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The system you are about to learn can change your life. This book contains a unique synthesis of ideas, methods and techniques brought together in one place for the first time. The individual components of this system, however, are not new; they have been learned and relearned throughout all the ages of man. These principles and practices have been tested and proven by millions of men and women, and all great success is based on them.
By integrating these ideas and methods into your daily life, you will feel happier, healthier and more self-confident. You will experience a greater sense of power, purpose and self-direction. You will be more positive, more focused and more able to achieve your goals. You will get along better with the important people in your life. You’ll be more successful in your career and you will feel wonderful about yourself.
You will learn how to unlock the great untapped reserves of potential that lie deep within you. By practicing the exercises that accompany each chapter, you’ll get results out of all proportion to the effort you put in. You will propel your whole life onto a highroad 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 numbers. If you turn to the right numbers in the right sequence, 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 you have the right numbers. By the same token, there is a proper combination 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 all amenable to the same principle. If you do the right things in the right way, you’ll get the results you desire. If you can determine exactly what it is you want, you can find out how others have achieved it before you. If you then do the same things they have done, you’ll achieve the same results they have.
This “secret of success” is so simple that it is overlooked by most people. Whatever you want you can have, if you want it badly enough, and if you are willing to persist long enough and hard enough in doing what others have done to accomplish similar things before you.
It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, male or female, black or white. It doesn’t matter if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or if you came from a deprived background. Nature is neutral. She is no respecter of persons. She plays no favorites. She gives you back what you put in, no more and no less. And you can determine what you put in.
Goethe once wrote, “Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, 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 the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets.”
Unsuccessful people have a hard time with this idea because they are so accustomed to looking for the reasons for their lives outside themselves. But the proof is all around us. Everywhere you look, you see men and women from every background—young and old, black and white, educated and uneducated—accomplishing great things and making valuable contributions to the societies they live in.
At the same time, you see men and women with every advantage of background and education who seem to be going nowhere with their lives. They are working at jobs they don’t like, staying in relationships they don’t enjoy and functioning far below their potential for achievement and happiness.
The way for you to be happy and successful, to get more of the things you really want in life, is to get the combinations to the locks. Instead of spinning the dials of life hoping for a lucky break, as if you were playing a slot machine, you must instead study and emulate those who have already done what you want to do and achieved the results you want to achieve.
That’s what this book is about. It contains the very best that has ever been discovered about individual achievement, in one place, free of jargon or complexity, ready to be put into action. This system gives you the combinations to the locks in virtually every area of your life.
I know these ideas work for two major reasons. First, I’ve tested and proven them by trial and error for many years. Second, I’ve taught this system to more than a million people and it has worked for every single person who has seriously applied these ideas in his or 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 about cooking, 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 some people were more successful than others. I was mystified by the disparities of wealth, happiness and influence I saw all around me. Something deep inside me said that there must be reasons for this apparent inequality, and I was determined to find out what they were.
I came from a poor family and I didn’t like it. My father was not always regularly employed and we never seemed to have enough money for anything but the bare necessities. For my first ten 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 always in trouble of some kind, angry and lashing back at life without knowing why. I was suspended several times and expelled from two high schools. I got more detentions than any other kid in any school I attended from the seventh to the twelfth grades.
I failed high school, dropping six out of seven courses in my last year. My first real job was washing dishes in the kitchen of a small 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 crews slashing brush with a chain saw. For a while, I dug wells. I worked as a construction laborer, and in a factory on the assembly line. When I was twenty-one, I got a job as a galley boy on a Norwegian freighter and went off to see the world. For the next few years, I traveled until I ran out of money, then worked until I could afford to travel again.
When I was twenty-three, I was still working as an itinerant farm laborer during the day and sleeping on the hay in the farmer’s barn at night. When I could no longer get a laboring job, I got into sales, working on straight commission, getting paid every night so I could eat and pay for my rooming house, one day at a time.
Throughout these early experiences, which taught me a lot about life, I continued to seek the answer to the question, “Why are 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 and order to what I saw going on around me. It was like a quest for me, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but with one big difference.
I am intensely practical. I was looking for clear explanations of specific things that I could do immediately to get better results. I had no patience for grand theory or abstract principles. My only question of each new idea was, “Does it work?”
When I got into sales, I spun my wheels for several months until I began asking, “Why is it that some salespeople are more successful 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 deal with the constant problems that salespeople face.
I tried everything that made sense and improved on it as I went along. My sales started to increase, bit by bit. In six months, I was the top salesperson in my company. I was soon teaching others what had worked for me, and many of them went on to be top salespeople as well.
When I got into management, I read everything I could find that could help me to be more effective at getting results through others. I used what I learned to build a sales organization with ninety-five people in six countries producing millions of dollars in new business each month.
