GET SMART! by Brian Tracy

• By using your brain—your ability to think, plan, and create—with greater precision and accuracy, you can solve any problem, overcome every obstacle, and achieve any goal you can set for yourself.
• Most people have enormous reserves of mental capacity that they fail to use, that they are apparently saving up for some good reason.
• Ignorance is not bliss. The failure to use the appropriate thinking tools and styles in a particular area or situation can be disastrous—and often leads to overwhelming failure.
• Perhaps your biggest problem today is not a problem at all. Perhaps it is an opportunity.
• Your beliefs, either positive or negative, helpful or hurtful, largely determine everything you do and how you do it.
• As your inner life changes, your outer life changes to reflect this new thinking.
• THE BETTER YOU THINK, the better results you will get and the more successful you will be in every area.
• The most important measure, the only measure of the quality of your thinking, is the results you get, the consequences of what you decide to do as a result of the decisions you make.
• Consequences are everything! The only question is, “Did your idea work or not?”
• Your ability to accurately foresee and predict the consequences of your decisions and actions is the true measure of your intelligence.
• An intelligent act is something you do that moves you closer to something you really want. A stupid act is something you do that does not move you closer to something you want or, even worse, moves you away from it.
• It is not what people say, wish, hope, or intend that counts. It is only what they do, and especially what they do when faced with temptation or put under pressure.
• People always seek the fastest and easiest way to get the things they want as soon as possible, with little consideration of secondary consequences.
• All action is focused on improvement of some kind.
• It turns out that successful people are intensely future oriented. They think about the future most of the time.
• Peter Drucker said that the primary job of the leader, especially in business, is to think about the future; no one else is tasked with that responsibility.
• The very act of thinking long term sharpens your perspective and dramatically improves the quality of your short-term decision making.
• When you have clear future intent, future orientation, it becomes much easier for you to think with greater clarity, to make those decisions today that will enable you to achieve your long-term goals.
• The critical word in long-term perspective is “sacrifice.”
• Successful people are willing to sacrifice, to delay immediate gratification in the present, in the short term, to enjoy greater rewards in the future—in the long term. Without the willpower and discipline to engage in “short-term pain for long-term gain,” little success is possible.
• Many millionaires and multimillionaires today are average middle-class earners, living in average homes in average neighborhoods.
• Peter Drucker said, “People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year. But they greatly underestimate what they could accomplish in five years.”
• Once you are clear about what your ideal career and income would be five years in the future, look back to the present, and decide the steps you will have to take to get from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. Then take the first step.
• The good news is that you can always see the first step. You don’t have to see every step on the staircase to begin climbing. You just have to take the first step. And when you take the first step, the second step will appear. And when you take the second step, the third step will appear. You will always be able to see one step ahead, and that’s all you need. But you must take the first step.
• The first step is always the hardest. It requires tremendous determination and willpower for you to do something more than and different from what you have ever done before.
• Learn to live on 85–90 percent of your income and save or invest the balance.
• Resolve today to develop long-time perspective. Become intensely future oriented. Think about the future most of the time.
• Practice self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-control. Be willing to pay the price today in order to enjoy the rewards of a better future tomorrow.
• Resolve today to think long term, to consider the likely consequences of a decision before you act. Project forward three to five years, and imagine that your life was ideal in every way. How would it be different from today? Decide upon one action that you are going to take immediately to create your ideal future. And then take the first step.
• By properly focusing the powers of your mind on any goal or desire you have, you can accomplish extraordinary things and often far faster than you realize.
• It takes tremendous discipline and willpower for you to control and constrain this onrushing river of thought and to channel it in such a way as to enable you to accomplish all that is possible for you.
• Whatever you do repeatedly becomes a habit.
• The very act of stopping to think before you say or do anything almost always improves the quality of your ultimate response.
• Good thinking is hard work. It must be learned and practiced over and over if you are going to truly plumb the depths of your mental powers.
• One of the best habits you can develop is to practice thinking slowly in those areas where slow thinking is required.
• Almost all of the mistakes we make in life come from not carefully considering the consequences of our actions beforehand.
• The more important a decision can be to you in the long term, the more important it is that you slow down, call a time-out, and carefully consider both the facts and your options.
• Think on paper. One of the most powerful thinking tools of all is a sheet of paper upon which you write down every detail of the problem or decision.
