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Gary Keller Quantum Leap Transcript Excerpts

Unleashing the Extraordinary You

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Contents

What does success look like? ........................................................................................................................ 3

Making Good Decisions............................................................................................................................. 3

The Science of Success .............................................................................................................................. 5

If Time Equated to Success Everyone Would be Equal ............................................................................. 6

Success Is Sequential Not Simultaneous ................................................................................................... 7

FOLLOW THE PATH OF MASTERY .................................................................................................................. 8

Self-Mastery & Becoming a Black Belt In Life ........................................................................................... 8

CRUSH IT ON YOUR 20% ............................................................................................................................. 10

Focus on the 20% That Matters Most ..................................................................................................... 10

STORY: Steve Kerr ................................................................................................................................... 11

STORY: Shaq ............................................................................................................................................ 12

Look At It This Way ................................................................................................................................. 13

Going Small – The Domino Effect ........................................................................................................... 13

STORY: Colonel Sanders KFC ................................................................................................................... 16

STORY: Dr. Joyce Brothers ...................................................................................................................... 16

Lie: Everything Matters Equally .............................................................................................................. 16

Mastery - Focus on Your 20% ................................................................................................................. 17

Procrastination ........................................................................................................................................ 20

MOVE FROM “E” TO “P” ............................................................................................................................. 22

Move From “E” to “P” on the 20% .......................................................................................................... 22

BECOME LEARNING-BASED ......................................................................................................................... 26

Becoming A Learning-Based Individual ................................................................................................... 26

CHOOSE TO BE ACCOUNTABLE ................................................................................................................... 27

Live the Cycle of Accountability .............................................................................................................. 27

THE MINDSET OF SUCCESS ......................................................................................................................... 30

6 Keys To Abundance .............................................................................................................................. 30

Gary’s AHA .............................................................................................................................................. 30

We Fail Our Way To Success ................................................................................................................... 32

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN ACTION AND HABIT ............................................................................................... 35

Six Life Discipline Areas ........................................................................................................................... 35

#1: Self Discipline .................................................................................................................................... 35

#2: Spiritual Discipline ............................................................................................................................. 38


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#3: Physical Discipline ............................................................................................................................. 38

#4: Time Discipline .................................................................................................................................. 40

#5: Money Discipline ............................................................................................................................... 46

#6: Growth Discipline .............................................................................................................................. 48

NO ONE SUCCEEDS ALONE ......................................................................................................................... 50

5 Key Relationships ................................................................................................................................. 50

1 – Mentors & Role Models .................................................................................................................... 50

2 – The Person You Determine Wealth For ............................................................................................ 52

Your Job Is Not Your Financial Wealth ................................................................................................ 54

3 – Love ................................................................................................................................................... 56

4 – Top Five Wealth Determiners ........................................................................................................... 56

5 – Top 25 Allied Resources .................................................................................................................... 58


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What does success look like?

MAKING GOOD DECISIONS

Okay, we talked about being the architect of your life, how that becomes the

cornerstone. And the reason that’s so important is because it allows you to use that as criteria

for all your decisions, right? If you don’t know who you are, then why are you doing what you

do? Remember the question I asked you, whose life are you leading? Well if you haven’t

decided who you are, and I don’t mean at some, you know, shave your head, sit on a

mountaintop, burn incense and chant for ten hours kind of a find yourself. I’m just talking about

you making a conscious decision. I’m going to be this person and I’m going to stand for this and

I’m going to behave this way in the world. And this is what I want my life to be about.

If you don’t make those decisions, then what’s your criteria for all the decisions you’re

going to make about what you’re going to do tomorrow morning? What’s your criteria? You

don’t have any, do you? Sounds good. Let’s do it. Awesome, dude. Let’s go do that. Yeah, I’m

going to do that. Wow. I don’t know. Yeah.

There’s a wonderful phrase written by a famous author that said, “leading quiet lives of

desperation.” I will assure you, you don’t want to ever emotionally understand what he meant.

But if you don’t decide who you are, you will. You will discover the anguish of that statement.

And it usually shows up later in life. They even coined a phrase called midlife crisis. Oddly

enough, I’ve mathematically passed that midpoint most likely, okay? I never had one. And I

think the reason why it never showed up in my life was because I kind of had decided who I was

going to be and I was kind of living my life. So there was no moment where I went, oh man. I

could have had a great marriage. Oh had one. Man, I could have had a family. Had one. Had a

cool dog. Had five. You know. Right? Could have made money. Made money. Could have built a

great career. Did that. You see my point?

Now I’m not using that as any sort of measuring stick for you to measure against. I’m

just sharing with you, that as I sit here today, if I drop dead in a few minutes, I will have no

regret. And at the end of the day…just write it down…you want to be able to say I’m glad I did,

not I wish I had. If you can get in touch with that moment in your life when you take your last


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breath, if you’re conscious…you can say I’m glad I did. See you won’t regret the things that you

did.

Here’s the odd thing. And you’re not old enough to have a lot of these. If you have a lot

of these, go see the doctor or something. But you shouldn’t be having moments where you’re

thinking, “I should have done it.” You shouldn’t have had amazing failures yet. But what you’re

going to discover as you live your life is, you fail your way to success. You don’t succeed your

way. You fail your way. Okay? And it’s in the failing that you grow. That’s how you grow is you

make mistakes and you grow from it, okay? So at the end of the day, if you make decisions and

you fail but you grow, the odd thing is, you won’t ever look back later and fully regret that

decision.

Now if you had told me that I would not have regretted marrying the wrong woman

right out of college, someone who had affairs on me and ended up taking every penny I had

and putting me in the poorhouse so that I literally had to dig my way out in my 20s, I would

have said, no I think I’m going to be pretty angry and upset my whole life if that happens to me.

And yet I can sit here today and tell you honestly, I wouldn’t change any of that. Because it was

that failure that actually had me correct the problem that it caused it. And it allowed me to

then go make great decisions going forward, right? I don’t think I would have ever recognized

Mary, the absolute love of my life. I don’t think I would have recognized her. Never dated a

blonde, not that I have anything against blondes. Never dated a blonde. I mean I can go through

a whole list. She doesn’t like classic rock. We are so incompatible on a check sheet it’s absurd

and yet so we’re so compatible as friends and partners in life, it’s ridiculous. Completely

unpredictable. But what happened was, I made such a horrible mistake, that I all of a sudden

woke up and realized I’d been looking for the wrong things, going the wrong direction and it

was that failure that caused me to then have the relationship of a lifetime. Does that make

sense?

So making mistakes is not a bad thing if you survive them. Okay? You’re going to fail

your way forward. At the end of the day you’re not going to regret the things you’ve done, even

if they were failures. That’s the point I’m trying to tell you. What are you going to end up

regretting? Yeah the girl you didn’t ask out or the boy you didn’t ask out, or the trip you didn’t


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take or the approach you didn’t take, or the friend you didn’t make, or the decision. It’ll start

racking up if you’re not careful. You’ll literally start going down a list and over time going, man, I

have so many regrets and I’m 23 years old. The way you fix that is to figure out who you are.

Make a decision.

You know what stops most people? What stops most people, even at your age, is they

go but what if I make bad choices about who I want to be and what my values are? At the end

of the day, making a choice is the key. You can change it tomorrow, right? Because I get asked

all the time, well if I decide now what my mission and my vision for my life is and what my

values are, I’m so young, that could change. I’m going, yeah, it probably will change a little bit.

So what? What’s wrong with that? Now if every year I see you, you’ve changed them you’re a

weirdo. That’s just weird. But over the course of your life, if you decide that you want to

sharpen that, lessen it, broaden it and redefine based on experiences and what your heart’s

telling you, that’s awesome. That’s definitely going to go happen. If you lead a normal life,

that’s going to happen and that will be fine. So don’t fear making a decision today. Fear not

making one. Right? Because the more you commit yourself today to being somebody that

you’ve decided to be, the closer you are to being the person that you’ve dreamed of being.

Does that make sense?

THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS

So one of the things that I want to talk to you about is science. Do you believe in

science? Okay so you believe in the laws; what we would call the laws of science or the laws of

nature. You believe in gravity. But do you see gravity?

No. You see the effects of gravity. Do you believe in air? Do you see air? No. You see the effects

of air.

So what’s interesting, is that you absolutely base every minute and second of your life

on gravity and air, two things that you’ve never seen. But you believe in them because you’ve

seen the effect. Well there is the science of success and it’s as real and as grave as gravity.

Okay? You can’t see the science of success. But you can see the effects.


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And one of the biggest challenges I have with people is when I start talking about the

science of success and the laws of success, what crud do they give me back? Well that’s just

your opinion, Gary. And I say, “Well do you think that gravity’s an opinion? You can’t see it, can

you? No. Well why are you calling the laws of success an opinion?”

It’s not an opinion. It’s a researched conclusion that if you behave this way, this is the

result you get. And it’s no different than the science of nature. Yet most people are unwilling to

give themselves over to the laws of of success. They just won’t do it. They just want to sit there

and say well that’s your opinion and everyone’s entitled to their own. And I’d say you’re exactly

correct. By the way, if you’re my competitor I say, “You’re right, hold that opinion; just hold

that. You’re absolutely the smartest guy I’ve ever met. You just keep thinking that way.” If

you’re my friend, I’m going to call you an idiot. I’m going to say, get your act together. You need

to understand that people that have lived before you.

And you know who made this statement to me? Walstein Smith, who was the head of

the Real Estate Department at Baylor University. He turned to me one day and he said you’re a

pretty smart guy, Gary. I worked for him part-time my senior year. He said, you’re a pretty

smart guy, but I want to tell you something, kid. People have lived before you and you might

want to study what they know before you start telling me what you know. Whoa. I’ve had never

gotten that. I mean it’s totally right. People do live before you.

IF TIME EQUATED TO SUCCESS EVERYONE WOULD BE EQUAL

When I first started when I was 21 years old. I got there at six thirty in the morning. I

viewed myself as a minor physical being having a major physical experience. So I got there at six

thirty in the morning. My goal was to beat everybody to work. My goal was, when the owner of

the company who ran the largest real estate company in Austin got to work, I wanted him to

see my license plate. That’s so stupid. That’s a worthless pursuit by the way. And definitely, it

worked because he knew who I was, you know because he could never beat me. I’d be sitting at

my desk so wiped out, you know.

I stopped that foolishness after a while. If time equated to success, everybody would be

equal, because everybody has the same amount of time. The amount of time you put in will not


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determine your success. It’s what you do with the time you put in. Everybody has the same

amount of time. You have 24 hours in a day. So it’s not how many hours you work; it’s the time

you give it.

SUCCESS IS SEQUENTIAL NOT SIMULTANEOUS

And there’s just a simple truth here. Just remember this. Extraordinary success is

sequential. It’s not simultaneous. Did you hear that? In other words, when you see people that

have a lot, they got it over time. When you see people that know a lot, they learned it over

time. When you see people that can do a lot, they learn to do it over time. Okay? So what they

did was they lived a sequential life. They built and built and built, right? I can sit here and teach

you for a week and never look at a note. Do you think I could do that when I was your age? No,

of course not. Do you think my understanding of the seven great religions was that way when I

was 21? No, not at all.

I can literally teach you anything you want to know about nutrition from soluble fiber to

mono and saturated fats. What do you want to talk about? Oh by the way, I can teach you

about everything you need to know about business. Okay? And I don’t need a chart or a graph

or a handout to do it. I can teach you just looking at you. You think I learned that overnight? Of

course not. I learned it over time. You sequentially build over time to learn it.

When we say sequential, what are we talking about? What’s that word? Sequential

means one at a time. Now, it was so funny. After I wrote the book, The ONE Thing, what was

interesting is that, immediately you had people say, this is a crock. I mean how can there be

only one thing? I thought it was real funny because it doesn’t say the only one thing. The word

only never appears in the book. But it was interesting on Amazon how many people attacked

this book saying, well it’s stupid, you can’t do only one thing. I never said it. They didn’t read

the book. Had they read the book they would have know that. But I never said it because that

would be stupid. It’s not one thing. It’s one thing at a time. Do you hear that? That’s all it

means.


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FOLLOW THE PATH OF MASTERY

SELF-MASTERY & BECOMING A BLACK BELT IN LIFE

So let’s talk about this idea of self-mastery and becoming a black belt at something in

life. A black belt is the rating of expertise and competence. So look at this. A white belt at some

point knows essentially and exactly what a black belt knows. Okay? Think about a guitarist. At

some point, anyone who plays a guitar and takes on, let’s say the minor blue scale, knows the

minor blue scale. So what is the difference between the person who is the white belt at the

minor blue scale and the person who’s the black belt? It’s their level of expertise and

understanding. They’re just further along the path. So when an individual says teach me

something new without having mastered the basics of a chosen subject, they’re in essence

saying I’m not into self-mastery. I’m not into being a black belt at something.

The greatest fulfillment in life is possible when you focus first on mastering the basics of

self in relation to a subject you’ve chosen for your life. And in continuing that process, I’m

focusing on mastering the basics of the other things I wish to master.

