Million Dollar Habits summary

Introduction

Million Dollar Habits by Brian Tracy. This book explains how your daily habits determine your level of success, health, and happiness, and provides actionable steps to develop positive behaviors. With 100 billion cells, each with up to 20 ,000 connections to other neurons, your brain is an incredible organ. You can likely think more thoughts than all the molecules in the universe.

Your capability is endless, but in your lifetime you're unlikely to achieve anything close to your true potential. Why is that? Well, you didn't get the manual, and you've had to learn by intuition. The problem is, that's just not good enough if you want to be successful.

In this summary of Brian Tracy's Million Dollar Habits, you'll learn exactly what it is that makes some people more successful than others, and what you need to do to be successful, too. First, though, you need to determine what success means to you. Tracy defines it as the ability to live your life the way you want to do it. Although we're all different, deep down Tracy posits we share four fundamental goals.

A need to be fit and healthy, to have great relationships, to enjoy what we're doing and to achieve financial independence. Give yourself a quick audit in each of those areas right now. Mark yourself between 1, low and 10, high for each. How'd you do?

Regardless of where you're at, we're about to look at the habits you need to cultivate in order to improve those scores, the Million Dollar Habits. The good news is that anyone and everyone can learn these habits, including you. So, let's get those brain cells fired up and learning.

Reprogramming for Success

Reprogram yourself for success. Humans have a problem. We've all developed our own unique self-concept that acts as the main program of our subconscious.

We've recorded everything that's ever happened to us, every feeling we've ever had, and every emotion we've ever felt, and all of these influence how we behave. This self-concept we've created determines our effectiveness and performance. In each area of your life, you have a mini self-concept. Unfortunately, once you've developed that, you always behave in accordance with it.

So, although you have the potential to be, for instance, a great linguist, if your self-concept is telling you you're terrible at languages, you're likely never going to become the multi-linguist you crave to be. Your mini self-concept held you back. If you truly want to achieve more in a particular area, the key is to increase your mini self-concept in that area. But how exactly can you do that?

Well, you need to reprogram yourself by examining three parts of your self-concept, your self-ideal, your self-image, and your self-esteem. Your self-ideal is the ideal image you have of your best self. It's a combination of your hopes and dreams together with the qualities and virtues you wish you had. High performers have a clear picture of who they want to be.

When you've developed your own positive self-ideal, you move faster toward becoming that person. How you see yourself on the inside, your self-image, affects how you perform outside. Positive and productive inside equals positive and productive outside. If you see yourself as unpopular or insecure, your outside persona will reflect the same.

To overcome any negative self-image aspects, fill your mind with positive images of yourself performing at your very best and hold them there. Then, relax. When you have to perform later, your subconscious will remember. Finally, your self-esteem is the emotional component of your self-concept and perhaps the most important part.

It's how much you like yourself. Your whole life revolves around it. Every positive experience raises it, and every negative experience lowers it. The gap between your self-ideal and your self-image also affects it.

When your current performance is consistent with your ideal, your self-esteem goes up. When it's inconsistent, it drops. Having a very clear self-ideal improves your performance, makes your performance closer to your ideal, and as a result, boosts your self-esteem. Even something simple like repeating, I like myself boosts your self-esteem measurably.

Never underestimate the power of words. Try it. You'll soon feel more confident and happier with yourself. Why do you need to do this at all?

While having higher self-esteem helps you develop the million-dollar habits that you'll need to release your full potential. Change your self-concept, and you'll change your reality. In the next chapters, we'll look at the four fundamental goals we discussed in the intro, starting with the habits you need to become fit and healthy.