Some things in
life are optional, and some things in life are mandatory. Taking
your next vacation to the Caribbean is optional. Building a
personal library and becoming an excellent reader is mandatory.
It is no longer something you can choose to do or not do. It is
absolutely essential and indispensable for your success.
A great many people do not read very much. Fifty-eight percent
of adult Americans never read a nonfiction book from cover to
cover after they finish school. The average American reads less
than one book per year. In fact, according to a Gallup study of
the most successful men and women in America, reading one
nonfiction book per month will put you into the top 1 percent of
living Americans.
It takes regular, persistent reading and studying for you to
improve, to move to the front of your field. It is not optional.
There are a variety of reasons why people don’t read as much as
they should. One is that probably 50 million Americans have been
graduated from high school with poor reading skills.
Another reason why people don’t read is because they have not
been told how important reading is. Lifelong learning, lifelong
reading is the minimum requirement for success in any field
today. If you are in sales, management, service, administration
or any other field that relies on the written word to convey
information and data, your ability to read well is absolutely
critical to your success.
Some people don’t read because they are simply lazy. They are
surrounded by so many distractions, especially television,
radio, socializing and other activities, that they just never
get around to doing any serious reading. They are so busy and
caught up in day-to-day activities and amusements that they put
off reading and then never get around to it. If continued, this
pattern could have devastating consequences.
Another reason why people don’t read is that they probably are
not working in the right field. One of the best tests for
compatibility with your work is your desire to read and learn
more about it. If you are doing the job that is right for you,
you will naturally be eager to read everything that you can
possibly find about your field. You will want to get better and
better. You will be hungry for new knowledge. You will be
determined to become excellent. And every single bit of new
information motivates and stimulates you and makes you excited
about learning even more.
However, if you are in the wrong field, you will look upon
reading about it as drudgery. If the reading and studying is a
required condition of your job or profession, you will do it,
but only under duress. You will want to get it over with, like a
visit to the dentist. If, for any reason, you are not eager to
learn more about what you are doing, it could very well be that
you are wasting your time and your life in the wrong field.
In one 22-year study of self-made millionaires, the researchers
found that one of the common characteristics of those special
men and women who went from rags to riches was that they were
absolutely fascinated by their work. They didn’t think so much
about making a lot of money. They were more concerned about
becoming better and better at what they did. Their work absorbed
them completely. In almost no time at all, because of their
commitment to reading and self-development, they were paid more
and more. And once they reached a high level of income, their
fascination with their work still continued. Instead of drawing
extra money from their business and spending it frivolously,
they reinvested it in themselves and in their career. As a
result, they became more and more proficient and wealthier and
wealthier. Then, one day, they opened their eyes, looked around
and found that they were worth more than $1 million. And the
continuous learning, the nonstop reading, was the key
ingredient.
Some years ago, a young man came to me and asked for advice. He
had been graduated from high school without the ability to read.
He told me that reading a whole paragraph actually made him
tired. His problem was that he was working at a dead-end job at
minimum wage, and he had been there for two years. He was living
in a small apartment on a limited budget. All his friends from
high school, none of whom could read either, were in pretty much
the same predicament. They all were working at low-level,
low-skill jobs with no future. He had been out of school for two
years and had made no progress. What advice could I give him?
I told him that he had to learn to read, and read well. He said
he didn’t like to read, and he wanted to be successful at
something that didn’t require reading. I told him that this was
not a matter of choice. The only jobs that didn’t require
reading were the kinds of jobs that he and his friends were
already doing. And even they soon would be surpassed by younger,
more eager people with better educations.
Much to his credit, he thought about this for a while and then
accepted the fact that he had to become a good reader. He began
taking community-college courses in remedial reading.
Eventually, he applied for entrance to a technical institute,
and he managed to get in by the skin of his teeth. Because of
his poor high-school education, it took him almost three years
to complete a two-year program in biomedical engineering. He
stuck in there and worked hard, and he finally came up with a
degree.