• The people you choose to work with or for, to socialize with or marry, to invest through or go into business with, will determine about 85 percent of your success and happiness in your personal life.
• One of the most powerful of all ways to practice slow thinking is for you to practice solitude on a regular basis.
• Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident, either. The more carefully you think and plan before taking action, the faster you take control over your success in the future.
• Resolve today to put a space where you think slowly between the stimulus, the problem or idea, and your response. Select one important area of your business or personal life and practice the GOSPA model to help you think clearly and at your very best in planning your future. Plan today to take thirty to sixty minutes for solitude, where you sit in complete silence and listen to your intuition. Do this regularly.
• The best decisions we make are almost invariably based on having acquired complete knowledge of the issue before we act. We “look before we leap.”
• In business, according to Forbes magazine, the number one reason for failure is that there is no demand for the product or service.
• According to McKinsey & Company, a leading business consultancy, the major reason for business success is high sales. The major reason for business failure is low sales.
• “The most important elements in business are facts. Get the real facts, not the obvious facts or assumed facts or hoped-for facts. Get the real facts. Facts don’t lie.”
• One of the most important words in business today is “validation.” Never assume. When you get a good idea, immediately take action to validate it, to gather proof that it is really as good as you think it is.
• One thought or observation can change your perspective completely.
• Create a hypothesis—a yet-to-be-proven theory. Then seek ways to invalidate this hypothesis, to prove that your idea is wrong. This is what scientists do. This is exactly the opposite of what most people do. They come up with an idea, and then they seek corroboration and proof that their idea is a good one. They practice “confirmation bias.” They only look for confirmation of the validity of the idea, and they simultaneously reject all input or information that is inconsistent with what they have already decided to believe.
• Be prepared to try and fail, to propose and be rejected, over and over. Failure, trial, and error are absolutely essential to your ultimate success.
• Be tough on yourself in becoming informed. Don’t let yourself off the hook or ask yourself softball questions.
• Keep gathering information until the proper course of action becomes clear, as it eventually will. Check and double-check your facts. Assume nothing on faith. Ask, “How do we know that this is true?”
• Nothing replaces experience in a fast-moving, rapidly changing business or industry.
• Experienced people develop what is called pattern recognition.
• Perhaps the most common advice given by wealthy people is “Don’t lose money.” In business and in life, your goal, too, must be to not lose money.
• The more information you gather before you make a decision, the more likely it is that you will make the right decision that leads to the success you desire.
• Your goal should be to become better informed than anyone else in those areas of business and life that are most important to you. You do this by continually gathering information and comparing different ideas. You remain skeptical and proceed slowly toward your decisions.
• “Success is goals, and all else is commentary.”
• Throughout your life, you will have a series of turning points. These are moments, insights, or experiences that can take a few seconds or a few months. But after one of these turning points, your life is never the same again. Sometimes you recognize one of these turning points when it takes place. In most cases, you only recognize that it was a turning point in retrospect.
• Only about 3 percent of people have clear, specific, written goals and plans that they work on each day. The other 97 percent have hopes, dreams, wishes, and fantasies, but not goals. And the great tragedy is that they don’t know the difference.
• The fact is that when you have clear, specific goals and clear plans to achieve those goals and you work on them every day, you save an enormous amount of time. You accomplish more in a few months or years than many people accomplish in a lifetime.
• Perhaps the very best way for you to develop the “big three” of superior thinking—clarity, focus, and concentration—is for you to develop clear goals for every part of your life.
• Fully 95 percent of success is developing clarity in the first place.
• You must become completely clear about who you are—your strengths, your weaknesses, your special talents and abilities—and what you want to do with your life. Then you must focus single-mindedly on one thing at a time, without diversion or distraction.
• According to both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the ability to focus on one thing at a time is more responsible for success in our fast-moving, turbulent times than any other mental ability.
• Goals enable you to develop the qualities of clarity, focus, and concentration much faster than anything else you could do or decide for your life. Goals are the best antidote to “fuzzy thinking,” which is probably more responsible for frustration and failure than any other factor.
• Those who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do.
• Perhaps the most important factor affecting your life today is the speed of change.
• One new piece of knowledge, one new idea or insight, can upset or overturn an entire industry, causing failure and bankruptcy.
