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MAXIMUMACHIEVEMENTStrategies and SkillsThat Will Unlock YourHidden Powers toSucceedBRIAN TRACYSIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKSNEW YORK . LONDON . TORONTO . SYDNEY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSISIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKSRockefeller Center1230 Avenue of the AmericasNew York, New York 10020Copyright 0 1993 by Brian TracyAll rights reserved,including the right of reproductionin whole or in part in any form .SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarksof Simon & Schuster, Inc.For information about.special discounts for bUlk purchases,please contact Sunon & Schuster Special Sales:1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com.Designed by Liney LiManufactured in the United States of America27 29 30 28The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows :Tracy, Brian.Maximum achievement : strategies and skillsthat will unlock your hidden powersto succeed/Brian Tracy.p. em.I. Achievement motivation. 2. Success.3. Self-actualization (psychology). 4. Motivation (psychology).I. Title.BF503.T73 1993158'.I-dc2093-4534 CIPISBN-13 : 978-0-671 -86518-4ISBN-IO:0-671-86518-8ISBN-1 3: 978-0-684-80331 -9 (Pbk)ISBN- IO:0-684-80331 -3 (Pbk) Writing a book is an incredible undertaking, especially if you'venever done it before. It takes years of research and experience,then months, if not years, of writing and rewriting. This book hasemerged from the thousands of hours of seminars I've given, andthe countless suggestions and observations from the thousands ofmen and women I've had the privilege of working with over theyears.My life has been one long, continuous process of personal andprofessional development, including reading thousands of booksand articles, listening to thousands of hours of audiocassette recordings and attending innumerable courses and seminars. As Tennyson says in "Ulysses," "I am a part of all that I have met." I havebeen influenced by more people than I can even count but I wantto thank some of them for making this book possible.First, let me thank the many fine men and women who haveattended my seminars and lecrures over the years. Their insights,observations and experiences have been invaluable to me and indispensable to the writing of this book. You know who you are, andmy gratitude to you is unbounded!Specifically, I thank the late John Boyle for opening my eyes tothe power of the mind in determining everything that happens tous. I thank Earl Nightingale for his wonderful insights into thepotential of the average person and Denis Waitley for summarizingthe principles of success in his PsychokJgy of Winnin,g audiocassetteprogram. I've been greatly influenced in my thinking by many won-
6ACKNOWLEDGMENTSderful thinkers, writers, and speakers such as Stephen Covey, KenBlanchard and Tom Peters, as well as by Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn,Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer.I am extremely grateful to my friends at Nightingale-ConantCorporation, Vic Conant, Kevin McEneeley, Mike Willbond andJill Schachter, who have worked with me over the years to assurethe quality of the audio recordings of these ideas.I'm especially grateful to my seminar sponsors, John Hammond, Dan Bradand, Jim Kaufman and Suanne Sandage, who havemade these principles available to many thousands of people byconducting public seminars with me in every major city in NorthAmerica over the years.In my company, past and present, there have been, and are,several people who have helped me immeasurably. My heartfeltthanks to Victor Risling, who worked with me on the road foryears, starting early and staying late, and who made a vital contribution to my career in its formative stages. I thank my friend andpartner, Michael Wolff, my marketing director, Donna Villerilli,my executive assistants and secretaries, Mavis Hancock and ShirleyWhetstone, without whose help in typing and retyping the manuscript, this book might never have been completed.I thank my friends at Simon & Schuster, especially my editorBob Bender, for their support and encouragement in the preparation of the manuscript, and without whom this book would nothave been possible. Perhaps the most important person of all in thiswhole process has been Margaret McBride, my literary agent,whose faith and confidence in me and my work served as the criticalspark that ignited the writing of this book in the first place. Thankyou, Margaret.One of the most important lessons I've learned in life is that noone ever does it alone. We are all dependent on others for virtuallyeverything. I would like to thank so many people, but I would runout of space, so let me conclude these acknowledgments by thanking my wonderful wife, Barbara, for everything, but especially forpatiently putting up with me over the months as I pounded awayat this book. And to my dear children, Christina, Michael, Davidand Catherine, who were continually shortchanged for my time. Ipromise to make it up to you.This book is lovingly dedicated tomy wonderful wife, Barbara,the best friend, wife, mother and partnerI could ever have dreamed of.God bless you and thank you for everything.You make me a very lucky man.
