How To Get

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life
Copyright 2004 by Early to Rise All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing by the publisher.
Early To Rise
245 NE 4th Avenue, Suite 102 Delray Beach, FL 33483 Phone: 866-344-7200 Fax: 561-278-5929 Website: www.earlytorise.com E-mail: support@earlytorise.com
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Start With a Master Plan ..................................................... 9 Your Personal Master Plan Will Be Not Only the Foundation But Also the Blueprint of Your Success .............................................................................9 Start Today by Selecting Your Life Goals. The Rest is Easy ..........................10 Turn Your 4 Life Goals Into Realistic Objectives .........................................10 A Near-Perfect Morning Routine ................................................................10 Chapter 2: Make Your Master Plan Effective ..................................... 13 Chapter 3: Make Every Day More Productive ................................... 15 Do You Use a Single, General To-do List? If You Do, Youre Making a Big Mistake ................................................................................................15 To Change Your Life, Youve Got to Stick With My Basic Program .............15 How Productive Do You Need to Be to Succeed? ........................................16 Is it Really Necessary to Be THAT Organized? ............................................17 My Success Program Takes Less Than an Hour a Day ................................18 Chapter 4: How Long Will it Take to Do What You Want? ................. 19 Anything Worth Doing Takes Time ............................................................20 Another Way to Speed Up the Process.........................................................21 Chapter 5: What You Think About in Your Spare Time May Determine Your Success ....................................................................................... 23 How You Dream Determines How You Do.................................................24 Chapter 6: How To Succeed With People........................................... 25 The 3 Golden Rules of Listening.................................................................25 Make 3 People Smile ...................................................................................26 Beware of E-mail and Return Buttons .........................................................28 Chapter 7: How to Get the Job You Want........................................... 29 How to Get a New and Better Job...............................................................29 Dont Send Out Resumes, Send Out Sales Letters Instead ...........................30 14 More Things You Can Do to Get a Better Job ........................................31 If You Want That Better Job, Go After it Like You Mean it .........................32 Want to Persuade Someone to Hire You? ....................................................33
Chapter 8: How to Get What You Want in Your Business or Career... 35 Make Friends in High Places .......................................................................36 Add Big Shots to Your Personal Network.....................................................37 Get Yourself a Free Mentor..........................................................................37 Promise to Follow Through on Your Career Goals.......................................38 The Best Way to Surpass Your Peers and Rise to the Top of Any Business....39 Chapter 9: The Most Important Skill You Need For Success ........... 41 The Persuasive Power of Personalization ......................................................43 Group Persuasion Techniques......................................................................44 How to Persuade Someone to Pay a High Price For Your Product ...............46 The Is it This? Is it That? Closing Technique............................................47 When Planning a Meeting, Plan to Persuade ...............................................47 Chapter 10: How to Be a Successful Negotiator .............................. 49 Chapter 11: No More Excuses ............................................................ 53 Addendum
Introduction
Surely you have a secret goal youve never accomplished. Im not talking about some dream that involves luck (like winning the lottery) but an accomplishment of some kind like writing a book or building a log cabin or learning to fly. Three years ago, when I first suggested that ETR readers identify and pursue such a goal, I had an unfulfilled dream of my own to make a movie. It was such an absurd idea. I knew nothing about making movies. I had no contacts in the movie business. I didnt even have an idea for a screenplay. Yet, despite everything that suggested my dream was foolish, I decided to make it one of my New Years resolutions. If you are a long-time reader of ETR, you know what happened. I made a deal with a friend to work jointly on the movie and gradually bought the equipment I needed to do so. By summer, we were ready to begin. I took two weeks off of work and spent 18 hours a day filming a movie that I was actually writing early every morning. The experience was an extremely brutal one. I learned a great deal about my shortcomings. But, at the end of the summer, I had a movie in the can. Its not a great movie. In fact, its not even a good movie. But its a dream. And I did it. What is your dream? Writing a song? Driving a Porsche? Spend a few minutes right now giving yourself permission to imagine yourself doing something that your life keeps telling you that you cant do. You can achieve what you want in life. You just have to make the effort, pay attention to what you are doing, and spend the time it requires to get there. Contrary to popular opinion, theres no big mystery to finding success. It is not a matter of knowing the right peopleor catching a lucky breakor being born with a silver spoon. Success is a matter of what you do, and how you do it. In the following pages I will show you how to get everything you need to succeed in life with a focused, deliberate approach that will help you reach your dreams faster than you ever thought possible. So lets get to it.
Chapter 1 Start With a Master Plan

To help you become successfulto get you closer to where you want to be in lifeyou need to have a Master Plan. A Master Plan is what Jack Welch used to communicate and achieve his vision for General Electric. And its what some professional sports coaches use to lead and motivate their teams when the prospect of winning a league championship that year or even the following one is next to zero. They know that instead of pumping up their players on the impossible dream, its much more realistic and can be just as exciting for them to chart a longerterm success plan that will take them where they hope to be. The same process can help you achieve your personal goals.
Your Personal Master Plan Will Be Not Only the Foundation But Also the Blueprint of Your Success
A Master Plan says that you are serious about your life goals. It is a formal contract between the visionary you and the daily, working you that lays out, point by point, what exactly has to be done to achieve all your major objectives over time. The Master Plan works because it takes very large, sometimes very nebulous, ambitions and breaks them down into specific tasks things you have to learn, things you have to know, and things you have to do. Transforming dreams into tasks may take away some of the romance, but what youll get instead is a growing excitement about how increasingly likely it is that you will accomplish your dreams. The reason most people dont achieve their ambitions is NOT that they arent smart enough, shrewd enough, or complicated enough. Its that they are emotionally too complex, shrewd, and smart. They allow themselves too many subconscious conflicts of interest, which stall their progress or derail them. Making a Master Plan work is about simplifying your interests and acting upon them in a very simple way. When you get the emotional gratification of taking one forward step toward one cherished goal, it will make it that much easier to take the next step. Think of your Master Plan as a behavior-response system for the ultrasophisticated (and highly interesting) YOU. To perform better than you have in the past (and achieve more than you have so far), you have to act differently now. And if you really want to achieve those dreams you dream about, you have to make sure that what you do today this very day, not tomorrow will move you closer to those dreams.
How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life 9
Start Today by Selecting Your Life Goals. The Rest is Easy

Dont be cynical. This can definitely change your life. It has worked for me and for everyone who has tried it, including dozens of individuals Ive personally coached. So lets get started. 1. Take out a sheet of paper. Title it Life Goals (if you have no shame) or Stuff to Do Before I Croak (if you are afraid someone will see it). 2. Make a list of everything you want to accomplish. Everything. Like making a lot of money. Writing books. Traveling to Rome. Learning to tap dance. Write till you are done. 3. Let your list sit for a few hours. Even a day. Then narrow it down to your top 10 choices. 4. Take another rest. Now make another cut. This time, you have to select your top four goals. (If you are having trouble figuring out what is really important to you, do this: Imagine your obituary. What would you want said about you?) These are your Life Goals, your ultimate priorities, the objectives that will make you the person you really want to be. Spend some time imagining yourself in the future, as you will be when youve accomplished them. 5. Now, pick the one Life Goal that is numero uno. 6. On a separate sheet of paperor perhaps on an index cardwrite down your four Life Goals with your top choice on top. Highlight that one.
Turn Your 4 Life Goals into Realistic Objectives

OK. Heres what you need to do now. Convert your four Life Goals into fiveyear objectives. For example, lets say that one of your goals is to have a net worth of $10 million. And lets say that you want to retire in 10 years. You might make having a $5 million net worth your five-year goal. You are going to use this five-year list to create your one-year list. And you will use your one-year list to create monthly lists. And you will use each monthly list to create weekly lists. And your weekly lists to create daily to-do lists. I know. I know. But it works. It really works. Next, Ill show you how to make this conversion from a five-year plan to a daily to-do list with a morning routine that will make it highly probably that you will achieve your four Life Goals.
A Near-Perfect Morning Routine

Over the years, Ive studied and experimented with dozens of time-saving techniques and organizational systems. The simple three-step program that follows is a unique combination of what in my experience is the best of the best.
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Step 1: Getting Your Inputs (5-10 Minutes)

Start with your weekly to-do list. (This is derived from your monthly to-do list, which comes from your yearly to-do list, which is a derivative of your five-year Life Goals list.) On a sheet of paper, jot down anything and everything you think needs to get done. Make sure you have at least one task associated with each of your four primary goals. Now, scan your e-mail. Dont read the messages. You will get bogged down if you do. Just give them a quick once-over to see is there is anything waiting for you that may need to be taken care of right away and/or will take some extra time. Next, check your phone messages, faxes, and inbox. Don respond to anything. Your job for the moment is simply to amass it all. When you have done all of this, you will have completed the first step of your morning routine. You will have gathered up all the work you might want to do that day. You will already be thinking about much of it. You will not have to worry about forgetting something important. And you will have a good idea of how much needs to be done.
Step 2: Sorting and Ordering (5-15 Minutes)

Now comes the fun part. Get out a clean sheet of paper or an index card and write the date on top. Referencing all the inputs you have just gathered, categorize each item according to the quadrant developed by Steven Covey (the Seven Habits guy) as either: 1. Important and Urgent 2. Important but Not Urgent 3. Unimportant but Urgent, or 4. Unimportant and Not Urgent Then select the items that you intend to accomplish before the end of the day. When you start out, youll be lucky to complete 15 tasks, so be realistic in your planning. As you become better at time spacing, you will do more. Make sure your daily to-do list contains nothing that is Unimportant and Not Urgent and a diminishing number of Unimportant but Urgent items (since they indicate that you are not in control of your schedule). Now highlight four or five of the items on your list. These should all be Important and Not Urgent. (The Urgent tasks you HAVE to do. The Important but Not Urgent tasks will advance your Life Goals. They are critical to your success, but you will almost certainly fail to do them unless you make them a priority. Thats why you are highlighting them.) To the side of each item, you might want to indicate how much time you think it will take. And then you might want to add another column to record the actual time
each task took. (I run a subtotal of the cumulating times to the right of that so there is some relationship between what I want to do and how much time I have to do it.) As a general rule, its a good idea to structure all of your tasks so that none lasts more than an hour. Ten-minute, 15-minute, and 30-minute tasks are best. If you have something that takes several hours to do, break it up in pieces and do it over a few days. It will be better for the extra time you give it and you wont get crushed on any one day. Also, be sure to slot in time for relaxing, eating, etc. When you are done, double check to make sure the time you allocated does not exceed the time you have available. You will have now finished Step 2. Your day is organized not according to what others want from you but according to what you want from yourself. If you have never done this before, it will be a major change.
Step 3: Giving Your Day a Jumpstart (30-60 Minutes)

