Focal Point
A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals
Brian Tracy is one of the classic modern self-development teachers and he's literally a Big Idea machine. In this Note, we'll have fun learning about the importance of taking responsibility in our lives and staying flexible (and, of course, some Ideas on how to do so!). We'll also check in on the importance of managing our time well by "one-touching" stuff and maintaining our optimism in the face of challenges.
Big Ideas
- “I Am Responsible”Yah, you are!
- “Everything Is Hard Before It Is Easy.”... Before it’s easy.
- Zero-Based ThinkingWould you start it again?
- Flexibility: The Single Most Important QualityMost important quality.
- Every Minute Counts (for Ten)!(For ten)!
- Single-Mindedly One TouchingOne touching.
- Visualization + Idealization+ Idealization.
- Time Management = Life Management= Life management.
- What Do You Think About Most of the Time?About most of the time?
- How’s Your Optimism?Filling glasses, baby!
- The Great Truths of Life Are SimpleAre simple.
- “Why Aren’t I at My Goal Already?”At my goal already?”
- Sharpen Your FocusNow.
“You can dramatically improve the overall quality of your life far faster than you might think possible. All you need is the desire to change, the decision to take action, the discipline to practice the new behaviors you have chosen, and the determination to persist until you get the results you want.”
~ Brian Tracy from Focal Point
I’ve learned a *LOT* from Brian Tracy.
He’s been doing his self-development and sales training work for decades now and I’ve enjoyed a variety of his books and audio programs and newsletters (highly recommend his newsletter if you’re looking for some great practical, motivational wisdom).
Some of my favorites include his books Goals! and Eat That Frog! (great little book about training yourself to the hardest thing FIRST; once you’ve “eaten your frog” for the day, the rest of the day is a breeze :), and audio programs on creativity.
This book, Focal Point, is all about focusing our energy to, as the sub-titles suggests: “Simplify your life, double your productivity, and achieve all your goals.”
Tracy is a treasure-trove of Big Ideas and I trust you’ll dig the handful I’ve mined here. If you’re feelin’ it and looking for a roll-up-the-sleeves and rock it guidebook, get the book!
Download MP3
Download PDF
Get the Book
Listen to the Podcast“I Am Responsible”
“Among the most important personal choices you can make is to accept complete responsibility for everything you are and everything you will ever be. This is the great turning point in life. The acceptance of personal responsibility is what separates the superior person from the average person. Personal responsibility is the preeminent trait of leadership and the wellspring of high performance in every person in every situation.
Accepting complete responsibility for your life means that you refuse to make excuses or blame others for anything in your life that you’re not happy about. You refuse, from this moment forward, to criticize others for any reason. You refuse to complain about your situation or about what has happened in the past. You eliminate all your if-onlys and what-ifs and focus instead on what you really want and where you are going.
This decision to accept complete responsibility for yourself, your life, and your results, with no excuses, is absolutely essential if you want to double your income and double your time off. From now on, no matter what happens, say to yourself, ‘I am responsible.’”
Can I get a chorus of “Amen”s and “Hallelujah”s, please?!?
(Thank you.)
If you haven’t noticed, this is RULE #1 for success. The willingness to take 100% responsibility for our lives. The willingness to be response-able. To be pro-active and not re-active. To have an internal rather than an external locus of control. To be a creator and not a victim.
If we want to enjoy life and expand into our highest potential, it’s clear we’ve gotta stop our criticizing, blaming, complaining and overall whining and eliminate all the “if-onlys and what-ifs.”
Starting now.
Sound good? Sweet.
Every great man has become great, every successful man has succeeded, in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.
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.
“Everything Is Hard Before It Is Easy.”
“German philosopher Goethe once wrote, ‘Everything is hard before it is easy.’ You may need to exert tremendous discipline to develop new habits of thought and behavior. But once you have them firmly locked in, they enable you to accomplish vastly more, with less.”
The only real questions are: What habits of thought and behavior do you need to build? AND (!) Are you willing to do the work to establish the new habits into your life?
(Oh, and those aren’t rhetorical questions. :)
—> What habits do I need to build? I will build these new habits of thought and behavior:
1. _______________________________________________________________
2. _______________________________________________________________
3. _______________________________________________________________
4. _______________________________________________________________
5. _______________________________________________________________
—> Am I willing to do the work necessary to establish these new habits in my life?__YES__
(Good answer. :)
Let’s rock what needs to be done and watch the quality of our lives skyrocket!
