The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success

by Brian Tracy

Overview

What makes one business flourish while another fails? “[This] book of laws has something for everyone who wants to be a success in any walk of life.” —General H. Norman Schwartzkopf
 
In The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Brian Tracy draws on thirty years of experience and knowledge to present a set of principles or “universal laws” that lie behind the success of businesspeople everywhere, in every kind of enterprise, large and small. These are natural laws, he says, and they work everywhere and for everyone, virtually without exception. Every year, thousands of companies underperform or even fail and millions of individuals underachieve, frustrated by thwarted ambition and dreams—all because they either attempted to violate or did not know these universal laws. But ignorance of the law is no excuse!
 
Tracy breaks the 100 laws down into nine major categories: Life, Success, Business, Leadership, Money, Economics, Selling, Negotiating, and Time Management. Drawing on a lifetime of observation, investigation, and experience, Tracy not only identifies and defines each law, he also reveals its source and foundation, whether in science, nature, philosophy, experience, or common sense. He illustrates how it functions in the world using real-life anecdotes and examples, and shows how to apply it to your life and work through specific questions, practical steps, and exercises that everyone can use—sometimes in just minutes—to begin the journey toward greater business success.
 
“Eloquently—yet practically—written . . . should be required reading for every entrepreneur, manager, and leader!” —Scott McKain, author of The Ultimate Customer Experience

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605098982
Publisher:	Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	340
Sales rank:	748
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Brian Tracy is chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International. As a keynote speaker and seminar leader, he addresses more than 250,000 people each year. He is the bestselling author of more than eighty books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He has served as a consultant and trainer to more than 1,000 corporations and more than 10,000 medium-sized enterprises in more than seventy-five countries.

Read an Excerpt

Success Is Predictable

This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more opportunities for more people to accomplish more of their goals, both personally and professionally, than exist today. And if anything, our situation is getting better and better with each passing year.

Why is this happening? The simplest answer is that we know more today about how to achieve better results in more areas of business than we have ever known before. And this information, these ideas and insights, are like water, flowing everywhere and to everyone who is open to them and willing to use them.

The wonderful thing about information and ideas is that they are infinitely divisible. If you have an idea that can help me to be more effective in some part of my business and you share it with me, we are both enriched. If I then share this idea with someone else, and that person shares it with someone else again, everyone who receives the new idea is better off.

And knowledge is cumulative. Once it exists, it does not cease to exist. It becomes available to more and more people and it grows exponentially. Every new piece of knowledge reveals connections and interconnections with other areas of knowledge in a self-reinforcing and accelerating pattern. Each breakthrough in knowledge creates new opportunities that expand and multiply as that knowledge is exploited.

The driving force behind the explosion of knowledge and the expansion of technology is competition. This competition is more aggressive, determined, creative, and ruthless than ever before, and if anything, it will be even tougher in the months and years ahead.

It has been said that business is war. Business books, articles, and courses are filled with references to marketing warfare, guerilla tactics, counterattacks, and other military terms. And these are all true with one important distinction: the nature of the type of war being fought.

Military warfare is aimed at the conquest of people and territory. Business warfare is aimed at winning customers and markets. Military combat aims at destruction and victory by the use of overwhelming force. Business competition aims at finding better, faster, and cheaper ways of pleasing customers in competition with other companies that are trying to please the same customers.

This business competition is fierce. Many of the finest minds and the most talented people who have ever lived are thinking and working day and night to find ways to satisfy customers with new and better products and services. The race is on. Only those who can learn and apply the very best ideas and methods faster than their competitors will survive.

The Winning Edge concept says, small differences in ability can lead to enormous differences in results. Small differences in your own personal repertoire of knowledge and skills can lead to major differences in your income and achievements.

Your aim throughout your career, for yourself and your company, should be to acquire and develop the winning edges in your field that can mean all the difference between success and mediocrity.

Today, strategies and techniques for achieving success at every level of business, and in every activity of life, are more widely available and proliferating more rapidly than at any other time in human history. And we can all benefit from them by seizing them and applying them to our lives.

The purpose of this book is to share with you a system of proven principles, or laws, that have been discovered and rediscovered, practiced and implemented, by the most successful businesspeople everywhere, in every kind of organization, large and small, throughout the history of business enterprise. The practice of these laws will give you the winning edge.