• Your competition is continually scouring the world of new information and technology, seeking opportunities to serve your customers with what they want better, faster, and cheaper than you are today.
• And the only thing we know is that the rate of change is going to be faster and faster in the months and years ahead.
• Goals enable you to control the direction of change, to assure that your life and work are self-determined rather than being dictated by outside events.
• Goal setting requires long-term thinking, slow thinking, and informed thinking. A key success principle is for you to “think on paper.” The very act of writing down what you want dramatically increases your probability of achieving it. Remember, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. You can’t hit a target unless you can clearly describe it on paper.
• The quality of your thinking is greatly enhanced by the quality of the questions that you ask yourself, especially in the areas of goal setting and goal achieving.
• Most problems in human life, most confusion, can be resolved by a return to values. Your values make up your core.
• Don’t be satisfied with your first answer. Your first answer will always be something simple, obvious, and admirable to other people. But keep asking the question. “What is my most important value in life?” You may be surprised at the answer you eventually come up with.
• What one great goal would you dare to set for yourself if you knew you could not fail?
• The fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success and the primary cause of failure in adult life.
• Your ability to think clearly about who you are and what you really want is central to your living a high-performance life.
• Find out what other successful people do over and over, and then do the same things that they do.
• Decide exactly what you want. Most people never do this.
• A major reason for failure in adult life is that most people think they already have goals. But what they have are not goals. They are merely wishes, hopes, and fantasies. A real goal, on the other hand, is something clear and specific.
• Write it down. A goal that is not in writing is merely a wish or a hope.
• Only 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals, and everyone else works for them. They earn and accomplish ten times as much as the average person over the course of their working lifetimes. People with written goals often accomplish more in one year than the average person accomplishes in five or ten years.
• Each goal you write down, and each time you write it, you are actually writing and programming into your subconscious mind.
• Written goals are very powerful.
• Set a deadline. A deadline acts as a “forcing system” for your subconscious mind. It gives your subconscious and superconscious powers a target to aim at.
• What happens if you don’t achieve your goal by the deadline? Simple—set another deadline. Many things can happen over which you have no control that can set back the accomplishment of your goal. No problem. Just set another deadline.
• Remember, there are no unrealistic goals, merely unrealistic deadlines.
• The first way you organize the list is by sequence. Create a checklist, a list of all the steps, one after the other, that you will have to take to achieve your goal. Working from a written checklist will increase the speed at which you achieve your goal by perhaps five or ten times.
• The second way you organize your list is by priority. What is more important, and what is less important? Twenty percent of the items on your list will account for 80 percent of your success. What are they?
• Take action immediately on your plan. Do something. Do anything. Take the first step.
• Do something every day to move you toward the achievement of your most important goal, whatever it is at that time. Never miss a day, seven days a week.
• When you do something every day, you trigger the “momentum principle” of success.
• It seems that goals you want to achieve within one year are more motivational than goals that reach five or ten years into the future, even though you will eventually set these goals as well.
• When you write down your goals, use the three Ps. Make them present tense, personal, and positive. Your subconscious mind can only work on a goal that is properly phrased this way.
• Take action immediately on one task, the first item on your list, and complete this one task as soon as possible.
• Remember the great truth: You become what you think about most of the time. Each morning when you get up, think about your goal. All day long, think about your goal. In the evening, review your progress on your major goal.
• The more you think, plan, and work on your major goal, the faster you move toward it, and the faster it moves toward you.
• Your earning ability is your ability to get results that people will pay you for.
• All success in the world of work boils down to one simple result: task completion. In the final analysis, your ability to complete your tasks consistently and dependably is what makes you a valuable and indispensable resource to your organization.
• The 80/20 rule seems to apply to the world of work. Twenty percent of people are on the fast track, continually increasing their value, moving up, and earning more money. Eighty percent of working people in all fields are timeservers. They come to work at the last possible minute and leave at the first possible minute. While they are there, they use their time poorly in comparison with the people on the fast track.
• According to Robert Half International, fully 50 percent of working time is wasted.
• Here, then, is the rule: Work all the time you work. When you go to work, work. Do not play with your friends, check your e-mail every five minutes, read the newspaper, or take care of personal business. Work all the time you work.
• Your goal, known only to you, is to develop the reputation for being the hardest-working person in your company. Work all the time you work.