When I decided to get into real estate development, I hit the books once more. I got a real estate license and read everything I could find on the subject. For my first project, having never developed anything before, I optioned, financed, leased out, built and sold a three-million-dollar shopping center. And I learned everything I needed to know by studying and by asking questions of other successful developers.
Over the next five years, I was responsible for buying, annexing, planning, developing, building, leasing and selling millions of dollars worth of commercial, industrial and residential property.
I went from a tiny one-bedroom apartment with rented furniture to my own condominium, then to a house, then to an even bigger house with a swimming pool and a three-car garage.
I studied sales, management and business so I could learn how to make a good living. I completed high school at night and by taking correspondence courses. Based on my life experiences, and a high score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, I gained admittance to an executive MBA program and spent three years studying business theory, majoring in strategic planning and marketing.
I subsequently became a management consultant and used my knowledge and experience to earn or save my clients millions of dollars.
I had always been fascinated with the subject of happiness, and why it was that some people were obviously happier and more fulfilled than others. To find the answers, I studied psychology, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, motivation and personal achievement.
To deal with my personality problems, I studied relationships, interpersonal psychology, communications and personality styles. When I got married, I read and listened to everything I could find on parenting and childraising. To improve the way I got along with people, I read books that helped me to better understand myself and the reasons I felt and acted the way I did.
I studied history, economics and politics to understand more about the past and present, and to learn why it is that some countries, and parts of countries, are more affluent than others.
In all, I probably put in more than twenty thousand hours of study over a period of twenty-five years. Many of these studies went on concurrently. Some took intense periods of two and three years, almost like obsessions. But these studies had one thing in common: They were all aimed at practical understanding. They were a continuous search for tested and proven ideas, insights and methods that could be applied to bring about improved results immediately.
And I made a great discovery. I found that I could learn anything I needed to know to become successful at anything that I really cared about. Knowledge made all things possible.
It took me twenty years to escape from poverty and from worrying about money all the time. I then concluded that if I put what I had learned about success together into a system of ideas that anyone could use, I could provide people with tools that would save them thousands of dollars and years of hard work.
In 1981, I sat down and assembled a “success system” for others to use. I designed it as a two-day seminar called The Inner Game of Success, and then offered it via direct mail and newspaper advertising.
I was on fire with the ideas in the seminar. I had an intense desire to share them with others. I knew these ideas worked and I was convinced that anyone who would apply even a small part of this system could bring about rapid, positive changes in his or her life.
Everything worthwhile takes time. The seminar took three years to catch on. During that time, I spent everything I owned fine-tuning the content and presentation of the course. Gradually, as I worked out the bugs, the seminar began to grow in popularity. More and more people attended, from farther and farther away.
From the beginning, people described the seminar with words like, “This is like getting a brand-new chance at life,” or, “This seminar is like a blank check on the future.” We eventually changed the name of the course to the Phoenix Seminar, naming it after the mythical symbol of transformation and new life.
In 1984, Nightingale-Conant Corporation, the largest distributor of audio and video learning programs in the world, released the seminar on audiotape as The Psychology of Achievement. It quickly became a best seller and has now sold almost five hundred thousand copies.
By 1985, the demand for the seminar outstripped my ability to present it personally. I recorded it on videotape with workbook accompaniment and trained people to present it professionally. We entitled it the Phoenix Seminar on the Psychology of Achievement. The video version became so popular that it has now been translated into twelve languages and is being presented in twenty-four countries.
This seminar is used as a core course in both personal and corporate transformation. Men and women who go through the program emerge more positive and optimistic about themselves, their families, their work and every aspect of their lives. They feel more confident, competent and capable of directing and controlling their lives in a more productive way.
Corporations use the Phoenix Seminar on the Psychology of Achievement to improve productivity, performance and output. They use it as a foundation course for both teamwork and total quality management programs, finding that when they build “total quality people,” the people then build the company.
This book is my reply to the thousands of graduates who have asked me to present these concepts in written form. The system you will learn in the pages that follow is the same system taught in the Phoenix Seminar on the Psychology of Achievement. It is a complete and comprehensive approach to the business of living well, of living a life characterized by happiness, harmony, health and true prosperity.
One last point before we begin: Over the years, thousands of my graduates have come back to me, sometimes within a few hours of learning this system, and said, “You won’t believe what’s happened to me!”
They’ve then gone on to tell me about wonderful things that have taken place in their work and personal lives since they began applying these ideas.
So, I want you to know, in advance, that I will believe it, whatever it is. I know that when you begin practicing these principles in your life, you will experience successes you may never have dreamed possible before, and the more you use these ideas, the better they will work for you. Your future will become limited only by your imagination!