I woke up one day and said to myself, you know what? I’m going to die being in the real

estate business. My aha was, that it’s kind of like trying to burn a leaf. The only way you can

turn a leaf into fire is if you get a magnifying glass, get it just right and hold it. If you did this,

what would happen? You would start a fire. You can never start a fire if you keep moving

around. The only way you start a fire is by concentrating. I’m sure you’ve tried it. We’ve all tried

to burn stuff with a magnifying glass, right?

Your life is the same way. If you concentrate your life on something until you start a fire,

you’re never going to have any excitement in your life in terms of what mastery brings you. You

with me? It’s a real simple idea. And you’re going to have the opportunity to move that around

if you want. I made the decision professionally that I would simply stay in real estate and that I

would die being the master of that and I would just get better and better and better and better

and better at that. And I get real estate. I get it really well.

If I were you, I’d go ahead and pick something now. If you’re in college, I would assume

that the best goal that you could give yourself is to whatever subjects you’re studying, make the


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best grade possible to be honest with you. I would make that the goal. My son screams and

says what does the grade have to do with anything? The grade has to do nothing with nothing.

What it reflects however is whether or not you committed to mastery. Have you learned what

it takes to put a magnifying glass on something and hold it until it burns? And if you’re telling

me that you’re going to come out of college without knowing how to start a fire, you’ve missed

the most important lesson you can learn in becoming an adult…how to start fires.

If you’re in the classroom, you’re wasting your time if you don’t give full effort. The

grade’s not the point. The grade is simply going to be a reflection of how well you mastered

that subject. That make sense? That’s all it is.

The biggest challenge that a student athlete has is what? They have to two “one things”.

As a student they have to master the grade. And they automatically agreed to master the sport

that they signed on for. I got to tell you, a student athlete has got to be the toughest thing on

the planet because they’ve committed to master two things in the same amount of time that

other students have only agreed to master one thing if anything. It’s tough. I don’t know how

they do it. I honestly don’t know how they do it. Most don’t, by the way. Because they just

master the sport and then they don’t go to the pros. And now they have a worthless degree

they mastered, right? Yeah. That’s why the graduation rate of a student athlete should be the

focus of all universities, right? Because what are the odds? How many of the students are

actually going to go on to professional and make a living from the sport? How many? In any

given year at Baylor University, how many of the basketball players are going to go on and earn

a living from basketball? One in ten years, maybe.

Vinnie Johnson was there when I was at Baylor and he played for the Detroit Pistons.

Won a couple of championships. He was amazing. I’m not aware of anybody else during my

four years that did anything. So we know there was at a least 50 or 60 players who didn’t

professionally. Now I hope they graduated. But they had to master two things, right? There you

go. And that’s the slight cheat of the student athlete; that they get cheated just a little bit. You

know what I’m saying? That’s the struggle of that that challenge for them.


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CRUSH IT ON YOUR 20%

FOCUS ON THE 20% THAT MATTERS MOST

So when we talk about the laws of success, the science of success, I want you to

understand that all we’re talking about is observed results. People behaved this way and then

we can come out with statistical probabilities based upon that behavior. We’re going to get

certain results. They call that the science of success. When I tell you about the 80/20 Principle,

one of the models that I follow, the mistake that you would make is thinking that’s an opinion I

have. The 80/20 Principle is a law.

There was a named Alfredo Pareto who made it his “one thing”. He studied that his

entire life. It was his observation. And it started off with wealth. He noticed that, in Italy, the

majority of wealth was in the minority of the hands. And then he started studying other

countries, right, and discovered it held true. Not only in other countries, but it held true over

time. By the way, you’ll soon discover this. You can take all the wealth in the world away from

all the people that have it and give it to all the people that didn’t have it, and how long do you

think it would take before it’d flip back? Not long. Why? Because the people that didn’t have it,

didn’t know how they got it, so they didn’t know how to keep it. And the people that got it

know how they got it and they’d go get it again.

There’s one of the big challenges of trying to create some sort of balance between the

classes of income in society. That’s the challenge. If I’m going to help a person who doesn’t

have it, the first thing I need is for you to want it. If you don’t want it and I give it to you, what

happens to that? What are you going to do with it? You’ll squander it. That’s the problem.

You’ll squander it because you don’t understand it. You don’t appreciate it. So there are certain

laws you have to buy into regarding success.

I would encourage you at your age just buy into what I’m fixing to tell you and then test

it over time. Make it your model today and then try to prove it wrong. I’m right on this by the

way because these are not my opinions. No, right here, these are not my opinions. These are

laws. Now you can build more laws into your model. I just have six.


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So this 80/20 Principle simply says this: 20% of your effort will give you 80 percent of

our results. Now said a different way, perfection is overrated. In other words, you have to be a

100% great, do you? So if you’re going to work eight hours, what’s 20% of eight hours? Less

than two hours? Great. Yeah. Let’s just call it two hours, 25%. Okay? So if two hours out of eight

every day, you’re unfreaking believable. You will slay the world. The other six hours you can be

the biggest goof off on the planet. I have proven that personally. No seriously. If you could give

four hours a day, you would be amazing. You could work another five or six and do whatever

you want and it won’t matter. That’s the crazy thing. Most people don’t understand that.

The 80/20 Principle is a big deal. So what it says is choose something you’re going to

master. At each point of your life, there should be something that you’re mastering. And by the

way, I don’t mean you’re changing that every year. By definition, if you’re choosing a new one

every year, you aren’t mastering anything. There’s the challenge.

If you haven’t given a purpose to your life, then you may end up constantly flip-flopping

on what you’re going to master because you’re just unsettled about it. Do you hear that? The

80/20 Principle is a big issue. It’s essentially telling you… and it’s counterintuitive. It’s very

counterintuitive. It’s essentially telling you that you don’t have to do everything to master

something. You just have to figure out what it takes to to be a master at that and give that all

the time that it needs. If I’m a basketball player and I can hit a three point shot with 40%

accuracy, am I going to make a living in the NBA? Oh yeah I am. You bet I am.

STORY: STEVE KERR

Just check out the name Steve Kerr for the Chicago Bulls, right? What’s interesting about

that is Steve Kerr was the best set-shot in the NBA when he played in his heyday with the

Chicago Bulls. In other words, a set-shot is when your feet are planted, aimed at the basket and

there’s nobody around you. In other words, he couldn’t create a shot; but if you got him open

where no one was around him, he was the most accurate shooter in the NBA. And he happened

to play on a on a basketball team with Michael Jordan. But Michael Jordan didn’t trust him and

he wouldn’t give him the ball.


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That first championship that the Bulls won, that Michael Jordan won, Phil Jackson was

the coach. Phil made a film, and it’s a very famous film. He took Michael Jordan playing with

three guys on him or two guys on him and spliced it with Steve Kerr wide open standing there

with no one around him. Jordan got the hint. When the Bulls won their first championship with

Michael Jordan, who hit the winning shot? Steve Kerr. Yeah. Kerr hit it. Michael Jordan could

never won those championships without Kerr. No one succeeds alone. Couldn’t have done it.

STORY: SHAQ

I’m telling you right now, just master something and you’re good. Now if you master

multiple things, that’s even better. What you don’t understand is why Shaq never mastered a

free throw. Now you can’t diminish the amazing career he had. Don’t get me wrong. And

actually it’s a blast listening to his commentary in basketball. I really enjoy him. I don’t know if

you know this about Shaq, but when he got out of college, he intended to earn 100 million

dollars his first year. Oh yeah. And you know how he did it? The thing about Shaq, Shaq not

only was a basketball player, but he was the second biggest shoe endorser behind Michael

Jordan. I mean he revived Reebok singlehandedly. Okay? Made a movie. Remember, he was in

the movies, okay? He was a rapper. And had it all planned out and that was his vision.

His deal wasn’t, I’m going to play basketball and I’m going to leverage that into one of

the biggest endorsement contracts possible. And when he came out of college within that first

year, he signed 100 million dollars, not that he earned it in one year, but he signed it for 100

million dollars between all those different areas. Amazing, huh? And he couldn’t hit a free

through. Didn’t need to. See it frustrated me, right? I’m frustrated watching this going dude, go

make a thousand shots a day. This is, the Hack-a-Shaq is driving me nuts, you know. But at the

end of the day, I think Shaq would look at me and say, I think you turned out okay. And then he

would hold up all his rings on his finger, right and ask, how many you got? You see what I’m

saying? I mean he’s the perfect example of perfection is overrated and it drove everyone crazy.

Right? Yeah.

They’d done the research on this. The Hack-a-Shaq never works. Isn’t that interesting?

They still employ it and now it’s called the Hack-a-Dwight-Howard in the Houston Rockets, but


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it doesn’t work. They’ve done the statistics. It actually doesn’t work. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah you

don’t win the majority of time when you do it. I don’t know why.

LOOK AT IT THIS WAY

So at the end of the day, the 80/20 Principle says this: 20% of the products will

determine 80% of your profit. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple they had over 100 products

that they were making and Jobs whittled it down to ten. When you look at the success of Apple

today, Apple’s biggest success isn’t desktops. Their desktops still only have almost nothing of

the business. Where do they make their money? Well actually they invented this thing called

the iPhone, iPad and all of that.

They started with the iPod, went to the iPhone, created the iPad, right, and then they

wrap it all up in iTunes. And they freed the world to write apps for their programs and made it

all proprietary and they just sucked the world in. Isn’t that crazy? How many things did they do

right to create the most valuable company in the world? Not many. Not many.

Yeah, so look at it this way. 20% of your efforts are going to give you 80% of your

results. So if you go to the gym and you want to build muscle and you just start throwing

weights around, that’s not going to be nearly as effective as what? Going right into it. I mean

it’s been proven that if you wanted to build muscle, it’s going to take you more than 30 or 45

minutes a day. Okay? But, you can’t go in there and just do anything, right? For 30 to 45

minutes what do you have to do? Be very purposeful about what it is you’re going to do, about

how you’re going to exercise, if you want the result. Does that make sense?

GOING SMALL – THE DOMINO EFFECT

So here’s a question for you. I posed this to you earlier. If everyone has the same

number of hours in a day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than others?

We have the same hours. Every day you and I have the same hours. So why are people getting

more done than others? Why are people getting less done than others? It’s a great question,

isn’t it?


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So here’s the answer. And I’d call it just going small. It’s ignoring all the things you could

do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding

the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s

realizing that extraordinarily results are directly determined by how narrow you make your

focus.

It’s called the domino effect. And what you want is to live a geometric progression in

your life in the things that matter. Okay? So here’s an interesting thing about the dominos. And

this is a scientific fact. A domino can knock down one and a half times its size if you set them

beside each other. Does that make sense? So if I take a domino, it can knock down up to one

and a half times its size. So if I have a domino that’s two inches, it can knock down a three-inch

domino. Does that make sense?

Here’s the crazy thing about that. I asked my research team to take that out for me a

little bit. Show me what that looks like. And here’s what it looks like. At the 18th domino, you’re

knocking down the Leaning Tower. At the 23rd domino, you’re knocking down the Eiffel Tower.

At the 31st domino, you are literally 3,000 feet above Mount Everest. And at the 57th domino,

you’re literally almost touching the moon. It’s called a geometric progression. It’s like if you

took a penny and doubled it every day, how much money would you have at the end of the

month? 10.2 million dollars. Yeah. And it’s called the amazing power of compounding.

And again, people that have extraordinary success understand leverage. They

understand compounding. Most people don’t even know that. They don’t know the answer to

that. They don’t realize the truth of this. And because they don’t know it, they don’t put it to

use. People that have very big lives, get it. They understand that. They understand that what

you do today is actually a domino run. You line things up. You go to the end in mind. You work

backwards. You line them up and then you flail away at that first domino four hours a day every

day and you don’t look up. You just hit it. That’s what you do.

Where you mess up is when you’re moving that magnifying glass and you’re not giving

four hours a day or three hours minimum to that thing, because you don’t trust that you’ve

lined them up. You don’t realize this domino is the key to everything you’re going to get. Don’t


15

realize it. And because you don’t, you haven’t thought it through and trusted it, you’re not

flailing away at it. Right?

Right now I would bet in 99% of your cases, your study habit and the grade you get is

the key domino for you right now in your life more than anything else. Why? Because when you

get out, based on what you’ve learned, how you can learn, or the grades you make, will

determine who’s willing to talk to you. You with me?

Now if you’ve if you’ve bypassed all that and you still expect to have an extraordinarily

life, no problem. You’re just behind the eight ball. Now you need to get ahead of it. And by the

time you’re 30, if you haven’t figured that out, you’re going to settle into somewhat of a rut.

Now it doesn’t mean it always has to stay that way. The real estate business is an example.

What’s interesting is, in the real estate business, you’d be shocked at how many multi-

millionaires come into our industry when they’re 40 or 50 years old. And usually it’s women.

And what’s happened is they’ve raised a family, they’ve raised a husband, they gave up their

career for maybe 20 years let’s say for that and now all of a sudden they’re 40 something years

old or 50 years old and they need college money or they need career satisfaction and or they

want a bigger life than their spouse had provided. And they come into the real estate business

and they are highly motivated. They got a chip on their shoulder and they’ve entered an

industry that has no known ceiling to income. In other words, you don’t get raises. You don’t

get bonuses. You get paid for the results that you achieve.

