Brian Tracy

Don’t be surprised, shocked, or set back when things go wrong. Your best-laid plans will often fall apart. Instead, expect disappointments and setbacks as a part of life. Take a deep breath, pick up the pieces, and continue onward.

Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote, ‘To have more, you must first be more.’ To achieve more in your outer world, you must go to work on your inner world, on developing yourself. There are no lasting shortcuts. There is no other way.

Life is like a combination lock; your job is to find the right numbers, in the right order, so you can have everything you want.

Unsuccessful people always wonder whether or not a particular goal is possible. High achievers, on the other hand ask only the question, ‘How?’ They then work to find ways to turn their visions and goals into realities.

The rule is ‘There are no unrealistic goals; there are only unrealistic deadlines.’

Your success in your career will be in direct proportion to what you do after you've done what you are expected to do.

Here is the most important rule of goals: ‘Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it.

Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar says, ‘The elevator to success is out of order, but the stairs are always open.’

Whenever you find great achievement, you find an individual who is absolutely clear about what he or she wants to do, and who is willing to do whatever it takes, for however long it takes, to achieve it.

Here is a test for you: For one day, twenty-four hours, see if you can think and talk about only the things you want. Resolve to keep your conversation free of all negativity, doubt, fear, or criticism. Discipline yourself to speak cheerfully and optimistically about each person and each situation in the world around you.

In 3,300 studies of leadership, seeking the common qualities possessed by great leaders through the ages, researchers found that the one quality all the studies had in common was vision. Leaders have vision. Nonleaders do not. Leaders have a vision of a better future for themselves, their families, and their organizations. They can see an ideal future in advance. They then work to make it a reality in the present.

You can earn a university degree in our society... and never once receive an hour’s worth of instruction on goal setting, even though goal setting is more important to long-term happiness than any other single subject you could ever learn.

You must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to be done.

A goal that is not in writing is like cigarette smoke: It drifts away and disappears. It is vague and insubstantial. It has no force, effect, or power. But a written goal becomes something that you can see, touch, read, and modify if necessary.

A successful life is merely a series of successful days, hours and minutes, minutes during which you think about your goals and your desires, about health and happiness and prosperity, and refuse to dwell on anything that you do not want to see manifested around you.

Keep pushing forward. Once you start moving, keep moving. Don’t stop. This decision, this discipline alone, can make you one of the most productive and successful people of your generation.

Your determination to become a more optimistic person in every part of your life will do more to ensure your success and happiness than any other single quality you can develop.

Decide upon your major definite purpose in life and then organize all your activities around it.

You will find that there are no limits to what you can accomplish except for the limits you place on your own imagination. And since there are no limits to what you can imagine, there are no limits to what you can achieve.

Continually ask yourself whether there is anything you should do more of or less of, start doing, or stop doing altogether? These are questions you should ask and answer every day. They are important keys to simplification.

An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but gets very little done.

You are a living magnet. What you attract into your life is in harmony with your dominant thoughts.

Longfellow once wrote: ‘Those heights by great men, won and kept, Were not achieved by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.’

Successful people make sure that everything they do in the short term is consistent with where they want to end up in the long term. They practice self-discipline at all times.

If you had all the time and money you wanted and you could be or have anything at all in life, what would you really want? The greater clarity you can achieve in describing your ideal future, the more likely you are to create that future for yourself, and usually faster than you can imagine right now However, you can’t hit a target you can’t see. Clarity is essential.

When you practice thinking and responding optimistically most of the time, this positive attitude soon becomes a conditioned response. You will eventually find yourself reacting and responding positively and optimistically all day long.

One of the smartest things you can do is to turn off the television and get to bed by ten o’clock each night during the week. Sometimes, one extra hour of sleep per night can change your entire life.

Fully 95 percent of your emotions, positive or negative, are determined by how you talk to yourself on a minute-to-minute basis.

Your level of optimism can be equated with your level of mental fitness. This form of mental fitness can be developed by practicing specific mental exercises, over and over, until you automatically respond in a positive and constructive way to anything that happens to you.

You can make excuses or you can make progress. You choose.

I discovered that you can achieve almost any goal you set for yourself if you have the discipline to pay the price, to do what you need to do, and to never give up.

It’s not that you don’t know what to do, but rather that you don’t have the discipline to make yourself do what you should do, whether you feel like it or not.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

My favorite organizing principle for high productivity is single handling, in which you concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing, all day long. Once you have programmed this work habit into yourself, you’ll be amazed at how much you get done.

You have to decide what your life would look like if you made it into a masterpiece.

There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important things. What are they?

Decide upon your major definite purpose in life and then organize all your activities around it.

I have found, over and over, that a person of average intelligence with clear goals will run circles around a genius who is not sure what he or she really wants.

Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘Man can either buy his wisdom or borrow it. By buying it, he pays full price in personal time and treasure. But by borrowing it, he capitalizes on the lessons learned from the failures of others.’

Determine the price you will have to pay in additional work, time, and commitment to achieve your goal, and then get busy paying that price.

Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with; bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with. The habits you have and the habits that have you will determine almost everything you achieve or fail to achieve.

For every difficulty that supposedly stops a person from succeeding there are thousands who have had it a lot worse and have succeeded anyway. So can you.

Bad habits are easy to form, but hard to live with. Good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with. And as Goethe said, ‘Everything is hard before it’s easy.’

You can get control of your tasks and activities only to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few activities that can really make a difference in your life.

Your ability to select your most important task, to begin it, and then to concentrate on it single-mindedly until it is complete is the key to high levels of performance and personal productivity.