Heres the best step. As your first task, take on one of the highlighted tasks. It might be something you enjoy doing or something you really dont want to do (because it will make you feel so good when its done). Follow these three steps right away first thing when you get in (which should be about 90 minutes before everyone else) and you will have accomplished more by starting time than most people do by lunchtime. (Or all day, for that matter, since most people see most of their day consumed by unimportant emergencies.) Very Important: Make sure, as I said above, that you do at least one task each day to advance each of your four Life Goals. Really, you should do more than that. Your days to-do list should roughly reflect, in terms of time devoted to each task, your Life Goals list, with priority given to your top goal, a bit less to your second, and so on.
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Chapter 2: Make Your Master Plan Effective

Success can come in a single windfall, but most often it arrives bit by bit. This is a way for you to give yourself a significant advantage over the people you compete with in life. It actually gives you three advantages. You get much more done. You have to deal with far fewer unnecessary crises. And, most important, you spend a much greater percentage of your time doing things that move you along toward the goals you desire.
Efficiency Tip No. 1: A Small Thing That Can Make a Huge Productive Difference
About two years ago, a retired publisher who does more work in one day than most working publishers do in a week, shared one of his secrets with me. Wherever he goes, however hes dressed, he carries in his pocket a very small pad of paper and a pencil. He uses it not only to jot down phone numbers and the like but also to record those fleeting good ideas big and small that come to us when we are least prepared to make note of them. Since Ive started using this system, I no longer forget these little ideas that make life a little better. I also use it to help me keep my priorities straight. Rather than waste 90 seconds staring at the light board of an elevator, I can take a quick look at everything Im trying to get done that day/week/month/year.
Start, Today, By Buying a Pack of 3-by-5 Index Cards

I use 3-by-5 index cards that are lined across the 3-inch side. These accommodate 18 entries on each side. (Eighteen seems to be about as many important tasks as I can get done in an average day. But you can use the back of the card if you have more to do.) Review your cards each morning and consult them whenever you have a spare moment. Youll be surprised at how much more on top of things youll be in a few days. Keep your cards (or notepad) with you at all times. When you get your next good idea, write it down. When you come across a fact that will help you sell an idea, record it. When you agree to do something, or meet someone, and you dont have that clunky calendar with you, make a note of it on your index card. Every few days or at the very least once a week transfer your notes. Appointments go in your calendar. Names go in your address book or Rolodex.
Ideas go in your idea folder. When everything has been properly disposed of, give yourself a fresh index card. You can also use an index card as a cheat sheet when you attend formal business functions. Jot down full names and key facts (i.e., baby boy, Jason) for colleagues you are likely to run into. It can help you make a good impression. Imagine. You will no longer forget important names and dates. You will develop a reputation for being good at follow-through. And youll never forget those great ideas that come to you briefly...and then are gone.
Efficiency Tip No. 2: Dont Let E-Mail Ruin Your Schedule

If you let your e-mail (or your inbox) ruin your schedule, you arent productive. It doesnt matter how hard you feel like youre working. You arent doing the most important things. Youve got to limit the time you spend on e-mail and stick to that limit. Unless you are in the very unusual situation of being responsible for hourly deadlines (in which case you probably need to work your way up in the organization), you should write/read/answer your e-mail only once or twice a day.
Efficiency Tip No. 3: Group Like-Tasks Together

Assembling common tasks makes you much more efficient. So group similar activities, such as making phone calls, handling e-mails, writing short memos, etc., into one category on your daily to-do list. (On a separate index card or sheet of paper, keep the phone numbers and a list of the memos you want to write.)
Efficiency Tip No. 4: Choose a Time Planner That Works For You
Most organized executives I know use personal organizers. Some use paper calendars. Others prefer electronic planners. I use a homemade system. That said, I have personally found that the most efficient are the daily diaries. The least efficient? Without a doubt, its the electronic planner. Ultimately, what matters is that you pick a system you will use consistently. So anything that tickles your fancy is the ticket.
Efficiency Tip No. 5: Use a Pencil First Then Ink

Ive made it a habit to enter my appointments in pencil and then at some sensible time pen them in as I confirm them. This lets me know, at a glance, which meetings are confirmed and which are not. And it forces me to look at least twice at each scheduled event better to remember it.
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Chapter 3: Make Every Day More Productive

A client and I met this morning. She said she was frustrated that she had begun using a daily task list, as I had suggested, but wasnt getting some important things done. To-do lists just dont work for me, she said. That sounded wrong, so I asked to see what she was doing. As it turned out, she was simply writing a list of to-do items on a sheet of paper and crossing them out as she got to them. Her list, which had perhaps a dozen items on it when she created it, now had 60 or 70 items covering several pages, some of them crossed out, others with notations. Scribbling here. Scratching there. This client is not the only person I know who has opted for a general to-do list over my more complicated task list. Some of the people who are closest to me (I dont dare even print their initials) do the same. As far as I can see, they are kidding themselves. They have the impression that they are being efficient, but in fact they are only wasting their time recording tasks and objectives that, for the most part, will never get done. By modifying my task-planning program to a general to-do list, my client had pretty much doomed herself to failure. The likelihood that shed make real progress on her most important goals was very low.
Do You Use a Single, General To-do List? If You Do, Youre Making a Big Mistake
In an attempt to get everything on paper, my client wrote up a single list of all the things she wanted to do. It included mega-goals (like become a stronger person), big objectives (like earn $80,000 this year), medium-sized tasks (like make three new appointments this week), and mini-tasks (like return Johns phone call). As I mentioned above, her list ran several pages. She worked with it every day, she saidand she had made some progress but the more she used it, the longer it got. Some important stuff went undone and she was feeling more swamped as time passed.
To Change Your Life, Youve Got to Stick With My Basic Program

You need to begin with four Life Goals usually with a five-to-seven-year time limit. These are the biggies like be a great mom, become wealthy,
and so on. Write those down and put them somewhere safe. Then create a yearly goal sheet that is directly the result of those Life Goals. Make sure that you have specific, yearly objectives that move you along toward each Life Goal at a realistic and satisfying pace. Next, create a monthly task list (directly from your yearly objectives) and a weekly list (directly from your monthly). Your daily to-do list should consist of specific tasks. You should estimate beforehand how long each task will take and you should therefore be able to accomplish 80% or more of those tasks each day. If your schedule requires you to accommodate interruptions, allow for them on your task list. You probably cant accomplish more than 20 or 22 significant tasks each day. Over the years, Ive found that a typical 10-hour day for me consists of approximately: 10 or 12 15-minute tasks Six or eight 30-minute tasks One or two 60-plus-minute tasks There is something about my nature the emotional, physical, and intellectual capacities I have that prevents me from doing much more than that. You may be able to do more, but chances are you wont. If you do find that your limit is about the same as mine (or even less), you can create your entire daily to-do list on one side of a 3-by-5 lined index card. Thats how I do it. The important point is this: There is a giant difference between using a generalized to-do list and following my program for getting things done. If you are doing the former, your chances for changing your life are probably less than 20%. If you take a little extra time and effort to do the latter, your chances are 90% or better.
How Productive Do You Need to Be to Succeed?

Successful people are usually those that spend most of their time in productive pastimes. From least productive to most productive, there are four types of activity: 1. Destructive (fighting, drinking, suing, being angry) 2. Fun but wasteful (watching television, reading fiction, shopping, drinking late) 3. Knowledge building (learning almost anything) 4. Wealth building (Im using the term wealth broadly here.)
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Get Honest With Yourself

We all tend to fool ourselves when it comes to assessing how well we use time. Its very natural to remember the hard work we do and forget about the little wasted things we do that eat up time. To assess your time-management skills, do this: Starting today and continuing for the next three days, track your hours meticulously. Be completely honest about the time spent. Not time spent looking out the window, chatting about personal issues, or reading irrelevant materials. When you are done, total up your time according to whether it was spent on a routine task, an ongoing project, or planning/development. If you dont like these categories, you can group your activities as productive, wasteful, or destructive. Or, if you prefer, according to the Covey quadrant.
Then Face the Truth

Do you spend at least 80% of your waking hours productively? And do you spend most of your productive time on your primary Life Goal? Do you waste less than 10% of your time? If you are happy with what you are doing, treat yourself to a good bottle of wine or a nice massage. If you are notwell, you know what to do.
Is it Really Necessary to be THAT Organized?

Someone once wrote me asking if I really do all the organizational stuff that I recommend. I dont think Id have time for anything else, he said. The answer is yes. I do. And I consider doing that organizational stuff the most valuable part of my day. There are countless studies showing that successful people (a) have formal objectives, (b) review those objectives regularly, and (c) plan their time accordingly. Not every successful executive I know does this. But as someone who has managed businesses both by reacting and by planning, I know the difference. If I had to guess, Id say I am honestly 50% to 100% more productive now than I ever was before. Not in terms of the actual number of things I get done, but certainly in terms of the number of important things I get done. I am now after so many years finally getting to some of the Important but Not Urgent objectives that I had been putting off for 20 years. And Im doing it without neglecting any of the Urgent stuff. In fact, Im better now at getting the Urgent stuff done before it becomes Urgent. I owe it all to planning to forcing myself to take the time to think and plan. To resisting the urge to jump right into the chaos that awaits me every day.
My Success Program Takes Less Than an Hour a Day

With my program, since you are working from a five-year plan, you spend (1) a full day every year planning the next 364 days, (2) about two or three hours once a month establishing monthly goals and organizing your daily follow-up files, (3) an hour each week establishing your weekly goals, and (4) no more than 15 minutes every morning organizing your day. Yes, you can accomplish a great deal without planning if you are ambitious, hard-working, and smart. But youll get even more done if you spend time planning. Give it a try. You risk only 15 minutes a day.
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Chapter 4: How Long Will it Take to Do What You Want?

