Money Mastery: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom

Author Name: Anthony Robbins

I first encountered Anthony 25 years ago through a tape. After watching a late-night television commercial, I took the plunge and purchased his Personal Power 30-day self-improvement program. I listened to the tapes every day for an hour during my commute from Oracle and on the commute between my home in San Francisco and our Redwood Shores office. I was so moved by Anthony's words that one weekend I stayed home and did nothing but listen to the 30-day tapes over the course of two days. I quickly realized that Anthony was truly remarkable, and his ideas were completely different from anything I had ever experienced. Anthony had truly changed me. By the age of 25, as the youngest vice president at Oracle, I had achieved great success—or so I thought. I was making about $1 million a year and driving a top-of-the-line Ferrari. Yes, I had what I thought was success: a nice house, a fancy car, and a good social life. But I always felt like something was missing; I just didn't know what. Anthony helped me find that missing piece, supported me in defining where I really wanted to go, and discover the deeper meaning behind how I wanted my life to be. It wasn't long before I enrolled in Anthony's intensive weekend program, Unleash the Power Within. There, I truly cleared my vision and committed to a new level of scale. As a result, I dove deeper into Anthony's work and began full-throttle on my journey to found and build Salesforce.com.

I applied Anthony's theories and insights and created an amazing five-step tool: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measure. I used this tool to focus my work—and my life—on what I truly want. My five-step program answers five questions Anthony posed:

What do I really want to achieve? (Vision).

What is its importance? (Values).

How will I achieve it? (Methods).

What is preventing me from achieving it? (Obstacles).

How do I know if I have achieved success? (Measurement)

Anthony told me that the quality of my life depended on the quality of my questions. I quickly began planning everything in my life, my business, and my future by asking myself those five questions, answering them, and recording those answers. The results were amazing. On the first day I launched the website, March 8, 1999, we wrote my five-step program (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measure), and today all 15,000 of our employees are required to do the same. This program creates alignment, awareness, and communication, and is based exactly on what Anthony has taught me over the past two decades. Anthony believes that repetition is the foundation of skill development—that's where mastery comes from—so we never waver in writing and developing our five-step program. That's one of the reasons why Forbes magazine named us the "World's Most Innovative Company" for the fourth year in a row, Fortune magazine called us the "World's Most Admired Software Company," and the seventh "Best Place to Work" in 2014. We now generate $5 billion in revenue a year, and we continue to thrive.