• Many people think that because they are at work, they are actually working. But you are only working when you are starting and completing important tasks. You are only working when you are getting results that your company wants and needs to generate revenues and create value.
• To manage your time effectively and get maximum results, you begin with clear goals to which you are committed.
• The most powerful time management tool is a list. You start with your major goal or goals and then make checklists of everything you will need to do to achieve that goal. In your work, you begin with a list of everything you want to accomplish that day.
• The very act of working from a list will increase your productivity by 25–50 percent the very first day.
• You can double and triple your productivity by breaking the addiction to electronic interruptions, especially e-mail.
• Practice the 70 percent rule. If anyone else can do this 70 percent as well as you, delegate and pass off this task to that person.
• Because of the comfort zone, we become accustomed to doing things of no or low value that we once did in the past but that are no longer important to the results we are expected to achieve.
• One of the most powerful and productive time management tools is contained in the Law of Three. This law states that there are only three tasks that you do that account for 90 percent of the value of your contribution to your company and to yourself. Everything else you do falls in the other 10 percent.
• It is impossible for you to be highly productive unless you are crystal clear about the most valuable thing you could possibly be doing.
• It is not unusual for you to conclude that one task is more important, but to your boss and co-workers something else you do is vastly more important.
• Do fewer things. The fact is that you will never get caught up. You will never be able to do all the things that you have to do. The only way that you can get control of your life is by stopping doing things of low value.
• Do more important things. Work on one or more of your three most important tasks.
• Do your most important tasks more of the time. Spend your entire day on them if you possibly can.
• Get better at each of your most important tasks. Continuous learning and personal improvement are essential to your success, but in what areas? Answer: Get better at achieving results at those tasks that are more important than anything else.
• One of the best of all time management questions is this: “What one task, if I were to do it especially well, would make the greatest positive difference in my work?”
• Your ability to overcome procrastination and get started on your most important task is one of the most valuable disciplines that you can develop.
• The key to success in your work is task completion. For this, perhaps the single most powerful time management technique is “single-handling.”
• The habit of starting and completing your most important task first thing each morning will transform your life.
• Think on paper. Write things down. Always work from a list or, even better, a checklist. Determine your “big three,” those tasks that represent 90 percent of the value of your contribution to your company and to yourself. Discipline yourself to start immediately each morning on the most valuable use of your time, and then persist until that task is 100 percent complete.
• The true measure of how successful you are in life is how happy you are—most of the time.
• Successful people practice positive thinking most of the time. As a result, they are happier, more genial, more popular and derive more real pleasure from life than the average person.
• The main obstacle between each person and the happiness that he desires is negative emotions. Negative emotions lie at the root of virtually all problems in human life.
• Thinking positively actually requires effort and determination until it becomes a habitual response to life and circumstances. Fortunately, you can become a purely positive thinker through learning and practice.
• The most powerful and profound way to distort the adult personality is rooted in “love deprivation” or the giving and then withholding of love when the child is young.
• Negative emotions are created when we attempt to explain away a situation or a behavior in our lives that is unpleasant for us.
• As a result of continually rationalizing away our negative behaviors, we become unhappier and more dissatisfied and fail to make progress in our lives.
• Another major source of negative emotions comes about when we justify our negative behaviors by explaining them away in some fashion.
• Many of our negative emotions come from our tendency to judge other people.
• We are hypersensitive to what we think other people might be thinking and feeling about us. We are so concerned with not incurring the displeasure or disapproval of others that we are often paralyzed or held back from taking actions that are in our best interests.
• Because your mind can only hold one thought at a time—positive or negative—you can cancel any negative thought at any time by simply repeating to yourself, over and over again, “I am responsible! I am responsible! I am responsible!”
• The key to self-esteem, self-confidence, self-reliance, and self-respect is for you to accept 100 percent responsibility for everything you are and all that you will become in life.
• The fact is that your parents are normal people just like you who made all kinds of mistakes because of ignorance and inexperience.
• You must set yourself free by forgiving yourself for every mistake that you have ever made.
• There is a direct relationship between the amount of responsibility that you accept and the amount of control that you feel in your life.
• Acceptance of responsibility is the mark of a leader, an achiever, and a self-actualizing man or woman.
