"Your greatest asset is your earning ability. Your greatest resource is your time." -- Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy (born in Vancouver, Canada in 1944) is a self-help author who has recorded many of his works as audio books. His presentations and seminar topics include leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness, and business strategy. He is now the Chairman of Brian Tracy International, a human resource company based in Solana Beach, California, with affiliates throughout the United States and thirty-one other countries.
"All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.""Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of evry part of your life.""Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.""Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.""Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor.""I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.""If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it's moving you away from your goals.""If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.""If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.""Invest three percent of your income in yourself (self-development) in order to guarantee your future.""It doesn't matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going.""Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.""Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.""Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.""No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.""Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.""People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.""Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.""Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.""Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?"""Successful people are simply those with successful habits.""Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it.""The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.""The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.""The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.""The more credit you give away, the more will come back to you. The more you help others, the more they will want to help you.""The more you seek security, the less of it you have. But the more you seek opportunity, the more likely it is that you will achieve the security that you desire.""The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.""Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.""We will always tend to fulfill our own expectation of ourselves.""Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.""Whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality.""Whatever you dwell on in the conscious grows in your experience.""Winners make a habit of manufacturing their own positive expectations in advance of the event.""You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.""You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.""You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile.""You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.""Your company's most valuable asset is how it is known to its customers.""Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else."
After dropping out of school before graduation, Tracy spent several years as a laborer. He then got a job on a tramp steamer and traveled around the world for eight years, eventually visiting more than eighty countries on five continents.
Since he could no longer find a job as a laborer, he went into sales, struggling at first. He decided to ask other successful salesmen and then emulate them. By the end of his first year, he attained the status of top salesman. After his second year, he was made a Vice President in charge of 95 people. At the time he was only 25 years old.
Beginning in 1981, Tracy assembled his "success system", which was initially called "The Phoenix Seminar." Three years later, in 1985, he released an updated version of this seminar as a self-help audio tape entitled "The Psychology of Achievement".
Tracy's book Maximum Achievement was included as one of 50 success, motivation and leadership classics in the book 50 Success Classics (2004) by Tom Butler-Bowdon.
Tracy is a member of the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based public policy research institute.
His body of work is loosely based on a number of other success "gurus" such as Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn and Denis Waitley. He has recently launched Brian Tracy University, an online course of study which is designed to assist entrepreneurs, business owners and sales professionals.
The Brian Tracy College of Business and Entrepreneurship at Andrew Jackson University (a distance learning school based in Hoover, Alabama), is named after him and based on his teachings. At the New York headquarters of ALM Media, a legal publisher, a motivational quote of Tracy's appears on the office wall: “excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends.”
In March 2008, Brian Tracy and some of his business partners created iLearningGlobal, which is another online learning community.
Brian Tracy's wife is named Barbara, and they have four children. Brian Tracy has three brothers, Arnold, Dalmar, and Paul (the names of the brothers can be seen in the dedication notes in Brian Tracy's book "Million Dollar Habits"; because he dedicates that book to his three brothers).
In April 2010, Tracy officially announced on his blog that he is suffering from throat cancer.
Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed (1993) ISBN 0-671-86518-8
Advanced Selling Strategies: The Proven System of Sales Ideas, Methods, and Techniques Used by Top Salespeople Everywhere (1995) ISBN 0-684-82474-4
The Psychology of Selling: The Art of Closing Sales (1995) ISBN 978-0743520690
Jones and the Salesman (1999)
The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success (2000) ISBN 1-57675-126-0
The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires: How to Achieve Financial Independence Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible (2001) ISBN 1-58376-205-1
Eat that Frog: 21 Ways to stop Procrastination and get More Done in Less Time (2001) ISBN 1-58376-202-7
Get Paid More and Promoted Faster (2001) ISBN 1-58376-207-8
Focal Point (2001) American Management Association ISBN 0-8144-7278-8
Victory!: Applying the Proven Principles of Military Strategy to Achieve Success in Your Business and Personal Life (2002) ISBN 0-8144-0750-1
Be a Sales Superstar: 21 Great Ways to Sell More, Faster, Easier in Tough Markets (2002) ISBN 1-57675-175-9
Create Your Own Future: How to Master the 12 Critical Factors of Unlimited Success (2002) ISBN 0-471-25107-0
Goals!: How To Get Everything You Want...Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible (2003) ISBN 978-1576752357
Turbostrategy: 21 Powerful Ways to Transform your Business and Boost Your Profits Quickly (2003) ISBN 0-8144-7193-5
Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (2003) ISBN 0-471-44858-3
Getting Rich Your Own Way: Achieve All Your Financial Goals Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible (2004) ISBN 0-471-65264-4
Time Power: A Proven System for Getting More Done in Less Time Than You Ever Thought Possible (2004) American Management Association ISBN 0-8144-7247-8
Something for Nothing : The All-Consuming Desire that Turns the American Dream into a Social Nightmare (2005) ISBN 1-59555-038-0
The Power of Charm: How to Win Anyone over in Any Situation (2006) American Management Association ISBN 0-8144-7357-1
Flight Plan: The Real Secret of Success (2008) ISBN 1-57675-497-9
