Exclusive Interview: Brian Tracy Shares His Business Secrets

For the past three decades, Tracy’s insatiable thirst for knowledge has propelled him to become an authority in various disciplines, ranging from economics and history to business, philosophy, and psychology. With a staggering collection of over 70 published books, many of which have been translated into numerous languages, he reigns as a top-selling author. Not stopping at the written word, Tracy has also crafted over 300 audio and video learning programs, including the iconic and globally acclaimed “Psychology of Achievement,” which has mesmerized audiences in over 28 languages.

Prepare to embark on a riveting exploration of the life and work of Brian Tracy with this exclusive interview, where we unveil the secrets behind his extraordinary success and unravel the profound impact he has made on individuals from all walks of life. Get ready to be inspired, enlightened, and motivated as we delve into the world of a true visionary and masterful communicator.

Today I would love to interview you and ask you what is the secret of the self-made millionaire.

Is there a secret? Or maybe none at all? I’ve lived in your country, Thailand, and in fact, I was just talking to one of my friends from there yesterday and I’ve done seminars for many thousands of people in Thailand. I started off the same way, I also wanted to be financially successful. As it happened I did not graduate from high school, I left high school and I worked as a laborer washing dishes in the back of a small hotel. And I remember reading the stories of self-made people and I am amazed at how many of them also started off washing dishes. Then my next job was in gardening, cutting grass, and I also worked as a laborer I find that many self-made millionaires started off the same way. So we say, it doesn’t matter where you are coming from, all that matters is where you are going. And what we’ve discovered is that when I started studying this subject maybe 30 years ago, there were about 5 million millionaires in the world. Today, there are more than 30 million millionaires. There were only one or two billionaires, and now today there are about 600 billionaires and to become a billionaire it’s 1,000 times a millionaire.

So how do you become a millionaire? The most amazing discovery for me was that the turning point is when you decide to be a millionaire, you make the decision, and I was very surprised when I began to study it. Today, the richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, and he was working as a Salesman in New York and he and his wife decided they would move to Seattle and start a new business. They did not know what the business would be, but they had some ideas. The idea was how can we serve other people in some way that they want. And so, they drove across the United States in their car, and Jeff sat with his laptop computer while his wife drove the car. They are now divorced and his wife received a settlement of almost 40 billion dollars. Anyway, they started with nothing and they said, what do people need? This is the most important thing of all, what is it that people need and want and are willing to pay for?

They came up with the idea that people are busy and they want to read books but they’re too busy to go to a bookstore. What they would do is they would make an agreement with publishers and they would say, we will sell books online, then send the orders to you, and then you will send the books to the customers. So then they started working out of their garage in Seattle. The primary idea is how can we serve people with things that they want. They became better and better and Jeff Bezos is famous for being obsessed. He’s obsessed with serving customers at low cost, so customers could get books at 30% off and delivered to their homes within seven days. That was the starting point, and then they kept looking at how they could do it faster and better. Then they realized if they wanted to do it faster they would have to take the services and do them all out of their garage and then eventually out of their warehouse and so on. I said to myself, I am going to achieve a net worth of one million dollars or more, and the number one reason why people do not become millionaires is because they never decide to. They think about it, and they wish, and hope, and pray, and they look for miracles and nothing happens. So once you have decided you want to be a millionaire, the question you need to ask is “How?” How do you become a millionaire? Well, the answer is, especially in America, what you do is you serve people in some way.

You serve other people with products or services that they want or need and they’re willing to pay you for it.

That’s when you make a profit and you keep part of it and do it again and again so that you become better at serving other people and increasing your value. Then you become wealthier and wealthier. Today, the richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, and he was working as a Salesman in New York and he and his wife decided they would move to Seattle and start a new business. They did not know what the business would be, but they had some ideas. The idea was how can we serve other people in some way that they want. And so, they drove across the United States in their car, and Jeff sat with his laptop computer while his wife drove the car. They are now divorced and his wife received a settlement of almost 40 billion dollars. Anyway, they started with nothing and they said, what do people need? This is the most important thing of all, what is it that people need and want and are willing to pay for? They came up with the idea that people are busy and they want to read books but they’re too busy to go to a bookstore. What they would do is they would make an agreement with publishers and they would say, we will sell books online, then send the orders to you, and then you will send the books to the customers. So then they started working out of their garage in Seattle.

