Life-Changing Books Podcast Episode 41. Brian Tracy: Author of Eat That Frog! for Students

Hello, BookThinkers family, and welcome to episode number 41 of our personal development podcast, BookThinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, I interview one of the world's top authors. And as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and to live better. In this episode, I have the pleasure to interview the legendary author Brian Tracy. Listen to this incredible resume. Brian is the Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations. He has consulted for more than 1,000 companies and he has addressed more than 5 million people in 5,000 talks and seminars throughout the U.S., Canada, and 70 other countries. Brian has studied, researched, written, and spoken for over 30 years in all of my favorite subjects. including economics, history, business, sales, philosophy, and psychology. He is the top-selling author of over 70 books, 70, and they have been translated into dozens of different languages. Now, our conversation today is all about Brian's brand new release, Eat That Frog for Students: 22 Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Excel in School. It was such an honor for me to speak with Brian. Like I said, he's truly a legend in the personal development space, and I cannot wait for for everyone to learn from him in this discussion.

So without further ado, please enjoy this amazing conversation with author Brian Tracy. Here's Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are you doing today?

I'm doing just wonderful. Thank you.

You have amazing energy. I'm really excited for our conversation. For those in the audience, and I'm sure there aren't that many, but for those in the audience that aren't familiar with your work, I'd love to have you introduce yourself to everybody.

Well, I, uh, my name is Brian Tracy, as we say. And, uh, as, as a young boy, I fell in love with reading. And I just read and read and read and read. It's interesting. There was a very wise man. He was a writer. And, uh, he wrote and wrote and wrote. And he wrote so many books, uh, that, uh, he had to actually build his own publishing company. and his own printing company and his own distribution company because he wrote so much. He was approached by writers, young people who wanted to be writers. Please give me some advice. How can I be a writer? How can I be famous like you? And he said, the only way to learn to write is to write and write and write and write and write and write and write.

Yeah.

You don't know if you've heard that, but it's a It's a wonderful insight. And so I'm a professional speaker now, and I have spoken to millions of people in audiences all over the world. I've spoken to 5 million people personally and tens of millions of people in my audio programs, video programs, and so on. So people are always asking me, they say, I want to be a speaker. And so I think of Elbert Hubbard, is his name. If ever you get a chance to read anything by Elbert Hubbard, you will be astonished at how good he is. And you see all the books behind you? Well, that's how many books he wrote, and they're intensely detailed. Anyway, so people will ask me, how do you learn to speak? And I said, well, the only way to learn to speak is to speak and speak and speak and speak and speak. So I got into speaking in 1981. I had been speaking for myself and my sales organizations. And that's what people ask me, how do you become a successful speaker? Well, it's to speak and speak and speak. And so if you want to be successful at anything, the key is to do it and to do it over and over and over again. Well, I've always been a student. So at a young age, I remember when I was a boy, if you like, I would go down to the pharmacy, if you like, in Toronto, Canada, and I would read the comic books. I finally decided, well, this is not really efficient, so I would steal the comic books. And I'd steal them, I'd take them home, but I'd take very good care of them. And then I'd bring them back and I would steal them 10 at a time. I thought I was getting away with it. And then I real— I learned later that the owner of the pharmacy knew that I was stealing. I was about 6 years old, and he knew I would always bring them back. And so throughout my childhood, when I was 8, 9, 10, and so on, I stole comic books and brought them back. And then I did more and more complex books and better and better books. And so I became a a real reader. And so if you ask me on any subject, as we were talking before we started, is I have a knowledge bank. And so with this book, Eat That Frog, once upon a time, my, my, I had a publisher and the publisher asked me if I had any ideas for a book. And without going into the details, I said, I said, well, here's a, here's a book. It's called Double Your Income and Double Your Time Off. And I had written it for salespeople because I was in the sales business. And he said, well, that's kind of a boring title. He said, can you come up with something else? He said, I like chapter 21, which is called Eat That Frog. There's 21 different ways to manage your time. And it comes from a man named Mark Twain. And Mark Twain was a man who had great influence in America. He was the top speaker. He wrote prolifically. He had a large home and, and so on. He had a beautiful, beautiful home in New York. He traveled around the world. He said that if the first thing you do when you get up in the morning is you eat a live frog, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that's probably the worst thing that's going to happen to you all day long. If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long. Well, yeah, if you have to eat 2 frogs, eat the ugliest one first. And my publisher Steve Persanti said, this is a great way of starting the book. So I turned it around and I ran the idea of eating that frog is getting started and getting going on the book. And your ugliest frog is the most difficult thing that you have to do. The one thing that if you do it, will have the greatest positive difference in your life. And it just seemed to catch on. It's now the best-selling book on time management in history. It's sold 2.4, 2.5 million copies actually, in 51 languages. It just sells and sells all over the world. And when I go around the world, 500, 1,000, 2,000 people come out to hear me speak. So it's really neat. And then, and so I wrote that and we thought it would sell 10,000 copies. You know, the average nonfiction book, like a self-help book, sells today about 1,200 copies.