• IN TIMES OF TURBULENCE and rapid change, your ability to think flexibly, to consider every aspect of a situation and then to respond effectively to change, can have an enormous impact on your business and your career.
• Your cherished ideas from a year or two ago, or even a month ago, are no longer valid or relevant in the turbulent markets of today.
• We are living in the fastest-changing, most disruptive, and most turbulent period in all of human history, except for tomorrow and next week and next year.
• Businesses get into trouble when customer tastes and demands change.
• To survive and thrive today, you must be on the cutting edge, as an individual or an organization, of the changes taking place around you.
• Today, many people have obsolete skills; they are being replaced by people with better and more appropriate skills that are in higher demand.
• People in the top 20 percent bought all the books, attended all the courses, listened to all of the audio programs, and continually sought ways to do their jobs better, cheaper, and faster.
• People in the bottom 80 percent were exactly the opposite. They seldom read a book, took a course, or made any effort to upgrade their skills.
• Many people today, at all income levels and in all career categories, are unaware of this pressing need to continually upgrade their skills.
• No one stays in the same place for very long. If you are not continually upgrading your knowledge and skills, you are not staying even. You are actually falling further and further behind, while people who are aggressive about continuous learning are moving further and faster ahead.
• Three enemies of change and flexibility must be countered head-on.
• The first and worst is the “comfort zone.” People start doing or working at something and quickly become comfortable. They then resist any change, even positive change that requires them to do something new or different.
• The second major obstacle to flexibility, to challenging and questioning the status quo, is fear of all kinds, but especially the fear of failure.
• The third reason that people fear and resist change is “learned helplessness.” The individuals responsible know that change is essential, but they feel that they are helpless, caught up in the complexities of the current situation and unable to change.
• The all-around champion tool to change your perspective and to develop higher levels of flexibility is “zero-based thinking.”
• In zero-based thinking, you ask the brutal question, “Is there anything that we are doing today that, knowing what we now know, we wouldn’t start up again if we had to do it over?”
• Look around you at your situation, and especially at those areas that are causing you stress, dissatisfaction, or unhappiness, and be willing to admit that you were wrong.
• Sometimes, people think that by admitting they are wrong, they are demonstrating weakness. They think people will not respect them if they admit that a decision they made and defended in the past was wrong. But it is exactly the opposite. In times of turbulence and rapid change, having the courage and character to admit you were wrong, when the mistake is probably clear to everyone around you, actually increases their respect for you and their willingness to be influenced by you in the future.
• Because of ego, many people find it difficult to admit that they have made a mistake, even when they obviously have, and it is clear to everyone around them.
• Because you are going to be wrong and make mistakes fully 70 percent of the time, don’t wait for everyone else to figure it out. Instead, jump ahead of the curve and quickly admit, “I was wrong. I made a mistake.” And then rectify the situation as rapidly as you can.
• Again, changing your mind when you get new information is a mark of courage, character, and flexibility, not of weakness.
• The more readily you can say the words “I was wrong, I made a mistake, I changed my mind,” the better you will think and the more respected you will be by all the people around you.
• The skill of zero-based thinking is absolutely essential if you want to realize your full potential in your work and personal life. And the more you practice it, the better you get at it.
• Sometimes, the simplest ideas can jar your thinking and cause you to see your situation in a completely different way. The key is for you to always be open to the possibility that whatever you are doing, you could be completely wrong. There could be a completely different and better way to do almost anything, and there usually is.
• There are seven tools you can use to increase your flexibility and your mental agility.
• Rethinking: This requires that you stop the clock, take a time-out, and stand back to look at your situation objectively.
• Reevaluating: Practice zero-based thinking, and consider the possibilities of doing things completely differently.
• Reorganizing: Look for ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations by moving people and resources around and by deploying them in different ways.
• Restructuring: This involves moving your people and resources into the 20 percent of activities that can account for 80 percent of your results.
• In business, your primary concern should be revenue generation. Move your very best people into those areas where they can have the greatest positive effect on generating more revenue for your company.
• Reengineering: Continually seek ways to simplify your work and life by delegating, outsourcing, downsizing, or eliminating certain activities.
• Reinventing: Continually imagine what you would do differently if you were starting over again today.
• One good idea can be enough to change the entire direction of your life.
• What gets inspected gets done.