Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement

Anthony Robbins, a motivational speaker and peak-performance consultant, opens with what appears to be a third-person account of a successful young man, only to reveal the subject is himself. Shortly before, Robbins was overweight, unhappy, and living in a small apartment. His transformation, he argues, demonstrates the book's central premise: In the modern information age, specialized knowledge and the ability to take action are the primary sources of power. Knowledge alone is insufficient. Action is what produces results, and Robbins defines power as "the ability to act." He introduces the Ultimate Success Formula: know your outcome, take action, develop sensory acuity to recognize results, and change behavior until you achieve what you want. He illustrates this through Steven Spielberg, who at seventeen snuck away from a Universal Studios tour and returned the next day in a suit to claim an empty trailer as his office. By twenty, Spielberg had secured a seven-year directing contract.

Robbins identifies seven traits shared by successful people: passion, belief, strategy, clarity of values, energy, bonding power, and mastery of communication. The book is organized into three sections: directing one's own brain and body, goal-setting and communication with others, and leadership and broader contribution.

The first section introduces modeling, the process of discovering what someone does to produce a result and replicating those actions. Robbins contrasts W. Mitchell, who survived catastrophic burns and paralysis yet became a millionaire and political candidate, with comedian John Belushi, who achieved extraordinary success but died at thirty-three from a drug overdose. The difference, Robbins argues, lies in how each communicated with himself. He introduces Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a discipline studying how language affects the nervous system, developed by linguist John Grinder and mathematician Richard Bandler. By modeling master therapists, Grinder and Bandler identified three ingredients of human excellence: a person's belief system, mental syntax (the order in which thoughts are organized), and physiology (how the body is used).

Robbins argues that all behavior springs from neurophysiological states created by two components in a cybernetic loop: internal representations (what a person pictures, hears, and feels mentally) and physiology (breathing, posture, muscle tension). Changing one automatically changes the other. He references the NLP principle that "the map is not the territory," meaning internal representations are personalized interpretations, not objective reality. A person who imagines a late-arriving spouse in an accident feels concern; one who imagines an affair feels rage. Robbins advocates "memory management," the deliberate practice of representing experiences in empowering ways.

Belief receives extended treatment. Robbins defines beliefs as guiding principles that function as commands to the nervous system, citing placebo studies in which 70 percent of ulcer patients improved when told they received an effective drug, compared to 25 percent told the drug was experimental. He presents belief, potential, action, and results as a self-reinforcing cycle: Limiting beliefs reduce effort, producing poor results that confirm the original belief, while empowering beliefs trigger the opposite spiral. He frames seven empowering beliefs as "lies" to remind readers that no belief is absolute truth. These include: everything happens for a reason and serves us; there is no failure, only results; whatever happens, take responsibility; people are the greatest resource; work is play; and there is no lasting success without commitment.

The book's most technical material addresses submodalities, the specific sensory qualities within each representational modality, such as brightness, size, distance, and volume. Robbins distinguishes between associated images (experienced as if one is present) and disassociated images (observed from outside). Association intensifies emotion; disassociation diminishes it. He introduces the swish pattern, a technique for replacing unresourceful representations with resourceful ones: A person visualizes the unwanted behavior, places a small dark image of the desired self in the corner, then rapidly has the desired image grow and burst through the old one. Repeated quickly, this trains the brain to trigger the new representation automatically.

Mental syntax, Robbins argues, matters as much as content. He recounts a project with the U.S. Army in which he modeled expert marksmen and designed a training course that produced 100 percent qualification in under two days, compared to 70 percent in the standard four-day course. He applies the same logic to education, arguing that many children labeled learning-disabled simply have strategies mismatched to teaching methods. Strategy elicitation relies on observing words, body language, and eye movements. Robbins contends that eliciting a partner's love strategy is critical for relationships, since people tend to express love in their own preferred modality rather than their partner's, leaving both feeling unloved despite genuine affection.

Physiology, Robbins argues, is the fastest tool for changing states. Standing tall with deep breathing makes depression nearly impossible; a slumped posture makes resourcefulness equally difficult. He introduces the "act as if" principle: Putting the body into the physiology of a desired state causes the brain to produce that state. He also presents six keys to living health: deep breathing using a specific ratio, eating 70 percent water-rich foods, proper food combining, controlled consumption, eating fruit on an empty stomach, and reducing reliance on high-protein foods.

The second section addresses goal-setting and interpersonal communication. Robbins cites a study of 1953 Yale graduates in which the 3 percent who had written specific goals were worth more financially than the remaining 97 percent combined twenty years later. He guides readers through a twelve-step goal-setting workshop and presents the precision model, a system for challenging vague language, including universals, modal operators, and unspecified nouns and verbs. Rapport, the ability to enter someone else's world, is the foundation of effective communication, achieved primarily through mirroring another person's physiology and speech patterns. Robbins describes metaprograms, internal patterns that determine what a person pays attention to, including moving toward versus moving away, external versus internal frames of reference, and matching versus mismatching. These are context-dependent tendencies, not fixed traits.

Additional tools include the agreement frame, which replaces "but" with "and" to maintain rapport; reframing, which changes meaning by shifting the frame of reference; and anchoring, the process of linking a sensory stimulus to a neurological state so the stimulus later triggers that state automatically.

Values, which Robbins defines as beliefs about what is most important, function as the executive level of the brain, overriding all other programs. People arrange values in hierarchies, and the same word can mean vastly different things to different people, making it essential to discover evidence procedures: the specific criteria determining whether a value is being fulfilled. Five practical challenges complete the framework: handling frustration, rejection, financial pressure, complacency, and the discipline of always giving more than one expects to receive. Robbins advocates a financial structure drawn from George Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon: give away 10 percent of earnings, use 10 percent to reduce debt, invest 10 percent, and live on 70 percent.

The final chapters extend these principles to mass persuasion, analyzing advertising as applied anchoring and arguing that media technology already exists to change mass behavior by reshaping internal representations. Robbins closes with a story from one of his children's camps in which he encountered a girl who had experienced seven years of sexual abuse by her brother. Using the book's techniques, Robbins changed her internal representations, anchored her into a resourceful state, and enabled her to confront her brother with confidence and authority. The incident embodies the book's message: The tools exist for anyone to create profound change, but only those who act will produce results.