Hmm.

Because there's so many books are sold and published. And so we got our book going and it became a bestseller all over the world. It's in every bookstore. So what is possible today is quite amazing. And if anybody wants to be a successful author, then we just explained the essence of being a successful author. And write and write and write and write and write and write and write. What I've done is I have done enormous research. I, thousands and thousands of hours. I love to read and I love to take notes. And I learned some years ago just about underlining and underlining and then taking those underlines and putting the notes in a spiral notebook. Then I would review the notes from the spiral notebook and that drove the ideas into my mind. So when I sat down to write, I had enormous mental stockpile on virtually any subject. So now I've written 90 books and my goal, I guess now, is to write 100. And I have subjects for another 3 to 5 books. But as you write a book, it doesn't have to be huge. This book originally started off as about 110 pages, and people like a book that is short. In fact, I remember talking to an executive and he was talking about this book. He said he liked it because he could read it in one flight. And he was top executive for a big company, but he could read it in one flight. So now people will buy a book that is short. and simple that they can read in a single flight or they can read in a single afternoon. And so if you write a short book, it can very likely become a best-selling book even if it's not world-changing.

Well, I love the introduction. In your best estimate, how many books do you think you have read over the last 40 years of studying time management?

On time management, between 300 and 500 books. But here's something I learned. My whole life is a series of quotes. I learned that if you read 3 books on any subject, you'll know more than 99% of people in the world.

Wow.

So now maybe you want to be a physicist, you have to read more. But if you just read 3 books on any subject, you'll know more than 99% of people. And what you do is read the 3 most popular books. How do you read the 3 most popular books? Is you go to Amazon and you look at, look at the score. And Amazon is brilliant at this, is they will show you the best-selling books in every category and every subcategory.

Mm-hmm.

And what you do is you just read those books and underline and take notes. And you will never meet anybody who knows more about the subject than you. And if you read 10 books, well, you're off the clock.

Yeah. So you're off the clock with time management, which is why probably the reason you've been such a successful author and speaker and producer of amazing sales and time management content. I told a couple people that you were coming on the podcast and they were all very excited because they've either consumed your content or audio tapes back in the day or listened to you speak or done online courses. So You're very well known for that.

Well, you know, I'm really big into success. I started off, I came from a poor family and I worked at laboring jobs. I started off washing dishes. From there, I moved my way up, but I worked on farms and ranches. I worked in factories. I had a perfect foundation of poverty and having no money in the early part of my life. And I got, I got better and better. And then I got into sales. And in sales, I struggled for about 6 months not making any money. And then I went to the top salesperson in my company, and he was selling 10 times as much as anybody else. And he didn't even seem to be working very hard. I would get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, and I'd tell you, I say that hunger is a real motivator. And I'd get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and I would read and study. And then I'd go out and knock on doors all day long, knocking on doors. And yet I wasn't making any sales. And finally I went to this top sales guy. His name was Pete and he's about 5 years older than me, in our 20s. So I was in my early 20s, he was in his late 20s. And I asked him, Why are you doing so much better than me? So he told me something that eventually changed my life. He said, well, tell me how you sell. What do you say when you meet a customer? And I say, well, I don't know. I tell them about the product and I tell them how good it is and how helpful it is and everything else. And it wasn't an expensive product. He said, well, that's not how you sell at all. He said, you sell by asking questions. And you ask them what they're doing now and what they want to do in the future. And you look at how your product, our product can help them and so on. And I was, that was the day when they said you have the gift of the gab. You know, you're a good talker, talk, talk, talk. So therefore you could talk them into buying, but it wasn't true. And I said, well, how do you do it? And he said, well, you, asked question after question after question, and he gave me a sales presentation of our product, and there was no pressure to it. It was just very relaxed, and by the time he showed me, 10, 12 minutes, I wanted to buy my product from him.

