Brian Tracy's Success Handbook

Brian Tracy's Success Handbook Box Set

*The Science of Motivation, Money, Influence* *by Brian Tracy and Dan Strutzel*

A boy with no degree, washing dishes on a ship

Brian Tracy did not start his career in a corner office. He started it in a galley.

He left high school without graduating. He worked as a laborer, washed dishes on a freighter, and slept in cheap rooms across three continents before he ever owned a suit. By his early twenties he had already crossed more than eighty countries, most of them on his own dime, often hitchhiking, sometimes broke. The man who would later be quoted by Fortune 500 CEOs spent his early adulthood asking himself the same question every poor young man eventually asks: why are some people rich and other people not?

His first real break came in sales. Not Silicon Valley sales. Not enterprise software. Door-to-door selling, the unglamorous kind, knocking on a stranger's door at six in the evening and trying to talk your way past a screen door. He sold encyclopedias. He sold soap. He sold whatever he could carry in a sample case. And he was bad at it for a long time, because rejection burns when you have nothing in the bank.

What changed him was a single decision. Instead of complaining about the no's, he started studying the people in his company who were getting yes's. He bought their books. He listened to their tapes during his commute. He copied their scripts word for word. Inside of a year he was a top performer. Inside of three years he was a sales manager training other reps. By his thirties he was running training seminars for companies that had once turned him down for entry-level jobs.