When you know and understand these timeless truths, you will gain a tremendous advantage over those who do not. When you organize your life and business according to these universal laws and principles, you can start, build, manage, or turn around a business or department faster and easier than perhaps you ever thought possible.

The more you incorporate these principles into your daily thinking and decision making, the more effective you will become. You will attract and keep better people, produce and sell more and better products and services, control costs more intelligently, expand and grow more predictably, and increase your profits with greater consistency.

Some of these laws may sound unusual or even controversial when you first read them. Nonetheless, they are timeless truths. They have always existed. They have always worked. They are natural laws. They are embedded in the universe. In the long run, they are inviolable.

Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in A Liberal Education, The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

In the same way, these laws are neutral, neither positive nor negative. They are indifferent to your personal beliefs, preferences, or desires. They have always existed in business and always will. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her she despises and only to the apt, the pure, and true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets.

If you want to cook, you study cooking and you follow the rules and principles regarding the combining of ingredients and preparation that have been found to work successfully in the past. You would not think to add or subtract key ingredients and expect the dish you are preparing to taste the same as if you followed the proven recipe.

By the same token, you would not expect to achieve the same business results accomplished by successful businesspeople by violating the essential laws and principles that they practice year after year.

There is a story of a man who decides to commit suicide by jumping off a thirty-story building. As he plunges toward the ground, someone leans out of a fifteenth-story window and shouts, How's it going?

The falling man shouts back, So far, so good!

Many people are living their business lives with this kind of philosophy, So far, so good! They are violating natural laws and principles that apply to business life, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. Nonetheless, these truths are immutable and unavoidable. You violate them at your peril. And even if you think you are escaping their consequences in the short term, you will ultimately pay the full price that they demand.

The good news is that when you organize your life and business activities around The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, you are virtually guaranteed to enjoy success and prosperity in your business activities. Just as you reap what you sow, when you put good things in, you get good things out.

Perhaps the most important quality of a successful businessperson is pragmatism. You are pragmatic when you are not necessarily concerned about the origin of an idea. You don't ask where it comes from or who thought of it first. You ask only one question: Does it work?

You are successful in business and in life to the degree to which you find out what works and then apply that principle wherever and whenever it is appropriate to get a particular result. This book is aimed at giving you ideas and strategies that have been proven, over and over, to work.

Universal laws and principles are similar to telephone numbers in that if you dial the right number, you get through to the desired party. But even if you are brilliant, well educated, sincere, determined, and intelligent, if you dial the wrong number, you won't get through.

Year after year, thousands of companies underperform or even go out of business because either the key decision makers in those companies did not know these universal laws or they attempted to violate them and succeed anyway. Even more hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of companies fail to achieve their true potentials in sales and profitability every year because of their violation of one or more of these laws.

Remember that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Even if you do not know the laws, you are not excused from obedience to them. Even if your violation of these laws and principles is unintentional, you will still pay the full penalty in failure, frustration, and underachievement.

My Own Story

My background was not very inspiring. My family never had any money, and I paid my own way with odd jobs from the age of eleven. I left high school without graduating. After working at laboring jobs for some years, I stumbled into sales. I struggled in selling for many months until I began asking the question that changed my life: Why is it that some people are more successful than others?

The Bible says, Seek and ye shall find, for all who seek findeth. When I began looking for the reasons why some people were doing better than I was, I began to find the answers everywhere. And when I applied the answers I found, I began to get the same results that other successful people were getting.

There is a 10/90 Rule in life. This rule says that the first 10 percent of time that you invest in finding out the underlying laws, principles, rules, methods, and techniques of successful action in any field will save you 90 percent of the time and effort required to achieve your goals in that area.

Over the years, I have found that the smartest people are those who take the time to find out the rules of success in any area before they attempt to get results in that area. They do their homework in advance.

In my thirties, I caught up on my formal education. I participated in an Executive MBA program at a major university and received a master's degree in business and administration. I invested about 4,000 hours of my time studying business subjects and business principles. Over the years, I read hundreds of additional books and articles in my search for the so-called Secrets of Success.