Wow.

It was so simple, and he said, so what you do is you ask questions, and then you show them how our product can help them too. improve the quality of their life or their work. And I thought, so I went out that day and I made 2 sales. I was up to making 1 sale a week and I made 2 sales. So I went back to him, I said, this really works. So instead of talking, I just asked questions and listened and nodded and took notes. And I said, well, what else can I do? And what I'm telling you right now, by the way, is the key to success in life. He said, well, have you read any books on selling? And I still remember that. I said, well, are there books on selling? I love to read, but I didn't know that there were books on selling. He said, oh yeah, go down to the bookstore, which I did. And I was astonished to see how many books there were on selling. So I bought a book. I didn't have much money, but I bought a book and it's called How to Sell Well. And I still remember, it was written by a man named Heinz Goldman from England. And he had started off as a salesman and worked his way up. And then he had explained the sales process and wow, I was, I read the book over and over again and my sales went up and up. And then I asked him, what else can I do? And he said, well, have you been to any seminars on selling? I said, are there seminars on selling? He said, oh yeah, there's really great seminars. And I still remember my first seminar. And the first seminar was given by a New York salesman. And he was, it was absolutely beautiful. I sat in the front row and I remember this gentleman came out to the middle of the stage and he said, ladies and gentlemen, today I'm going to show you how we sell in our industry. And I still remember that, and I was leaning forward like a dog, thirsty dog, and taking notes. And I noticed I was taking notes and the others were just sitting there nodding and smiling. And at the break, and this is important, at the break, it was 30 minutes, it was a downtown convention center, I went out to the nearest office building and went up to the top floor and I began Going to office, from office to office, immediately applying what I had just learned, and then back in time for the next session, and so on. And I learned a whole lot of things that I didn't know until later. I learned that if you learn something, apply it immediately. This is really important because if you don't apply it immediately, what will happen? The answer is you'll forget about it, or you will forget it. So when you hear a good idea, apply it immediately. So these are the things that change your life, is if you read 3 books on a subject, you'll know as much as the top 1% of people in the world on that subject. You and lots of people do it. They take my book, Eat That Frog, and they read this book 3 times and they go out and give seminars on time management. If you read Eat This Frog for students, you go out and make seminars On time management for students. And what I learned, and I really want to pass this on, is the greatest law in history was from Aristotle, 350 BC. And Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history.

Right.

For 2,000 years after Aristotle, everything was just a commentary on Aristotle. All philosophy. So there's another thing, I read Aristotle so I could sound intelligent. And I would quote Aristotle. I said, well, as Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics, and people would think, well, this guy must be really smart if he's quoting a Greek philosopher. What Aristotle discovered in 350 BC was the Aristotelian principle of causality. And I, because I thought it was Socrates that had come up with this principle, but somebody in one of my seminars corrected me. I said it was the Socratic principle and he said, sent me a note, he said no, it was the Aristotelian principle. So now I'm really smart, I can quote the 3 philosophers.

Yeah.

And what it was, was the law of cause and effect. And the law of cause and effect was something that Jesus taught, which was that there is a reason for everything. Whatsoever you sow, that also shall you reap. And that was to me a fantastic idea. But what I learned from Pete was that if you want to make more sales, you have to learn how to make sales, and then you have to practice the principles. So if anybody is listening to this, and they want to be successful in life, what they have to do is learn how, is they have to learn the principles. And so if you want to be successful in any field, learn the cause and effect principles, study the very best people and do what they did and do it over and over again until you master it. So that has been very helpful for me. Every subject, every job I've ever been in, every career, And I've started and built 22 different businesses. And what happened is the first thing I did is I went out and I learned the foundation principles. I got into real estate sort of accidentally, but I've developed about $500 million worth of real estate. And how did I learn? I went down to the library and I checked out books. Today you buy them. And what I did is I bought the books or I checked them out and I read them and took notes and then I went out and practiced it. And my first real estate development, I still remember, was a shopping center, a $3 million shopping center. And I started knowing nothing about real estate, but I'd read something in a business magazine about how people develop real estate and they find a piece of property They tie it up, they make a down payment, they arrange for financing, they get tenants and so on. So, I just really followed the book. And in 1 year, I went from— it was a trailer park. I bought the trailer park and then I found money and investors to invest and I found Safeway.

