Brian Tracy

Legitimately unhelpful. While the titular premise is promising, that is all this book has to uniquely offer.

The advice boils down to "Never EVER perform a low priority task if you have a high priority task, never EVER do tasks that are not immediately tied to success, and play less golf."

Much of his advice directly contradicts robust scientific evidence. His early assertion that you are a spineless failure if you succumb to the allure of getting a quick task "out of the way" before tackling show more your hardest most challenging obstacle is not evidence-based. Getting a small task done can boost your self-confidence and give you momentum to begin a task you're procrastinating on. Likewise, his demand that you only ever perform the most grueling task on your checklist while never EVER taking a breather to clear out some pesky lower priority tasks is in reality the quickest way to burn yourself out while dropping the ball in all other areas of your life.

His approach is not possible for a large number of occupations and professions. And that is my biggest gripe about this book: it is only helpful for the very specific circumstance that the author must be imagining in his head.

In short, large swaths of this book are full of neutrally inapplicable or even actively harmful advice. It is inflexible and without nuance. And I haven't even mentioned how repetitive and condescending it is.

If you want a steady stream of "Do as I say and you will be great, you will be better than everyone else, you can do anything" and nothing more, this is the book for you. Otherwise, I urge you to look elsewhere. show less

It starts out reading like a how to on using a Franklin Covey Planner, but then continues on. The whole book impressed me, but the following about 0.1% daily improvement really impressed me. Page 169 of Focal Point: If every day you do 0.1% better in performance and output, then over the course of a year you will have a 43% improvement. Of course, in real life 0.1% would be impossible to measure, it would be down in the noise, but I like the idea.

Brian Tracey recommends 1) getting up two show more hours earlier each day & spending the first hour reading in one’s specialty. Every day rewrite your goals. Every day do planning. Start the day by doing your most important task. Keep learning. At the end of the day ask yourself two questions:


What did I do right?
What could I have done better?

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I am responsible
Whatever you concentrate on grows.

Simplify; Concentrate on the 20% of the activities that produce 80% of the value.
The grand SLAM formula.
S stands for simplify
L for Leverage your strengths & abilities, other people's knowledge; other people's energy; other people's energy; other people's money; other people's successes; other people's failure; other people's ideas; other people's contacts (or credibility)
A for Accelerate
M for multiply

Six Steps to doubling your Income and Doubling Your Time Off
1 Identify the few tasks that contribute the greatens value to your work
2 Identify the routine tasks and activities that consume so much time but contribute little or nothing to your long-term goals at work
3 Use the Grand Slam formula
4 Take at least one full day each week off work during which you spend time exclusively on your personal pursuits. (no employment related work)
5 Once you are comfortable... expand your time off to two days, a full weekend, every week. Schedule a three-day vacation every three months, and eventually every two months.
6 Start today to pay closer attention to the things you do.

"You are where you are and what you are because of yourself and nothing else. Nature is neutral. Nature doesn't care. IF you do what other successful people do, you will enjoy he same rewards and results as they do.. And if you don't, you won't." (p 58)

"Today, we call it the law of cause and effect. In biblical terms, it is the law of sowing and reaping. Sir Isaac Newton called it the law of action and reaction. This is the great law of Wester civilization. It underlies more than 2000 years of advances in science, medicine, technology, and business." (p59-60)

"You can be, have, or do anything you want in life if you simply find out how other people achieved it before you and then do the same thing yourself. ... if you do what other successful people do, you'll eventually get the same results they are getting. It is entirely up to you." (p 60)

So, Keith: What are other successful people doing?

