PNTV: Focal Point by Brian Tracy (#37)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes TV today as always, great book. Today we have Brian Tracy's focal point. One of the most inspiring teachers. Brian Tracy that I've studied totally deeply influenced me as always. Great book. Six page PDF philosopher's note. I've got like 15 big ideas from this book in the note. Brian is a big idea machine. His books are literally one small big idea after another. And like I said, he's been one of my biggest inspirations. He's really, really, really inspiring and really practical. So I just dig him. And he's really a broad thinker as well. I've listened to a lot of his audio tapes as well that I highly recommend. I mentioned some more of them in the note. Other books that I love. Goals. Eat that frog. He's got a bunch of just great stuff. So Brian Tracy today focal point. The subtitle is a proven system to simplify your life, double your productivity and achieve all your goals. So audacious subtitle and the book really lives up to it. Here are some of my favorite big ideas. The first one is I am responsible. Brian goes off on how important it is that we choose to be responsible for our lives. And we talk about this again and again and again and again and again and again. It's just huge. So Stephen Covey says, habit number one, we've got to be proactive. Many times in these notes we talk about the word responsible and how if you break it down, it's really two words. Response able. We're able to choose our response. We aren't a stimulus response reactive machine. We're response able. And we say, look, I'm not going to make excuses. I think it was the magic of thinking big. We talked about excusitis. It's a dreaded disease that affects all average people and failures to one degree or another. The author says, right, so we need to stop making excuses, accept responsibility for our lives and do our best. That's a huge idea. Big, big, big, big big. So Brian also talks about the fact that everything is hard before it's easy. And he quotes Goethe, one of my favorite guys who says everything is hard before it's easy. So we may need to exert tremendous discipline in order to create break old habits and and create new habits. But as we do that, our life just gets on a channel where things become more and more effortless. We've got to remember the metaphor of a rocket or a space shuttle, right? It takes so much energy to get the space shuttle up and out of the gravitational pull of our atmosphere. Right. I don't know what percentage it is, but it's huge. The percentage of energy required to get out of the gravitational pull of our atmosphere. But once the space shuttle is on the other side of that, or a rocket is on the other side of that gravitational pull, the amount of energy it takes to make tweaks is very, very small. So it's the same in our lives, right? This is a common story, but it's so powerful. Same thing goes with our lives. We need to exert a lot of energy sometimes to break out of our old habits, our old gravitational pull that holds us down. But once we make a few big changes, things can become easy. So everything is hard before it's easy. Too often we just want to do what's easy. That's not going to work. It takes again the diligence, patience, persistence. And when we see that, we can make it playful and make it fun. He's got a great big idea here in the note. I'll go back for a second. What habits can you build in your life? Right. What's the number one habit? It's the question I love to ask all the time. What's the number one habit you could start building in your life right now that would have the most positive benefit in your life? I got that from Brian Tracy. That's adapted from his stuff. He asked that question all the time. What's the number one thing you could start doing that would have the most positive benefit in your life? What's the number one thing you could stop doing? That if you stopped doing it would have the most positive benefit in your life? If you've watched these episodes, you've heard me ask that question at least a half a dozen, maybe a dozen times now. The question is, have you paused and thought about it and are you living according to that? Whenever I'm stressed or overwhelmed, I go to those two questions and I say, what do I need to start doing more of? And what do I need to start doing less of? What do I need to stop doing? It's an amazing compass for us to get clarity and really take our life on the track we want. So. So I'd suggest you press pause. Think about that in the note. We've got some space for some journaling, but contemplate that and remember, everything's hard before it's easy. But that's what makes life fun. Another big idea, zero based thinking. So Brian has a great idea here. Imagine this. Imagine asking yourself, okay, let's just assume that I could restart anything. And ask yourself the question, is there anything in my life that if I was going to start doing it right now, I would never start doing it? Is there anything in my life that if I was going to start doing it right now that I wouldn't start doing again? Right. Knowing what you now know, would you start that behavior again? It's a really big idea. It's called zero based thinking. We zero base our thinking and say, look, let me take an inventory of my life. Is there anything, any relationships, any jobs or projects or activities that I'm engaged in that knowing what I know now, I'd never start again? It's a good thing to do an inventory on often and to check in and to get in the habit of correcting things that may not be working doesn't mean you need to completely blow it up, but it might mean you need to significantly change them and create new behaviors and habits around those activities or those people. But get clear on that and then be more conscious of not starting things that you really don't, that you don't feel really, really good about. Another really big idea, flexibility, he says, and he cites some research that we talk about in the Note that flexibility is the most important characteristic for healthy, functioning, successful people in the 21st century. And I talk about this often, but I like to think of flexibility. One of my other friends and teachers, Dan Siegel, says flexibility is the river that flows between the banks of chaos and rigidity. We can be too chaotic and spontaneous or too rigid and inflexible. Flexibility flows between that. We're open, we're receptive, we're moving with the world. And one way to do that is to zero base our thinking right and to come back to that often. Really, really big idea. Brian Tracy is all about effective planning, and he says that every minute that you spend in Planning saves you 10 in execution. Isn't that a big idea? It's kind of like habit number seven from seven habits of highly effective people Sharpening the saw Too often. We're sawing with a dull blade and we want to spend the time sharpening our sauce. We can be more effective. Same thing with planning. Before rushing into something, why don't you spend a minute or 2 or 5 or 10 or 60, then actually map out what you want to do? If Tracy's numbers are right, you're going to see that you're going to save 10 minutes for every one minute you invest in planning. That's a really big idea. I love practicing with that one. Here's One of my favorite big ideas of all of them. Single mindedly one touching is what I call it. So, so Brian's got some great ideas on this. So imagine one touching something, right? Single mindedly doing something until it's done. Too often we start something and then we get distracted. Then we come back to it and then we got to remember where we were and then we do a little more work and then we get distracted. Then we come back. It's very, very, very, very, very inefficient way to do things. Brian says one of the key ways you can get into your focal point is to identify what the most important things are that need to get done and then single mindedly focus on it until it's done. Your productivity will explode when you do that. I've certainly seen it in my life. One of the things I do from a mundane perspective when I get mail I usually not always my productivity is going to go up even higher when I make this an always practice get the mail out, take it, open it, write the checks, send the checks, walk the mail back out with the bills done. One touching versus getting the mail out, having it sit there. So you look at it and well I wonder what's in the mail over there. And then you kind of open it. Then you don't write the checks. You're thinking about it. Open loops. Not a good idea. Single handedly or single mindedly. One touch it. Another big thing for me is email. I get a lot of email. I've got a lot of rules set up and stuff and I'll do a video on how I do that soon. But I also one touch my email. If it's going to take me less than 2 minutes to reply, I reply immediately. Less than 5 minutes. Really. I one touch it. I hate letting emails build up into my inbox. So there's a mundane example of how to rock that. We're already out of time, but check out the note. Brian's like a question machine as well. He's got awesome, inspiring questions to help us find our purpose. You can see them in the note. Get them in the book. Hope you enjoyed. Share more with you soon. See you.