YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*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.

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.

#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:

#4: Make Habit-Formation a Regular Part of Your Life

This one idea alone makes the entire book worth reading. If this was the only thing you brought away from reading Million Dollar Habits, your time would still have been well invested. I mean, what a wild idea! Installing one habit a month for five years would transform you into the highest of high performers.

Now, I do have to say here that it's important not to get overwhelmed, and it's definitely important not to try to install 60 habits at once. Not even close to that. Indeed, I would go so far as to say you could start much smaller.

Depending on the habit, it's said that it takes around 66 days for it to become an automatic part of your life. That number depends on a wide range of factors, such as how often you generally perform the habit in the first place.

A monthly habit of writing your goals down for the next month is, by definition, only done once per month. So it might take you 4-6 months for it to become a habit, per se. Alternatively, something you do every single day might take much less time to become a habit.

Regardless, 66 days seems to be a pretty fair middle ground, and if you were to adopt a new habit every 2 months for 5 years, that's still 30 positive, life-enhancing habits that you would be practicing by the end of it! Can you imagine that?

At the end of the five years, you'd be meditating every day (if you find that helpful), reading every day, doing something challenging every day, sending a thank you message every day, exercising every day (or at least a few times a week), reaching out to new connections every day...and you'd have 24 more great habits stacked on top of those ones! You'd be a superstar!

The time is going to pass anyway, so you may as well use it to free yourself before it's lost forever, never to return. As they say, you don't have to be great to start, but to be great, you have to start.

#5: This Never Happens

I was going to just put this in the Book Notes section, but I do want to call special attention to this idea. Brian Tracy might just have something here.

Generally speaking, what you want to do in life is install habits that make it extremely unlikely that you won't be successful. I mean, if you were to work out every single day (or, again, at least a few times per week) for an entire year, it's extremely unlikely that you wouldn't be in fantastic shape by the end of the year. Maybe not exactly where you'd like to be, but you'd be a hell of a lot better off than you would be if you didn't install that habit.

In the same way, if you run a business, and you decide to reach out to 100 new prospective clients each and every day without fail, and you were to commit to doing this for an entire year, then, again, it's extremely unlikely that you'd have to worry about money by the end of the year.

It's the same with reading. I mean, there are probably at least a few people who haven't "transformed their lives and their careers by the habit of daily reading," but there are a massive number of people out there who have.

What you're doing is playing with the probabilities, and stacking the odds in your favor. Reading - and learning in general - is one of those things that are nearly always time and money well spent. That's what Brian Tracy is trying to get across here. Try it for a year and get back to me.

#6: Today Will Be Different

I'm going to drop another excellent book recommendation right here and suggest that you read The Revolution from Within, by Jiddu Krishnamurti. I say this a lot but...it changed everything for me.

One of the main messages of that book is that transformation doesn't happen in time. Or, better yet, as a result of time. Transformation only takes place now; never in the future.

What that means is that your personal evolution is literally now or never.

Think about it this way: if you say that you're unhappy and that you're trying to become happier, what have you done?

You've defined yourself as someone who is unhappy and thus, you will always be unhappy. You're thinking that sometime in the future you're going to make this big change and attain contentment or peace or happiness, but your identity is still that of an unhappy person.

Now, obviously, I would never tell you that every one of your problems - not even psychological ones - could be solved instantly, with no effort. Mental illness is a real thing, and real change is hard.

But your future is not determined, and you can always make different choices today, in this present moment, to change direction, to improve your circumstances, and advance towards the kind of success and fulfillment that's possible for you.

Your past doesn't automatically determine your future. You can make changes. You can evolve. You can make it.

So how do you move forward?

It's simple, but it's not easy: you start thinking different thoughts; better thoughts, ones that serve you, rather than disempower you. You start taking different actions that are more aligned with where you're heading. You start installing different habits, ones that will carry you forward inexorably toward the fulfillment of your highest potential as a human being.

Human beings are always in a state of becoming. That state exists now, and you can begin where you are. You must begin where you are, and you must begin today. Right now.

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