Mentors Magazine: Issue 3

MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 3 | 35

will try every new idea ten times, before I
give up. And what I found was that most
new ideas do not work the first time, so
therefore I am going to try it ten times.
And then I will pass judgement on whether
or not it’s a good idea for me, my business,
my selling, my customer. And I found that if
it’s a good idea by the
fourth or fifth or sixth time
of trying it, you start to get
more fluent with it, more
confident, more competent,
you feel better, you feel
happier, you smile more.
And if it’s a good idea, you
add it to your repertoire.
Your tool case, and you have
it for the rest of your career.
And now you can go any-
where in the world and you can be an out-
standing salesperson of any product that
you have to sell.

But you are right, the fear of selling is what
holds people back and the way that we
overcome the fear, is we just do it over and
over again until the fear is gone.

Neil: How do people make sure that they
continue to use business model reinven-
tion in their business?

Brian Tracy: Well I teach very practical
techniques. And one of my favourite... and
by the way I wish I could say I invented
these. I have just spent by my estimation
about 150,000 hours in the study of a prac-
tical subject for most of my lifetime... One
of the things that I learned which I teach to
all of my clients, is called “Zero Based

Thinking”. And zero-based thinking, comes

from management science, and it basically

says, 'is there anything that you are doing

today that knowing what you now know,

you would not do again today if you had to

do it over?' You would not get in to it again

today if you had to do it over. So, what you

do is you zero base, you

draw a line under all the de-

cisions that you have made

in your life up to now. And

say, 'is there anything that I

have decided to do up to

now that knowing what I

know I would not have

done?' I wouldn't get in to it

again. And if the answer is

yes, then the next question

is how do you get help and

how fast? In other words, you cut and run.

If you decided that you wouldn't get in to

it, it means that it’s over. It means that its

finished, it means that the situation cannot

be saved.

Sometimes I talk to large audiences, I say,

for example, let us say you are in a bad re-

lationship, and you ask this question, the

zero-based thinking question... And the

question is, 'if you were not in this relation-

ship with this person, knowing what you

now know, would you get in to the rela-

tionship again?' And if the answer is no

then how do you get out and how fast?

And it’s astonishing how many peoples'

lives would change by that because they

are trying so hard.

And so, I ask, 'how do you know if you are

in a zero-based thinking situation?' And the

“is there anything that

you are doing today

that knowing what you

now know, you would

not do again today if

you had to do it over?”