They come into this industry, and holy cow, they just nail it. So don’t think for a second

that I’m telling you that there’s a death sentences here and that your life is completely defined.

What I’m saying is that you’ve created roadblocks that will take extraordinary effort to

overcome. What you would prefer to do is not continue to put roadblocks in your life. What you

continue to do is it gets easier and easier and easier, not harder and harder and harder. Does

that make sense? Because I don’t think for a second that you could screw up for ten years and

then your life is ruined forever.


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STORY: COLONEL SANDERS KFC

You know Colonel Sanders is an interesting story. When he retired in his 60s, he was

broke. I mean he was on Social Security. And the story or legend is that he went out to commit

suicide and couldn’t do it. And the only thing that he’d mastered was how to cook chicken. He

was a short order cook. So he took his recipe for cooking chicken and he went to restaurants

and he would say, let me cook my chicken and you cook yours. Then you choose what you like

better. Well they chose his. And he said, great, I’ll charge you a penny a bird. That’s how he did

it. About 15 years later or so, he’s teaching at a university and they ask him how rich he was

and he said, well let’s put it this way, if I want it, I buy it. So be real careful right, about you with

me?

STORY: DR. JOYCE BROTHERS

Wonderful story there with Dr. Joyce Brothers. I don’t know if you ever heard this story

but Dr. Joyce Brothers. She was in school and she was also working to help her husband

through school and the family needed money. And at that time, there was a game show, The

$54,000 Question. And what she noticed was the people that got on the show were people that

were experts in something quirky. So she became an expert in boxing. And when she

interviewed on the show, here was this matronly looking individual who was you know… you

have to think about the era about how this all looked, right? It was the black and white TV era.

And she’s a boxing expert. Well the cool thing is she got on the show and she won the money.

She went all the way to the top and won the whole prize and then used that money to leverage

herself and went onto become Dr. Joyce Brothers.

So you need to be really careful. I’m not telling you any of these are death sentences.

What I’m telling you is how to prevent roadblocks from showing up in your life, because it’s

tough to overcome. So what we want is a geometric progression.

LIE: EVERYTHING MATTERS EQUALLY

The first one is the reason you buy into the idea that you could do all these things.

Because you think that everything matters equally. But everything doesn’t matter equally. It


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doesn’t. How do we know that? We already talked about it. The 80/20 Rule. What is the 80/20

Rule? Remember it’s a law of success. It’s not an opinion. The 80/20 Rule tells you that things

don’t matter equally. You can do two things and get different results. You better decide what

you do. Have you ever heard the word priority? Say yes.

Have you ever heard anyone say I know what my priorities are? How can you? What

does the word priority mean? How can you have a multiple one thing? So there again you have

people not even understanding what they’re saying. They say they know what their priorities

are. And you say, really, how can you have priorities? Folks, you can’t have priorities. At any

moment, you can only have one priority. Now you can talk about over my life and over time I

know what priorities will be. But when we’re talking about achievement and they’re talking

about getting things done.

You can’t have priorities. It defies logic. In the dictionary the word priorities should say

impossible, because you can’t do it. So what we know is that things don’t matter equally, right?

We know this.

MASTERY - FOCUS ON YOUR 20%

If you study success, which I have made it a practice of mine to study it and help people

figure out that thing that matters most. Again, people always struggle with the idea of one

thing. And I never said only one. Research doesn’t say only one. What it says is one at a time. So

at any moment, there should be something you should be giving three to four hours to. Does

that make sense? When you wake up, there should be something. And it should be the first

domino. What’s the domino staring in front of you today? Whatever that is, you give it three to

four hours. Right? And we talked about this. This is why the student athlete has a problem.

Why? They have two one things. They have two dominos. They have the domino of school and

they have the domino of athletics. That’s rough. Right? You got to have a lot of empathy and

appreciation for that kind of commitment. That’s really tough.

The other thing is, just as a sidebar, between the ages of zero to 18 is when you have

control to some degree over what the kids spend their three to four hours a day at. Which

means that you can teach them over time to have all the life skills that they need, all the sports


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skills that they need, or not. You get a choice, right? Because once you get into college, if you

decided you wanted to take up tennis and you never played tennis before, but you wanted to

get really good, how many hours would you have to give it and would you have the hours to do

that?

You want to take up golf but you never played golf before. Now you’re 20 years old. Do

you think you have the time to do that? Now you’ve become a student athlete, haven’t you?

And if you want to be really good at it, how much do you have to give it? See you have the time

over a lifetime to master how many things? If you started mastering something and gave it four

hours a day and it takes 10,000 hours of pure mastery, and you’re going to live to 100 and you

started at age 20… test question. How many things can you actually master? The law of

numbers says a maximum eight. There’s your number. Now how many things do you think most

people master?

You run into them as adults. You see the promise in them as children. You see the

sparkle and the excitement at 22 and then you run into them at 50. And you say what have you

mastered? Show me. Get out and show me. Show me the thing that you mastered. What do

you think you see? Well what you see is average. And you might even see above average. And

you could see very happy people. Remember, I’m not talking about being unhappy. Mastery

and happiness are two separate concepts. Most people, my experience is, are happy. Okay.

Why do we want to master something then?

Well that definitely gives you leverage. I say you want to do it because there’s another

side to life that you don’t experience if you don’t. It’d almost be like trying to tell someone who

doesn’t have a kid what it’s like to have a kid. Trust me, if you haven’t had a child or raised a

child, you do not understand. You could say all the things I’ve decided not to. And that’s cool

and that’s fine. But trust me, you don’t know a dang gone thing about children if you didn’t

have one and raise it as yours. You really don’t. You can’t. It’s an impossible thing.

So I’m not saying that people are unhappy. What I’m saying is… and remember this is a

class about leading life to its fullest. This is not a class about leading life to its least. That’d be in

another room. You can leave now if you want to go to it. But if you want to get the most of it,

then you’re going to pick things and master them, right? I got out of college and all of a sudden


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I looked up. I get in the real estate business and I discovered that what launches a real estate

sales career is lead generation. That’s it. After you’ve learned the skills and the data, all the

knowledge and data about the market and housing, you’ve learned all of that. You have all this

knowledge and you’re good. Now what’s the only problem? Finding someone who wants to do

business with you. So you look up and you go okay. I have to do two things. I have 20 percent of

my time. I have to keep getting smarter about the industry. Training, right? The other 80% I’m

going to do what?

How many people are in Keller Williams? Anybody know? I think it’s like 116,000 today.

We’re headed towards 200,000. I’ll tell you the reason why that number exists. It’s because,

from the day I got into the industry I understood that. That’s the one thing. All of the other

dominos only get to fall if you hit those numbers. If you don’t hit those numbers, all the other

dominos just don’t happen, right? So think of it as an organization that has its lead generation

foot nailed to the pedal. And no matter how hard they try to take it off of that three to four

hour a day pedal, we don’t let them. We make that the issue. Does that make sense?

So you’re going to get out of college. Now if you came out and you started mastering

something and then you gave it ten years, what would your life look like? Well it might look like

me. Number one in your city. I’ve been number one in my city since 29 years old. Okay? I won’t

ever be number two. Not in my life. Okay? But how did that happen? Well it happened because

I got it and I said, three to four hours and I’m going to do that domino. Got it?

What’s really cool about bringing discipline to yourself so that you develop a

habit…Remember, we talked about this in our class last time. A lot of people walk around and

say I want to be self-disciplined. Well you need discipline because discipline is the bridge

between not doing something regularly and doing it regularly. Now if you do something

regularly what’s that called? Yes, a habit. So what is discipline? Discipline is finding a way to do

it until it becomes a habit. And so when someone says they have self-discipline, what they’re

really saying is they have the ability to self-discipline, to discipline them self to do something

until it becomes a habit. That really doesn’t happen. Unless you’re a miracle child, that doesn’t

happen at 20, 22, or even 30. Usually it takes another relationship that holds you accountable

to do that.


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PROCRASTINATION

By the way, procrastination is the law of the land. You will be a procrastinator your

whole life. Okay? Just don’t procrastinate on the one thing each that will matter most, right? In

whatever category. So again, if it’s exercise, make sure you do that every day. Don’t

procrastinate. Okay. In business, if you want your business career to go forward, you’re going to

have three to four hours of focus time on the thing that matters most, okay? Don’t

procrastinate that. All those other things, believe it or not, you can be horrible at and

procrastinate and people will yell at you, but you’ll still be amazingly successful.

Remember, when you see successful people at a level that you might aspire to be

professionally, financially, whatever, do not think they’re perfect. They’re succeeding in spite of

all the screw-ups, all the procrastination, all the not doing in the world. The reason why you’re

looking at them going man, I wouldn’t mind being, having that success for whatever the topic is

because they didn’t procrastinate what it took to do that. Does that make sense? So that’s my

point to you is that you can actually have an amazing life by just having half your day or I guess

half of your workday you know, from the time you wake up to about noon or one o’clock,

having that be tightly managed and focused. You could. Trust me.

I procrastinate things for years out. I mean literally, if I get to Monday and I’m supposed

to touch base with you but my priorities aren’t where they need to be. I’m blowing you off. I

will literally just push you back another week. Might send you a text or email that says hey

sorry, swamped. I’ll talk to you later. I have some people ashamedly that I have put off for at

least a year. I say talk to me next month and then they’ll email me and I go look at my schedule

and go. Talk to me next month. Talk to me next month. By the way, some of those people if

they came in this room would not describe me in glowing terms. I get that. But I’m not trying to

make their hit list you know of people that make them happy. Right? But I’m getting my work

done. I’m getting things that matter the most done. Does that make sense?

And thus, I am hitting, I’m hitting my numbers. I’m hitting my strides. I’m hitting it. Does

that make sense? Yeah. I’m happy to go hang out with you as long as it comes after hanging out

with my family. And if I do not feel like I’ve hung out with my family enough, I’m not going with

you. Even though I said I’m going to the game with you, I’m not going. I’ll literally strike it. Does


21

that make sense? Because in my values system it’s going to be God, family and everything after

that. And I’m going to live my life that way continually. I’m not going to violate it. Some of my

friends get frustrated with me every now and then because I’ll cancel. Now I do a little

combining and my wife hates this.

Like next Friday I’ve rented a bus and a gang of us are going down to San Antonio to the

Majestic Theater to see the Doobie Brothers, right? Right. And I’ve got the food ordered and

the drink ordered and we’ll just get on the big bus. But I got my family with me too just so you

know, right? I’m just combining all that. If that makes sense. I’m combining all that, right? And

then the following Monday night we’re renting a bus again. We’re going out to dinner

downtown and then we’re going to see The Who. There’s a big gang of us.


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MOVE FROM “E” TO “P”

MOVE FROM “E” TO “P” ON THE 20%

Let’s walk through this mentally. We’re agreeing to be purposeful. Right? We’re going to

pick out something we’re going to master. We’re going to give 80% of our time to just 20%.

Think about that. So when I said two hours a day, what I really want you to do is I want you to

give it four or five hours a day, right? In other words, what I want you to do is wake up in the

morning, and whatever you need to master, I want you to give it at least three to four hours a

day. That’s going to put you on a path of about ten years.

So if you start at 22, at 32 you’re going to be a master. Meaning that you’re going to be

in the upper one or two percent of whoever’s doing that thing. Now how do you think your

compensations going to be if you do that? Yeah, you’ll be the highest paid person on the planet

or you’ll be in the top one percent of all wage earners in that thing whatever it is.

Now when you look around the world, at your competition, this was the thing that really

got me excited. How many people you think in the real estate business in Austin, Texas were

willing to do that? See that was what was laughable. I got in and all of a sudden went holy cow.

It was more competitive playing backgammon than it was selling real estate. I mean it was a

bloodbath. I get into the real estate industry and I realize that people are just trying to get by.

And I went this is awesome. This is awesome. All I have to do is show up and for four hours a

day, I have to stay focused, four hours a day and do the thing that levers my success, whatever

that is for four hours a day. And that’s it. That’s all I had to do.

Now it’s easier said than done. I understand that because of distractions. So that’s it. So

E to P means simply this. You wake up in the morning. Everybody starts out with what we call

entrepreneurial effort. You start out with energy, drive, excitement and enthusiasm. Your effort

is natural and what we notice is that people get various levels of success as a result.

You see it early on in athletics because you see two kids and one kid is more gifted than

the other. Either they’re faster or can jump higher or throw harder, just naturally. The kid who

naturally is better gets picked to the first team and then gets all the practices with the first

team. So automatically, who’s going to get better naturally? That kid. And that’s going to


23

progress and progress and progress. And the kid who wasn’t gifted early on and didn’t

overcome that ultimately drops out and doesn’t play sports. It just happens naturally.

So if you don’t break that, what’s going to happen to you is you’re going to go out and

live your life and you’re going to attempt all these things and you’re going to do that

entrepreneurial. You’re just going to naturally do it. You’re going to naturally study and then

you’re going to look up and notice that the way you study gives you a C. And then you have a

decision to make.

