100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success. Brian Tracy
customers in competition with other companies that are trying to please the same customers.
This business competition is fierce. Many of the finest minds and the most talented people who have ever lived are thinking and working day and night to find ways to satisfy customers with new and better products and services. The race is on. Only those who can learn and apply the very best ideas and methods faster than their competitors will survive.
The “Winning Edge” concept says, “small differences in ability can lead to enormous differences in results.” Small differences in your own personal repertoire of knowledge and skills can lead to major differences in your income and achievements.
Your aim throughout your career, for yourself and your company, should be to acquire and develop the winning edges in your field that can mean all the difference between success and mediocrity.
Today, strategies and techniques for achieving success at every level of business, and in every activity of life, are more widely available and proliferating more rapidly than at any other time in human history. And we can all benefit from them by seizing them and applying them to our lives.
The purpose of this book is to share with you a system of proven principles, or “laws,” that have been discovered and rediscovered, practiced and implemented, by the most successful businesspeople everywhere, in every kind of organization, large and small, throughout the history of business enterprise. The practice of these laws will give you the winning edge.
When you know and understand these timeless truths, you will gain a tremendous advantage over those who do not. When you organize your life and business according to these universal laws and principles, you can start, build, manage, or turn around a business or department faster and easier than perhaps you ever thought possible.
The more you incorporate these principles into your daily thinking and decision making, the more effective you will become. You will attract and keep better people, produce and sell more and better products and services, control costs more intelligently, expand and grow more predictably, and increase your profits with greater consistency.
Some of these laws may sound unusual or even controversial when you first read them. Nonetheless, they are timeless truths. They have always existed. They have always worked. They are natural laws. They are embedded in the universe. In the long run, they are inviolable.
Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in A Liberal Education, “The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”
In the same way, these laws are neutral, neither positive nor negative. They are indifferent to your personal beliefs, preferences, or desires. They have always existed in business and always will. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her she despises and only to the apt, the pure, and true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets.”
If you want to cook, you study cooking and you follow the rules and principles regarding the combining of ingredients and preparation that have been found to work successfully in the past. You would not think to add or subtract key ingredients and expect the dish you are preparing to taste the same as if you followed the proven recipe.
By the same token, you would not expect to achieve the same business results accomplished by successful businesspeople by violating the essential laws and principles that they practice year after year.
There is a story of a man who decides to commit suicide by jumping off a thirty-story building. As he plunges toward the ground, someone leans out of a fifteenth-story window and shouts, “How’s it going?”
The falling man shouts back, “So far, so good!”
Many people are living their business lives with this kind of philosophy, “So far, so good!” They are violating natural laws and principles that apply to business life, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. Nonetheless, these truths are immutable and unavoidable. You violate them at your peril. And even if you think you are escaping their consequences in the short term, you will ultimately pay the full price that they demand.
The good news is that when you organize your life and business activities around The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, you are virtually guaranteed to enjoy success and prosperity in your business activities. Just as you reap what you sow, when you put good things in, you get good things out.
Perhaps the most important quality of a successful businessperson is pragmatism. You are pragmatic when you are not necessarily concerned about the origin of an idea. You don’t ask where it comes from or who thought of it first. You ask only one question: Does it work?
You are successful in business and in life to the degree to which you find out what works and then apply that principle wherever and whenever it is appropriate to get a particular result. This book is aimed at giving you ideas and strategies that have been proven, over and over, to work.
Universal laws and principles are similar to telephone numbers in that if you dial the right number, you get through to the desired party. But even if you are brilliant, well educated, sincere, determined, and intelligent, if you dial the wrong number, you won’t get through.
Year after year, thousands of companies underperform or even go out of business because either the key decision makers in those companies did not know these universal laws or they attempted to violate them and succeed anyway. Even more hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of companies fail to achieve their true potentials in sales and profitability every year because of their violation of one or more of these laws.
Remember that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Even if you do not know the laws, you are not excused from obedience to them. Even if your violation of these laws and principles is unintentional, you will still pay the full penalty in failure, frustration, and underachievement.
My Own Story
My background was not very inspiring. My family never had any money, and I paid my own way with odd jobs from the age of eleven. I left high school without graduating. After working at laboring jobs for some years, I stumbled into sales. I struggled in selling for many months until I began asking the question that changed my life: Why is it that some people are more successful than others?
The Bible says, “Seek and ye shall find, for all who seek findeth.” When I began looking for the reasons why some people were doing better than I was, I began to find the answers everywhere. And when I applied the answers I found, I began to get the same results that other successful people were getting.
There is a “10/90 Rule” in life. This rule says that the first 10 percent of time that you invest in finding out the underlying laws, principles, rules, methods, and techniques of successful action in any field will save you 90 percent of the time and effort required to achieve your goals in that area.
Over the years, I have found that the smartest people are those who take the time to find out the rules of success in any area before they attempt to get results in that area. They do their homework in advance.
In my thirties, I caught up on my formal education. I participated in an Executive MBA program at a major university and received a master’s degree in business and administration. I invested about 4,000 hours of my time studying business subjects and business principles. Over the years, I read hundreds of additional books and articles in my search for the so-called Secrets of Success.
When I was given an opportunity to build a sales force covering six countries, I asked the experts, read the books, listened to the audio programs, and attended the courses on recruiting and building sales organizations. Then I applied what I had learned and practiced the laws and principles that seemed to be the most effective.
In one year, I went from walking the streets, selling on straight commission, living from hand to mouth, to building a ninety-five-person sales force covering six countries and generating millions