Accomplishing a goal has 3 phases: deciding to do it, determining what specific actions are necessary and in what order, and executing those actions. By now you should have chosen your life goals and derived from them five-year, one-year, monthly and even weekly objectives. I have given you a very good system for getting them done. Whats left is the doing. Ah, theres the rub. Out of every 100 people who choose to do something, the majority will drop out before they begin because they dont have an effective plan. Of those that remain, 80% will fail simply because they stopped the doing. Execution, as they say, is nine-tenths of the game. So we are going to talk about how long it takes to execute you goals. My theory (a hopeful one, admittedly) is that if you begin a task with a realistic idea of how long it will take to accomplish it then your chances of finishing it are greatly improved. If you decide to become a lawyer, you need to know that it will take you three years of full-time effort after college. If you decide to learn Spanish you are better off recognizing that a certain sum of hours is necessary to achieve any level of proficiency. You might want to know, for example, how long it takes to: Speak Spanish Become a good public speaker Dance well at weddings Practice a martial art Play a musical instrument Learn the secrets of direct marketing Become a good copywriter Almost as soon as you ask the question, you realize that how good needs to be defined, for we recognize that it is possible to practice any skill at various levels of proficiency. To make matters simple, lets say that, broadly speaking, you can have the following three levels of skill: Competence Mastery Virtuosity
Anything Worth Doing Takes Time

Lets illustrate this principle with ballroom dancing. You probably know people who move well on the dance floor. Whether its a cha-cha, a swing or a fox trot playing, they can go out there and make the moves. They are not professionals they could not compete favorably in contestsbut they are definitely competent. The next level mastery is the level of the professional dancer.the teacher or the member of the dance troupe. Its easy to see the difference between competence and mastery, isnt it? Virtuosity? Thats Fred Astaire. If one of a hundred dancers is competent, one of a hundred masters is at the Fred Astaire level. Ive spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, talking to professionals and recalling personal experiences. My conclusion is as follows: It takes about 1,000 hours to become competent at any worthwhile skill. It takes about 5,000 hours to master any skill. It takes between 25,000 and 35,000 hours to become world class. (And then only if you are gifted.) Now these are ballpark numbers, but they are surprisingly reliable. Skeptical? Lets check it out. What shall we use? How about language? How many hours would it take you to become a competent French speaker? Based on my experience learning French, heres a good guess: 300 hours to learn cold the 20 most common irregular verbs in three tenses. 100 hours to master about 50 prepositions, conjunctions and articles. 200 hours to get a good grasp of French grammar 200 hours to learn about 1,000 useful nouns 100 hours to memorize gender 50 hours to acquire passable pronunciation. What does it all add up to? 950. As I said, that would get you speaking well, but it would hardly qualify you as a French teacher. To get to that level youd need to do a lot more work. Say you studied 2 hours a day and practiced for another 3 hoursand you did this for three years, youd probably be ready to teach, dont you think? You would have reached a level most would consider fluent. Take one more example Jiu Jitsu. I have been at it now for two years. I have spent about 600 hours and have just received my purple belt. I feel almost competent. I can easily handle white belts and most blue belts, but I struggle with good blue belts. I have the distinct feeling that I am about 100 hours away from competence. Seven hundred hours are not 1,000, but in my case Ive had the advantage of being trained by Reylson Gracie, probably the best instructor of his kind. That kind
20 How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life
of education counts. In this case it saved me about 30% of the time I would have spent otherwise. So I would make this adjustment to my theory. Deduct 20% to 30% for good teaching.
Another Way to Speed Up the Process

Heres a great way to become perfect at just about anything: When you practice, dont ever do it wrong. If you practice perfectly, you will become perfect. I want to propose this to you as an ETR Big Secret. Heres the background of the Jazz Masters Secret: I was talking to a colleague who plays a very good blues guitar. He told me that about 20 years ago he attended a small seminar given by legendary jazz guitarist Howard Roberts. Roberts told the secret of his virtuosity: Never practice a mistake. According to Roberts, most musicians, in their eagerness to play complex pieces, move too fast. What he had always done and the secret to his success was to practice only what he could do perfectly. His theory was that any learning and guitar learning in particular is the biological process of creating neural networks in the brain. Every perfect repetition beats a good path one that you can travel on later. Every incorrect repetition beats a parallel but incorrect path one that you can easily slide onto if you arent careful. The more you practice the right moves, the deeper the memory path. The trick is to make the correct paths as deep as possible and the incorrect paths shallow or nonexistent. The faster you eventually perform a task, the more likely it is that you will make a mistake, unless, that is, you have cut only one path for it a perfect one. Likewise, when you are performing a task under stress or in association with other tasks, it is easy to bungle it unless you have no neurological way to screw it up. The trouble with most guitar students, Roberts said, is that they rush themselves. They are fixated on completing a movement rather than on performing it well. They figure the sooner they can simulate the completed movement, the better they are doing. But the truth is quite different.
How to Practice Everything Perfectly

Most things worth learning are complex. Thats why we learn them in pieces. Whether its guitar playing, dancing, or public speaking, the ultimate performance is a complex combination of many simpler tasks. Thus, to make the performance perfect you need to perfect each of the simpler tasks. Most learning systems are based on this understanding. To do a task perfectly even a simple task usually means slowing down. You should slow down as much as you need to in order to make the movement perfect.
Dont worry about your progress. Doing a repetition at half speed does not make the learning process twice as long. It makes it faster, because you are creating just one neural pathway and none to cause you to deviate from your course. The fundamental rule is this: Do it right every time you try and you will learn faster and perform better. It may be possible that the secret to virtuosity itself is not some mysterious preexisting natural capacity for a particular skill, but a natural inclination to practice it correctly. Isnt that what imaging is all about? Isnt imaging just a visual way to improve the quality of the repetition? ETR readers know the secret of accomplishing any goal: 1000 hours to achieve competence and 5000 hours to achieve mastery. Ive talked about how you can shorten that time by being coached well. Now I see that being coached well means having someone who can show you the perfect way. By learning perfect form and practicing it perfectly, the time it will take you to master a task any task should be considerably shorter. Im convinced. From now on Im going to slow down and get it right. When I put aside, say, fifteen minutes to practice something, Im not going to try to do as many repetitions as possible, but to do as many perfect repetitions as I possibly can.
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Chapter 5: What You Think About in Your Spare Time May Determine Your Success
If youve done some thinking about what you want from life, you may have discovered that becoming wealthy is not at the top of your list. This presents a dilemma: If you spend your prime time on some other goal, you may live poor; if you focus primarily on making money, you may fail at what you value most. This is the problem of a friend of mine who runs a 3-year-old career counseling and training business. After a strong start, sales had reached a plateau and profits were shrinking. He was working hard, he said, but things were slipping through the cracks. Some of those things were important. Shareholders werent happy. He felt overwhelmed and unappreciated. He was thinking about quitting. We took a look at what he was actually doing the specific tasks he was finishing every dayand what we discovered was that he was not working smart. He was wasting time on unimportant problems that, through prior neglect, were becoming emergencies. All that could be fixed in time and by some task-management work, but there was also a more serious problem. He didnt have any good ideas about how to boost sales and increase profits. Ive tried everything, he said. I just dont know what else to do.
How to Tell if You Dont Have What it Takes

The bells went off. This was the statement of someone who has psychologically abandoned his job. The ship is sinking, and the captain doesnt know what to do. This may seem hard to accept, but you cannot run out of ideas unless you have run out of commitment. Exasperation is what happens after you stop trying. And ideas stop coming only after you stop thinking. It took some time, but my friend finally recognized this to be true. It became clear to him when our conversation snaked into the process of his thinking. I had asked him what he thought about when he daydreamed. My fiance, he answered. To make a long story short, my friend was spending all his spare time and most of his creative energy thinking about his impending marriage. Since he was still working 10 hours a day, he felt like he was still doing his jobbut he wasnt. To run a successful business, you have to think about it day and night. That means you daydream about business at home. My friend was doing just the opposite.
Test Yourself
Do you spend time thinking about your personal life at work? Even attending to it by phone calls and e-mail messages? Or does your day fly by and you find yourself sneaking in extra work at home and dreaming about business problems? If you are fully committed to your work, you will dream about itat night and during the spare moments of your day. Blunt, purely rational approaches do not solve the really tough problems. They require an imaginative approach that normally comes from dreaming.
How You Dream Determines How You Do

If your underlying emotional drive is directed at your personal life, you will never find the creative solutions you need for your business problems. And if your primary concern is business, you may never figure out how to fix your personal problems. What I am saying, I think, is that you need to manage your daydreaming just as you do your time in general. You must recognize where your creative energy is going and ask yourself if that is in accordance with your life priorities. In my friends case, he could not solve his business problems because he was spending all his emotional energy on his engagement. His daytime business thinking was ineffective because it lacked emotional intensity. His nighttime thinking was taken up by his personal life, but even that was suffering because of the anxiety he faced because of work. So what should I do? he wanted to know. I want my marriage to work and I also want my business to succeed. I am not prepared to give one up. You may have to, I told him. At least temporarily. This may be one of those situations where you can only accomplish one thing. You may have to choose. Postpone the wedding until the business is fixed. Or get a less responsible job. He didnt like those choices. And so we worked out a plan that hedged the bet. He would work only eight hours a day, but the eight hours he worked would be good ones. He would not allow his personal life to interfere. This could only happen we agreed, if he took better care of his engagement, which he would do by spending two extra hours a day focused on it. The little thinking we do in our spare moments is valuable thinking. It connects the dots and provides us with the emotional and imaginative energy to achieve creative breakthroughs. If you are losing your grip on your goals and daydreaming about something else, its time to reassess your priorities.
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Chapter 6: How to Succeed With People