If you want to get better, you’re not going to be able to study that way. And some

people naturally studied and got As. I had a guy that was my roommate at Baylor who was a

genius. He went on to be a very successful in Houston. I mean he’s a genius. And he’s over

there taking organic chemistry and all these things that people just scream about. And the night

before a test, he’s sitting around in his underwear, scratching his butt, reading his organic

chemistry book before the final exam and he goes in and makes a 93. I’m over there busting my

butt and I’m making a C+ on something. Seriously. It’s just killing me.

At that time I didn’t understand that the way I studied, the way I learned, the way I had

naturally learned to learn was not at the A level. And he had naturally figured out, that given his

intelligence, he could do that and get an A. I couldn’t do that and get an A. It wasn’t until I get

out of college and I’m now competing against a goal that I need, which is a minimum income to

live, and now all of a sudden it matters. Through trial and error, I quickly, all of a sudden,

discover the secret to how you can lever yourself better than the guy next to you. It wasn’t

complicated.

If I gave everybody a hammer, a saw, some wood and some nails and said build me a

doghouse, show me naturally how you do that. Wouldn’t it be interesting? We’d all come back

a day later and we’d be laughing, right? But there would be a couple of you that would really,

no pun intended, nail it. Right? I mean some of you would have an amazing doghouse. But not

the vast majority of us.

It’d be like if I gave each of you a recipe and the ingredients and said follow it and make

me a cake. Now you would think following a recipe and baking a cake would be that easy. But if

you’d never done it before, how do you think it’s going to turn out the first time?


24

So here’s my point. When you go through life and you do things, if it doesn’t matter to

what you’re trying to master, say toobla boobla and accept the level of success that you do it

at. In other words, I’ve never mastered building a doghouse and I never will. And if we have a

contest, I’m going to lose. And I’m okay with that. You’re going to hit a ceiling of achievement.

Natural only gets you so far.

Remember this, Michael Jordan was not drafted first in the NBA when he came out. Isn’t

that interesting? He was drafted number three. By the way, number one was my hero Hakeem

Olajuwon. Number two was a guy by name of Sam Bowie who never made success at anything.

Number three was Jordan.

Jordan didn’t even make the high school basketball team at first. He reinvented himself.

Nobody projected that Jordan would be who Jordan became.

How did Tiger Woods become so amazing? When did he start? Yeah. I think he was this

tall when he started, right? I still remember him on the Tonight Show when they brought him

on with Johnny Carson and hit golf shots on the Tonight Show. I mean, he started his mastery of

that many hours a day when he was how old? Sure. Well that’s why the people that nail success

first in mastery are usually musicians or athletes or actors. Why? Because those are the three

fields that people attack early on in their teens, right?

Michael Jackson was not an overnight success. I mean he’s nailing it at a young age, but

when did he start? Oh I think he got in his 10,000 hours by the time he was probably 17 or 18.

You with me? So that’s why you usually see athletes, actors and actresses and musicians hit

their 20s and those that are amazing are absolutely amazing because they put in the time and

the energy and they started when they were five or twelve. They put in the hours.

You’re going to come out of college and if you didn’t have one of those three, where did

you put in 10,000 hours on anything? Where did you break a ceiling from average to above

average in anything? That’s the challenge, right? And if you did it up until then, whatever it is

you choose, will that actually lever you now in the professional world? That’s the challenge of

the student athlete. Right? That’s the challenge of the high school athlete at anything. They give

the majority of their time to the pursuit of whatever the sport is. Now, if they don’t take away


25

the idea that you have to put in that number of hours mastering something, what’s that going

to do for them?

That was my big aha. I did not encourage my son to play organized sports and the

reason was because what I’d experienced is all the guys that did, didn’t play them later and

didn’t do anything with it. I encouraged him to go after individual sports. So if I invited my son

in here today and you wanted to shoot arrows, he’s going to be one of the top shots in this

room, right? At 220 yards he’ll hit the bullseye. If you want to shoot a bow and arrow, he’ll nail

that deer from as far away as you want to go.

If you want to ski, he’ll ski down backwards. If you want to wake surf, he’ll nail it, right?

If you want to ride horses, he can do it. If you want to fly fish, he’ll tie the fly, go stalk the fish,

and he’ll catch him and then he’ll skin him and cook them and eat him, right?

Any of those sports that you want to do from golf to that, that’s where we put all our

time in. So here he is at 23 and he now has all those activities for life. Why? Because I started

him at that age. And he used to yell at me. I’d put a golf club in his hand and he’d throw it back.

He’d pout and run away. I made him do it. I didn’t give him a choice. I made him ski. I took him

every year multiple times and put the skis on him and headed him down the slope. Today he

looks up and he says what do you want to do? Does that make sense? Yeah, because what I

understood was when he was so young, he’d just train his body to do those things, he’d have

those sports his entire life. Anywhere you’d want to go and have fun, you could do. You with

me?

You’re going to hit a ceiling. When you hit a ceiling where it doesn’t matter, say toobla

boobla and have a nice day. When you hit a ceiling where it matters, and it’s only going to

matter a couple of times, you’re going to have to get purposeful and intentional. We’re going to

talk about that.


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BECOME LEARNING-BASED

BECOMING A LEARNING-BASED INDIVIDUAL

Now that we’re purposeful and intentional, we need to become learning-based. You

have two choices. You can be learning for knowing sake and you can learn for doing sake. In

other words, you can be an intellectual or you can be an achiever. You can be a legend in your

own mind or you can actually go out and do something in the world. What you know has to

have practical application or it doesn’t have any value other than knowing.

So what we want to do is to be learning-based individuals. We want to be individuals

that say, “I know what I know and there’s more to know on the subject that matters.” Does

that make sense? So whatever subject you’ve picked that you want to master, what do I expect

you to do? Keep studying. Keep studying.

School’s never out, for the professional. You keep studying. You get smarter and smarter

and smarter and smarter. Over time, what are you going to look like? By the time you get to

your 30s, if you’ve approached it this way, you’ve hit that ceiling and then you reinvent yourself

and you attack it again to learn that again and again and again. What are you going to look like?

Yeah. Boom. You’re going to come out of your 30s like a rocket ship compared to everybody

else. You’re going to get launched fast.

You’ve got to be learning based. You know what you know and there’s more to know on

the subject that matters. Don’t ever walk around and say you’ve learned it all. That’s a mistake.


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CHOOSE TO BE ACCOUNTABLE

LIVE THE CYCLE OF ACCOUNTABILITY

All right, the next one is you have to be accountability based. You cannot be victim

based. And what that basically means is, a victim naturally seeks a way of not having change.

That’s what makes them a victim. What makes you an accountable person is when you’re

willing and actually seeking change at all times on the things that matter. Now notice I keep

saying on the things that matter. Perfection is overrated. I’m not trying to get you to wake up in

the morning and continue to be try to be perfect every second of every day. You with me? It’s

overrated. Quit it, stop it. It’s not important. You can have an amazing life and be the biggest

doofus the majority of the time. That’s the good news. And you need to hear that because if

you walk around and you think that the people that have the biggest lives are people that are

perfect at everything, you’ve made a sad mistake. That is not true.

What you’re seeing is that they’ve mastered something or they’ve mastered it to the

degree that puts them in the game at a big level. You’re not going to get that way by being a

victim. You wake up in the morning and life happens and then you have a choice. You either

seek reality or not. And the second that you seek reality, you’re choosing to be an accountable

person. When you don’t seek reality about the truth of the situation, you’ve immediately

headed down the path of the victim. And you’ve seen people that are not real. They’re not

getting real. Don’t you see it?

You may have been there yourself. But I’m telling you right now, that when you realize

somebody is not getting real and not looking at it with an open mind to see the truth of it, they

are headed down the path of a victim. What they’re doing is fixing to build a wall where no

change occurs and it’s a defense path pattern that they’re taking. So if you don’t seek reality,

then you’re going to turn around and fight it. You’re going to deny it. That’s not the way it is,

that’s not how I see it. You’re going to say things like that.

By the way, that’s going to make sure that nothing changes, which means reality is still

there. Whatever your situation is, it hasn’t changed. You’re still faced with it. So then you say,

well it’s everybody else’s fault if they would just do their job. If you’d done what you’re

supposed to do. If you’d told me that in advance. So immediately when denial doesn’t work,


28

you go into blame and start pointing a finger. Well that doesn’t work. It doesn’t change

anything.

So when reality still won’t go away, you then make excuses. Well it’s not my job. I did

my part. You should have done yours, right? And you start hearing this language, which is all

deflection. I tried to deny it. I tried to blame it. Now I’m going to make excuses.

I didn’t know what to do. You didn’t tell me. Whatever, dude. It’s not going to go away.

So you have to understand something. All the stages of being a victim accomplish only one

thing. Nothing. Which is the intent of being a victim. That’s why they’re a victim. Because they

don’t change their situation. They literally get the same thing, right? Remember that old saying

that says: Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results is insanity. It’s

also a victim doing the same thing but expecting a different result. It’s going to make you a

professional victim.

Now again, you don’t need to seek reality on everything. I have people all the time that

go dude, get real. And I say, you get real. That doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t matter, you don’t

need to seek it. So don’t walk around and try to be perfect and try to be this superhuman

person that every day you walk around and you’re trying to be perfect at everything that

happens because you think that’s what success is, that’s what achievement is, that’s what

productivity is. That is not what it is. It’s not.

And oh by the way, when excuses don’t work, they just sit down and wait for the second

coming. Right? Well if it was meant to be, it will happen. You hear that all the time. And when

you hear that, you’re listening to the language of a victim. Well let’s just wait and see. Well

we’ve done all we can do. Let’s just see what happens. Well time will tell. It’s out of my hands.

The proof will be in the pudding. That’s all the language of just sitting there and waiting for

something to happen instead of making it happen.

Now an accountable person is just the opposite. Reality shows up and they immediately

say okay, what’s going on. What’s going on? They acknowledge that and they get clarity. And

then they say, okay, I own it. That’s what you love in sports. What you love is the signal of

owning it. Yeah. My bad. You love that. Because in that moment, what you have is someone

who wants a different outcome and is admitting they goofed up. Nobody hates that person. In


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fact, they love that the guy or gal is willing to take that position and say, it’s on me. They own it.

And when you own it, the next thing is you look for solutions. How do I make sure that doesn’t

happen again, right? What are my options? How can I do what I need to do? How can I get what

I want?

You’ll hear that language. What do we do? What do I need to do? You’ll never hear that

from a victim. A victim will never say what do I need to do. What do I need to do differently?

Victims don’t say that because that would then mean they would have to do something. I ought

to tell you in business, I have spent the majority of my career dealing with more victims that I

can count who have no goal whatsoever to get better. They’re happy with what it is and they

get mad at you for trying to change it.

So look for solutions. And then by the way, when they find out, they make an action

plan. So they get clarity; they get energy and focus; they look for possibilities; they pick one;

they take action and then they evaluate. And reality shows up and then they ask, “What’s the

reality? What’s the deal? What happened? Okay, how do we fix that? What are our choices and

options? Okay, what’s the best one? Okay, how do we do that? Okay, let’s do that.” I just

described how you write a business plan, by the way. That’s how you do it.


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THE MINDSET OF SUCCESS

6 KEYS TO ABUNDANCE

So you’ve now given purpose to your life. You’ve now decided okay, this is who I am.

And I don’t want you to get caught up in right or wrong. Just make a decision and go with it.

You will ultimately fine-tune that to where, all of a sudden, it feels good to you. And it begins to

guide you. So, there’s this simple little formula here and it says, “How do you get the highest

level in life?” I’m going to tell you that there are basically six steps.

The first is to commit to a path to self-mastery in chosen areas. You’re not going to

master life, but you can master the piano if you want. You with me? You’re not going to master

everything. I’ll go back to that chart, the circle and the pie. You’re not going to master

everything, but you can master something. And what you’re going to discover in life is, it takes

about five to ten years to get to what we would call a black belt, where you would have that

kind of mastery. So let’s just pretend you’re going to live 100 years and that you didn’t even

start thinking about this until you were 20. How many things do you think you’ll even have a

chance of being master of? Seven or eight, at the most.

By the way, if you just mastered one thing for 80 years, your life would be so amazing, it

would be stunning. But it takes about five to ten years to master something. And by the way,

that’s if you give it four hours a day five days a week for ten years. If you give 20 minutes a day

three days a week, you’re on the 200-year plan. And don’t kid yourself. You’re on the 200-year

plan. And that’s why most people don’t master anything. That’s the stunning truth.

The second step is to focus on the 20 percent that matters most. Then you move from,

what we call, E to P; meaning entrepreneurial to purposeful. The fourth step is to make being

learning-based the foundation of any action plan.

Step number five, you remove your limiting beliefs. And number six, you always live the

cycle of accountability.

GARY’S AHA

If you interview most people and say where are you going, what’s their answer? And

that was my big aha, right? I’m in my 20s and all of a sudden I realize I’m kind of rudderless. I’m


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kind of actually chasing money and success. I was. There’s no question about it. I didn’t know

anything else. For better or for worse, I was just living the materialistic life. I was just heading

on. I was getting up in the morning and hitting it. I was like the athlete whose only goal in

playing the game was to pummel the competition and rejoice in the awards I got or celebration

I got for doing it for scoring more. What happened to me is an interesting story.

