Brian Tracy is a motivational speaker who’s written countless books and made hundreds of presentations on the subjects of overcoming procrastination, increasing sales, and mastering personal effectiveness. I’ve come to really appreciate his direct, no-nonsense style that’s based upon his own personal experience, not the reformulation of trendy industry catch phrases and buzz words.
A favorite Brian Tracy technique is his philosophy of incremental daily improvement. Essentially, incremental daily improvement is the process of improving yourself, just a fraction of a percentage point, every day. He said, this technique, over time, accumulates to 1,000% effectiveness. He said, at one point in his life early in his career, he made an annual salary of $14,000. He started to apply the principle of incremental daily improvement and in 7 years, he had increased his annual salary 1,000% to $1,400,000.
Brian Tracy was a high school dropout. The cards, on the outside, seemed to be stacked against him. But he had vision, set goals with deadlines, was filled with energy, and a fierce desire to succeed.
The technique works. Apply it to virtually any area of your life. If you had a goal to lose weight, set a target goal for what you would like to weigh, set a deadline for yourself so that your subconscious mind knows how quickly it needs to respond, then improve your diet and exercise regimen just a little bit each day. Eat an apple instead of a candy bar one day. Get up earlier. Do twenty pushups before rewarding yourself with a football game. Run up and down a flight of stairs 10 times for no other reason than to get your heart rate up.
Financially, tell yourself how much you’d like to make this year and then go after it. Daily, make another contact, another sales call, read an article on selling techniques, learn more about your industry… You get the picture. Just do it every day, all the time.
The best part of this technique is how it gets you past one of the major stumbling blocks of goal setting – giving up or losing momentum. By incrementally improving every day, all the time, you don’t have to worry about forever, just today. Even if you stumble a little, you know that you are incrementally improving all the time and will make adjustments later in the day, and the next day, and the day after that. You will get back on track. You are always sharpening the razor. If you make the razor dull with a bad decision, get right back after it, double your efforts, and start sharpening. If a goal seems too big, break off a little piece of the big picture and do something that pushes toward that goal. Voila. You’ve improved over slothfully doing nothing and being intimidated by your big goal.
Just when you think you’ve peaked, you’ll find another way, the next day, to out-do yourself. You just keep building momentum. And momentum is addictive because you don’t want to stop once you get it working in your favor.
Incremental daily improvement. It’s great. It works. Try it. Good luck!