Whether youre selling face-to-face, building your personal relationships, or trying to impress your boss, theres an important skill you should learn. How to make people like you, over and over again According to Nicholas Boothman, author of How to Make People Like You, what you do in the first few minutes of every personal encounter determines how people will respond to you later on. First impressions do count, Boothman believes, more than most people realize. And its not just the very first impression. Its the first impression you give each and every time you greet someone. Each and every time you encounter a friend, family member, or business associate, do the following: 1. Be aware of how you feel. Make yourself feel positive and allow that feeling to be reflected in the way you hold yourself. 2. Make eye contact: Always look the other person directly in the eye, even if only for a moment. 3. Beam. Be the first to smile. Let your smile, as well as your body, show that youre happy to see him/her. 4. Make your Hi! or Hello! sound friendly. 5. Take the lead: Extend your hand first. 6. Shake his/her hand strongly. Shake it like you mean it. 7. Lean toward him/her: An almost imperceptible forward tilt will very subtly indicate your interest in and openness to the other person. Bonus tip: However much you can, know what you want out of every new relationship or new encounter before you begin it. This will allow you to channel that positive first impression into something meaningful and beneficial.
The 3 Golden Rules of Listening

Recently, I negotiated the purchase of two very desirable oil paintings for a client and me. The price quoted was $35,000. I had an argument ready a good argumentfor paying about $5,000 less. But instead of making it, I chose to listen. I said, That price seems substantially too high. Tell me how you justify it. He gave me four reasons, two of which were solid and two of which were weak. I refuted the weak reasons with specifics. He was impressed, almost taken aback. He
gave me a price of $29,500. I would have paid $32,000. Making my case after I had listened to his gave me an advantage one that probably saved me a couple grand. So the first and most important Golden Rule of Listening is to shut up and let the other person talk first. Do that, and youll be way ahead of the game. If you want to become a listening master, you might want to remember two more advanced listening rules: Listen on two levels: (1) to the literal content and (2) to the emotional story behind it. Summarize before you present your case. Restating the speakers thoughts and feelings ensures him that you understand him and makes him grateful and more open to your ideas. (Note: Be very careful not to devalue the speakers ideas or feelings by the words you choose to summarize them.) Frankly, I sometimes find it difficult to follow this advice. When I enter into a discussion, I have usually been thinking about it for some time. In thinking about almost anything, I approach it from different points of view. That gives me the illusionary feeling that the conclusion I come to should be good not just for me but for the person to whom Im speaking. Thats not always so. Moreover, people sometimes just need to be heard. They want to tell you their story, and they want you to listen to it. If it involves a problem and you think you have the solution, you may be tempted to interrupt their story to offer it to them. Usually a bad idea. Let them finish their sad tale. Then ask if they have a solution. You may be surprised at how frequently they do. Why did they bother to tell you? It may be as simple as the need for sympathy. Nothing wrong with that, so long as the need doesnt become neurotic. Constant whiners are impossible, unproductive, and draining. They should not be tolerated. Are you a great listener? Heres a clever way to find out: Ask someone who knows you. And listen to the answer.
Make 3 People Smile

In my experience, there are basically three personalities people display when theyre trying to sell you something. The something could be their viewpoint, an idea or an actual product/service. The personalities are the bully, the charismatic, and the invisible salesman. The bully succeeds by pressing you so hard that you agree to his proposition just to make him go away. He sells you once, but he will never sell you again. The charismatic charms you. What he lacks in knowledge and selling skills, he makes up for in good humor. You buy from the charismatic because you like him. The best seller is the invisible salesman. He focuses your attention on the idea, or product/service and the benefits they provide YOU. Attending to your interests and reactions, he tailors his presentation to meet your wants, beliefs, and feelings.
When you are in the presence of an invisible salesman, you may forget about him completely because you are so excited about what you are about to buy. No one is purely one kind or the other. We are all, in parts, charming, aggressive, and self-effacing. Learning to focus the targets attention on whats in it for him is the primary skill of the invisible salesman. But it is also important to work on your personal skills and that means diminishing those characteristics that intimidate and developing those that charm.
The Best Opening Technique is Very Simple

Here is one way to bully less and charm more. I got this from a colleague who uses it successfully every time he wants something from me. I am not sure he does it intentionally. I am not sure he even knows he does it. But I suspect he learned it during his twenty-year career as a successful salesman. Heres what he does: He makes me smile. He does it almost every time we meet. And I dont know how. But I have observed that every time he pops his head into my office, he carries a big smile. He says something anything the purpose and usual effect of which is to get me to smile back. This is not an easy accomplishment. Im a sometimes-temperamental bastard. But even in my foulest moods, this guy has an astonishing record of squeezing that meltdown smile out of me. Whats his secret? Thats what Id like to know. But I know this it starts with the fact that he tries. When someone cares enough about your feelings to try to make them improve, it feels good. This is not a common quality, but it is characteristic of the charismatic salesman. First, make people smile. After that, everything else is easy. You may be the sort of person for whom this comes easily. If so, you need only realize what a talent you have and resolve to use it more. If you are less-than-gifted in the sunshine department (charisma-challenged, like me), you should consider adding this technique to your persuasion arsenal. If it doesnt come naturally, youll have to practice. You can start today. Heres the challenge: Make the next three people you meet smile. Make them smile before you do anything else. Say something do something to get that smile on their faces before you begin your conversation. Hint: You have to be really good to make someone else smile when you are frowning. So start off by smiling yourself. If you are really retarded in this area (as I am), you might want to practice in the mirror before you experiment on a live subject.
Try it Out Today. Three Times. And See What Happens

You may notice the following:
1. It will make you feel good. 2. It will give you a feeling of power. 3. Your smiling subject will be more open to your ideas and interests.
Actual Proof From Someone Who Tried it

I tested it (successfully I might add) with two people. The third test was not done in person, but with a voice on the phone. Someone whose job it was to scold me for missing some sort of credit card payment. Instead of acting snotty, I acted happy to hear from her. I even made a joke. The response was amazing. She abandoned her nasty script and spoke nicely to me. I could actually hear her smiling. We got the problem (something to do with a change of address) cleared up in record time. I hung up the phone feeling good much better than I would have expected. She was happy too. Not a bad result, considering the alternatives. So theres your action plan for today. Three people. Three smiles. Good luck.
Beware of E-mail and Return Buttons

I did it again. Copied a sensitive e-mail to the wrong person. Its soooo embarrassing. In what I thought was a confidential memo to my partners I characterized someones proposition as insane. I neglected to check the recipient box before I sent it off and as fate would have it, he got it. Theres an old bit of advice that goes something like: Always speak about everyone as if he were in your presence. Ive never been much good at following this rule. I enjoy slander but I have gradually come to realize that it is not a good practice. An amazingly high percentage of the calumnies I utter find their way back to the victims. Its never a pretty situation. When you say nasty things in print, its worse, because its permanent. And with e-mail, its worst of all, because it is so easy to broadcast the recrimination yourself . . . and it is permanent. . .and it happens so fast! Im sure you are better mannered than I. Still, it wont hurt to consider the following e-mail rules. 1. Never write anything about anyone in an e-mail message you would not want that person to hear about. 2. When you simply cant resist a witty barb, dont use any button that allows you to send the message automatically to a group of people unless it is absolutely necessary. 3. Double-check the recipient list every time you send out an e-mail. Check the last name, not the first. What you want Paul Smith to read might infuriate Paul Jones.
Chapter 7: How to Get the Job You Want

A guy I know just lost his job. He came to me for advice on finding a new one. He faces several problems. Hes 50 years old and an expert in an industry that is shrinking. His initial efforts were completely unproductive which created an additional problem. He now lacks confidence. Im afraid Ill end up bagging groceries, he told me. Ive got two kids to put through college and a retirement fund that evaporated when the market crashed. He is scared and with good reason. But I told him not to worry about the zero responses he got from sending out 50 resumes. Thats the worst possible way to get a job, I told him. If you have lost a job, fear losing a job, or simply want to get a better one (by transferring, shifting, or being promoted), what Im about to say will be helpful to you. This is based on my experience both as a job seeker and as a job giver, as well as what Ive learned by consulting with a resume writing business and some ideas Ive gotten from a very good book on the subject titled Dont Send a Resume.
How to Get a New and Better Job

Most people end up with jobs that result from a series of half-baked actions and fortunate accidents. Ask a dozen executives to retrace their careers and youll hear a dozen versions of this happened and that happened but very few saying I wanted this so I did that. When you try to get a better job by sending out a bunch of resumes to businesses you barely know, you are doing the equivalent of cold selling, says Jeffrey J. Fox in Dont Send a Resume. Cold calls have a low success rate. The customer may have absolutely no need for the product, may not even be in the office...The person who receives the resume may have no need for an additional employee, may not even be the hiring person. Fox is right. Resumes dont usually work, because they are designed wrong. They are all about you, the job candidate. But the person doing the hiring is not at all interested in you. Hes interested in his business the problems and the challenges he faces every day. Hes interested in hiring you to help him meet those challenges and solve those problems. He doesnt care about and doesnt have time to consider your career goals, what you like to do in your spare time, and what organizations youve joined. Hell
only even listen to that kind of information if he thinks it will help him out in some way. But the more he reads about what you want and what you need, the further away he feels from his own wants and needs. Thats not what you want to do.
Lets Face it, When it Comes to Getting a Better Job, the Process is a Sales Event
The product is you. The customer is the business you want to work for. And the process of selling yourself should resemble a sales call, not a celebrity interview. How do you sell something? You start by doing some background work. You study the potential customer base. You try to understand what they need, what worries and confuses them, and what their problems, hopes, and desires are. You become close to your prospects, because you know that when it comes time to sell you are going to have to answer their questions, solve their problems, and convince them that you can help them achieve their dreams. In this case, you have to sell your customer on the idea that you can make its business better. To do that, you need to figure out how you will improve its profits. And to accomplish that, you need to study it. If you want a better job, you have to be willing to sell yourself as a better product.
Dont Send Out Resumes. Send Out Sales Letters Instead