CONTENTS Introduction / 111. Make Your Life a Masterpiece / 192. The Seven Laws of Mental Mastery / 343. The Master Program / 594. The Master Mind / 1085. The Master Skill / 1386. The Master Power / 1787. The Master Decision / 2008. The Master Goal / 2349. Mastering Human Relationships / 25910. Mastering Personal Relationships / 28511. Mastering the Art of Parenting / 30912. Mastery: The Power of Love / 328Appendixes I 345
INTRODUCTIONr The system you are about to learn can change your life. This bookcontains a unique synthesis of ideas, methods and techniquesbrought together in one place for the first time. The individualcomponents of this system, however, are not new; they have beenlearned and relearned throughout all the ages of man. These principles and practices have been tested and proven by millions of menand women, and all great success is based on them.By integrating these ideas and mc:thods into your daily life,you will feel happier, healthier and more self-confident. You willexperience a greater sense of power, purpose and self-direction.You will be more positive, more focused and more able to achieveyour goals. You will get along better with the important people inyour life. You'll be more successful in your career and you will feelwonderful about yourself.You will learn how to unlock the great untapped reserves ofpotential that lie deep within you. By practicing the exercises thataccompany each chapter, you'll get results out of all proportion tothe effort you put in. You will propel your whole life onto a highroad of success, achievement and greater happiness than perhapsyou've ever known.To use a simple analogy, life is like a combination lock, only withmore nwnbers. If you turn to the right nwnbers in the right sequence, the lock will open for you. It's not a miracle, nor does itdepend on luck. It doesn't even matter who you are as long as
12INTRODUcnONyou have the right numbers. By the same token, there is a propercombination of thoughts and actions that will enable you to accomplish almost anything you really want, and you can find that combination if you search for it.Health, wealth, happiness, success and peace of mind are allamenable to the same principle. If you do the right things in theright way, you'll get the results you desire. If you can determineexactly what it is you want, you can find out how others haveachieved it before you. If you then do the same things they havedone, you'll achieve the same results they have.This "secret of success" is so simple that it is overlooked bymost people. Whatever you want you can have, if you want it badlyenough, and if you are willing to persist long enough and hardenough in doing what others have done to accomplish similarthings before you.It doesn't matter if you're young or old, male or female, blackor white. It doesn't matter if you were born with a silver spoon inyour mouth or if you came from a deprived background. Nature isneutral. She is no respecter of persons. She plays no favorites. Shegives you back what you put in, no more and no less. And you candetermine what you put in.Goethe once wrote, "Nature understands no jesting; she is alwaystrue, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and theerrors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable ofappreciating her, she despises and only to the apt, the pure, and thetrue, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets."Unsuccessful people have a hard time with this idea becausethey are so accustomed to looking for the reasons for their livesoutside themselves. But the proof is all around us. Everywhere youlook, you see men and women from every background-young andold, black and white, educated and uneducated-accomplishinggreat things and making valuable contributions to the societies theylive in.At the same time, you see men and women with every advantage of background and education who seem to be going nowherewith their lives. They are working at jobs they don't like, stayingin relationships they don't enjoy and functioning far below theirpotential for achievement and happiness.INTRODUcnON13The way for you to be happy and successful, to get more of thethings you really want in life, is to get the combinations to thelocks. Instead of spinning the dials of life hoping for a lucky break,as if you were playing a slot machine, you must instead study andemulate those who have already done what you want to do andachieved the results you want to achieve.That's what this book is about. It contains the very best thathas ever been discovered about individual achievement, in oneplace, free of jargon or complexity, ready to be put into action.This system gives you the combinations to the locks in virruallyevery area of your life.I know these ideas work for two major reasons. First, I've testedand proven them by trial and error for many years. Second, I'vetaught this system to more than a million people and it has workedfor every single person who has seriously applied these ideas in hisor her life.Some people study law and some people study engineering.Some read the sports pages and become authorities on football,baseball or basketball. Others invest many hours learning aboutcooking, history, stamps, computers or a thousand other subjectS.I studied success in all its many forms.From a young age, I wanted to know why it was that somepeople were more successful than others. I was mystified by thedisparities of wealth, happiness and influence I saw all around me.Something deep inside me said that there must be reasons for thisapparent inequality, and I was determined to find out what theywere.I came from a poor family and I didn't like it. My father wasnot always regularly employed and we never seemed to haveenough money for anything but the bare necessities. For my firstten years, most of my clothes were from the Goodwill and the St.Vincent de Paul charities.I was a behavior problem when I was growing up. I was alwaysin trouble of some kind, angry and lashing back at life withoutknowing why. I was suspended several times and expelled from twohigh schools. I got more detentions than any other kid in anyschool I attended from the seventh to the twelfth grades.I failed high school, dropping six out of seven courses in mylast year. My first real job was washing dishes in the kitchen of a
14INTRODUCTIONsmall hotel. After that, I drifted from laboring job to laboring job,living in boarding houses, small hotels or one-room apartments,and occasionally sleeping in my car, or on the ground next to it.I worked in sawmills stacking lumber and on logging crewsslashing brush with a chain saw. For a while, I dug wells. I workedas a constniction laborer, and in a factory . on the assembly line.When I was twenty-one, I got a job as a galley boy on a Norwegianfreighter and went off to see the world. For the next few years, Itravel d until I ran out of money, then worked until I could affordto travel again.When I was twenty-three, I was still working as an itinerantfarm laborer during the day and sleeping on the hay in the farmer'sbarn at night. When I could no longer get a laboring job, I got intosales, working on straight commission, getting paid every night soI could eat and pay for my rooming house, one day at a time.Throughout these early experiences, which taught me a lotabout life, I continued to seek the answer to the question, ''Whyare some people more successful than others?"I was a voracious reader. I had a passion to know, to understand. I read everything I could find that would give meaning andorder to what I saw going on around me. It was like a questfor me, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but with one bigdifference.I am intensely practical. I was looking for clear explanations ofspecific things that I could do immediately to get better results. Ihad no patience for grand theory or abstract principles. My onlyquestion of each new idea was, "Does it work?"When I got into sales, I spun my wheels for several monthsuntil I began asking, "Why is it that some salespeople are moresuccessful than others?" I attacked the question wholeheartedly,reading everything I could find on selling, listening to every audiotape available and attending every training seminar that came along.I asked top salespeople how they sold and what they did to dealwith the constant problems that salespeople face.I tried everything that made sense and improved on it as I wentalong. My sales started to increase, bit by bit. In six months, I wasthe top salesperson in my company. ,I was soon teaching otherswhat had worked for me, and many of them went on to be topsalespeople as well.When I got into management, I read everything I could findINTRODUCTION15that could help me to be more effective at getting results throughothers. I used what I learned to build a sales organization withninety-five people in six countries produc
road of success, achievement and greater happiness than perhaps you've ever known. To use a simple analogy, life is like a combination lock, only with more nwnbers. If you turn to the right nwnbers in the right se quence, the lock will open for you. It's not a miracle, nor does it depend on luck. It doesn't even matter who you are as long as