The primary idea is how can we serve people with things that they want. They became better and better and Jeff Bezos is famous for being obsessed. He’s obsessed with serving customers at low cost, so customers could get books at 30% off and delivered to their homes within seven days. That was the starting point, and then they kept looking at how they could do it faster and better. Then they realized if they wanted to do it faster they would have to take the services and do them all out of their garage and then eventually out So we say, it doesn’t matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going, and if you decide to become a millionaire. Then what we’ve discovered is that when I started studying this subject maybe 30 years ago, there were about 5 million millionaires in the world. Today, there are more than 30 million millionaires. There were only one, or two billionaires. And today there are about 600 billionaires and it’s 1,000 times a millionaire. So how do you become a millionaire? The most amazing discovery for me was that the turning point is when you decide to be a millionaire, you make the decision, and I was very surprised when I began to study it. I said to myself, I am going to achieve a net worth of one million dollars or more, and the number one reason why people do not become millionaires is because they never decide to. They think about it, and they wish, and hope, and pray, and they look for miracles and nothing happens.

So once you have decided you want to be a millionaire, the question you need to ask is “How?”

How do you become a millionaire? Well, the answer is, especially in America, what you do is you serve people in some way. You serve other people with products or services that they want or need and they’re willing to pay you for it. That’s when you make a profit and you keep part of it and do it again and again so that you become better at serving other people and increasing your value. Then you become wealthier and wealthier. Today, the richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, and he was working as a Salesman in New York and he and his wife decided they would move to Seattle and start a new business. They did not know what the business would be, but they had some ideas. The idea was how can we serve other people in some way that they want. And so, they drove across the United States in their car, and Jeff sat with his laptop computer while his wife drove the car. They are now divorced and his wife received a settlement of almost 40 billion dollars. Anyway, they started with nothing and they said, what do people need?

This is the most important thing of all, what is it that people need and want and are willing to pay for? They came up with the idea that people are busy and they want to read books but they’re too busy to go to a bookstore. What they would do is they would make an agreement with publishers and they would say, we will sell books online, then send the orders to you, and then you will send the books to the customers. So then they started working out of their garage in Seattle. The primary idea is how can we serve people with things that they want. They became better and better and Jeff Bezos is famous for being obsessed.

He’s obsessed with serving customers at low cost, so customers could get books at 30% off and delivered to their homes within seven days. That was the starting point, and then they kept looking at how they could do it faster and better. Then they realized if they wanted to do it faster they would have to take the services and do them all out of their garage and then eventually out of their warehouse and so on. Then someone came along and said, “Can you sell my product with the same systems that you’re using?” And they hadn’t thought about that. Today they sell 30 million different products from other people that are not books, by driving forward and looking for ways to serve people. And what people want is to be served faster and cheaper. So it’s very simple, how can you serve people faster and cheaper to give them something that they want and need and are willing to pay for? And that’s what made him the richest man in the history of the world. What do you do? Well, many people think that the key to being successful is to find some trick or some gimmick, but you’ll find that it’s amazing how many millionaires started off at home. They started off in their garage and they called them kitchen table millionaires. They started sitting at the kitchen table saying how can we start a business.

Not long ago, I had a client they were selling business services from company to company, and the owner of the company decided to shut down the company because it was not profitable. There were four salesmen and they all came over to this man’s house and they said, “Well what do we do now?” They know how to sell services and what they do is they help people find staff for their business. And so, they would go from company to company, and they’d say, do you need staff members? And if you do, we can find it for you and we will take a commission. So, the four of them sat at the kitchen table and they said, what do we do now? We are unemployed and we have almost no money and they said, well, we can do this ourselves and make it profitable, and grow the business. Then they began working together at this kitchen table.

When I worked with him, he had his own private jet and his company was worth four billion dollars, and they went on and grew and grew. Today, it is one of the biggest and most profitable companies in America, but it started off with four salespeople and the kitchen table. So, I asked him, I said, “How do you think about yourself in terms of your work?” He said, “I think of myself as the chief sales officer, what I do is I sell our services, I may be the president of the company because I started at the beginning, but I’m in charge of sales and everybody in my company thinks of themselves as a salesperson.” And so people say, well, I don’t like sales, the reason you don’t like sales is because you don’t know how to do it. Therefore you are nervous about it, you’re afraid of it, you avoid it, you are afraid of rejection. So the key to success is to become excellent at what you have to do to be successful, and the starting point in business is you have to sell something to somebody. And selling is a skill, I started off and I was working on a farm, I was digging ditches, I was working with nothing. Then I got into sales and I was terrible at it, I was very afraid of rejection.