Resumes dont work because they are all about you. Sales letters work because they are all about the customer (the company you want to work for). If getting a better job is your goal, plan accordingly: Target a limited number of potential future employers. Study them. Determine their goals, problems, and challenges. Write to the person youll be working for. Convince him you can help him achieve his objectives. This advice applies to getting outside jobs as well as better jobs within the company youre now working for. You can even use it to convince your current boss to give you a better job than the one you have now. Your sales letter can be a formal letter, a personal note, an interoffice memo, or even an e-mail. The medium you use is a matter of whats appropriate to the relationship. The fundamental nature of the letter should be the same. A good letter: 1. Says something good about the company and the person you want to work for 2. Lets your prospect know that you know his goals, problems, objectives, etc.
3. Makes the claim that you are the person to solve/achieve them. 4. Proves that you are serious about working for this company. 5. Requests a specific action (asks for the sale). If you write the right sales letter, its OK to send a resume along with it.
14 More Things You Can Do to Get a Better Job

Here are 14 more ways to get a better job from your current employer or a new one. 1. Your cover letter should be very personal. It should indicate that you (a) know the company in some detail, (b) like the company, and (c) believe you have something specific and valuable to contribute to it. 2. If you include a resume, make sure it is tailored to the individual company. 3. When talking about yourself, dont use self-serving clichs (such as a passion for customer service) that virtually any job candidate can make. Instead, use facts, incidents, and numbers to reveal your qualities and capabilities. 4. When you are talking or writing about your accomplishments, focus on what you have done recently (say, in the last few years). 5. If you have no relevant experience, dont try to pretend you do by making a job at Burger King sound like rocket science. Here is where you make up for your lack of experience by showing specific knowledge of the company and industry you aim to work for. If youve done your homework well, you will be seen as a blank sheet with great potential (always desirable). 6. Dont summarize your career, experience, or skills. State the facts briefly and clearly once. 7. Dont say what your career objective is. No one cares but you. Your job, as the salesman and the sales product, is to talk about the needs and desires of your prospect, not yourself. 8. When you go for an interview, have a specific objective in mind and work hard to achieve it. If you havent been promised it by the end of the interview, ask for it (nicely). 9. A hiring interview is a sales call. Dont talk or tell. Answer, ask, and listen. 10. Consider showing something a customer survey, industry data, etc. that illustrates the work youve already done and helps make the case that you can contribute to the companys success. The tactic of showing is a time-honored staple of strong sales people. 11. If you interview at a restaurant, dont drink alcohol and/or order something and eat very little of it. 12. In your research, discover dress preferences, if any, of the company youre interviewing for. Dont be a rebel. Conform.
13. Dont try to befriend your prospective employer. Be friendly instead. 14. If you feel you might not get the job you are seeking, suggest that you can do a project for the company on a freelance basis. Perhaps even for free. That way, you can find out if I can do what Ive promised, you can say, without any risk on your part. This works in selling vacuum cleaners. It should work for you. One final word from Fox: If you dont know why the company should hire you, its a good bet the company wont know either.
If You Want That Better Job, Go After it Like You Mean it

If you want to go faster and farther, you should not only be doing good work at your present job but also be actively pursuing a better one. This is a process that should be ongoing. It should begin the day you start working on one job and continue until the day you get accepted at the next. If you put that kind of upward pressure on your career trajectory, its bound to skyrocket. Your better job may well be with another company or in another industry but more often than not, it will be the next best job with your current employer. If you prepare yourself for a better job by working harder and smarter, chances are (ironically) you wont have to go out and get one. Your current employer will be happy to keep you and promote you and hell meet your growing capabilities with increasing compensation. But if you do find yourself unemployed, you will have to go after your next job with the target-marketing approach I described earlier this week treating yourself both as a salesperson and as a sales product. And you must work just as hard as you work doing anything thats worthwhile. That means putting in at least 50 hours a week. If you currently work fewer hours than that well, you are probably in trouble. Heres are some suggestions on how to maximize the hours you work getting a job. 1. Work every day getting contacts, appointments, interviews, and commitments. You might even have fun with this system by assigning each event a point value. For example, a lead would be worth one point, an appointment would be two points, an interview would merit three points, and a commitment would give you four points. A good daily goal to aim for would be five points, made up of any combination of these point/event values. 2. Maintain your goal and task lists. Most of the tasks on your daily to-do list should be aimed at getting a good job. Achieving a daily point goal (see above) would certainly be one of the tasks that would get highlighted. 3. Develop criteria for the job you want. These should include location, company size, the type of work involved, flexibility, etc.
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4. Review newspapers, magazines, online sites, and trade journals but research only prospects that meet your criteria. 5. Narrow down each days possibilities to a handful of genuine opportunities. 6. Research each of these opportunities by reading, visiting the business, examining its products, speaking to current employees, going for informational interviews, etc. 7. Write targeted letters to potential bosses (bypassing their personnel departments). 8. Send thank-you notes to all those who respond to you, even if negatively.
Want to Persuade Someone to Hire You?

Be prepared to answer these. . . According to Sallie Mars, senior vice president of human resources at McCannErickson Worldwide, the seven toughest interview questions (whether youre the interviewer or interviewee) are: 1. What salary are you looking for? (Honesty is important.) 2. What are your greatest strengths? (They should be strengths relevant to the job.) 3. What is your greatest weakness? (It should be a real weakness that has been overcome.) 4. Where do you see yourself in five years? (It should be a realistic goal, 2-3 steps away from the job being sought.) 5. Why do you want to leave your current job? Reasons should be positive, not negative.) 6. What is an example of a time you failed? (The answer should refer to learning from a past mistake.) 7. Do you have any questions? (At least 2 questions that are focused on the company/job show that the prospective employee prepared for the interview.)
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Chapter 8: How to Get What You Want in Your Business or Career

I recently had lunch with Ted Nicholas, the advertising guru and self-made millionaire not very impressive by todays standards. Still, he leads an enviable life. Married to a beautiful, intelligent, woman, he lives in Switzerland and Florida, travels extensively, plays top-level tennis, and works when he wants and as much as he wants. He was in my neck of the woods (southern Florida) for business. We met to catch up. The conversation started small hows the family, nice weather, what about those Yankees and so on but that didnt last long. Ted wanted to know about me. What was I doing? What new projects was I involved in? What new marketing tests had I observed? It occurred to me that this habit was one of Teds success secrets.
A Conversational Trick That I Promised Myself Id Practice More Often

If you are lucky enough to be in the company of a successful businessman, why waste your precious time talking about baseball. . .or worse, yourself? Why not take advantage of the situation and ask a few questions? Heres what will happen if you do: First, you will be surprised at how forthcoming your conversation partner is. As Dale Carnegie pointed out so many years ago, there is nothing that distinguishes the great conversationalist more than curiosity. Second, you will be astonished by how much you learn. People will tell you the most amazing things sometimes even their most valuable secrets if you let them.
Im From New York, So I Dont Ask Questions Very Well

New Yorkers are an interesting lot, a colorful and opinionated people. You can take us anywhere and we have no trouble getting a table in a restaurant or asking for a refund. But dont drop us off in a strange neighborhood. Well be lost forever. For a New Yorker, asking directions . . . in fact asking anything . . . is tantamount to admitting inferiority. So its not easy for me to ask questions, particularly of someone I consider my competitor. But when I realized how much good information Ted was getting from
me, I forced the conversation back to him, his business and his business ideas. Here are a few things I learned: 1. Ted is a big believer in what we call in direct marketing the back end. Most companies, he correctly points out, spend most of their time and money on acquiring customers and then neglect (and disappoint) them thereafter. 2. Smart companies realize that the new customer, properly treated, is a source of income for life. Rather than ignore him, you should astonish him with attention. He provided one good example: he likes to give new mail order information buyers a free, unexpected book along with a short thank you note sometime during the first week after they buy. He tells them he appreciates their business and that he hopes the book is helpful. 3. Ted has found that since he retired, he makes plenty of money, all the money he needs, without working so hard. He recommends selective working picking and choosing the work you do and the people you do it with. I know this sounds like Advice from a Rich Guy, but I believe its profoundly true.
Ted Got All Kinds of Information From Me

I told Ted how all my businesses are doing. I told him about my new projects, even revealed to him my theories about which are going to work very well and why. This is information I shouldnt be telling him, I thought to myself as I talked on. I told him I was looking at the purchase of a list management company in New York . . . I even told him where it is located . . . Hes probably making a counter bid as I write this. I told him about a hush-hush public offering Im marginally involved with, one that could make a lot of money. Yeah, Ted got a lot of good stuff from me. But Im happy to have shared. In the long run we will both profit from the exchange. Ive promised myself to leave my New York smugness in New York and ask more questions especially when Im in the presence of someone I can learn from.
Make Friends in High Places

Now, I am going to open a little door into your future. First, answer this question: Who in your industry would you like to know? Whose trust or confidence would you like to gain? Who could help you succeed (Im talking about someone you know of, not someone you know personally.) Next, think about something this person has done that you admire. It may be a product he has recently developed. It may be the standard of service he sets. It may be an award he has won. Anything you genuinely admire. Now on some very nice, dignified stationery write him a note expressing your feelings. Dont fawn. Be direct and complimentary.
End by saying something like, I know you are a very busy man, but if you ever have a spare half-hour, Id love the chance to get some advice from you on my own career. Insert your business card and post it. Repeat once a week until you run out of names.
Add Big Shots to Your Personal Network