A small company hired him as a sales representative, to call on
hospitals and clinics in a rural territory. It wasn’t much, but
he took it and ran with it. He continued to read and studied
sales and communications. He started at $22,000 per year, and
within two years, he was up to $30,000 per year. In his third
year, he was hired away by a rival company and paid $40,000 per
year. Two years later, an international company heard about his
success in the marketplace and hired him at more than $50,000
per year, with a company car, an expense account and substantial
benefits.
In seven years, he went from being a semiliterate, minimum wage
worker to a highly paid biomedical technical representative
working for an international corporation. And he was back in the
big city with a town house, a new car, a wife, children, and a
great life. The interesting thing was that as he went around to
renew his old friendships, he found that most of the people he
had graduated with were still working at dead-end jobs.
Seven years seems like a long time in the course of a life, but
it passes in a flash when you are busy doing something you enjoy
and getting continually better at it.
The last great obstacle to regular reading and continuous
learning is that most people have been brought up with what we
might call the old paradigm, the outdated way of viewing
education. It’s likely that as you grew up, education was looked
upon as something that was done to you by other people. For the
first 18 years of your life, you went off to school and
education was done to you as though you were a passive object.
Even when you went to college, you signed up for the courses
that were recommended, you learned the subjects that were
required, and you took the exams that were given. When you came
out, you were the product of an education. It was almost as
though the education had “just happened” to you, while you
merely went along and did your share at the right time.
However, after you finish school, you are responsible for your
education. From that moment onward, you are responsible for
buying your books, planning your courses of study, learning your
subjects and continually upgrading your skills. It’s not the
responsibility of anyone else. You are in charge. It’s all up to
you.
Many people think that it’s up to their company to educate them
if they need additional training. Well, if your company provides
training, you should take every minute of it that you can get.
But if it doesn’t, and most companies don’t, you are still
solely responsible for maintaining and increasing your value
through continuous reading. There is no other way.
Let me share with you some ideas that helped me to go from
high-school dropout and dishwasher, working in the kitchen of a
small hotel, to chief operating officer of a $265 million
company. These are practices of most of the successful men and
women in America. Their cumulative effect on the quality of your
life can be amazing. First, if you are not a good reader, make
the decision, right now, that you are going to go any distance,
pay any price, overcome any obstacle and spend whatever amount
of money it takes to become an excellent reader. If you do not
know how to read particularly well, stop everything else that
you are doing outside your work and dedicate yourself to
reading. Spend every spare minute reading as if your future
depended on it, because it does.
It may take a week, a month or a year to become a better reader.
It may take even longer. But it doesn’t matter. Your becoming an
excellent reader will kick open doors of opportunity for you
that you cannot now imagine.
Second, if you are already a good reader, or when you become a
good reader, learn to speed-read. The Evelyn Wood Reading
Dynamics program is probably the best that has ever been
developed. Also, many communities throughout America offer
speed-reading classes. Speed-reading is like touch-typing. In
typing, you can use the hunt-and-peck method all your life, or
you can learn how to do it right and increase your speed to 50
or 60 words per minute. In reading, you can take your speed from
50 or 60 words per minute up to 300, 400, 500 or even 1,000
words per minute, with no loss of comprehension. Speed-reading
courses are absolutely essential to the success of really
ambitious men and women today.
Third, build a personal library. Although public libraries are
extremely helpful for research, you should buy your own books.
People often ask me what books they should buy. To decide this,
you can use the Law of Relative Importance. Buy the books that
are most important to your life at this moment. The key word
here is relevant. Adults learn best when what they are studying
is extremely relevant to their needs, their work, their life,
and their present situation. If you read material that is not
relevant to what you are doing, you will find it difficult. You
will not be drawn to the material, and you will forget most of
it as you go along. But when you read material that is both
relevant and applicable to your work, your mind sparkles with
all kinds of ideas on how you can use this new information to be
more effective. The prospect of learning new methods and
techniques that you know will improve your life is both exciting
and highly motivating.
Next, in building your own library, ask the most successful
people in your field what books they would recommend. Then, go
straight to the bookstore and buy them.
One of the marks of the professional, and professionalism is a
state of mind, is that he has a library in his field. If you are
in sales, you should have a library of sales books. You should
be reading at least one hour per day in sales, one book per
week, 50 books per year. You should be a consistent, persistent
student of your craft. You should know more about the field of
selling than anybody within 500 miles does. You should set a
goal to become so knowledgeable about your field that you would
be able to give advanced classes in your profession within a few
years. With this idea as your guiding star, you will find
yourself learning and remembering far more than you would if you
were just browsing through the material.