I was married right out of college. After two years of marriage, my wife came home one

day and said I don’t love you and never loved you. Turns out she was having affairs on me. I had

started Keller Williams. It was one year old. They took everything I had. I was almost 27 years

old at the time. I looked up. The company had made $102,000 its first year, so they started at a

million dollars. I didn’t have a million dollars.

Have you ever landed on Boardwalk in Monopoly and it has like five hotels on it. What

do you do? You push everything across and you say okay, can I sign an IOU, right? So I literally

lost my home. I lost the dog. I lost every physical possession I literally had except my guitar. I

was literally driving a rented car and living in a rented apartment on the third floor with no

elevator and no furniture. But I had the company, right?

Then my partner a year later comes in and says, I made some mistakes and I got to sell

my stock. So now, by the way, I had to sign notes, right? So I’m in debt now to the attorney and

ex-wife. Now I have to turn around and I have to sign notes for my partner. So I buy it. I have to

literally buy my company back. And as the law said, I only own 25% of it, right? We were 50/50

partners Williams and I, but I only owned half of my 50% according to the law. I had a

prenuptial agreement and they blew right through it because I had an attorney who didn’t

know what they were doing. So I lost everything. Now I’m in debt beyond numbers I can count.

And the market crashes. It’s now 1987. The market crashes.

And it’s interesting. I met my wife Mary right after, right at the point of divorce. She had

more money than me. I can’t imagine why, maybe she loved me but I can’t imagine why she’d

want to date me because I was a financial mess and I didn’t know what my prospects looked

like. I can’t imagine them looking any worse at that moment to be honest with you. The market

crashes. Then the rust spell. This was in the ‘80s and the top real estate companies all go

bankrupt in Austin, Texas. The top home builder went bankrupt. The banks are going out of


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business. It’s devastating, you know. And it was actually manmade. Go study your economic

history, but Ronald Reagan on his way out of office basically destroyed the economy for half the

country by a simple one decision. And it’s interesting how the dominoes all fell like that.

Now I’m in big trouble. I’ve lost half the people in my company. I’m in debt up to my

eyeballs. And I had to sign contracts that said that even if I die, they get paid and I had to take

on life insurance policies. So there’s no way to escape the debt. I’ve got to pay it back, right?

But by the way, I never borrowed money. I wasn’t in debt until those things happened because

of two relationships.

The way I would explain it to you is this. I was going through life, up until that point,

routinely, okay. I was playing the game of no mission, no vision, no values. I didn’t have any of

that. I’m going through life hopping about this high and I had just fallen in a hole that deep and

I had a problem. If I couldn’t learn to hop this high, I was never getting out of that hole. I did the

math on the debt I was in and my current earnings rate, it would take me another 12, 14 years

or so to get out of debt. In other words, I would be 40, okay. Yeah. I said, God, you’re kidding

me. So I reinvented myself.

WE FAIL OUR WAY TO SUCCESS

Actually I went to a therapist. And I highly recommend it, by the way. I went a therapist

and I said “fix me, fix me now”. There’s something broken about me. And so he said okay, well

let’s talk about this. At the end of the first visit he said, “okay, well we’re never going to talk

about your ex-wife or your ex-partner again”. I said, well how come? He said, in your marriage,

it’s all your fault. I said, what do you mean it’s all my fault? He said, well just like your partner. I

mean it’s your fault too. I said, what are you talking about? He says well, who asked who to

marry who? I did. Well who suggested the partnership? I did. He said, okay. We got to figure

out why you got into a marriage and into a business relationship that shouldn’t have been. We

need to figure out why you did that. I went, oh my God. And I discovered something. I had been

operating with probably the worst self-image on the planet.

I can trace it. I can tell you because I’ve examined it. I even know how I built this path to

this ridiculous self-image. Basically my vision was that I needed to succeed in order for you to


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like me. Now that’s a sick perspective. That’s where I was coming from. And through therapy

and analyzing it, I finally looked up one day and I went holy cow. I’m okay. I don’t need to do

that. And then I went, oh no I’m screwed. I now have no longer any motivation to succeed, you

know. I’m not going to be successful financially or professionally anymore because I’m okay. I

don’t need to do anything. Right? And that lead me on that journey to understand that I had

never made the decision, was I physical or spiritual being. Most people, myself included,

function as a pure physical being with no spirituality whatsoever. That this, what’s going on on

the inside doesn’t exist. It’s all mechanical and biological and that there’s no other me. There’s

nothing here. I’m just all physical. The pure atheistic view. I’d been living that.

And I’ll guarantee you, most religious people are living an atheistic life. For good or bad,

they are. Because what they’re living is a life based on physical, not spiritual. And I’d been doing

it too. And I looked up and I went holy cow, I need to decide. I went on my own and I came back

and said, you know what? I think I’m a spiritual being having a minor physical experience. The

way I’d been living was saying I was a physical being having a minor spiritual experience. Did

you get that?

Most people who claim they are spiritual and or religious are actually living physical lives

with very minor physical experiences. You got it? I looked up and it was very self-incriminating,

right? I felt horrible and I also felt somewhat lost. But I made a decision then and I said

remember, breathe. This is my journey. And I said you know what? I’m a spiritual being and I’m

having a minor physical experience. And that means that tomorrow morning, the goal of my

physical experience is to enhance my spiritual destiny. Everything I do physically is only meant

to develop me inside. All of that is. And if it doesn’t do that, I don’t need to do it. Then I had an

interesting aha. When you go out to do something in life, when do you learn the most? Do you

learn the most when you succeed or fail? Isn’t that weird? That was a big aha for me. I went ah,

I learn the most and grow the most when I fail. Because when you win, what do you do? You do

the chest bump or the back bump or whatever.

When you make a mistake, what do you do? Or when you lose, what do you do? You

ask, how do I fix that? What do I do? I don’t want to have that experience again. And then you


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grow. There is no growth that occurs from winning. There isn’t. Because when you win, what’s

your assumption? I did everything right, baby. That’s how I won. I did everything right.

It’s a false assumption, you know. My aha later was you you actually win or succeed in

spite of what most of you do, not because of it. Let’s take a sporting event. When your team

wins, is it because they did everything right or they did just enough right? Yeah there you go.

Okay so there’s the truth about it, isn’t it? Your team wins in spite of having done a lot wrong.

The goal is to do 51% correct. I guess the other team only doing 49% correct. Yeah? Okay.

So write this down. Just another aha for you. Perfection is highly overrated. This idea

having a great life, do you interpret that as being a perfect life? No. An amazing life is going to

suck a lot of the time. You’re going to have horrible experiences. If you live long enough,

everyone you know will die before you. If you live long enough, right? Yeah.

Let me tell you this. One of the great principles of life, and write this down, is you do not

succeed your way to success. You fail your way. You do not succeed your way to success. You

fail your way to success. When you look at the greatest achievers on the planet, do you think

they’ve succeeded their way to success or failed their way? Study history. What will they tell

you? They failed their way. Yeah because the only way you can get to Mount Olympus, that you

can get to the highest level of a marriage, or the highest level of personal fitness, or the highest

level spiritually, or the highest level financially, or even in a business… The only way you’re

going to get anywhere to the highest level is you’re going to have to reinvent yourself multiple

times.

You will not be the same person you are today if you’re going to get to the top of a

relationship. You will not. If you think you are, you’re kidding yourself and you have not had

enough relationships. You’re going to change. And if you think your business is going to get to

the highest level and not have failures along the way, you’re kidding yourself.


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THE BRIDGE BETWEEN ACTION AND HABIT

SIX LIFE DISCIPLINE AREAS

All right. Let’s switch gears now. We’re going to dive into this. I want you to just realize

that this is this is like pouring a fire hose down your throat, right? The amount of information

you’re being given is massive and I’m well aware of that. I’m not teaching you this material; I’m

exposing it to you. Okay? It’s going to be up to you to take it and go do something with it.

So let’s dive into this next idea here, this idea of these areas. Did you ever read the book

The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People by Dr. Stephen Covey? He said there were seven

habits. I’m going to argue with him and say that there are actually 18 and that they’re going to

come in six areas. And what I want to do is briefly talk you through them, okay?

So notice again this is one of those charts. I don’t want you to write on it. I want you to

Xerox this page and I want you to stick it up somewhere and I want you to get a mental picture

on how you become an intentional, abundant living individual. We start again with mission,

vision, values, beliefs and perspective. Now remember, just as a sidebar, perspective is that

accountability part. So a leader who’s an accountability-based person always asks, “How are we

doing right now?” “How am I doing right now?” That’s perspective. Okay?

#1: SELF DISCIPLINE

So we start out with a definition of who we are and where we’re going. And then we

drive this through these six areas and the first one is the area of Self Discipline. There’s only

three habits you need, okay? The first habit is what I call the Reality Habit, the non-victim habit.

The Reality Habit is an accountability habit. The habit that says if you want to be in charge of

yourself, the first thing you have to do is ask, “What’s going on? What’s real? What’s my

situation?”

The second habit is the Mindset Habit. So you’re building this habitual way of behaving

where you ask what’s going on and then you figure out what you need to set your mind on.

And number three is the Proactive and Persistent Action Habit. So you ask what’s going

on, then what do I need to do, and then you do it and don’t give up. Does that make sense?


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And that’s how you get things done in life. You ask, “What’s the situation; what do I need to set

my mind on and focus on; what action do I need to take?” And then you do it. Don’t stop. Be

persistent. Be proactive. Take action. And don’t stop.

And let’s remember something about the definitions. People get the words discipline

and habit confused. Can you give me a definition of discipline? Do you know what discipline is?

It’s weird. Most people don’t know the definition. You’re not alone. Most people

struggle with it. They don’t know what it is. Discipline is getting yourself to do something when

you don’t want to do it. When you say I seek discipline, you’re seeking getting it done in spite of

the fact that you don’t want to do it.

So what happens is, we usually have a negative connotation of the concept of discipline

because we relate it to punishment. And the reason is because of how we were all raised. And

we were almost all raised this way. Your parents said eat your peas they’re good for you. And

you said I’m not eating them, right? So then your parents tried all the different forms of

coercion.

First they started with, look you know, peas can fly, open your mouth, they’ll fly in your

mouth, right? Or peas are good for you, look, you know, Yogi Bear eats peas. You should eat

peas. Right, whatever, you know. SpongeBob eats peas, whatever. He likes peas, look. They do

everything they can to get you to eat peas. Hey, it’s good for you. They’ll appeal to whatever

intellect they think you might have, right? They’ll try to trick you and they’ll put jelly on the

peas. They’ll do everything possible and it never works. And in the end, what do they resort to?

Eat your peas or you’re going to time out. And immediately you do it. Then your parent says

wow, I could have short-circuited this by simply saying eat your peas or you’re going to have a

punishment.

They were trying to get you to have the habit of eating correctly. Remember, discipline

is the bridge between wanting to do something and habitually doing it. You with me? Discipline

is a bridge. We bring discipline to something when we we don’t consistently do it but we know

it needs to be done. When you have a habit, it means you’ve gone past discipline and you

habitually do it because you have learned how to do it regularly. Right?


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What’s interesting is, because of the way we’re introduced to discipline, most of us, by

the time we get to 18, the one thing we don’t ever want to do again is be disciplined; which is

silliness. It’s the complete opposite. You do want discipline in the areas that matter to bridge

the gap between doing them consistently. Discipline is what you bring to someone to get them

to do something they need to do, when they don’t habitually do it. You with me?

A lot of you need discipline. Your study habits are horrible. It’s not getting you as much

success as you want and you need discipline. But immediately I say the word discipline and

what does that sound like to you? Does it sound like a positive or a negative? That’s right. It

sounds negative. Isn’t that weird? And yet discipline by definition is the most positive thing you

could do to get yourself to be consistent in life.

The smart person, the accountable person, the non-victim person, as an adult starts

seeking out discipline. They bring discipline to their life. A lot of people misuse the word. They

see someone doing something habitually and what do they call them? A disciplined person.

Isn’t that weird? And they’re not a disciplined person are they? They were disciplined by

somebody or somehow in order to become a habitual person.

I get this all the time. People say, boy, you’re highly self-disciplined. I say, no, I’m a

highly habitual person. I do a handful of things habitually.

Here’s a good example. Exercise is a natural one, because what happens is, people get

disciplined either naturally or unnaturally and they exercise. At some point in their life, it clicks

that if they don’t exercise, they don’t feel right. It feels weird not to go run for a mile, or it feels

weird not to go into the gym, or it feels weird not, whatever, right? It just feels weird because

they’ve done it so much it’s become a habit and a rhythm in their life. So what we have to

understand is that we have to bring discipline and these are the areas where you want to bring

discipline: self, spiritual, physical, time, money, and growth. These are the areas where you

have to bring discipline until you have a habit. And then I’m going to make an argument that

there are only a handful of habits.