Zero-Based Thinking
“To simplify your life, zero-based thinking is one of the most powerful strategies you can learn and apply on a regular basis. Here’s how it works. Ask yourself, ‘Is there anything I am doing right now that, knowing what I now know, I wouldn’t get into again if I were starting over today?’”
THAT is a powerful question.
And “zero-based thinking” is a Big Idea.
So, how about it? “Is there anything you are doing right now that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into again if you were starting over today?”
Ponder that one and then “If your answer is ‘yes,’ then your next question is, ‘How do I get out of this situation, and how fast?’”
It takes clarity and courage to open yourself up to the question and even more to take action that’s in integrity with your answers.
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.
Flexibility: The Single Most Important Quality
“According to reports generated from the Menninger Institute in Kansas City, flexibility is the most important single quality you can develop to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century. Flexibility entails openness, receptivity, and the willingness to try new methods and techniques. Flexibility means that you practice zero-based thinking continually.”
Flexibility. It’s the hallmark of healthy humans.
Imagine flexibility as the river that flows between the banks of chaos and rigidity.
How can you be more flexible today?
In what ways are you TOO planned and therefore rigid?
In what ways are you TOO spontaneous and therefore chaotic?
Find the flow.
Stay open, receptive and willing to try new methods and techniques, yo!
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.’
Every Minute Counts (for Ten)!
“Every minute you spend in planning will save you as many as ten minutes in execution.”
Abraham Lincoln said that if he had 6 hours to chop down a tree, he’s spend 4 of ‘em sharpening his ax.
How ‘bout you?
You rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off (saw that the other day… wacky!) or are you spending time planning? Tracy tells us that for every ONE minute in planning we’ll save TEN (!!!!) in actual work.
Let’s test it out!
Single-Mindedly One Touching
“Once you have thought through your work and decided on your most valuable task, you must discipline yourself to start it immediately and stay with it until it is complete. When you concentrate single-mindedly on a single task, without diversion or distraction, you get it done far faster than if you start and stop and then come back to the task and pick it up again. You can reduce the amount of time you spend on a major task by as much as 80 percent simply by refusing to do anything else until that task is complete.”
This is simple but very, very big.
First step: Do some thinking/planning and figure out what THE most valuable use of your time is in this moment.
Tracy is REALLY big on the idea that we constantly ask ourselves, “Is this the highest and best use of my time?!?” Simply making that decision *consciously* rather than mindlessly plowing through your email/whatever work shows up on your desk will make you a rock star within days. (Seriously. :)
Alright. Now you know what THE most valuable use of your time is.
Next step: Remove ALL distractions and SINGLE-MINDEDLY (!) focus on that task until it’s completed. He calls this “single handling”—where, once you start something, you FINISH it. No phone calls, no spontaneous “gotta clean the desk” moments, no getting stuck and then letting the little gremlin voice in your head say: “Oh, jeez! We better check email now… it’s been 4 minutes. Someone REALLY important might have just emailed and if we don’t get back to them within 13 seconds we’ll look like we’re lazy!”
It’s impossible for me to overstate the power of these ideas. If you only did ONE of them (discovering your #1 priority or focusingon a task exclusively till it’s done), you’d prolly crank up your productivity by a factor of 10. When you consistently do BOTH? Well, that’s pretty much a one-way ticket to world-classness.
* issues ticket * See you in paradise! :)
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.
The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary.
Visualization + Idealization
“In this respect, clarity is terribly important. Successful people have tremendous clarity about who they are, what they want, and how they are going to get it. Unsuccessful people usually are unsure and confused about who they are, what they want, and where they are going. One powerful exercise you can practice to supercharge your thinking and accelerate your results is called idealization. In idealization you continually imagine the perfect outcome or solution for any situation in your life. You project forward three to five years, or even further, and then create a mental picture of the kind of life and career that would be ideal for you in every respect.”
Maslow says the same thing about psychologically healthy/successful people having clarity. He says that whereas the average individuals “often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are,” self-actualizing individuals have “superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general.”
How about you?
You have a good sense of who you are/where you’re headed/all that jazz?
One tool we can use to help us rock any and every aspect of our lives is to practice “idealization.”
Fast forward three to five years and create an image of your ideal life.
What are you doing? Who are you around? What do you look like? How’s your health? How’s your family? )And, what else do you need to be asking yourself?!? :)
And then let that vision guide your present performance!
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.