Should you buy hardcover books or softcover books? I recommend
that you purchase any book, of either kind, that can help you.
Some books cost $20 to $30. The average person complains that he
can’t afford such a book. The superior person recognizes that
the information contained in that book can save him a year or
two of hard work. Remember, it may take an author 10 to 20 years
to learn his subject. It may take him two to three years to
write a book on it. It then may take one to two years to get the
book published. By paying a few dollars for a book, you probably
are getting the results of 20 or 25 years of effort by one of
the smartest people in your field.
Never scrimp on your education. It is one of the most damaging
things you could ever do.
Get some good bookshelves, and begin categorizing your books by
subject. Have a section on sales. Have a section on management.
Have a section on family and child raising. Have a section on
personal motivation and success. If you like novels, have a
section on fiction, or on history.
Organize your sections in alphabetical order, either by the
title of the book or by the author. You don’t have to make it
too formal or structured. The point is to set up your library in
such a way that you pretty well know where each book is, you
know whether or not you have a book, and you know where to go to
get a piece of information when you need it.
Once you’ve bought a book, read it with a red pen in hand,
underlining and making notes at every key point you find. If you
read a book twice, use a different-color pen to underline points
you may have missed the first time.
I have books that I have read 10 or 20 times and that look like
rainbows from page to page. They are literally covered with all
kinds of colors and marks. Needless to say, the information and
ideas in those books has soaked so deeply into my psyche that I
can recite much of the material in my dreams.
You need to read an hour or two each day just to keep current
with your field. You need to read newspapers, magazines,
newsletters, correspondence and other materials. But you don’t
get ahead with regular reading. You must invest in the future
while you keep current with the present. If you want to get
ahead, you must read things that give you new ideas and
insights, not merely things that confirm what you already know.
Becoming a proficient and persistent reader may not be easy to
do so, but it’s certainly possible. The future does belong to
the competent. Those who know more will always win out over
those who know less. The more you read, the better you get. The
more you learn, the easier it is for you to learn. And the more
you challenge your mind, the smarter you get.
By: Brian
Tracy
Benjamin Franklin once said, “There are two ways to acquire
wisdom; you can either buy it or borrow it. By buying it, you
pay full price in terms of time and cost to learn the lessons
you need to learn. By borrowing it, you go to those men and
women who have already paid the price to learn the lessons and
get their wisdom from them.”
This is the essence of the mentor-protégé relationship. By going
to people who are ahead of you in the personal or professional
arena, and by opening yourself up to their input, advice and
guidance, you can save yourself the many months (maybe even
years) and the thousands of dollars it would cost to learn what
you need to learn all by yourself.
Kop Kopmier, the famous success authority, said that one of the
most important secrets of success is to learn proven success
methods. He once told me that perhaps the fastest way to get
ahead was to study the experts and to do what they do, rather
than trying to learn it all yourself. In fact, he mentioned that
no one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn
starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely,
positively have to find people who have already paid the price
to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.
The mentors you choose should be people you respect, admire and
want to be like. The advice you seek should be guidance
regarding your character and personality and specific ideas on
how you can do your job better and faster. Remember, you can’t
figure it all out for yourself. You have to have the help of
others. You have to find men and women who will guide you and
advise you on the road of life, or you will take a long, long
time getting anywhere.
There are two vital aspects to look for in a mentor. The first
is character and the second is competence.
Character is by far the most important. Look for a mentor who
has the kind of character you admire and respect. Look for a
person who has high degrees of intelligence, integrity, judgment
and wisdom. The more you associate, even in your mind, with men
and women who are advanced in the development of their
character, the more you will tend to pattern them and to become
like them.
The second thing you look for in a mentor is competence. This
means that the person is extremely good at what he or she does.