When I was given an opportunity to build a sales force covering six countries, I asked the experts, read the books, listened to the audio programs, and attended the courses on recruiting and building sales organizations. Then I applied what I had learned and practiced the laws and principles that seemed to be the most effective.

In one year, I went from walking the streets, selling on straight commission, living from hand to mouth, to building a ninety-five-person sales force covering six countries and generating millions of dollars per year in revenue.

Later, when I got into real estate development, I followed the same procedure. I borrowed all the books the library had on real estate development and studied them, long into the night. I spent hours with other real estate developers, plying them with questions. Then I optioned a piece of land for $100, put together the necessary financial analyses and proposals, found a financial partner with the strength to underwrite the project, and went on to build and completely lease out a $3 million shopping center in the next twelve months.

When I began importing Japanese automobiles, I followed the same procedure. Within one year, I built a sixty-five-dealer network through which I eventually sold more than $25 million worth of vehicles.

When I became the chief operating officer of a $265 million development company, I applied to my new position the proven, tested laws, principles, and techniques that I had gathered. I completely restaffed, reorganized, and refocused the company, turning it from confusion to profitability in less than a year.

Businesspeople began to hire me as a consultant and as a troubleshooter. In company after company, I used the same procedure. I immersed myself in the business until I had ascertained the underlying success principles of that industry or field, and then I applied them. As a result, I was able to save or make my clients millions of dollars time after time.

I then began organizing these ideas and principles into talks and seminars for public and private audiences. Eventually, I created an entire series of seminars and training programs for individuals and businesses, many of which have now been recorded on video and audio. They are taught to businesses across America and throughout the world, in twenty languages and in thirty-one countries.

The reason that these principles, and the seminars and programs based on them, are so successful is simple. They are built around practical, proven techniques that save people years of hard work in achieving the same results. My graduates have applied the ideas they have learned toward generating hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars of increased sales, reduced costs, or improved profits.

Over the years, working with hundreds of businesses and thousands of businesspeople, I have found that all the successful, happy, dynamic, prosperous, and growing enterprises practice these principles consistently in virtually everything they do. And when you do the same things they do, you will begin almost immediately to get the same results.

Most success in business can be easily explained by the consistent practice of these laws. Most failure can be explained by the violation or ignorance of these laws. When you align your activities with these universal principles, you will find yourself getting more and better results with less effort. You will be more relaxed and confident. You will be more optimistic and cheerful. You will be more efficient and effective.

Instead of working yourself into a state of exhaustion, only to feel frustrated and overwhelmed, you will go through enormous quantities of work quickly and easily and get far better results than other people who may be working twice as hard.

There is a simple analogy for the use of these principles that I sometimes share with my seminar audiences. I ask the question, If you purchased a treadmill and took it home, what would determine how much benefit you got from that treadmill? Quite quickly, the businesspeople in my audiences reply that the amount of benefit they would receive from a treadmill would be in direct proportion to how often they used it and how long they stayed on it each time.

Here is the point: There is never any question of whether or not the treadmill would help make a person fitter and healthier. Everyone knows that this is a given. The treadmill is a tested and proven device for physical fitness. This has long since been settled.

It is the same when you begin to use these tested and proven laws and principles in your own business life. The question is not whether or not they will work. The only question is how faithfully and consistently you apply them to your activities. And like a treadmill, the more often and the more consistently you apply these laws, the better they will work and the greater and easier results you will achieve.

One final point before we begin. The most common quality of successful people is they are intensely action oriented. They are proactive rather than reactive. They take initiative. When they hear a good idea, they act on it immediately. By taking action quickly, they immediately get feedback that enables them to self-correct and move ahead. They learn and grow from every experience. And they keep trying new things.

When you see a good idea in the pages ahead that you can apply to your work, resolve to take action on it immediately. Don't delay. One decisive action or decision to do something different can change your whole life.

