Brian Tracy is the preeminent expert on productivity. His book “Eat That Frog” has sold 1.5 million copies worldwide. His own “rags to un-rags” story, as he puts it, is evidence that anyone can achieve their goals: at 23, he was a migrant farm laborer who had to sweat in the fields and sleep in a barn. Today, he has given seminars to more than 5 million people in 84 countries.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.American Essence: What are your top three tools for success?
Mr. Brian Tracy: I have what I call my golden triangle, which is three keys, which I share with every audience. The first part of the triangle is self responsibility. This is the biggie: it underlies all social and personal problems in our society. People have to accept that, I am responsible for my own life. And the opposite of accepting responsibility is blaming someone or something else. If you want to cripple your future, then start to blame other people and other situations beyond your control for your problems.
The natural tendency of human beings is always to look outside themselves and blame someone or something else for their problems. And the natural tendency of high performance people, is they always accept responsibility and they say, “I’m not happy with this situation. So what do we do about it? What is the next step?”
Number two is to set your goals. Write them down, make a list of everything you need to do to achieve them. Pick the most important thing and start and complete it. What happens when you write down goals is you’re actually transcribing them into your subconscious and superconscious mind. And they began to work on the goals 24 hours a day, waking and sleeping.
Here’s one of the most wonderful payoffs: when you are working on something that’s important to you and you feel yourself making forward progress, you develop what psychologists call a positive addiction. Every time you start and complete a task, you feel like a winner, you feel positive, you feel happy, you feel exhilarated, and you feel motivated to do it again, and do it again. This is the simple secret of success of successful people.
Number three is continuous learning and improvement. And in every study I’ve ever read about anybody who was successful: they always talk about continuous learning. They’re always reading, they’re always taking courses. They’re always listening. They’re hungry for new information.
AE: If someone is struggling with a lack of motivation, what can they do to stay on track with their goals?
Mr. Tracy: When you have a setback—which you will have, they are inevitable—the only question is, what did I learn from this setback or failure? What did I learn? Write it down. Write it down. Keep coming back to your list and adding into it. And pretty soon what you‘ll have is a template of things to do and not to do that will guarantee that you’ll be successful next time.
Keep thinking of yourself as a learning machine. Realize that every single setback and difficulty has been sent to you like a gift from God—to teach you to be successful. So when you finally do break through, which you will, it’s inevitable—and you'll be able to hold onto it.
[Famed football coach] Vince Lombardi had a wonderful line. He said, the quality of your life is determined by the level of your commitment to excellence, no matter what your chosen field.
AE: What’s the best way to self-assess where you are and decide where you want to go?
Mr. Tracy: One of the things that I always teach is the magic wand method. If I imagine I had a magic wand, that I could wave it and I could accomplish or complete any goal on my list: Which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on my life? Which one goal? Writing it down makes you far more precise, gives you much greater clarity.
Everything in life has priorities. In life, some things are more important than others. If you take a look at your life, what is most important? Probably your health. Start off with that. And then, your most important relationships. And then, your goals, your future. But everybody has priority. So what you do in terms of dramatically increasing your productivity is very simple: at the end of each day, take your list of what you’ve done, what you didn’t get done. Write it down. Then, you go over the list. And you ask this question: if I could only accomplish one goal, or complete one task on this list, which one task would make the biggest positive contribution to my life and my work? It’s also the one that you’re most likely to procrastinate on, the one you’re most likely to make excuses about, the one you’re most likely to dodge. Discipline yourself.
I’ve had people who’ve doubled and tripled their productivity by simply stopping doing things that are of low value. And in contrast, start doing more of the things that are helping you the most, to move forward toward what you care about. Eventually, you develop the habit of only doing those things that are helping you the most.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