Safeway.

Was my major lead tenant. And with the Safeway in a shopping center, you can get everybody else, all the other tenants. And so, I didn't have the money, but I did have the property and I did have the tenants and I did have the cash flow. Well, how do you put together a financial proposition? Well, I went and I tell them, I just read the books. Just read the books. And They'll teach you how. So I, everybody, everything has been done over and over. And what I did is I just read the books and I followed the cause and effect and I did every part of this and I did my little shopping center. My most recent piece of property was the $330 million piece of property in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And we bought it and tied it up and brought in partners and— It was really quite amazing. And then sold it off and kept part of it, but enough we got all of our money back, but we kept part of it. And so everything that you want to do in life, you can learn how to do by studying the subject and then doing it over and over until you master it.

Yeah, that's, that's one of the biggest changes that I've made in my life personally is finding these books and then actually implementing what you learn. I like to call it Sort of like a tool belt. Every time you read one of these books, you can add a new tool to your belt. And when you see a nail, you can take out the hammer and use it. And then you need to practice because you might miss a couple times, but eventually you'll be good and efficient with the hammer. So I love books like yours. You do say in your book that there's a need to be selective and that it's sort of like the 80/20 principle. So I'd love to have you describe that to everybody, like high-impact activity versus low-impact activity.

Right. Well, as a speaker, I would take a pen. I carry a cross pen, gold pen. I take a pen and I would say, imagine that you have a magic wand and you could wave this magic wand over your life and you could accomplish anything that you want to accomplish. And so I use that as an example. I say, so if you have a list of activities and you could accomplish any one of these goals or any one of these activities, or sometimes I say, imagine you could wave a magic wand and be absolutely excellent at any one skill. If you could do that, what one skill would help you the most to achieve your most important goal? And I did this in a seminar in Fort Lauderdale, surprisingly enough, and somebody came to my coaching program, came And he showed— he had this. It's a magic wand. And so he said he brought this as a gift to the first session of this coaching program. He said, you can use this, you could take it with you and you could wave it in front of an audience instead of using a pen. A really nice guy, really nice guy.

It's a great gift.