Whether your goal is to start your own business, climb to the top of the one you are employed in or master a valuable skill there is nothing better you can do for yourself than build a Rolodex or e-mail list of people who can help you. You need all kinds of people technical and creative, from clerks to CEOs and you need them to like you well enough to answer the phone when you call. Heres a great suggestion from a publisher whose career has been (to use a useful clich) meteoric. To make contact with industry experts, she reads the trade journals and when she sees a story bylined by someone shed like to have in her network, she writes him a personal note complimenting him on the article. Its amazing how often youll get a reply, she notes. And what better way is there to start a relationship than by complimenting an expert on his industry knowledge. He likes you because you have admired him and he thinks youre smart because you were smart enough to compliment him. (Im paraphrasing.) In my experience, the deepest friendships often begin in contention, but you dont have to squabble with your target expert to win his respect. Flattery works. So does asking provocative questions. This is really a clever tactic. I used it unwittingly during the time I was retired and writing fiction. Id write authors of short stories I admired. Well-known authors like John Updike and Charles Baxter. And the response rate was amazingly good.
Get Yourself a Free Mentor

As your business (or your career) develops, you will face problems and opportunities you havent met before. In such cases, it helps to have the advice of someone whos been there before. You might consider hiring a consultant but my experience with professional consultants has not been good. (A consultants primary job is to sell you, not teach you.) If you cant rely on the help you get from expensive professionals, what can you do? How about get better-quality advice for free? Heres how to do it: Take a look around your industry. Find successful businesspeople who retired two to five years ago. (During their first two years of retirement, they are still enjoying their extended vacation and havent yet realized what a drag it is to play golf all day. After five years, they may be a little too out of touch.) Make a list of four or five such individuals and then write each one a nice letter telling him youve heard about how good he is and asking for his advice.
Dont offer to compensate him. Simply ask for a short interview. Take him to lunch and ask questions. If your personalities click, youll have a permanent mentor. Dont abuse the relationship. Remember that in most cases the compensation retired executives are looking for is psychological, not financial. Continue to let your mentor know how helpful he has been. Make small but meaningful gestures of gratitude. If and when you have your mentor working for you more than an hour or two a month, it will be time to think about cutting him in. Most people in your mentors situation would be happy to take a percentage. Dont overcompensate, but be fair. His contributions will be greatest in the beginning and then taper off mostly because youll have learned from him. Something between 2% and 10% seems right to me.
Promise to Follow Through on Your Career Goals

Of all the qualities that contribute to an accomplished life, none is more important than persistence. Intelligence, knowledge, connections, luck they are all important ingredients in the stew of success, but persistence is the stock. Persistence is a big virtue comprising many large and small ones, including endurance, tenacity, perseverance, and follow-through. Follow-through means completing the action you promised. It means making the phone call, sending the package, or replying to the e-mail. It is usually a relatively small action that comes after a larger one. You dream and scheme to get an interview with a prospective employer. Finally, it is done. You have the meeting and he tells you he is impressed with you and would like to check your credentials. You tell him youll send them to him. You dont. Thats the interesting thing about this little virtue. It doesnt require a lot from you, and it usually follows a great effort. But its so often not done. At an American Writers & Artists Institute seminar, the publisher of a direct-mail newsletter business invited the participants to contact her should they want a shot at writing a professional package. Eight students gave her their names. Each of the eight had completed a $500 basic program in copywriting and had begun a much more expensive graduate training program that required them to do a lot of work and travel long distances to attend seminars. All this was done in the hopes of getting hired to write copy. Here was their chance. All they had to do was follow up and theyd be on their way. Their long-held dreams would become reality. Heres what happened, according to the publisher: They had all expressed a particular interest in health and were VERY eager to get started. Since they were new to writing, I invited them to send me samples of
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their course work or anything they had written. When they left, I worried that I had just created a new full-time job for myself, responding to these 8 or so people. I expected a rush of e-mails and packages with everything they had ever written, including grocery lists and letters to their mothers. Only one person has ever contacted me. Interesting. Only one in eight. The rest had come so far and then on the verge of success faded. How can you explain such behavior? Laziness? Fear? However you think of it, what didnt happen was something very simple: follow-up. Make yourself this promise: that you will promptly follow up on everything you promise and especially everything that will help your wealth-building and success-generating goals.
The Best Way to Surpass Your Peers and Rise to the Top of Any Business
Whats the best way to surpass your peers and out do your competitors? Work harder than they do. If that sounds daunting, consider this: Most people dont work very hard. Some people spend their time doing as little as they possibly can. Most do stay busy, but they are not always very productive. They write long memos, discuss issues that dont need much discussion, contest insignificant points, and attend to the tedium. But only a very few apply themselves long and hard to the critical business challenges. According to Saul Gellerman, an expert on the subject, people at work form a bell-shaped curve when it comes to diligence and follow-through. At the bottom are the loafers and goof-offs. In the middle is the silent majority that does just enough to get by. At the top are the relative few who are motivated to achieve. When you understand the dynamics of any such group, you understand that a modest amount of hard work will put you beyond both the terminally slothful and the lump-along middle crowd. Just by being modestly ambitious, you will rise to the top third of almost any organization. But getting up the last few rungs of that ladder will be tough, because the few you are competing against are competing hard. Chances are they are as smart and talented as you, with the same (or more) basic resources. They may even have better contacts. But there is one thing they dont have more of and that is time. If you can use your time more effectively than they use theirs, you will move ahead of them. Hard workers eventually succeed even against those who have advantages. You can do better than someone who is smarter, richer, and luckier than you so long as you are willing to work harder than he does. As a friend said to me the other night, Life isnt fair. When it comes to money, beauty, intelligence, and talent, the distribution is uneven and arbitrary. But one
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thing we all have an equal amount of is time. We each have 24 hours a day. Even the length of life you get is not fair, but the 24 hours you have each day is the same for everyone and what you do with those hours will determine your success and happiness. ETR gives you the chance each morning to plan your day and think about a new way you can use your hours better. People who rise to the top work long hours, but not excessively long. They are at their desks early at least an hour before others and they stay later (though it may be only a half-hour later). But what they do best is work harder when they work. They do the necessary things first, even if they are difficult. They learn what they need to know and dont waste business time learning unimportant stuff. They are willing to harass and cajole, tease and criticize, flatter and pout to get the job done. They spend a few minutes every morning organizing their days and a little while every Monday morning planning their week. They select their tasks based on what will achieve their goals, not on what happens to end up in their in boxes. They manage their jobs; they dont let their jobs manage them. Hard work is a lot of, well, hard work. But if you break every job down into little, easy-to-handle pieces as we do with ETR you can accomplish an extraordinary amount. And once you get into the habit of working harder and smarter than the people you compete with, your success is guaranteed.
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Chapter 9: The Most Important Skill You Need For Success

Id like to talk about THE most valuable skill you can have and share with you some of the secrets Ive learned over the years that can help you become very good at it, very quickly. On the road to wealth, developing a financially valuable skill is the most important step. Its the foundation upon which every other step is based. What is the worlds most valuable skill? Simple: the ability to sell. Not just products and services but ideas, concepts, and beliefs. You know as well as I do, in any organization, power moves inexorably to those who are persuasive. This is true for every business in every country in the world. What matters is that you have a way to convince people (your boss, colleagues, customers, investors, etc.) that your ideas (and your work) are worthwhile. Ive identified a few fundamental secrets of selling over the years a few tricks of the trade. And thats exactly what Im going to share with you right now the basics behind every great piece of salesmanship. I call them THE 3 FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF SELLING and they are ... #1. People dont like the idea of being sold. #2. People buy things for emotional, not rational, reasons. #3. Once sold, people need to satisfy their emotional decisions with logic.
Rule #1: People Dont Like to Be Sold

On the face of it, this doesnt make sense. Every year, trillions of dollars worth of goods and services are bought and sold ... billions through the mail alone. Think about your friends. Many of them, no doubt, love to shop. People like to buy things. But they dont like to be sold. Remember what I said earlier about the bully personality? He may sell you once but never again. So whether youre writing a sales letter or trying to convince your friend to go to a concert, dont apply pressure. Offer to give something. Dont force. Tempt. Lets say you want to get your friend to buy a piece of chocolate cake. You wouldnt start off by listing 10 reasons why cake is good for him, would you? Of course not.
In real life, if you really wanted to get a friend to buy a piece of cake, youd probably start by describing how great the cake smells, how gooey it is, how thick the icing is, and how it will just melt in his mouth... In other words, youd create a verbal picture that teases his desires his hunger, his craving for chocolate. Youd tempt him by appealing to his emotions. You would not bore him with reasons or bully him with force. Understand this first principle and youll have people eating out of your hands.
Rule #2 Hit Em Where It Hurts: People Buy Things for Emotional, Not Rational, Reasons
If people acted rationally, you couldnt sell chocolate cake. Theres no logical reason to eat it. Its not nutritious. It makes you fat. It screws up your metabolism. And its expensive. So why is chocolate cake a multi-million-dollar industry? Because it makes you feel good! To be persuasive, you have to appeal to your prospects feelings and desires. Here are seven very important ones: Fear, Greed, Vanity, Lust, Pride, Envy, and Laziness.
Rule #3: Once the Prospect is Emotionally Sold, He Needs to Justify His Irrational Decision With Rational Reasons
Think about TV commercials for cars. How do they work? First, you see a stirring image of the car itself beautiful, stylish, new. The background says something too: Theres a mountainous landscape for the prospect who wants to see himself as rugged. A five-star hotel for the prospect who wants the car to enhance his status. A beautiful woman for well, you get the idea. Next, you see an interior shot to show how luxurious your life will be with this car. You get to listen to the state-of-the-art sound system. (The type of music depends on the feeling required.) Then, theres a shot of the car driving by the ocean. Put it all together and you have an effective 20-second movie thats designed entirely to appeal to emotion. But car commercials dont stop there. They usually give you numerous bits and pieces of information the size of the engine, statistics on fuel economy, speed, weight, interior space, rankings in national surveys and customer satisfaction reports, and so on. All this data isnt meant to sell the car. Its to make the prospect feel good about the decision hes already made. And in the final analysis, this is almost as important as the emotional appeal. Though the information doesnt sell the car, it does justify the sale. These secrets are, of course, only the beginning. But the great thing about the secrets of selling is that once you understand how they work, you can use them in every aspect of your life: to land a better job to get a promotion to sell more
of your companys products even to convince your friends to follow your advice for your next vacation. Make no mistake about it; mastering the basics of selling can really give you an edge. And theres no better program to help you do this than the sales writing program from American Writers & Artists Institute (AWAI). For more information on this program go to www.thewriterslife.com or call AWAI at 561-278-5557.
The Persuasive Power of Personalization