Then I had a turning point in my life where I learned that sales is a skill and you can learn this skill. Similar to skills like riding a bicycle, driving a car, or typing with a keyboard, it’s a learnable skill. I’ve found that every skill is learnable. Therefore you say what skills do I have to learn in order to serve customers at a better level, wonderfully enough, you can learn the skill, and the more you practice it, the better you become, and the easier it becomes, and the more comfortable you are, the more money you earn, and the more customers you attract. And so you get onto an upward spiral in life and get better and better at doing the most important things to serve your customers. Well Brian, in your video training or your book, you also say that to become a self-made millionaire you have to become a completely different person. What do you mean by that? Well, most people think of themselves as working for someone else.

If you have to do it, you have to think of yourself as self-employed. This is one of the most important things of all, is to realize that the only person you ever work for is yourself. And it’s a totally different approach because people who work for someone else think in terms of going to work and then going home, but you have to think of yourself as self-employed, you work for yourself and that means you have to work many more hours than the average person and you have to just simply say to yourself, I am a self-made millionaire. I do not have the money yet, but in my mind, I am worth more than a million dollars.

Think of yourself as a self-made millionaire. The most important discovery in all of human history is that you become what you think of as self-employed, you work for yourself and that means you have to work many more hours than the average person and you have to just simply say to yourself, I am a self-made millionaire. I do not have the money yet, but in my mind, I am worth more than a million dollars. Think of yourself as a self-made millionaire. The most important discovery in all of human history is that you become what you think about most of the time. So if you want to be a millionaire, you must think about yourself as a millionaire and you must read about millionaires, and there are an enormous number of books and stories about people who started with nothing and became successful. So you must study millionaires, how they started, what did they, what mistakes they made, and what did they right. And so on. Wonderfully enough in America, if a person is successful the very first thing they do is teach other people how they became successful.

Now we say you become what you think about most of the time. If you study wealthy people, you find that wealthy people spend about 10 to 20 hours per month studying financial success. Average people practice or study maybe one hour per month thinking about earning money. But successful people spend ten to twenty hours per month and therefore it’s like stepping on the accelerator of a car, they go faster and faster toward becoming a person who thinks about earning money. When you start earning money you start to see all kinds of opportunities. During the pandemic, I wrote the book, “Go All In,” and this book talks about the commitment that you are going to do it full out, go all the way in. You’re committed, not just interested in doing it but it’s not convenient right now, let’s make an excuse.

So what I heard from you is the first thing you need to do is make the decision, right? The decision that you are going to be a self-made millionaire, then you take it into responsibility, and then you study really intensely about what it takes. What is the requirement for you to be a self-made millionaire? Yes, well, I say that there is a Golden Triangle for success and the first part of the Golden Triangle, you just mentioned, is to accept responsibility for yourself and your future. You say the magic words, and I was just talking to a self-made millionaire two days ago, and he said, what he learned from me when he was young and poor, the magic words were, I am responsible. So, therefore, you do not expect someone else to do it for you, you don’t make excuses, you don’t blame other people if you’re having problems, and you realize that you are in charge of your life. Everything that you accomplish is up to you. You are responsible. That was my turning point when I was 21 years old. So remember, I was living in a small apartment with two rooms and it was very cold. It was in Montreal, it was 35 degrees below zero and I was working as a construction laborer, and I had to get up at 5:00 in the morning to take a bus for two hours to get to my job and then work all day.

As a laborer, you carry construction materials, and then at the end of the day at 5:00 or 5:30, I would take the buses and go back home and I’d get there by 7:00. This is what I did, and I earned enough to pay for this little one-room apartment and I realized that as I sat there in my little kitchen and I said, “This is my life and nothing will change unless I change, I have to change, I have to develop new skills.” I was working on an office building and below it was a shopping center, and this one day at lunchtime, I went to the bookstore in the shopping center and I bought some books on selling and on business and other subjects that I began to study all the time, and I was reading and learning all the time. The most wonderful thing happens when you learn something new, you very soon get an opportunity to use your new knowledge. It’s sometimes called the law of attraction, it’s when you learn something new and something happens and you get a chance to use your knowledge. When you use that new knowledge you’ll get more opportunities and you start to move ahead faster, start to be more successful, and you start to have more opportunities and possibilities.