Yeah, it's a great, it's a great gift, but it's a way of thinking. So think, imagine you have a magic wand and you could wave a magic wand And you could accomplish any one goal in your goals. One of the exercises that I do is I have people make a list of 10 goals that they would like to accomplish within the next 12 months. And then imagine they have a magic wand and go over this list and say, if you could accomplish any one of these goals within 24 hours, wave a magic wand, which one goal would have the greatest positive effect on your life? And so you have to think. And when you think about that, say imagine it's guaranteed. It's guaranteed where if you write it down, you can achieve it. And by the way, that's another principle is there's something about writing things down. In fact, I had a great conversation with someone who's a real expert in this field. When you write something down, writing it into your superconscious mind, And the superconscious mind then takes and programs that into your reality. And what happens is that your subconscious mind then works on it 24 hours a day, day and night. And you'll have ideas and you'll have opportunities and people will come up to you and you read an article in a magazine. Let me get this correct. You read an article in a magazine and later I wrote a book called The Luck Factor. And The Luck Factor book was a top seller, but it had very little in it. But one of the things it said, which I never forgot, is one of the great reasons for luck is a casual meeting with a stranger. A casual meeting with a stranger. You bump into somebody at a meeting or at a bus stop, and you just chat, and somebody gives you an idea or insight. And I have a book idea that I'm working on, and I call it Turning Points. And I'm always thinking of books to write on. And turning points is what we find is that in your life you have turning points. And this is a wonderful concept for you to think of because when you— these turning points, you're going down the road of life and you change direction and you're never the same again. And the famous poem is The Road Less Traveled. And if you read The Road Less Traveled, which I I think was a contributing factor to Robert Frost becoming the Poet Laureate of the United States. It's an incredible thing. He says, and looking down 2 roads, long I stood and looked down one to where it turned in the undergrowth, then took the other as just as fair, lesser used and wanting wear. And so I shall be telling this with a sigh, ages and ages hence, 2 roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. And the reason people love that poem is because in your life you will have turning points and you will do something different. And he says, knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. And so in your life you have had turning points, and if you think of them, I remember My wife, for example, is— I met her accidentally at a university. We were both adults taking adult courses and she was sitting with somebody that I knew. Somebody I knew called me over and I came over and she introduced me to my wife Barbara. 42 years. My life was never the same. We've been together 42 years, 4 children, 7 grandchildren, and so on. So very often in life you will do something unexpected and your life will never be the same again. A wonderful thing about reading, by the way, is that when you read, it opens your eyes, opens your mind to so many different possibilities that enable you to recognize things, see things, be aware of things that you would never have been aware of before. So I like this, and the reason we talk about this with regard to time management. I have people write out 10 goals and imagine that you could achieve any one of these goals. It's like taking a magic pill. You could wake up the next morning and be absolutely excellent at this particular skill to achieve this particular goal. And people start to think about that and they say, well, if I, if I was really good at this, that would really have a great impact on my life. And so they study to become really good at that, and it has a great impact on their life, and their life is never the same again. It's just like a very simple idea. Instead of saying, well, yes, but I'm not that smart and I didn't go to university. No, put all that aside and just— I say, nobody's better than you, nobody's smarter than you. So therefore, imagine you can learn any skill that enables you to achieve any goal, what would it be? Imagine you have a magic wand. Anyway, so these are fun ideas, and this is the way people like Einstein think. They think in terms of unlimited possibilities. I remember one of his great lines, which I learned in a seminar: every child is born a genius. Every child is born a genius. And And over the years, their genius goes underground. They don't think about it, but then if you realize you were born a genius, you can learn anything. And if you could learn any one skill, which one skill would help you the most to achieve which one goal? And then you focus on that single goal. You focus on that single goal. What I have found is don't try to achieve multiple goals, achieve one, the one that will have the greatest difference. in your life and lead you on the road less traveled.

It's pretty surreal getting, getting kind of like a private lesson from you because you're speaking to me about these subjects. And, uh, on the turning points point, that's been, that's been a theme in my life. There are random encounters that have completely changed everything about the way that I live, including some of the first books that I read, uh, in starting this podcast and things like that.

Here's something I would ask you. If you could give one piece of advice to young people, and I would say probably many of your listeners are young people, give one piece of advice to them that would help them to be more successful faster, because that's really what everybody wants. Everybody wants to be successful, which means they want to achieve their goals and they want to achieve them faster.

Yeah.

What piece of advice would you give?

Hello, Book Thinkers family. A quick word from today's podcast sponsor. Today's episode is sponsored by Audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks ranging from bestsellers to celebrity memoirs, business, and my favorite, personal development. And as part of Audible's partnership with us, we're actually offering listeners a free 30-day trial. This trial includes 1 credit good for any Premium Selection titles you'd like on the whole platform. So that's pretty much any book, including the one we're talking about today. That book is yours to keep even after the trial is over. Now, this trial also includes access to Audible's Plus catalog of podcasts, audiobooks, guided wellness programs, and Audible Originals. You can listen all you want, no credits needed. Now, everyone on the Book Thinkers Instagram knows that I love physical paper books. There's nothing better than having a book in your hand Scribbling notes everywhere in the margins. I kind of tear those things up, but I've been completing an additional 20 to 30 books every single year using Audible by listening when I'm in the car, doing chores around the house, or while I'm on my morning walks or runs. You could take advantage of this free trial by clicking the link in today's show notes or going to www.bookthinkers.com/audibletrial. You will not regret it. Now, back to today's episode. You're asking me? My piece of advice would be to become more aware as a first step of areas in your life that you could improve and then read as many books as you humanly can about those subjects. Just because I believe in any area of our life, if we have insecurities, There's a good book that can help us deal with those problems. And then you become more bulletproof as a person and you increase your chances for success. And I never read any books until my early 20s. I mean, I really didn't. And at that point I was anxious and insecure, full of ego. I read a bunch of good books and I flipped the nail on its head. And so for me, it would be to read as many books like you were saying at the very beginning, read, read, read, read, read. And for me, that helps. How would you answer that question?