As I continue reading in the book Focal Point, I am impressed that I should be doing these exercises on a regular basis. I am also impressed that these are not new things. These are the same exercises that I have had recommended to me before. Brian Tracy comments that when he got into sales he "searched out and applied every bit of information on sales methods and techniques that I could learn from other successful salespeople. And they worked. in no time at al, I was among the top salespeople in my organization." (p 61)

When I went into real estate development, I read more than twenty books on the subject, including... " (p 61)

Often when I explain this cause-and-effect principle, people dismiss it as being too simplistic to apply to their own situations, but the most powerful principles are almost always the simplest. That is why greater success and achievement are possible for almost everyone. (p 61)

"Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects. (p 61)

The key is asking the right questions.

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Now, in 2021, 18 years after first reading it, I ask myself: Have I improved 0.1% per day? I have to say:
1. I can’t tell because human performance is highly variable from day to day.
2. I can’t tell because human performance is notoriously difficult to measure.
3. I don’t think I am 711 times more productive than I was 18 years ago.
See the following table for the results of the equation:
Result = 1.01^(365*Years)

Years Result
1 1.44
5 6
10 38
15 238
18 711
20 1475

It’s a captivating concept, but real life has
1. A lot of bumps and turns that change our trajectory immensely.
2. Could we really measure it?
3. Perhaps it was the wrong goal in the first place. What really matters? (See Stephen R. Covey) show less

This book starts out strong, centered around its valuable 'Eat That Frog' prescription, but then gets more and more ridiculous the further along you get. By the end, each chapter sounds like a parody of itself.

Once I got to the technology chapters, I was certain I was reading some poorly aged book from the 90's, which is mostly true since the first edition came out in 2001. But then the author includes specific mentions of smart phones so no one can claim it hasn't been updated. I think the show more truth is Eat That Frog was written for the boomer white-collar demographic, now at retirement age, and unfortunately that means you can expect a certain level of tone deafness about what challenges the younger digital natives are facing. show less

According to this book, I should not be updating my Goodreads first thing in the morning, but here we are.

I had recently taken a quiz on PureWow or some such site about my "chronotype," which is like what kind of productivity schedule works best for you based on different animals, and that had convinced me to work on my most strenuous tasks between the hours of 10 and 2. But obviously, 10 became 10:30, then 11, or if I never got into my toughest stuff, I didn't even sweat it. It really just show more became a looming deadline of when I would have to start my most difficult, dreaded tasks. When I was discussing that concept with friends, they mentioned "eating the frog," which I had never heard before but could kind of guess what it meant.

The title is ostensibly based on a Mark Twain quote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day," which gets transmuted into “If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first,” somewhere on the back of the boook. Although actually, there isn't much evidence outside of the internet that Mark Twain ever actually said that, and it probably originated from the French humorist/social critic Nicolas Chamfort (this is according to what I read on quoteinvestigator.com), with a couple of journalists taking the liberty in the late 80s/early 90s of attributing this to Mark Twain, because, why not? This is a little bit depressing because obviously it makes one question the reliability of all of the other information that is presented as fact in the book, but I do like the approach in general, namely that you should get your biggest, most important, most vital tasks done first thing, rather than last thing. The book goes off the rails at some points; the author goes from saying that optimism (a.k.a. being action/solutions-oriented, practicing positive thinking) is an important virtue to saying that you should always answer "I'm feeling terrific" when someone asks you how you are and that you should never share your problems with anyone (80% of them don't care, 20% of them are happy that you have them–although I'm slightly obsessed with this). He spends a lot of time talking about the utmost importance of maximum productivity, but he also prefaces it with the overall goal of minimizing time at work and maximizing time with loved ones, for example, and how to set meaningful goals and define success for yourself in all areas of life. This book is from 2006, for better and for worse; there are references to Blackberries and PDAs (lol), but he still makes some good points about technology being a servant > master, and the value of unplugging. I'm also just a big fan of any book that doesn't primarily exist as a tool to sell you something else (a planner, journal, course, etc.).

I listened to this book, but I definitely just put a hold on it so that I can work through the exercises and activities on paper, too. I'm excited to institute this as my New Year's resolution and see what happens in my work and life spaces! show less