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#2: SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

Under spiritual there are only three habits that I believe you need. One is the Authority

Habit, which is learning to understand that you didn’t invent yourself. Now whether it is science

or religion—I think of them as the same thing—doesn’t matter. It’s the acknowledgement you

didn’t do it. Go find out who did or what did. Go seek that. It’s a way of thinking about life

that’s habitual.

Number two is the Prayer and Meditation Habit. If you didn’t invent yourself, then

something or someone did. Something happened, okay? Well how do you communicate with

that? In the physical world you communicate with your voice. In the spiritual world, you

communicate through meditation and prayer. It’s intercommunication. I’m talking to myself.

I’m talking to the spirit. This is how I’m doing it. And it’s a habit. You build a habit by doing it

regularly.

Depending on how you were raised, but in America and in a lot of cultures, it’d be pretty

common that you would pray at a mealtime or at bedtime. Why do we do that? Well, you have

to understand, originally they prayed because they were very grateful for food. And they

prayed at night because most people didn’t wake up in the morning. Well now I lay me down to

sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Should I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.

There’s this prayer that was said because people died regularly in their sleep. It doesn’t happen

today. But there’s still this habit that was built in culturally where they do it. It serves a

purpose. You’re building a habit of four or five times a day where you take a break and you

communicate with your spirit. And that’s the value of a habit.

And the last one is Thankful and Grateful Habit. It’s the habit of, if you didn’t invent

yourself, then at the end of the day, the habit that’s going to serve you the best is a grateful

and thankful heart. I am grateful and thankful for what I have and the opportunities I have.

Whatever they are.

#3: PHYSICAL DISCIPLINE

In the physical area, you want to bring three disciplines until they become habit.

Number one is the Nutrition Habit. In other words, you are what you eat. Food is medicine.


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When you think about it, if you go to the doctor and you say I’m ill and the doctor prescribes a

medicine for you, where does that medicine come from? Did they invent it from nothing?

Where did they get the medicine? Where did they get it from? Did they get it from a rock? No.

Where did they get it from? Is it animal based? I don’t think so, dude. They got it from plants.

99% of the medicine you’re going to get when you’re ill is coming from where? It is coming

from materials in the earth. They didn’t invent it out of the thin air. They got it from organic

natural materials.

They discovered that you could eat this seed and it made you go to sleep. And back 200

years ago they just gave you the seed. Today it’s ground up, it’s put in a capsule machine and

turned into a capsule and sold to you for $9.95 at the drugstore called Sleep Ease.

But in its original form, it was a seed on a plant sitting out there on the field. Right?

What’s happened today in countries like America, is we’re so distanced from that, that we can’t

make the connection that food is medicine. You can prevent it and you can take, right? You can

take it as nutrition or take it as medicine. You can get on the front end of your health or be on

the back end. It’s the same thing they’re giving you. Isn’t that odd? Yeah.

By the way, there’s no way they can fix the health costs in America without going to

prevention. You can’t do it because it will just escalate and escalate, right? I mean the cost on

the backside will escalate and escalate and you can’t fix it. The only way you can fix it is to drive

the cost down and that would be by eating and exercise.

So the second habit has got to be the Exercise Habit. You need to exercise. And again,

the researchers were clear on this. I’m going to argue with you and you’re going to say you

don’t know what you’re talking about. But I’m going to say that, if you’re a betting person, bet

on a plant based diet. If you’re a betting person. Now you’re going to immediately get mad at

me. My son argues me constantly and says he has to have meat. I just got to have meat. I have

to have meat. I’m saying well, here’s the China study, which is the largest study of any group of

people on the planet, right? Here’s this other study which is the largest study of anybody who

lived over 90 years of age you know, and gave all of their facts in over 30 years to science.

Here’s the research and here’s what it says. It says your diet should be plant based. Probably no


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more than 10% - 20% of your food should come from animals. And actually that should come

from lean, lean protein, preferably fish, right?

What was the Okinawa diet? Did you ever read that book? Well the Okinawas are the

people that have the longest longevity of any group of individuals on the planet and they

studied them and they wrote a book called the Okinawa Diet, which is a study of that. And the

diet shows that these people live longer because they’re plant based and cold fish based and

they walk everywhere. So it’s diet and exercise. Okay?

They also have low stress. They have low stress. Okay? So you got to learn. So those are

the three habits. What you eat, how you exercise and the Stress Management Habit. There are

not four habits. There are not five habits or ten habits. There are just three here. And I’m going

to make an argument that from an exercise standpoint, the best time to do that is in the

morning. Not everybody can do that. But the best time to do it is then. Okay?

#4: TIME DISCIPLINE

There are only three issues about managing time. So you want to bring three habits to

your life. The first one is what I call the Play Time Habit. It seems a little odd to suggest that the

first thing you want to manage is your play, but understand that what most people do is reverse

engineer their play. They fill their calendar up with work and then if they have any time left off,

they play. Since my twenties, I actually do the opposite. I put all my playtime in first, and then I

just work in between playing. That makes sense? Yeah, actually, it’s okay.

And let me tell you; most successful people do that. You know why? Because they know

they’re going to have the money and they deserve to go play. The reason why people who are

not highly successful don’t do it is they don’t think they deserve it and they can’t afford it

because they weren’t productive. Highly productive people will flip it and they’ll immediately go

in there and block their time off. You’ll see it, big blocks. They just don’t work, okay? And the

reason is because they need to rejuvenate and they can afford it. They intentionally did it that

way.


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Everybody else says, well I only get to take this time off. They’re always negotiating their

time off. But highly productive and successful people don’t do it that way. Not in my world. I

haven’t experienced it and I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people. Just don’t do it.

It’s so funny. People think, and particularly at your age, people think that calendars are

for appointments. This actually isn’t correct. Your calendar is for preplanning your time. Your

calendar is actually for looking at the day or the week or the month and asking yourself how

should I use my time. It’s not for appointments only. Your calendar is actually for you to pre-

manage your time.

That’s why you also use a pencil. It’s one of the reasons why the digital age isn’t going to

solve this problem. You’re better off using a paper calendar and keeping that the rest of your

life. And the biggest reason is because it allows you to see the interaction of time. The phone

and the iPad can’t do that. They can’t blow it up big enough to do that. So you can’t see it.

It was so funny, I was getting back on a plane years ago and there was a professional

musician. He was actually lead singer Larry Braggs from Tower of Power. I’m a big fan. I knew

who he was. And it was just he and I standing there at the Southwest Airlines line. We were

there way early. Larry was on his phone or whatever, right? And we started talking. And by the

way, I saw he had a briefcase and it said Larry Braggs on it, Tower of Power. I knew who it was,

there it is. Right. So I said excuse me, and I interrupted him. We started talking.

It turned out there was a show in Austin. I said hey there’s a show in Austin you might

want to see. I can get you tickets to if you’re ever in the area. It was Kenny Loggins. And he said

he would love to see that. My wife and I haven’t been there in a while. We’ll bring the kids. I

think we can actually. I think I could be available to do that. And he starts to do it on his phone

and I thought, oh no. I couldn’t help myself. I said, tell me you haven’t gone over to the dark

side. Your calendar is on your phone? He said yeah. I said, okay, old west. My calendar is paper

and it’s in my backpack, which is shut. Your phone is in your hand. When I say go, you you start

checking to see if you’re in town on that day or if you can do it and I’ll reach into my bag and

see if I can and we’ll see who gets there first. Ready, set, go.

He starts pushing buttons. I open it up my bag, pull out my calendar, and he’s still over

there trying to pull his up. I said oh and by the way, I’m doing this on the day before and do this


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on the day after. The week after that I’m doing this and the week before I’m doing that. I’m

doing this and this and this and this and he’s still pushing buttons.

The biggest problem you have in managing time is not what you’re going to do today,

but what you did the day before and what you’re going to do the day after, right? Does that

make sense? What happens is you’re born into technology. You think that technology is the

solution for everything. It’s not the best solution for everything. Just because it’s possible

doesn’t mean it’s probable or that it’s the right thing or the best thing for you. Now again, some

of you are going to argue with me. That’s fine. But I’m going to beat you every time. If we get

into a contest, you’re going to lose every time on time planning.

It’s interesting, my coauthor, who helps me do the research for my books, again is more

of a digital age person than me and he was using that. And when we were writing The One

Thing, I made him stop. I made him go to paper. I told him I was going to prove this to him. Get

rid of that and go back to paper.

If he walked in right now he would absolutely tell you paper’s better and he loves paper.

Once he was forced to use paper and saw the benefit of it, he decided he couldn’t go back.

Because the biggest problem is you’ll say yeah I’m free that day, but what you don’t see in that

moment is what you did the day before and what you’re going to do five days after that. What

it allows me to do is in one glance, I can see the entire month and I can see how many times I’m

doing or not doing that thing. And I can see where my energy is going up and down. I can see

where my commitments are. Does that make sense? I can see in one glance.

This is a good example. I could see how many lunches I was having with my son at

school. In one glance, I can see the entire month, right? I can see it there, there, there and

there. You can’t do that with digital. It won’t show you that. And I can immediately just get my

eraser and go and move it. A computer won’t let you do it that fast. If you can even see it, it

won’t let you do it that fast. And it can’t fix it because it’s about size. Next thing you know,

you’re going to be doing it on your watch and you think that’s going to be efficient, right?

I thought it was funny, a comedian the other night, he said, “It’s amazing, Apple, they

looked at their phone and they saw the clock and they thought, we could put that on your

wrist. It’s already is on my wrist.” Yeah, I thought that was interesting. It’s going to be


43

interesting how that plays out, isn’t it? I don’t know that there’s a benefit to interruption and

distraction. That’s the biggest challenge you have is technology has become the biggest

distraction.

Your generation is called the most distracted generation in history. Your brains are being

rewired to not be able to focus. You’re jittery, you’re nervous, and you can’t sit still. You’re

constantly checking and checking and checking and checking and checking. And research is real

clear on this. You’re rewiring your brains. The downside of that is that it’s not as effective as a

focused person. There’s no way. It just doesn’t work that way.

The second time habit is the Pay Time Habit. You mark out all your vacations first. The

second thing you do is you turn around and you identify the one thing that you have to do

every day, that 20% that gives you 80% of your results and you block that out for four hours.

The research is real clear. If you want an A, you have to study four hours a day unless you’re a

genius. If you want a B, it’s three hours. If you want a C, it’s two hours. For a C or less, it’s one

hour or less, unless you’re a genius.

Again, I had a roommate that was a genius and he didn’t have to do that. The rest of us,

if we didn’t put in the hours, we just didn’t get the best grade, right? Interesting, isn’t it?

By the way, think about that as the student athlete. The problem they have if they’re an

offensive lineman on the football team, how many hours a day do they have to practice to be a

master of that? Yeah. What does their day look like? They’ve got to study four hours. They’ve

got to practice four hours. That’s eight hours. And they’re in the classroom how many hours?

Three to five a day, four maybe on average a day. Well that’s 12 hours. Okay. How controlled

do you have to be in order to get up in the morning and work out or practice for an hour or two

and then study and then go to class and then go back and practice and then have social time

and go to sleep and get up?

It’s Groundhog Day every day. It’s really hard, by the way. It’s really hard. And that’s

why there’s a lot of break down there. There’s a lot of break down. There’s misbehavior, the

grades aren’t what they should be or the performance on the field isn’t where it should be.

What they’re asking someone to do is so unbelievable. It’s so tough, right? Yeah. All right.


44

So if you looked at my calendar, you would see that going back to when I was 22 years

old, I blocked out the morning every morning to do my 20% that gave me 80% of my results. My

goal was to have a perfect day by noon. And you’ll notice from high achievers, that’s what they

do. They time block. Does that make sense?

Go study surgeons. There’s a very specific time when they do rounds and there’s a very

specific time when they do surgery. And they really don’t move that around a lot. They’re into a

rhythm. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at these times we do these things. The

reason why is because at that level, it’s life or death. I want you to notice that. When it’s life or

death, there’s never one person in the room. Right?

You get on an airline, how many people in the cockpit? There are always two or three

people. Why? It’s called redundant systems. Death would not be good for their business. It’s

the same in the medical profession. You go in for surgery, why are there several people in that

room? Why isn’t it just one person? Well because they’re specializing and because they use

redundant systems. They have one person focused on this, one person focused on this, and one

person focused on this, right?

You go into do dentistry work. They’ll never be one person in that room. Never. If there

is, run, because they don’t understand the gravity of the situation. You have to have someone.

There’s someone flying the plane and there’s someone managing the person flying the plane at

all times. You with me? It has to be that way. Has to be that way. That’s why it’s so safe. That’s

why it’s safe.

If you put two people in the car where every time one person drove and the other

person had the manual out and had the map out and was constantly monitoring traffic and

telling them what to do and how to do it, what would happen to traffic fatalities? And what if

you had to have a breathalizer before you can get behind the heel to turn the car on? What

would happen? But what’s happened is that death in automobiles is acceptable. It’s not

acceptable in airlines. That’s why it’s safer to fly than drive. Wouldn’t it be weird tomorrow

morning if the government said you have to have a breathalyzer and cars won’t turn on without

them? And oh by the way, there always has to be two people in a car. What would happen to


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life? This is when as an adult you begin to realize that life is negotiated. In other words, death is

negotiated. There’s a certain percent that’s acceptable.