It’s like a miracle but it happens all the time. So, the starting point is to decide to become a self-made millionaire and see yourself as self-employed, to say I work for myself, I don’t work for someone else. I remember I was working on this construction job and there was a man who we called the big boss the big boss was very rich and he came to inspect the construction. This is a multi-million dollar office construction project, and he came and he walked around and looked at everything he stopped and spoke to me and he said, “What is your name and what are you doing here?” And I spoke to him and I was very sort of flattered because he was the most important person in the whole company, and he spoke to me. He would come back again another day and another day and he would stop and ask me how things are going and I would talk to him. And then one day he said to me,” This is not the right place for you. You have so much potential to be a laborer. You must devote yourself to self-improvement, you have too much potential.” And I never remembered, I was embarrassed, but I said thank you. I remembered that for the rest of my life to this minute, that big boss told me that I have the potential to be a big success. It didn’t happen overnight, it took several years before I was successful, but he saw the potential in me, and I continued to work at my job.

Each person has enormous potential that they seldom ever use, but if you start to develop your potential by learning new materials and new ideas and then practicing them over and over. A good friend of mine once said, “The key to success is to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later.” And so instead of doing what most people do, 80% of people do as little as they can, and then go home and watch television. Successful people work longer and longer hours, and as a result, they achieve more. So this is what you need to do to become a self-made millionaire, study self-made millionaires, study people who started with nothing, and find out what they did to become successful. We found out that what they did was start to buy books. I have a book here, this is the book that I wrote it’s called “21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires,” and I pulled this out for our talk, and basically after I had become a millionaire, I sat down and said, what are all the simple changes that I made in my life? I came out with twenty-one. It was interesting, I was called by a big boss of a company, he had 800 people working for him, and he called me up and he said, “We are having our annual convention, and I would like you to come and speak to them, they all want to become millionaires, could you speak to them about becoming one?” And I said, of course, I always say yes, and then I hung up the phone and I realized I didn’t know anything about millionaires.

So I began to study millionaires and I still remember, I spent the next two months reading everything that I could find about millionaires and then I gave a talk, it was one hour long and it was called the “21 Success Secrets of SelfMade Millionaires,” and I got a standing ovation people loved the talk and somebody came up to me and said, “can you give that same talk to the people in my company?” I said, of course, always say yes. So I gave it again and again, and at first it was 60 minutes and then it was 90 minutes, and then half a day, and then a full day, and I began to learn more and more ideas. People have told me that this book made them millionaires, so the next thing I did was I recorded my talk I cleaned it up and I began to sell it for ten or twenty dollars. And people told me they got this CD or audio cassette and they would listen to it over and over again.

One man told me he started off broke at the beginning of the year and he listened to this once a day every day for one year, and at the end of the year, he was a millionaire. What happened is, that his way of thinking about himself changed completely, and as a result, he began to attract into his life ideas and opportunities to become wealthy. Brian, I want to tell you, that I’m listening to your book “21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires” every day too and I hope next time when I see you again I will tell you that I am a millionaire. There is nothing that can stop you except yourself, and the only way you can stop yourself is by stopping. It’s just simply a matter of saying, I will work until I achieve this. There is no question, that I’m going to become a millionaire. I don’t know how at this moment, but I will find out, and what you do is take every advantage, of every idea that comes to you, and as you practice it most of the things that you attempt will not be successful. And so therefore you learn from that experience, and you continue to move on.

At a certain point, you’ll find exactly the right thing for you, and you will know that it’s the right thing because it makes you happy. You write like 4-5 books a year, right? And for over 20 years now. What would you like to say to new authors who have that passion for writing? And what would you share with them? Many years ago, I was working as a speaker and a literary agent came to me because I was successfully selling audio programs. She came to me and she said, “Can you turn your audio program into a book?” And I said, of course. She said, “I could probably get a publisher for you.” I wrote the book and what I did when I thought about writing a book, is I went down to a bookstore and they had a special section on writing books, and I went there and I began to buy books and read. I still have them behind me, and I began to read these books on how to write a book, how to use your time, how to organize, how to plan, and how to do research. What I found is that book writing is a very common profession. Now, this year they will write about 3 million books in the world.

When I started, they were publishing about 200,000 new books each year, and these books were published by major publishers. So, I wrote a book and it began to sell, and I started to do interviews the way that you promote your book, one of the ways is you do interviews on the radio, television, newspapers, or magazines and then people write about the book and say, this is a good book. Sometimes it just takes one person who reads your book and is well-known to say this is a good book to cause your book to become a best-seller. I hired an agent to get interviews for me and she was very successful. She got more than 100 interviews for me, but after 3 months, the interviews stopped. And I asked her, I said, “Why don’t I have any more interviews?” And she said, “Well, your three months are up.” and I asked her, “What do you mean?”