A good mentor in your career is one who has the knowledge,
skills and abilities to move ahead far more rapidly than his or
her peers. The impact of a mentor on your life is dependent on
two additional factors. The first is your degree of openness to
being influenced by another person. Openness is so important
because many people, especially young people, are extremely
impatient, always looking for shortcuts. When they get advice
that another person has spent many years learning, they often
try to add their own variations and improve on it without ever
having mastered the original instruction in the first place.
Remember, when you open yourself up to guidance and input from
another person, concentrate first on understanding and learning
exactly what that person has to teach you. Afterward, you can
modify and change that lesson to suit your changing
circumstances.
The second factor that determines the influence of a mentor on
your life is the willingness of the mentor to help you in every
way possible to achieve your personal goals. We know that the
more emotionally involved someone is in our life, the more
susceptible we are to being influenced by that person. When you
consciously and deliberately seek out a mentor, you must look
for someone who genuinely cares about you as a person and who
really wants you to be successful in your endeavors.
So, for a good mentor-protégé relationship, you must be wide
open to the influence and instruction of the other person, and
at the same time, the mentor must be genuinely concerned about
your well-being and your ultimate success. These are the two
essentials.
Your ability to choose your mentors, in written form, on audio
and video, live at seminars, and (even better) in person, can be
a crucial step toward achievement in all areas of your life. So
here are twelve steps you can take to build successful
mentor-protégé relationships:
1. Set clear goals for yourself in every area of your life. Know
exactly what it is you want to accomplish before you start
thinking of the type of person who can help you accomplish it.
2. Determine the things you have to do in order to achieve your
goals, the obstacles you will have to overcome and the
roadblocks you will have to surmount.
3. Identify the areas of knowledge, skill and expertise you will
have to acquire in order to overcome the obstacles standing
between you and your goals.
4. Look around you and select the most successful people in the
areas in which you will need the most help.
5. Join the clubs, organizations and business associations these
people belong to. You can find out this information if you ask.
6. Once you have become involved in these organizations, become
actively involved and volunteer for responsibilities. This will
bring you to the attention of the people you want to meet faster
than anything else.
7. Work, study, and practice continually to get better and
better at what you do. The very best mentors are only interested
in helping you if they feel it is going to be of value. You will
have no problem attracting people to you when you develop a
reputation for being an up-and-coming person in your field.
8. When you find a potential mentor, don’t tackle him or her or
make a nuisance of yourself. Instead, ask for ten minutes of his
or her time, in person, in private. Nothing more. Remember, most
mentors are busy people, and they may be opposed to someone
trying to take up a lot of their time. It’s not personal.
9. When you meet with a potential mentor, express your eagerness
to be more successful in your field. Tell him or her that you
would very much appreciate a little guidance and advice to help
you move ahead. Ask for an answer to a specific question, or for
a specific book or audiotape recommendation, or for a specific
idea that has been helpful to him or her in the past.
10. After the initial meeting, send a thank-you note and express
your gratitude and appreciation for his or her time and
guidance. Mention that you hope to meet again if you have
another question.
11. Each month, drop your mentor a short note telling him or her
about what you are doing and how you are progressing. There is
nothing that makes a potential mentor more open to helping you
than your making it clear that the help is doing you some good.
12. Arrange to meet with your mentor again, perhaps on a monthly
basis, or even more often if you work closely together.
Over the course of your life and career, you will have many
mentor-protégé relationships. As you grow and develop, you will
move on to mentors who can give you the kind of advice that is
most effective for your current situation.
The most wonderful thing about this process is that successful
people are very open to helping other people who want to be
successful. This is especially true if you are willing to be a
mentor to others who are younger and less experienced than you.
The more open you are to helping other up the ladder of success,
the more open will be to helping you.
The fastest way for you to succeed is by piggy-backing on the
good advice and counsel of men and women who have already spent
years learning how to succeed. When you do this on a regular and
systematic basis, you will open up doors of opportunity and
possibilities for you that today you cannot even imagine.
When you practice positive self-talk, and keep your words and
your mental pictures consistent with your goals and dreams,
there is nothing that can stop you from being the success you
are meant to be.
About Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy is a leading
authority on personal and business success. As Chairman and CEO
of
Brian Tracy International, he is the best-selling
author of 17 books and over 300 audio and video learning
programs. Copyright © 2001 Brian Tracy International. All Rights
Reserved.
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