So, I would look at your calendar and here’s what I would see. Whatever your pay time

is, you would have four hours blocked off for that. Does that make sense? If you’re a student,

what would I see? Four hours of study blocked off every day five days a week. But I’d see it. Oh,

don’t do it. It’s fine with me. Get what you want. But when you come out, if you work for me, if

you don’t block the four hours off, I’m firing you. You’re not going to work with me. And by the

way, you wouldn’t work with a Steven Jobs or a Michael Dell or a Bill Gates either.

You also couldn’t be a CEO or a high executive for Warren Buffet. You would not

operate at that level because they wouldn’t let you. Because you’re going to dumb up the

business and ruin it and they’re going to put you out over somewhere else. So go ahead and not

live it now, that’s fine. I didn’t live it at your age. But you will be confronted with this at some

point. The reality that you better master what matters and you better get in on calendar and

get it done. If not, they’re going to promote somebody above you. They’re going to put

someone else in there. If that’s okay with you, then don’t do it.

But remember, this class is about how to have an abundant life, not how to have a

stupid life. So I’m telling you how to have the most abundance. Okay?

The last one is the Organization Time Habit. You’re going to have to plan, and the best

habit to do that is, once a week, to get your day timer out. Get your month at a glance calendar,

get your goals, get everything out and for about 30 minutes or so, just stare at it and look at it

and move things around to make sure you’re always doing what you need and want to do.

That’s all it is. And it takes about 30 minutes a week to do that.

I recommend you just pencil it in. It’s what you do. I do mine every Sunday afternoon.

It’s just a habit. It’s the best time to do it. I can do it watching football or basketball, or just do it

sitting on the back porch. It’s no big deal. I just do it.

The other thing I do is I look at my financial statement every week. I stare at it just as if I

was playing a game and I ask the question, how can I improve it? How can I improve my

financial condition? I’m very aware of money. Not because I’m money hungry or anything other

than it’s important, right? It gives me freedom, so I manage it. And the way I manage it, is I look


46

at it every month. I look at my P and L, my personal P and L. I look at my assets and liabilities, of

which I have no liabilities by the way, and I look at all that. And then I ask, now what would I do

with that money? Where would I go with it? How would I invest it? What would that be? Okay?

How do I get a better dollar? See? Make sense?

These are the three habits.

#5: MONEY DISCIPLINE

All right, the next one is money. Number one, the Gross Income Habit. What that means

is to make the habit of trying to make the most money out of your job. It all plays back into the

rest of these, but the issue here is, get some income.

Now by the way, no matter how much your income is, you can only live off of 70% of it. I

did the math for my son. We’ll do this math in our next class together. But I did the math for my

son. I showed him and he said, “oh my gosh, when I get out of college, I won’t have any

money.” I said, yeah that’s right. You won’t have any money.

Because you’re looking up saying, in my profession they pay X amount of money. I said

yeah, but what I want you to do is live off of 50% of it, not 70%. What? Yeah, I want you to live

off of 50%. What am I going to do with the other money? Well let me show you what’s going to

happen in five to ten years if you do that where you’re going to be financially. Okay? Let me

show you what happens. Do the math. Okay?

See here’s the thing is, if you don’t have equities or assets that are appreciating that are

going to make you money, whatever income you make today, if you live off of half of it and

invest the other half at average rates of return, in 40 years you can retire at that half income.

Did you hear what I just said? Now the game is can you beat that? I’ll say it again. If you take

half the, let’s say you make $100,000. If you live off of only $50,000 and you invest the other

$50,000, this is all. I’m just saying this is after tax, okay? And you invest the other $50,000, for

40 years, at the end of 40 years you will have $50,000 the rest of your life at average rates of

return. And I mean average rates of return meaning what? Three to four percent. If you can get

ten percent, then you only need 20 years. You see what happens? If you get 20% you only need

eight years.


47

So the game becomes how much you can start with early on, because you’re not going

to be a genius and you’re not going to get 20%. Warren Buffet in his lifetime is only average

21%. And he’s the greatest investor of all time. So you better start early because that means

you’re being smart. If you’re a genius and you happen to invent something, then good for you.

But if you don’t, at least you’re taken care of. But most people don’t do that. They consume,

right? They consume 105% of their earnings, not 50% of their earnings. You with me? Yeah.

That’s the challenge.

In other words, you’re going to have live at least ten years when you get out of college

way beneath your means. When my wife and I didn’t move into our current home until almost

12 years ago. What was interesting is that all of our friends prior to that lived in much bigger

houses and drove nicer cars…they spent money. We just invested and did all these other things.

And then about 12 years ago, we built a house.

It shocked all of our friends when we invited them over to our home. It’s a really cool

house by the way. And all of a sudden they all kind of went whoa, where did that money come

from? Then we took them out to our 2000-acre ranch and showed them that, which is 20

minutes from here, and showed them that. They all wondered where the money came from.

You see we didn’t spend the money until we could pay cash for it. And not only could we

pay cash for it, but our investments outside of the businesses we owned, would pay for the

upkeep whether we went broke or not. It’s a very conservative approach. What it meant was

we were never going backwards, okay? But people didn’t realize that I had any sort of financial

wealth until about 12 years ago. I’m 57. Remember, I was a millionaire at 29. Nobody knew it

nor ever experienced it until I was in my 40s. Because what was I doing? Constantly making my

money work.

All right. So you live off of only 70% of your income. The other money habit is the Value

and Accountability Habit. This habit means that you only invest in value and you always hold

your money accountable. And we’ll talk more about this later. There’s a very specific habit

about money and you don’t want to violate it.


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#6: GROWTH DISCIPLINE

The first habit in the Growth Discipline is the Unique Ability Habit. Unique ability ties

back into what you’re going to do 20% of your time. Your unique ability is that thing you’ve

mastered that you can do better than almost everybody else. What is that thing? Because by

the way, when you put four hours a day into that, you’re going to have the most fun because

you’re going to have the most success. You’re going to help the most people and you’re going

to get paid the most amount of money. So you’re going to win when you put four hours a day

into what you do the best. And if you put four hours into anything over five to ten years, it’s

going to do all that for you.

Now here’s an interesting thing. As we start giving our time to more and more things,

what happens? What does your ability to earn do when you start doing these other things?

Does it go up or down when you do these things? It goes down because you’re not as good at it.

By the way, how many people do you help? Less. How much fun is it when you get paid less and

help less people? Less.

So as you move away from unique ability, what does it look like in life? It’s characterized

by less: less happiness, less income, less making a difference. All of that because you’ve agreed

to let people snipe your time. Less is more.

Doing less but doing it better gets you everything you want. It’s the exact opposite of

what you think it is. That’s what happens. It’s odd but true. It’s one of the reasons why, in this

course, this is what you’re being introduced to. I have four books planned. The ONE Thing is the

first book I wrote on it. And what I did was, I went straight to personal productivity as the first

book. Because if you don’t get that, the rest of its irrelevant. I don’t need to teach you the rest

of it. Make sense? All right. So you give it three to four hours a day to your unique ability.

Honestly, it’s what you have to do.

By the way, the Leverage Habit means when you’re giving all your time to that one thing

for four hours a day, what are you going to end up having to do? Hire other people and

delegate. Aren’t you? Yeah because you don’t have time to do everything because what are you

doing? You’re doing the thing that matters most. So what happens is the people that focus on

their unique ability over time become the most leveraged people in the world. Why? Because


49

they have the most amount of income to pay other people to do other things and then it

becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. See what happens?

Yeah, as you make more money, because you get rewarded more in your job because

you do that better than anybody else, that gives you more money and if live off of less than you

than you earn and you invest that in leverage, that gives you more time to do your unique

ability which gets you what? More money. Which allows you to buy what? More leverage.

Which gives you what? More time and money. Which gives you what? More leverage. That’s

exactly right. That’s what happens.

So over time you end up leading this really cool life where you’re really nailing

something. You’re changing the world because you’re nailing it and you’re getting financially

rewarded because you’re nailing it and you don’t have to spend time doing other things. Make

sense? It’s not complicated. You just have to buy into leading a small life in order to lead a big

one. And that’s where people get confused. They struggle with that.

And then the last one is the New Capacities and Repairs Habit and that is when things

get broken and they matter, you have to fix it. You cannot let it go. So you’re constantly trying

to get better at it, new capacities, and you’re fixing things that are broken in that area that

matters. Make sense? Yeah. You can’t leave it alone. You got to fix it.


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NO ONE SUCCEEDS ALONE

5 KEY RELATIONSHIPS

So there’s basically five key relationships in an abundant life.

1 – MENTORS & ROLE MODELS

The first one I call mentors and role models. Remember earlier today I said, “the

wonderful thing about life is you get to pick your mentors”? You also get to pick your profits?

You get to pick them. You get to pick the people that you model your life after. You know, it

became really clear to me when Charles Barkley spit on a fan that he was not a role model for

me for how to treat people. He’s definitely a great role model for being an awesome

announcer. He’s definitely a role model for being an amazing forward in the NBA. He’s not a

good role model for how to treat people. And I don’t say that disparagingly. It’s just a fact. And

he would agree with that. He would probably say look, thank you for not trying to make me

perfect. I never said I was. Are you with me? So we get to pick our role models. We get to pick

our mentors.

No one succeeds alone; no one fails alone. So when you look at each area, the question

would be, who are your mentor and role models? Who’s your….start with a role model. Who’s

your spiritual role model? Who would you mirror your life after spiritually? Muhammed?

Abraham? Christ? Buddha? You get to pick. That’s the wonderful thing. You get to decide.

It always drives me crazy though when someone doesn’t have a role model. That drives

me crazy when they don’t have one because when you don’t have one, what does it mean

you’re following? Nothing. You don’t follow anybody.

By the way, go look at people who have high achievement and ask them if they have a

role model. They’ll tell you, absolutely. In whatever area it is they’ve mastered, they have a role

model. They literally went right after somebody and said there’s my model. There’s my

minimum standard for behavior in that area.

Who would it be physically? Go study Jack LaLanne. Jack LaLanne was the original

exercise guru, right? Ever heard of jumping jacks? That’s Jack LaLanne. You know most of the


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gym equipment that you see today, a lot of it, if not most of it, was invented by Jack LaLanne.

He was the original gym owner that ultimately sold to Bally’s or somebody. But he was the

original franchise gym owner and he was the TV guru that wore the blue tights and had the

white dog Lucky or whatever. And he was all into it. His agenda was to live to 100. He died at 96

by the way. Okay. But go study his life. I have Jack LaLanne weights in my office, just as a

reminder. That’s who he was. He was the guy who understood that.

Later when the science changed and plant based was the way to go, he embraced it and

of course he made a fortune with the Jack LaLanne juicer. You can Google it. The guy made a

fortune because he got behind the whole juicing thing and realized that meat based was not

the way to live. And go study his feats of strength. And by the way, he did a full workout the day

before he died. Just died, you know, at 96. Didn’t make it to 100.

In your personal life, who’s your role model? Who are you modeling after? It would

have been a mistake for me to model my finances after my father. And that’s one of the big

traps that we have. We tend to pick our parents as our role models for everything and there’s a

tendency to pick it in religion. There’s a tendency without thinking about it, to just go with the

family choices. Not that it’s a bad thing, but it’s an unexamined thing. That’s a challenge, right?

Another one is finance. How you manage money and how you view money. The blessing

that I had was my dad did a really cool thing. I had the unique experience of never working for

anyone who wasn’t a millionaire or didn’t become a millionaire. The only time that it ever

happened was for the two semesters that I was a dorm director. I don’t know what ever

happened to him, but he certainly wasn’t rich. But all the other bosses I had in my life that were

what I considered jobs were all millionaires or became millionaires.

When you report every day to somebody who’s a millionaire or a multi-millionaire

several times over, they look at money differently. They look at how you get money and how

you preserve money and how you multiply money. They look at it very differently. Most people

assume that a job is wealth, financial wealth. And their whole goal is to retire at that level and

then manage it accordingly. And you’ll run into people all the time saying well my parents had a

great life. I thought that was wonderful. That’s what I want.


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There’s nothing wrong with that. But you do understand that you’re making your

decision based on only knowing half the story. You’re making your decision on that basis, not

the other basis. I lived in both worlds. My best friend’s father was very rich and retired at 40.

And I would go to his house every day and I observed this, right?

He was actually a football coach and he quit coaching and went into hospital

management right at the time before HMOs. Right before all that started. He went into

management and he went to a company that ultimately got huge. And he would actually send

his wife down to the credit union that my dad was running, the nonprofit for the school district

and she would borrow money from the credit union to buy stock in the company that was

turning into an HMO. And at 40, he retired and bought a thousand acre ranch in Carville and

quit working. Never worked again. By the way, he’s 88 years old and still paying golf every day

in Carville. Not a bad deal I guess.

I was exposed very early on to two different worlds. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, this whole idea

of there’s a way to look at money. And these are all good people. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not

judging them as people. I’m simply pointing out that be careful who your role model is; who

you’re getting your mentoring from. Be very aware of how you’re learning about these things

and whom you’re paying attention to.

