking, several of the Key Ideas, etc. There’s lots more for you to read if you enjoyed what you read in this email!

You can also apply to work with me directly on this page right here.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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