Million-Dollar Habits

Million-Dollar Habits

*Brian Tracy, 2005*

A boy washing pots in a small hotel kitchen

Picture a sixteen-year-old standing at a sink in the back of a small hotel, sleeves rolled, hands raw from hot water and detergent. The pots come in greasy from the line, stacked two and three deep. He scrubs, rinses, racks, scrubs again. He has already mowed lawns that summer. He has hoed weeds, raked leaves, delivered newspapers. He has dropped out of high school. The dishwashing job is, at the moment, the high point of his working life, and he just got promoted to pots and pans.

That kitchen is in Vancouver, sometime in the early 1960s. The boy is Brian Tracy. A few years later, when no laboring job will hire him, he takes a position selling vacuum cleaners door to door on straight commission. He sleeps in a boarding house. If he does not make a sale that day and collect the cash that evening, he is out on the street the next morning. He is, in his own words, one sale away from homelessness for years at a stretch.

What changed his life was not a windfall. It was a question. One afternoon, sitting in his car between cold calls, he asked himself why some salespeople in his company were earning ten times what he was earning while doing roughly the same work. So he walked into the office of the top producer and asked him directly what he did differently. The man told him. Tracy went out and did it. His sales went up. He asked someone else. He read sales books at night in the boarding house. He listened to audio programs in his car. He attended every seminar he could afford. The pattern of asking, applying, and observing the result became, in his telling, the first deliberate habit of his adult life. Everything that came after, the eighty languages, the eighty countries, the eighty books, the consulting work with hundreds of corporations, traces back to that small repeated act in a parked car between calls.