The only question that should concern you is, Does it work? And these ideas work. They work virtually everywhere, under virtually all circumstances in our business system. And the more you use them, the better they will work for you. The more you align your life with these laws and principles, the happier and more successful you will be. There are no limits.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	About the Author	xv
	Introduction--Success Is Predictable	1
Chapter 1	The Laws of Life	11
1.	The Law of Cause and Effect	14
2.	The Law of Belief	17
3.	The Law of Expectations	19
4.	The Law of Attraction	21
5.	The Law of Correspondence	23
Chapter 2	The Laws of Success	27
6.	The Law of Control	32
7.	The Law of Accident	35
8.	The Law of Responsibility	37
9.	The Law of Direction	40
10.	The Law of Compensation	47
11.	The Law of Service	48
12.	The Law of Applied Effort	52
13.	The Law of Overcompensation	54
14.	The Law of Preparation	57
15.	The Law of Forced Efficiency	59
16.	The Law of Decision	61
17.	The Law of Creativity	64
18.	The Law of Flexibility	67
19.	The Law of Persistence	70
Chapter 3	The Laws of Business	73
20.	The Law of Purpose	78
21.	The Law of Organization	80
22.	The Law of Customer Satisfaction	81
23.	The Law of the Customer	85
24.	The Law of Quality	89
25.	The Law of Obsolescence	93
26.	The Law of Innovation	96
27.	The Law of Critical Success Factors	97
28.	The Law of the Market	101
29.	The Law of Specialization	104
30.	The Law of Differentiation	106
31.	The Law of Segmentation	108
32.	The Law of Concentration	110
33.	The Law of Excellence	113
Chapter 4	The Laws of Leadership	117
34.	The Law of Integrity	121
35.	The Law of Courage	123
36.	The Law of Realism	126
37.	The Law of Power	129
38.	The Law of Ambition	133
39.	The Law of Optimism	135
40.	The Law of Empathy	138
41.	The Law of Resilience	140
42.	The Law of Independence	141
43.	The Law of Emotional Maturity	143
44.	The Law of Superb Execution	144
45.	The Law of Foresight	146
Chapter 5	The Laws of Money	149
46.	The Law of Abundance	155
47.	The Law of Exchange	157
48.	The Law of Capital	160
49.	The Law of Time Perspective	163
50.	The Law of Saving	166
51.	The Law of Conservation	169
52.	Parkinson's Law	170
53.	The Law of Three	172
54.	The Law of Investing	175
55.	The Law of Compound Interest	178
56.	The Law of Accumulation	180
57.	The Law of Magnetism	182
58.	The Law of Accelerating Acceleration	185
Chapter 6	The Laws of Selling	189
59.	The Law of Sales	193
60.	The Law of Determination	197
61.	The Law of Need	199
62.	The Law of Problems	202
63.	The Law of Persuasion	204
64.	The Law of Security	206
65.	The Law of Risk	208
66.	The Law of Trust	210
67.	The Law of Relationships	213
68.	The Law of Friendship	216
69.	The Law of Positioning	217
70.	The Law of Perspective	219
71.	The Law of Advance Planning	221
72.	The Law of Perverse Motivation	224
Chapter 7	The Laws of Negotiating	227
73.	The Universal Law of Negotiating	232
74.	The Law of Futurity	234
75.	The Law of Win-Win or No Deal	235
76.	The Law of Unlimited Possibilities	238
77.	The Law of Four	240
78.	The Law of Timing	242
79.	The Law of Terms	245
80.	The Law of Anticipation	248
81.	The Law of Authority	250
82.	The Law of Reversal	251
83.	The Law of Greater Power	253
84.	The Law of Desire	258
85.	The Law of Reciprocity	259
86.	The Walk Away Law	262
87.	The Law of Finality	264
Chapter 8	The Laws of Time Management	267
88.	The Law of Clarity	271
89.	The Law of Priorities	273
90.	The Law of Posteriorities	274
91.	The Law of the Most Valuable Asset	275
92.	The Law of Planning	277
93.	The Law of Rewards	279
94.	The Law of Sequentiality	280
95.	The Law of Leverage	282
96.	The Law of Timeliness	283
97.	The Law of Practice	285
98.	The Law of Time Pressure	286
99.	The Law of Single Handling	288
100.	The Law of Competence	290
	Conclusion--Start Now!	293
	Learning Resources of Brian Tracy International	297
	Recommended Reading	307
	Index	309

Editorial Reviews

Brian Tracy is one of the country’s leading authorities on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness. Tracy will lead you to more time and success.

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