No one succeeds in business without really trying. Good luck won’t do it anymore. Neither will good looks. You can’t sit back and wait for success to come to you.

Everyone who talks about today’s economic scene paints a picture in dark, murky, overcast colors. And when economists, the federal government and national surveys say things will be bad on a large scale it can easily be interpreted to mean things will be bad for you because:

In the first place, there aren’t enough jobs to go around these days.

And in the second, if you are lucky to find a job, there aren’t enough promotions or raises available these days. The corporate and job advancement ladders are as congested as the unemployment lines. So not only isn’t there a fast way up, sometimes there isn’t even a slow way.

The shortage of jobs at every level of the company structure means that people just don’t move up through the ranks the way they used to. Raises don’t add up the way you’d like them to anymore. And, inflation takes an ever-increasing bite out of our wallet.

Finally, the word is that this condition is not likely to change. It is expected to keep getting worse.

When I wrote Get A Job in 60 Seconds, I knew what the experts had to say about the scarcity of jobs. I didn’t buy it. So I presented a system for getting the job you want anyway.

The book wasn’t about proving the experts wrong or demonstrating that what they are saying isn’t so. The book was about how you, as a powerful and creative individual, can override negative statistics, cruise right over obstacles and predictions of gloom and doom, and win in low-win or even no-win situations.

When I wrote Get A Job in 60 Seconds, I didn’t know what the experts had to say about the scarcity of raises and advancement opportunities.

So this book is to complete both the job started in that book and the job you may have started using that book.

Of course, this book will help you whether or not you have read my last book. Or anybody else’s book for that matter. It can help you win at the job you’ve had all along.

And the way you’ll win is to get more money in less time. Or a raise in 60 days.

Why 60 days?

Because if you are willing to align yourself with this book and follow the suggestions outlined for you, 60 days is all you will need.

Perhaps you can get your raise even sooner. If you are a truly powerful communicator, in may take only 60 minutes for your boss to see your value to the company and reward you appropriately. However, it usually takes approximately a month to undercut impressions people at work have already formed about you. It then takes approximately another month to lock new and more positive evaluations and judgments in place.

By the time your supervisor begins to think, “Wow, Susan used to be the laziest person I ever saw and now she’s sparkplugging the whole department,” your raise will be around the corner.

To get your raise in 60 days you need to start at the beginning. And the very first thing to get clear about is who you are. You are you. Whatever your name is. If you have any question about that, get up right now and check yourself out in the nearest mirror.

Now that’s settled.

So I don’t need to tell you who you are anymore. Instead, I’ll tell you what you’re not. Just once. And just for the record. What you are not is a statistic or a number or any part of anyone else’s cumulative data.

That means whatever is true for statistics and other forms of databases, and all the people who are willing to be included in them, does not necessarily have to be true for you. Because you’re not any of that.

Once you are not willing to be lumped with everyone else, or to be just a small part of a large trend, it all gets easier. More or less.

There’s still something important to clear up. And that’s what getting a raise looks like to you.

Getting a raise probably looks hard. It looks risky. It looks as if you will have to confront someone.

Almost everyone is uncomfortable about asking for a raise and about handling the feelings of vulnerability and fear of rejection that go along with asking.

The way you’ve been going about it so far, there’s no way around that. It’s the truth. Asking for a raise is definitely hard. And risky. It may mean a confrontation. And all the rest.

Asking for a raise also has had a funny way of not working about as often as it works. So far. It’s been truly difficult.

Picture how it looks for just a moment.

You screw down your shaky courage and you go in to see the boss. Your heart is pounding in your chest. Your stomach is all knotted up. Your throat and shoulders are tight. You’re hardly breathing at all. And your voice is tiny and sticks in your dry throat.

Will you ever get a raise by asking for it that way? Maybe not. It is certainly a hard way to do it.

Hoping for a raise is even harder. You just stick around, show up every day and wait for the next review or the next fiscal year or the next big contract, and you hope.

When one of those things happens, maybe you’ll get your raise. Or maybe you’ll get canned instead. More likely they’ll just forget about you all together. All you have been doing is not calling attention to yourself. And that’s what happens. No one pays any attention to you. If asking for a raise is a fifty-fifty proposition, the success rate of hoping for a raise is less than one in a hundred.

Even lower on the scale of probable success are demanding a raise, pleading for a raise and doing anything that quickly comes to mind about getting someone to give you a raise.

The big mistake in each of these good-old-traditional-raise-getting techniques is the same. And it is the major source of the problems that keep your paycheck from growing.

Why should your boss give you a raise for sitting around hoping, wishing or praying when he or she can just go out and hire someone else for less? Unemployment is predicted to remain high during the next few years. There are lots of people who could do your job and many of them are available for work right this minute.

I’ll tell you how to leap over traditional techniques and problems and how to get your raise in Chapter 10. But first, there’s a lot you may need to discover about yourself and your work.

Until now, your whole approach has been wrong. On several counts.

First, you have probably always thought you weren’t making enough money. And that not making or having enough money were reasons enough to get your boss to give you more.

No way.

You’ll get to look at money at length in Chapter 4, and you’ll see how you can begin to always have enough of it. Remember, no one will ever give you a raise to reduce your hardships or balance the injustices of the world.

Second, you’ve probably thought you deserved a raise. You probably thought that the length of time since your last raise or the way you put up with all the aggravating working conditions gives you some kind of divine right to more money after a while.

Guess again. Hardly anyone will ever give you a raise for reasons like those. Reasons like those have no impact. They carry no clout. They do not make any difference at all. Not ever.

Reasons such as those may get you an increase in salary. An increase is a lot less money than a raise. You get an increase for waiting around long enough or because everyone else got one too. If you’re reading this book, you’re playing for higher stakes than that.

Third and most important of all, no matter what you thought, you have probably always believed that getting a raise involved somebody else giving you one and that someone else was in control of the process. So naturally, you had to ask, prove yourself, manipulate circumstances or otherwise get someone else to do something about your need or desire for more money.

Wrong again.

That one mistake has kept more people earning less money than anything else.

To get a raise in 60 days, begin by canceling that belief, erasing it, dissolving it, or doing anything it takes to eradicate it.

Instead, hold on to this: Getting a raise in 60 days simply involves getting a raise in 60 days. It does not involve getting your boss to give you a raise. Even though that’s exactly what your boss will ultimately do.

As long as you delegate the responsibility for your raise to your boss, you are at your boss’s mercy. And on your boss’s timetable.

When you take over complete responsibility for your raise and become the sole causal agent for creating it, getting a raise in 60 days begins to look very easy.

No matter how impossible that may sound right now, stick around.

By the time you finish this book, you will be in complete touch with your own power to create what you want for yourself. You’ll do it without buying into trends, statistics, performance standards or other people’s considerations of any kind.

You will see how it works when you begin to cause the events you want in your life, instead of waiting or hoping for them to happen. And those events will include financial abundance.

As part of the payoff, this book will arm you with a system for getting the raise you want.

Based upon interviews with a wide variety of executives, managers, supervisors and other people powerful enough to increase their employee’s paychecks, this system will work for you. It will work simply by showing you how to take over and begin to produce the kind of results that produce raises.

What’s so nice about all this is, it doesn’t matter what your job is or how long you have been working at it or what traditional salary review procedures are in effect.

If there is any way in the universe to shake a raise down from your employer’s money tree, and you can bet that there is, this book will tell you how to do it and support you all along the way. That will start the process of you supporting yourself in the style to which you would like to become accustomed.

In just 60 days.