YOU CAN BECOME extremely successful by doing what other top military leaders and business executives have done before you. By applying the principles of military strategy to your life and work, you can learn to think and act faster and more effectively than anyone else around you. When you practice the critical thinking tools used by the greatest leaders in history, you can dramatically increase your effectiveness and improve your results in everything you do.
As you incorporate these twelve military principles into your life, remember that every extraordinary achievement is usually an accumulation of hundreds and thousands of ordinary achievements that no one ever sees or appreciates. These accumulated achievements can add up to significantly more money and rewards for you if you follow the 1,000 percent formula. The 1,000 percent formula is based on the strategy of continuous betterment, or the Kaizen strategy. Just as it has worked to create giant world industries, it can work for you.
When I was thirty years old, after a series of ups and downs, sometimes making more and sometimes making less, my income for the year was $14,400. Ten years later, my income was over $1,500,000, an increase of more than one hundred times in ten years!
What happened? I decided to create a formula for income improvement that I then disciplined myself to follow every day, every week, and every year thereafter. Although there were fluctuations in my income over the years, it continued to increase, as long as I followed the formula that I am about to share with you.
The 1,000 percent formula is based on the discovery that it is possible for you to increase your income by ten times over the next ten years. Most people are incredulous and amazed at the very idea of doubling their income over the next ten years, much less increasing it by ten times. However, I have shared this formula with people all over the world. I have never had anyone come back and tell me that it didn’t work. If anything, this formula is conservative, as you will see for yourself.
It is quite simple. By following the seven-step formula listed below, you can increase your productivity, performance, output, and eventually, your income by one-tenth of 1 percent each day.
One-tenth of 1 percent is an improvement of 1/1000th in your overall effectiveness and efficiency in the course of a twenty-four-hour day.
Is it possible for you, if you really wanted to, if you were determined enough, to increase your overall productivity and performance by one–one thousandth in a twenty-four-hour day?
You will have to admit that one-tenth of 1 percent, or one–one thousandth, improvement over the course of a day is not very much. In fact, if you were just to plan your day a little better and concentrate on your highest-value tasks a bit more, you would probably increase your productivity by 50 percent in a single day, rather than a mere one–one thousandth!
If you increase your productivity, performance, and output by one-tenth of 1 percent per day, five days a week, and you don’t improve at all on the weekends, you will improve by approximately one-half of 1 percent per week. This is a one–two hundredth improvement every five days. Again, could you do this if your life depended on it? What if your future depended upon it? Of course you could!
If you increase your productivity, performance, and output by one-half of 1 percent per week and you do this every week throughout the year, at the end of the year, even without the compounding effects that will occur, you will be producing 26 percent more than you were twelve months earlier. Question: Is it possible for a hardworking, determined, ambitious individual like you to upgrade your productivity, performance, and output by 26 percent over a one-year period?
The fact is that you could probably increase much more if you really wanted to. But 26 percent over the course of twelve months, one day at a time, is eminently achievable. This is the principle of continuous improvement in action.
Every improvement in one area leads to small improvements in other areas. Very much like the miracle of compound interest, as you get better and better in some things that you do, you seem to get better in other things as well.
A 26 percent improvement each year, compounded, would lead to a doubling of your productivity, performance, and output in less than three years and an increase of 1,004 percent in your productivity, performance, and earning ability in ten years.
Some years ago, in Portland, Oregon, I shared this formula with a group of young salesmen. Seven years later, I was visiting Portland again and one of those salesmen approached me. I still remembered him. He said, “Brian, I have been practicing your 1,000 percent formula every day, without fail, for seven years. And it doesn’t work.”
I asked him, “How do you mean?”
He smiled and with great delight he told me, “It didn’t take ten years to increase my income ten times. It has only been seven years. As of this February, my income was ten times what it was when you first taught me that formula.”
Here is the seven-step formula. Each of these principles is so powerful that one of them alone could increase your productivity, performance, output, and income by 1,000 percent. When you practice all seven principles every day, your results will increase at a faster rate than you can currently imagine.
Step one: Arise a little earlier and spend the first thirty to sixty minutes of each morning reading something educational, inspirational, or motivational. The first hour is the “rudder of the day.” Invest the first hour in yourself, in reading and preparing your mind for the day. This alone will give you a 1,000 percent gain over ten years.
Step two: Rewrite your major goals each day in a spiral notebook, in the present tense, exactly as if they had already been achieved. This exercise takes three to five minutes and it programs your subconscious, your superconscious, and your reticular activating system for the rest of the day. By continually refocusing your mental powers on your most important goals, you will be amazed at how many of those goals you achieve, and how fast you achieve them.
Step three: Plan every day in advance, preferably the night before. Make out a detailed list of everything that you have to do the next day—at the end of each day. This allows your subconscious mind to work on the list while you sleep. Often, when you wake up in the morning, you will have ideas and insights that will enable you to complete your tasks and achieve your goals even faster than you thought possible.
Step four: Set priorities on your list and always concentrate single-mindedly on the most valuable use of your time. This practice alone will increase your productivity, performance, and output by 1,000 percent over ten years, or sooner. No matter what happens, like a gyroscope, keep coming back to your most important task and keep working on it until it is complete.
Step five: Listen to audio programs in your car. Turn your car into a “university on wheels.” Never let your automobile be running without educational audio programs playing.
By listening to audio programs as you drive, you can get an additional five hundred to one thousand hours of concentrated instruction each year. As you move from place to place in your mobile classroom, continually feed your mind with great ideas that can help you to improve your life and work, and achieve your goals. Don’t waste time listening to music or talk radio.
Step six: Ask the two magic questions after every experience, whether it is successful or unsuccessful:
These two questions are amazing! The more you ask and answer these questions, the more you learn from every experience and the faster you move ahead. These two questions alone can give you your 1,000 percent increase in income over the next ten years.
Step seven: Treat every person you meet like a million-dollar customer. Start at home with the members of your family. As you go through the day, treat everyone you meet as if that person has the ability to buy $1 million of your product or service, or to steer such a buyer to you.
Thomas Carlyle once wrote, “You can tell a big person by the way he treats little people.” Ann Landers wrote, “The true mark of character is how you treat a person who can’t do you any good.” When you habitually treat people as though they are valuable and important, not only will this have a positive effect on your personality, it will open doors and create opportunities for you that you cannot today imagine.
As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, we are entering into the golden age of mankind. We are entering into a period where more people will accomplish more than has ever been accomplished or dreamed of in all the history of humanity.
There are no limits on what you can accomplish except the limits that you place on your own mind. It doesn’t matter where you are coming from; all that really matters is where you are going. And where you are going is limited only by your own imagination. As Shakespeare said, “What is past is prologue.” Everything that has happened to you up to now is just a part of your education.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember in the weeks and months ahead is that you can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you set for yourself. You can develop any skill or quality that you need, to become the kind of person that you need to be, to achieve any success that you desire. Theodore Roosevelt said that the key to success is “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Anything that anyone else has done, within reason, you can probably do as well. Any goals that others have achieved, you can probably achieve as well. There are no real limits on what you can do, have, and be when you take complete control over your life and your future. When you resolve right here and right now to apply these principles of strategy to everything you do, you will achieve victories beyond anything you have ever accomplished. You will become unstoppable.