Time Management = Life Management
“Time management is really life management, personal management, management of yourself. People who value themselves highly allocate their time carefully. They give their time usage a lot of thought. When you love your life, you love every minute of it. You are very careful about misusing or wasting any of the precious minutes and hours of each day.”
Benjamin Franklin, one of his day’s leading entrepreneurs, statesmen and scientists, said this: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.”
A couple thousand years before that, Aristotle said this: “We live in deeds, not years; In thoughts not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs.”
How about you?
How highly do you value yourself?
One way to find out is how you allocate your time. Are you wasting precious minutes and hours of each day? Is it time to throw away the remote control and spend more time with your spouse, your kids, your art, your business plan, your journal, your …?
It’s a precious resource, this moment, this heart throb…
Let’s honor it by using each moment wisely, my friend.
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.
What Do You Think About Most of the Time?
“Over the years, thousands of successful people have been asked, ‘What do you think about most of the time?’
Their answers tend to be the same worldwide. Successful people think about what they want and how to get it most of the time. As a result of this mental focus, they accomplish much more than the average person, even though they may have started with no particular advantages.
Unsuccessful people, on the other hand, tend to think and talk about what they don’t want most of the time. They think and talk about who they are mad at and who is to blame for their problems most of the time. They don’t understand why their lives don’t improve even though they have been working as long as others. They slip into the habit of thinking and talking even more about their problems and who is to blame, thereby making the situation worse.”
What are you thinking and talking about these days?
Things you’re excited to create?!? Or things that are bothering you?
Choose (very) wisely.
We greatly overestimate what we can do in one year. But we greatly underestimate what is possible for us in five years.
How’s Your Optimism?
“Your level of optimism is the very best predictor of how happy, healthy, wealthy, and long-lived you will be. The more optimistic and positive you are, the more energy and enthusiasm you will have. Your immune system will be stronger and more resistant to disease and infection. You will seldom be sick. You will get along with less sleep, and you will have more mental and physical energy throughout the day.”
Did you know that your level of optimism is the best predictor of how much of all the stuff you want (health/wealth/happiness/etc.) you’ll actually have? Yepperz.
Tracy’s a big fan of Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism (see Notes) which goes off on how your “explanatory styles” dictate your level of optimism/pessimism which then shapes your life. Check out the Notes for a full description.
And, how about this vision of an optimist (I forget where I read it but dig it): an optimist is someone who’s glass is half full and who is looking for a pitcher of water so they can fill up their glass along with everyone else’s! :)
* raises my full glass to toast yours! *
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.
The Great Truths of Life Are Simple
“The great truths of life are simple. It is amazing how many problems, both personal and social, could be resolved if everyone decided to treat other people the way they would like to be treated. Listen to people the way you would like to be listened to. Sell your products and services the way you would like others to sell their products and services to you. Be courteous and respectful to other people, just as you would like them to be courteous and respectful to you. Be patient and understanding with people when they make mistakes, just as you would like them to be patient and understanding with you when you make mistakes.”
Amen.
Common sense that we need to make common practice, eh?
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.
“Why Aren’t I at My Goal Already?”
“Ask yourself, ‘Why aren’t I at my goal already?’ If you want to double your income, why aren’t you earning twice as much already? If you want to spend more time with your family or friends, why aren’t you doing it already? Often, forcing yourself to develop the answers to these questions will enable you to see the critical constraint that is holding you back.”
That’s big.
So, why aren’t you at your goal already?
(Seriously. What constraints are holding you back?!? Identify. Remove. Enjoy. :)
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.
Sharpen Your Focus
“Here are several additional questions that you should ask and answer regularly as part of your personal strategic planning:
If you could wave a magic wand and have whatever you wished for in any part of your life, what would it be?
If you could design your perfect lifestyle… what would it look like?
How would you change your life if you received $1 million cash, tax free, today? What is the first thing you would do?
What parts of your work do you enjoy the most and do the best? Where do you excel? What sorts of activities make you the happiest?
What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned today that you had only six months left to live?
What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail? If you were absolutely guaranteed success in any one goal, small or large, short term or long term, what would it be?”
Tracy wins the award for coolest questions EVER.
I’ve answered dozens of his questions many, many times. I *know* the time I’ve invested exploring these types of questions is one of the major reasons why my life is unfolding more and more magically.
So, step on your remote control until it no longer works, bust out your journal and rock these questions! (Pretty, please. :)
And, if you’re feelin’ it, grab the book, sign up for his newsletter at BrianTracy.com and get your Focal Point mojo on, yo!!!
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.
About the author