What happens is that people will interview you for three months and then they interview someone else. They move on. Yes, and so I said, “Well, what can I do?” She said to write another book, which is funny because most people take two or three years to write a book. So I said, “I give a lot of speeches, I could write a book on selling.” So I began to write a book on selling. Then I said, “I’m going to write one book every three months so that I’m always doing interviews,” and they said, “That’s crazy, nobody writes a book every three months.” I said,” I have done so much research for my speeches that I have already done the work.” So for 15 years, I wrote four books a year, sometimes five books, sometimes six books, sometimes a bigger book, sometimes smaller books. But my job was as a speaker, not as a writer, but I was doing so much research that I just kept on writing books on different subjects, and if you want to learn about this, go to Amazon or Audible and look at that, you’ll be amazed.

There are almost 100 books that I have written, and some are bigger and some are smaller. So, what I did is I began to read and study how to write a book, and it’s a skill. People would say to me, “How do you write so many books?” I said, well you do this and then you do that, and then you do this and they said, it’s complicated. They said, “Can you write it down for me?” I was teaching business coaching and I was so tired of people asking me, how do I do it? So I wrote it down and I haven’t even thought about this, but I said, all right, what I will do is, I will write it down. I wrote down everything that I learned about how to write a book and I came up with 20 steps.

It’s like a recipe in the kitchen and it has 20 ingredients starting with number one, number two, and number three. And if someone wants this recipe, they can have it. They just have to go to my website which is BrianTracy.com and it’ll pop up and it’s free, or you can go to my website and you can download it and you can give it to anybody you want, and there is no charge. People say I want to write a book, well here it is, here’s the recipe and this is not a wish list, this is a person who’s written 90 books and I’m finishing book number 91. These books are published in 51 languages and they have sold maybe 10 million copies.

Sometimes they sell a lot and some have sold a million. Some people think I’m going to write one book and I’m going to just work and work to make this book successful, but I said no, that’s not a good idea, I’m going to write one book after another. The book that became the most successful for me was called, “Eat That Frog,” and that became the most popular book in the world on time management. You can look on Audible or on Amazon for many books on the same subject about overcoming procrastination, but my book somehow has something special about it that caused it to be very popular. Therefore, if you’re going to take advice, take it from someone who is successful, follow their advice. Go to my website and download the 20 steps to write a book, and if you want to come to my seminar, we give it once every three months. We also have a special workshop for three days for 10 people.

For three days we work and we teach them step by step how to be a successful author. People are amazed because they have never written a book and within a year they are published and they become a best-seller. It’s life-changing because what I do is I work very hard with them for three days. They’re never the same again. So that’s how we will leave our talk here, if you want to be successful, you can go and download the 20 steps to writing a book and becoming a successful author. And how can I be one of the 10 people who gets trained by you for three days to write a book?

Well, I charge ten thousand dollars per person and the reason I only have 10 people is that I work very hard with each person, and my daughter who is now a published author as well, works with me and my son works with me and then I have my staff who work with me and we all work in one room around a boardroom table. We work and we teach people day by day, hour by hour, how to write and publish a successful book. And once you learn this, you come out with a big workbook with everything written down. If you practice what we teach you, then you’ll soon be an author, and if your writing is good then you’ll be a successful author. I am very serious about this, thank you so much for sharing with us, and again, the commitment, the responsibility, and the decision is the key.

Let me finish my triangle, the Golden Triangle starting point is to accept responsibility, which means you don’t make any excuses or blame anyone else. The second key is that you set goals, goal setting is the turning point in your life, you write down a goal and you always write it down in the present tense. It could be, that I am a successful published author. I am fit and healthy. I am a self-made millionaire. You always write down your goals as though they were already true. The third part is continuous learning. You continuously learn new things by learning more about your subject so that people will say that this person are very knowledgeable in your specialty.

You are not somebody who just works in this field, but you’re skilled because you constantly study and become better and better. So, those were my three success principles, accept responsibility, set goals, and commit yourself to continuous learning, and if you do those three things, nothing can stop you from a big success. Brian Tracy I love you, I’m grateful for you, and thank you so much for being here and sharing with us today. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Nim. It makes me very happy to be with you, and I wish you the very best of success. Those were my three success principles: accept responsibility, set goals, and commit yourself to continuous learning, if you do those three things, nothing can stop you from a big success.

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