In your personal life, it’s the same thing. In your career, it’s the same thing. Business,

same thing. Just pick a mentor and a role model. Pick somebody and study them. And you’re

not studying them because they’re perfect at all things. You’re studying them because of how

they lead their personal life. Okay? You want that. How you get that. Okay? So it’s really

important. What you’ll discover is most people don’t have mentors and role models. They

don’t. They have a sense of it, but they never made a decision about it.

2 – THE PERSON YOU DETERMINE WEALTH FOR

The second relationship, which is really important, is the person you send money to.

Whomever you call boss or whomever you feel accountable to for money. This is a big issue.

Because what you need to realize is that there’s two places you can go to work. A place that

cares about how much you make and a place that doesn’t. It’s as simple as if you’d gone to


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work at Dell Computer when their stock was splitting, like I don’t know many times, and every

time that you had a chance to take a stock option, you took one. You could have worked there

ten years and retired a multi-millionaire. I saw a lot of people do that. In Austin they call them

the Dellionaires. They worked there less than ten years at the right moment in history and a

sales person making $50,000 a year retired; just turned around and sold their stock and netted

two and a half million dollars. How many years would it take at $50,000 a year to make two and

a half million dollars? Right? They turn it around and bought a home for $400,000 and retired.

Said I’m going to raise my family.

Now there are other people who are selling something and making $50,000 that didn’t

work at Dell. They didn’t get that opportunity. If they worked at Randall’s grocery store, they

never got that. I don’t mean that offensively to Randall’s. I’m just pointing it out to you. They

made the same income. But because they sent money to two different groups, one group made

them rich and one group did not. And so it’s very important when you go out and start looking

at a career path, you need to ask, what’s the path? What are the opportunities here? What do I

get to do?

Now again if you decide this is what I want to do and that doesn’t matter, so be it. I’m

showing you the path of how to think. You get to decide what you get to do. That by the way is

why I quit my job when I was vice president of that company. That guy didn’t make anybody

else rich. He’s the only rich guy in the company and he’s rich. Nobody else is. Nobody. There’s

your clue right there.

So what if you decided to go into the clergy? Have you forsaken financial wealth? Say

no. Thank you. You became a schoolteacher. My sister and I argued about this because my

sister’s a schoolteacher. She wrote a math book. Books don’t make you any money. Yeah they

do. Yeah they do. My first book I wrote 11 years ago and I made 1.2 million dollars the first

year. No one would publish it. I had to self-publish it. Yeah. Then they wanted to publish it

because it was the number one selling book in the category that year. Nobody wanted it. Okay.

But isn’t that interesting?

This happens all the time. You do understand that when Rowling wrote Harry Potter, no

one would publish it. You know that story, right? Who published it? Do you know? Scholastic


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Books. Go look back on your Harry Potter copies. Scholastic Books. That’s the company that ran

the book fairs at your elementary school twice a year where you went in and bought all those

books. Remember that? That’s Scholastic Books. But everyone turned them down but

Scholastic didn’t. Scholastic Books took a bet and published that book. There you go, man. It’s

interesting, isn’t it? Yeah when you start studying success, success leaves clues. So does failure.

Okay?

Your Job Is Not Your Financial Wealth

Your job income is not your financial wealth. Okay? There isn’t anybody who got on the

Forbes 500 or the Forbes 1000 or the Forbes 10,000 based on income from their job. Maybe

even Forbes 100,000. They did not. Okay? So when you think about what you want to do for a

career, please understand that you’ll follow your passion and some of you may choose careers

that pay $24,000 a year. That’s okay. You can be financially rich beyond your imagination

making $24,000 a year. Now you won’t get it with your money because that won’t be enough

money. Maybe.

I only invested $1000 in Keller Williams in 1983. That’s all I have invested in. That’s all it

took. Okay? It’s really interesting. I had a conversation with a musician once. He was actually

the lead guitar player for a classic rock band called The Little River Band. And we were actually

driving around one day just talking and he had come from a background of poverty and his wife

had too. And he had chosen a musician’s life and an incredible musician probably was earning,

I’m going to bet about $50,000 to $60,000 a year. Okay? What he was earning personally. I’m

just guessing. And we started talking. So I gave my second book the Millionaire Real Estate

Investor. I said read this and let’s talk. He read it. Got the book on tape. Listened to that. Next

time we were together we were riding around again and we were talking about how if you

want money, go get money. Right? And if you want to make your life about money, well that’s

your choice. But I will tell you that your job rarely will get you there.

So we were talking and he had this, he said well the first thing I need to do is find money

because I don’t have any to invest. I said money’s not your problem. He said what do you

mean? I said money isn’t your problem. Let me ask you something. If tomorrow morning you

found a wonderful real estate investment that would generate at least a ten percent. But let’s


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say that it could generate maybe even more, may a 12% or 14% rate of return, cash on cash.

You put the money in and you get, let’s say 12% to 14% interest. Do you think you would find

someone who would partner with you that has money? He said yes. You don’t need money, do

you?

So your problem is not money. If you want to make money, your problem is not money.

Money will find you. The vehicle is the challenge. If you want to be financially wealthy, then you

must study investing and you must learn how to make money, which is different than your

passion. That’s the point I want you to get.

I don’t mean this disrespectfully to professions, but when I was growing up, I witnessed

this phenomenon over time. A lot of college kids choose medicine, legal, accounting and those

kinds of careers. Not necessarily because they have a deep abiding love of the law or whatever,

but someone gave them a list, or they experienced it in their neighborhood, that the people

who had the most amount of money, typically were the individuals who had those jobs. So they

thought, if I’m going to have a job, I might as well get a high paying job. Then again, I’m not

dissing that, you know. Oddly enough I have tons of friends who are attorneys. I only have one

that I know of that has loved being an attorney. Just an interesting sidebar. They don’t

necessarily love it.

I remember when I got of college, one of my dear friends was just going into law school,

and he’s like a Mensa. And he asked me what I was going to do? I said I’m going to sell houses.

And he said, to families? I went yeah. I am. And he said, well can you make any money at that? I

think you can. Yeah, you can. The answer is yeah. Yeah. I made more money after about my

third year than he’s ever made, right? I make more money in a month than he’ll make the rest

of his life. Yeah. But that’s because I pursued money. Not as a passion. But the thing about

money is to understand that, if you have a dollar, you have to know what to do with it. Enjoy

the moment and plan for the future. Most people enjoy the moment with the dollar instead of

holding some back and that becomes the lesson.


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3 – LOVE

So the third line is the love line and that is again the relationships where you use the

word love. And here’s the cool thing about that. Notice I put professional associates. Because

when your life gets sent to alignment, what happens is the only word that actually is applicable

is love. And it’s not a romantic. Love has more than just romantic implications.

You get to a point where you turn to a business partner and you go man, I love you. And

it’s like is not strong enough. And it’s not romantic love; it’s deep abiding affection for that

individual. And saying you’re affectionate towards them doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t work.

The only word is love. I go into a meeting with my executives that run my businesses and we all

say we love each other. And we say it openly and we just say it and it doesn’t feel weird at all.

In fact, if we didn’t say it, you’d fire their butt. Well because that would that would be an

indication of how you felt about them and they felt about you, at that level. Just telling you,

when your life is that way, it’s pretty cool. It’s very cool.

In my organization, everyone who’s been a leader and succeeded in our organization is

still in it. It’s a crazy thing. We’ve had three transitions over 25 years and the company never

missed a beat. You don’t even know it happened almost. Isn’t that weird? Yeah. It’s not by luck

though. It’s not by luck. I made sure of it. It was very important to me that it that it felt that

way. And they call it a family and many times they’ll make fun of that.

We’ll talk about this in our class on business. But when you build a culture around

caring, there’s no other way to describe it. And we have competitors in our industry that make

fun of us as an organization. They call it drinking the Kool-Aid and all kind of stuff like that. They

say, oh it’s a cult. And you go well, culture taken to an extreme is cult. And the fact that you’re

not is kind of an indication of the way you look at life.

4 – TOP FIVE WEALTH DETERMINERS

The fourth one is your Top Five Wealth Determiners. Here’s an interesting thing. Warren

Buffet confirmed this. He said that 80% of his wealth came from five investments. This is the

richest investor of all time. Five investments. Now this was not today. This is back when he was


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number two richest man on the planet. I remember when he said it. I did the math and looked

up and said, holy cow, it’s true. It’s the law of small numbers.

In other words, if you intent to be successful as a professional, what you’re going to find

out is it won’t take more than five relationships. What’s interesting is if you’re if you’re a

Christian, the aha you have is that God only needed 12, right? Disciplines, right? Jesus only

needed 12. Well you would think that if you’re going to change the world and all of that, you

might need more than 12 disciplines to do it. But oddly enough when you look at the

connectivity of life, you begin to understand that it’s unnecessary. It’s quite astounding.

The way I describe to people is I want you to think of these five people like five cards in

your hand. And you have three draws and then you lay the hand down and you’re done for life.

So you’re picking up a hand of five cards. These are five relationships. Now how many do you

want to get rid of for the first time? You’re going to be a bad poker player if you say I’ll take

five. Right? And then you get five more and you go, how many do you want now? I’ll take five.

Yeah, it should be that after your first five, at worst I would want you to say I’ll take four. But I

would really prefer, I’ll take three. And then your next round you say, I’ll take two. Got it? And

the last round you go how many you take? I’ll take one. Lay your hand down and there are your

five relationships.

I was doing this math for someone the other day and it was my third manager that I

hired that I never replaced. That manager became the CEO of the company and has been my

partner. We’ve been in business since he was 31 years old and he’s 54 now. That’s how long

we’ve been in business. After my third manager I never hired another manager for that

business again. My third hire, okay? I hired one CEO. Since then I’ve never hired any other

executive upstairs to run the entire organization worldwide. Why? Because the second I hired

you, your job was to find your replacement. From the second we started talking, I needed to

know who was your backup guard. Who was the second string quarterback. Right?

I’ll use football as an example. You have a world class quarterback and he’s going to play

for maybe three years or four years or maybe just two years, right? But you have the ability to

recruit the guy behind him and then the guy behind him who’s willing to sit on the bench for a

year or two years and maybe only get a year or two of playing time. That almost what has to


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happen to have a continuous program, right? I’m just using that as an example. Because if you

had to have four years of one quarterback and then the next thing you knew was all the other

great quarterbacks went to other schools and so then you had to start over every four years

with a freshman, what’s that going to look like to you?

No one succeeds alone by the way. I want you to act like you only had five cards that

you can play. I want you to treat those five relationships like five marriages. It’s what I want you

to think about. Okay? Because what you’re going to discover…and this is why I want you be that

serious about it…because those people will determine your wealth more than anyone else.

They are going to be no more than five people that will define your financial wealth, either in

your job or in investments. It won’t be more than that.

5 – TOP 25 ALLIED RESOURCES

And then the last one is your Top 25 Allied Resources. These are the 25 professionals

that you bring into your life that support you. Your doctor, dentist, lawyer, accountant, and

your banker. It’s all these relationships that you get to choose. It’s like the young man that I

hired to manage my ranch. Now he’s in charge of Keller Williams’ Farm and Ranch Division

worldwide. I just hired him as a hand out at the ranch, as a contract person to come out and do

ranch management for me, okay? But immediately I knew it was a draft choice. You don’t waste

one.

So when I put someone in the job, who do I put in the job? Do I put in someone who’s

just going to play for me for a year or two and then I’ll have to replace, or they’re only going to

go, sorry? I have my draft pick, what do I use it for? Yeah. For opportunity, right? So what

happens is, you look up and you go oh, you mean the lawn boy. If I picked them properly, I

might end up in business with that guy someday. Well the guy that runs my ranch was the guy

that landscaped my house. Okay? Because you don’t just pick anybody. All of a sudden you look

up and go holy cow. Yeah the guy that runs my entire investment company that manages all my

money was a real estate guy who sold me real estate in West Virginia. I don’t hire just anybody.

In other words, if you wanted to do business with me, even if you wanted to sell me a

Coke, I’d look at you hard and I’d say well I have a dollar to spend. Now I can just buy a Coke


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from anybody and walk away. Or I can find somebody who can be meaningful in my life, and

buy the Coke from them instead. You see that?

Financially wealthy people, when they go into their wallet and they pull out money, they

say okay, I’ve got a dollar here. And what happens is that when they pull that money out like

that, they don’t see it as a dollar wasted. They see it as a dollar invested. Where they shop,

where they get their cleaning done is all an investment to them, because they can give the

money to anybody. They literally ask the question “Who do I give money to?” and they always

make the money work for them. Does that make sense? Yeah. That’s why they have more

money, because they do that.

And they understand that those can turn into relationships. So they don’t just go to any

church. They don’t just go to any movie theater. They’re always asking the question, where

would be the leveraged opportunity? Now, understand I’m only looking for how many

relationships in the end? Five. Yeah. And these 25 people are all applying for those five

positions at all times. Does that make sense? Pretty simple, huh? Not as simple to apply. It

takes a long time to get it. We have a class that we teach in the company on how to find those

relationships. That’s a different class by the way.


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