A fundamental principle of selling is that customers will buy more if they feel they know you. Understand that and you will be a much more powerful businessperson. The principle is true for all selling ... from telemarketing to direct mail to retail to door-to-door. And it makes sense. When you are buying from a new vendor, you cant always be sure you are getting the best product at the best price. You have to scrutinize the deal, ask for backup and substantiation, and conduct a minor investigation. Once you have made an initial purchase and are satisfied with the transaction, the next one is easier. Eventually, the vendor becomes trusted almost a friend. As a businessperson, you should cultivate this trust in your customers. The sooner you can achieve it, the better your business will do. The simplest and best way to establish trust is to do what you say you will do. Over and over again. But this takes time. To accelerate the process, marketers often use tricks and techniques to create a feeling of intimacy and knowledge where none exists.
A Shortcut to Trust
One of those techniques is personalization. If you can make your customer feel special, noticed, and important, he will be open to your suggestions. Dale Carnegie says the prettiest sound in any language is the sound of your own name. Professional salesmen and politicians know this.
What I Learned From a Master of Personalization

When I think of the selling power of personalization, I remember an old friend of mine, a gregarious Irishman and the best bartender Ive ever known. He had an amazing ability to remember names but he did more than that. He also remembered one significant fact about each person he met. Then he put these two bits of information to superb use. Ive never met a betterliked person or anyone who could rack up more tips. When you walked into a bar where he was working, youd be greeted by name with his thunderous, jubilant voice making you feel important and cared about in a moments time. He would shout something about you for me it was MMF! El professoro! because I was a part-time college teacher at the time. For my brother, a student of
Latin at Cornell, it was AF! Amo, Amas, Amat, Amantis, Amatis, Amant! My friend seldom varied his greeting originality wasnt one of his virtues but he never failed to warm your heart and loosen your purse strings. And it worked despite the fact that he did it not only with my brother and me but also with every other person who walked into the bar. The 2 most important secrets of making personalization work This taught me something about how personalization works. The key is not that you pretend you dont have other personal relationships. Its that you make each relationship (1) enthusiastic and (2) individual. So, when you meet someone, memorize his name and one interesting (hopefully positive) thing about him. Then, the next time you see him, greet him jubilantly and ask a question or make a comment related to that one thing. Youll be amazed at the effect. This is a great tool for improving all your relationships, personal as well as business. And it will also improve your mood. Faking enthusiasm has a surprising tendency to create it.
Personalization When You Cant Speak Face-to-face

Lois Geller, writing in Target Marketing magazine, has three good suggestions for making your direct mail and Internet copy more personal. 1. Say thanks. Every time you take an order, thank your customer. The more personal the thank-you, the better. 2. Sound like a person. Make your copy sound as if it comes from a real person. When feasible, show a photo of the person making the statements. 3. Be straightforward. If you get too clever with your personalization, it will seem like a gimmick. Remember that the point of personalization is to create trust through intimacy. Showing how clever you are doesnt cut it.
Group Persuasion Techniques

Sooner or later, you will have to sell something perhaps an idea, a business, or a product in front of a group of people. If you are not prepared, you may have a difficult time of it. Mastering a few fundamental skills of group selling will ensure your success. Some of the ideas below come from a book called The Sales Bible by Jeffrey Gitomer (www.salesman@gitomer.com).
Knowledge and Faith The Foundation of Persuasion

The first and most important rule of group selling is to sell only what you know well. This is a tough rule to follow, especially if you like to wing it. You can quiet the crowd with enthusiasm, but you wont convince them.
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I learned this lesson vividly years ago. When teaching English literature in Africa, I would sometimes come to class unprepared and try to get by with a spirited half-assed presentation. I figured my students had two disadvantages: They knew nothing about English literature, and they didnt speak fluent English. I should have been able to snow them, but I couldnt. Somehow, they knew what I was doing. So the first rule of group selling is to talk about nothing except things you have a comfortable knowledge of. If you do that, you will never do badly. If you want to do better than OK, however, you might consider the following techniques used by professional speakers. Ask questions early. Get an idea of whom you are speaking to. Find out who they are, what they want from your speech, how much they know, and so on. This technique gives you three advantages: By letting them talk about themselves, you get their attention; by getting their thoughts out there first, you can account for them in your comments; and, finally, by allowing people to express their ideas, theyll feel part of the solution your solution when it comes. Talk only about what you know and ask for feedback before you make any pronouncements. If you follow these two golden rules of public speaking, youll always do fine. Here are a few more rules for you: 1. Make your first sentence engaging and compelling. Your first sentence is like a headline. It needs to be carefully created. Use the extra time you get by listening to your audience talk about their lives and their ideas to formulate the precise words that capture your thoughts, address those of the group, and advance your agenda. 2. Make your last sentence equally strong. You dont want to dilute the effectiveness of your argument by running on too long or finishing with a secondary remark. Be sensitive to your audiences reaction to what you are saying. If you do, you will have their attention and at some point in your presentation whether it is a formal one that lasts an hour or an impromptu argument that runs 30 seconds you will recognize that you have hit your mark. The group will be moved to your point of view. When you reach this juncture, end quickly and strong with a single, powerful sentence. 3. Whenever possible, solicit testimonials. If someone in your audience can testify to what you are saying, by all means ask him to do so. For longer, more formal presentations you should also do the following: Anticipate questions and answer them in your presentation. Tell your audience beforehand that you will answer questions at the end.
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Illustrate what you mean with little stories anecdotes the audience can picture. Toward the end of your presentation, create a sense of urgency, a reason to act now rather than later. It needs to be real, not contrived. Spend some time thinking about it. If you are naturally funny, be yourself. But dont try for laughter. Practice your presentation. If you dont, two bad things will happen: One, you will not be able to finish the material you have assembled. Two, your audience will be thankful when you run out of your allotted time. Remember, these skills apply to group selling situations of all sizes, including business meetings/dinners/etc. If your motive is to sell, use these techniques and succeed.
How to Persuade Someone to Pay a High Price For Your Product

Ive gotten involved with a local Jiu Jitsu academy thats run by several young people, none of whom has much business experience. Teaching martial arts is probably among the 10 worst businesses you can be in. Every year, thousands of new academies open up all over America. Within six months, over 90 percent of them are gone. Those that survive just scrape by, affording their owners a modest income not much more than theyd get by working for someone else. There are exceptions: a few chains that operate like McDonalds, using low-cost employees and catering to a discount market (tots and young children). And then there is our academy. Or so we hope. Our strategy and so far its working is to go upmarket. We are selling private lessons to affluent adults. The per-hour charge for learning from us is more than twice that of other Jiu Jitsu academies. We get away with it by offering more than twice as much as they do. We promote our extras by following some well-established principles of upscale marketing. Many of these have been explained lucidly by a colleague of mine, copywriter Robert Bly (www.bly.com): 1. Make an apples-to-oranges comparison. Dont compare us to a group class in a karate studio. Compare us to an hour-long, personalized tutorial on computer programming. 2. Decrease the price by adding valued component parts. The lesson is $60 ... but a supervised training period is only $15. By taking one of each, you pay only $37.50 per session. 3. Identify the unique, invaluable aspect of your product. Our program was specifically designed by ... to ensure the fastest possible ... No other program ...
4. Make the high price itself a benefit. Our service is not for gym rats. You will find only quality people here: doctors, lawyers, etc. 5. Shame them into acceptance. If you cannot afford our fees, I can recommend several group-lesson programs that fit into the price range you are looking for. Feel free to adapt any one of these techniques to your next sales presentation.
The Is it This? Is it That? Closing Technique

Heres another strategy that can help improve your sales skills. You are trying to persuade someone of something. He is resistant. You suspect it is because he has misgivings he prefers not to talk about. You dont want to upset or offend him, but you do want to close the deal. What do you do? According to a young colleague of mine whos recently become a real-estate broker, you should ignore your misgivings and hit the prospect with is its? You want to sell the house, dont you? Well, yes. And you plan to list it with someone, right? Well, I suppose so. You appear to be hesitant. Is it because Im a woman? Oh, no. Of course not? Is it because Im too young? No. Is it because Im Italian? And so on, until there are no more is its? However, you would not want to offer an is it? that really could be it. For example, you wouldnt want to say, Is it because Ive never sold a house of this size before and I couldnt possibly know anybody rich enough to buy it? Ask a question like that, and you might be stumped by a Yes, thats exactly it. That qualification stated, the is it? technique makes a good deal of sense when you are dealing with irrational objections.
When Planning a Meeting, Plan to Persuade

Every time you have a business meeting and this applies equally to informal lunch meetings and conferences in the boardroom you have a chance to advance your business and moneymaking goals. Like it or not, every business meeting you have and even every social meeting with a business colleague is a forced performance. You are on stage. The person or people you are meeting with are the audience.
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What you do how you act, what you say, your gestures, and the tone of voice you choose is making an impression. It can be (a) good, (b) bad, or (c) indifferent. It might improve (though only slightly) your image, tarnish it, or reinforce an existing prejudice. You cant ignore this fact, so why not take advantage of it by committing yourself to making each meeting a positive one? Why not promise yourself that at the end of the meeting you will either have improved someones impression of you or secured for yourself and your company some business advantage? Make sense? Then heres what you should do: 1. Spend a few minutes thinking about what you want to get from the meeting. Is there a particular objective you can attain? If not, resolve to improve the relationship or simply improve your image as a smart and capable person. 2. Give yourself a reasonable goal. If you want to close a deal but realize it cant be done at this particular meeting, settle for something else such as an agreement on one part of the deal if and when it comes to fruition. 3. If your goal is to improve the other persons impression of you and you know he thinks you are a scoundrel, dont press too hard. Be happy with showing him that you are perhaps not all that bad. You want your goal to be achievable, of course, because if its not youre going to push too hard and damage a potentially good relationship. 4. To accomplish any objective specific or general you need to figure out how it is going to benefit the person (s) you will be meeting with. Formulate an if ... then approach. If the person you are speaking to agrees to help you with your objective, then he will enjoy certain positive results. (If you cant figure out beforehand what such positive results would be, your objective may be unreasonable.) 5. Once you have a fair and sensible if ... then proposition, present it subtly. In most cases, you wont want to put it as directly as If you do this for me, Ill do this for you because it will make the other person feel manipulated. That said, make your point and keep making it until youve achieved your goal. If you make this a habit, youll be amazed at how much youll get done and how powerful youll feel.
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Chapter 10: How to Be a Successful Negotiator

Like selling, negotiating involves persuading someone that a particular deal which you know is in your interest is also very much in their interest. The difference is that the terms of the deal are not decided by you in advance but must be mutually determined. Three elements are at play in a negotiation, according to James Sebenius (writing in the Harvard Business Review) who has done thousands and ought to know: 1. Issues are on the table for explicit agreement. 2. Positions are one partys stands on the issues. 3. Interests are underlying concerns that would be affected by the resolution. Despite the clear advantages of reconciling deeper interests, people have a builtin bias toward focusing on their own positions instead. This hardwired assumption that our interests are incompatible implies a zero-sum pie in which my gain is your loss. Research in psychology supports the mythical fixed-pie view as the norm. In a survey of 5,000 subjects in 32 studies on negotiating, mostly carried out with monetary stakes, participants failed to realize compatible issues fully half the time. A very useful technique for solving problems and negotiating differences is one that was coined years ago by Roger Fisher, Bill Ury, and Bruce Patton in their book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. The technique is BATNA an acronym for best alternative to a negotiated agreement. With BATNA, before you engage in a negotiation, you face the fact that you might not reach an agreement at all. If you dont, you dont want to be stumped. So you figure out, beforehand, what the best alternative to a negotiated agreement would be. It might, for example, involve approaching another buyer, enduring a stalemate, going to court, etc. The idea is that if you have a BATNA, it will allow you to negotiate strongly without feeling anxious if things arent moving forward well. According to James Sebenius, heres what you need to do to succeed at negotiating: First, focus on the full set of interests of all parties, rather than fixating on price and positions. Look beyond common ground to unearth value-creating differences.
Assess and shape BATNAs. Take steps to avoid role biases and partisan perceptions. The great negotiators are those who take a broader approach to setting up and solving the right problem. With a keen sense of the potential value to be created as their guiding beacon, these negotiators are game-changing entrepreneurs. They envision the most promising architecture and take action to bring it into being.
Thinking Out of the Box Can Help the Negotiation Process

Much has been made of the importance of thinking outside the box. To solve difficult problems, it is said, you need the ability to do this. I agree. Completely. Because Ive seen supposedly insurmountable problems solved by this kind of intelligent thinking many times. Apparently, the phrase thinking out of the box originated with an intelligence test called the Nine-Dot Box. Youve probably seen it. Imagine three rows of three dots, each equally spaced some distance apart on a plain piece of paper. The challenge is to connect the dots by drawing a minimum number of lines. The only rules are that you must draw a line through every dot once and only once, all lines must be straight (no curves), and your pen/pencil cannot leave the paper. If youve ever seen this done as a bar trick, you know that most people cannot figure out how to do it with fewer than five lines. Yet, its quite easy to do it with four. And its even possible to do it with fewer than four. The trick to thinking outside the box is to ask yourself if you are making any unfounded assumptions about the problem. More specifically, ask yourself if you are limiting the possible solutions of the problem by some imagined and unspoken restrictions that dont exist. If you discover that you are, all you have to do is think beyond them and an answer will usually come quickly. In the case of the Nine-Dot Box, the hidden assumption is that there is an imaginary boundary surrounding and boxing in the perimeter dots. But there is no rule that says your line cannot extend beyond that perimeter. In fact, that boundary exists only in your mind. By thinking outside the box, you can connect all the dots with four lines. In fact, you can connect them all with a single line if you realize that there is no rule against rolling the paper into a cylinder and then torquing it so that the dots are at an angle to one other and all can be connected by one continuous straight line around the cylinder. Ive used outside-the-box thinking to resolve situations such as a stalemate between two friends and business partners. I wont bother with the details, but the crux of the matter is that they were deadlocked on a contract that was working well for one but not the other. The former wanted the contract honored and was intransigent. The latter felt he was getting screwed and was prepared to litigate.
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The unspoken assumption was that the contract itself was the basis of the relationship. I knew it was not. The basis was the deal itself: One party wanted something the other could provide and was willing to pay for it but not on the contracted terms. I was able to persuade them both that fighting over the contract would get them nowhere. Starting from ground zero, they were able to write a new contract that made both of them happy without either of them feeling cheated. Next time you run into a difficult problem, think about the hidden assumptions that might restrict the way you approach a solution and ignore them. Youll be surprised by how easily and often this works. Before long, youll be known as a creative problem solver.
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Chapter 11: No More Excuses

At any given time, I am mentoring a dozen or more individuals. Its not something I seek to do. It seems to be the natural result of (a) knowing a lot of ambitious people and (b) being happy to offer advice whenever asked. Most of the time, most of my protgs make good progress. But sooner or later, everyone gets stuck. In the past few days, Ive met with three people whose forward motion (in terms of Life Goals) has been stalled or stopped entirely. So Ive been asking a lot of questions. And there does seem to be a common problem with all three people. They are all making excuses. There is an old saying: He who is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else. That phrase echoed in my mind as I consulted with my protgs. MMF: So why dont you think you have made any progress? PROTG: Well, theres such and such personal problem. And theres such and such business difficulty. And blah, blah, blah. MMF: That does sound challenging. Are you following your goals and keeping to your daily task sheets? PROTG: Well, thats not going too well either. MMF: How so? PROTG: Well, I just dont think it works for me. For me, I need blah, blah, blah. MMF: Why dont you ignore that and start the program from scratch? Give it another go? PROTG: Well, you have to understand. First, there is blah, blah, blah. Then, there is yackety, yackety. Then, there is such and such and so and so. Are you making the progress you want? Moving forward at the pace you set for yourself? If not, do this today: 1. Take out a sheet of paper and write down your current Life Goals. You should have four of them. 2. Underneath or next to each one, list the three main reasons you have for not accomplishing it. 3. Take a long hard look at those reasons. Then kiss them goodbye. 4. Promise yourself you will never use them as excuses again.
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That means you will never mention them to your boss, your co-workers, your spouse, or your confessor. You wont talk about them when you are scared, tired, weary, or drunk. You wont ever again give them a place in your speech. Nor will you provide them a berth in your thinking. If you are going to fail, do so properly without excuses. If you are going to succeed, you have to leave those excuses behind you. OK, the excuses are gone. Ive shown you the steps to take. Now its up to you ... Follow this program and youll get everything you need to succeed in life.
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How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Chapter 1 Start With a Master Plan

Start Today by Selecting Your Life Goals. The Rest is Easy

Turn Your 4 Life Goals into Realistic Objectives

A Near-Perfect Morning Routine

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Step 1: Getting Your Inputs (5-10 Minutes)

Step 2: Sorting and Ordering (5-15 Minutes)

Step 3: Giving Your Day a Jumpstart (30-60 Minutes)

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Chapter 2: Make Your Master Plan Effective

Start, Today, By Buying a Pack of 3-by-5 Index Cards

Efficiency Tip No. 2: Dont Let E-Mail Ruin Your Schedule

Efficiency Tip No. 3: Group Like-Tasks Together

Efficiency Tip No. 5: Use a Pencil First Then Ink

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Chapter 3: Make Every Day More Productive

To Change Your Life, Youve Got to Stick With My Basic Program

How Productive Do You Need to Be to Succeed?

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Get Honest With Yourself

Then Face the Truth

Is it Really Necessary to be THAT Organized?

My Success Program Takes Less Than an Hour a Day

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Chapter 4: How Long Will it Take to Do What You Want?

Anything Worth Doing Takes Time

Another Way to Speed Up the Process

How to Practice Everything Perfectly

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

How to Tell if You Dont Have What it Takes

How You Dream Determines How You Do

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Chapter 6: How to Succeed With People

The 3 Golden Rules of Listening

Make 3 People Smile

The Best Opening Technique is Very Simple

Try it Out Today. Three Times. And See What Happens

Actual Proof From Someone Who Tried it

Beware of E-mail and Return Buttons

Chapter 7: How to Get the Job You Want

How to Get a New and Better Job

Dont Send Out Resumes. Send Out Sales Letters Instead

14 More Things You Can Do to Get a Better Job

If You Want That Better Job, Go After it Like You Mean it

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Want to Persuade Someone to Hire You?

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

Chapter 8: How to Get What You Want in Your Business or Career

A Conversational Trick That I Promised Myself Id Practice More Often

Im From New York, So I Dont Ask Questions Very Well

Ted Got All Kinds of Information From Me

Make Friends in High Places

Add Big Shots to Your Personal Network

Get Yourself a Free Mentor

Promise to Follow Through on Your Career Goals

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life

How to Get What You Need to Succeed in Life