There are cosmic numbers. 3, 7, and 12 are cosmic numbers, and you see them repeated throughout history. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. There are 7 colors in the color spectrum. There's 7 notes in the musical scale. There's 12 apostles, and so on. So I think about those. With 21s, I came up with the idea of 21s because I thought if there were 21 great ideas in a book, people would say, well, it's got to have something worthwhile. If he's got 21 chapters, I'm certainly going to get my money's worth. So that was my, that was my reasoning. So I kept thinking all these general topics that everybody wants, and I wrote them down, just sort of like Brainstorming. And I came up with idea after idea after idea. And then I wrote them up. So I ended up with 21 21s.

21 21s.

21 21s. And I put them on— did them so they're about an hour each. So I recorded them on audio programs. But anybody who's watching this could actually write a book on any subject. What you do is you just think of all the things you'd write in a book. Oh, by the way, I wrote out how to be a bestselling author. And so that's another one of my subjects. 65% of adults in America dream of writing a book, maybe even 68%. They have an idea, I'm going to write a book someday. So I wrote down a program on how to write a book and get published. Because maybe— and I showed people, this is how to write a book and get published. And I now have been selling that program for several years. And countless people have bought the program, written the book, and gotten published, and their books are in the bookstores.

Yeah, no, it's amazing. Well, 2 things. Number one, my dad's favorite number is 21, and he also likes 3 and 7. So 3 times 7 is 21. So my entire life growing up, I was all around those numbers, uh, that you're talking about. And 21 backwards is 12. So it shows up again.

They're cosmic numbers. Yes. We don't know why they're cosmic numbers, but there they are.

Yeah, they are. We do have a lot of aspiring authors in the audience, and I'm an aspiring author. I'd love, I'd love to write a book within the next few years. And I have a few different ideas. Uh, I really like your turning points idea. That's a, it's a really good book idea.

Just like that idea from Elbert Hubbard, I had a good friend. He teaches writing at University of California in Sacramento, and he's also a member of the National Speakers Association. His name escapes me now, but just a super guy, and he teaches writing. And he said— and so people come to him and say, what is the key to being a successful writer? He said, 2 words: just write. That's right. Sit down. And I, and I, so I started, I started reading books about writing, how to write a book and get published, or, uh, write, uh, writing well. And so I have back here, I have a whole shelf of books on writing. And so that's another way. When I wanted to, um, develop real estate, I read— my usual goal is 21. books. All right, so I read 21 books and took notes on real estate development. And by that time, it was overlapping. There wasn't any more new stuff. And so I went out and developed, as I said, a $3 million shopping center. And that was the foundation for the next shopping center and the next shopping center. And it was just absolutely astonishing. And because you can learn— just is my, one of my favorite lines, Nick. is you can learn anything that you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. And I love the Nike idea, just do it. Just do it. Don't wait. So I developed a program. It's on my website and it's called How to Write a Book and Get Published. And it's not 21, but it's based on my experience. And as I said, countless people have come and bought the program. It's not expensive. It's unconditionally guaranteed. If you're not happy, get your money back. But it's absolutely astonishing. And people get up and they read the book and it's got workbooks and everything that you need to know step by step by step. I call them recipes. And here's a recipe. So if you want to use a recipe to make a dish, what you do is you get all the ingredients in the right proportion. portions, and you put them all together, and there you have it. But here's another thing, is don't waste your life trying to figure it out all for yourself. Find someone who's already done it, and then do it yourself. Copy that person. Copying is one of the smartest things that you can do in the whole world, because you can save yourself months and years of hard work. One of the reasons I wrote all these books is to is to help, to save people the effort of learning it all by themselves and making the mistakes and spending all that money. People say, what are the keys to writing a book? I said, well, here's the— in my coaching program, people would ask over and over because people who go to my coaching program are ambitious. So they want to know how to write a book. So I show them how. And so I put that on my website as well. And it's free. So that's another way to help you to achieve things. So one of the smartest things you can do is research, is find out from other people what they have done. And then if you want to go deeper into it, well, you may have to spend a little bit more money, but the smartest thing you can do in the whole world is learn from others. Learn from others. One book, one chapter in one book can change your life. Many people have told me that one chapter of one of my books made them a millionaire. It made them a millionaire because it explained something that they had never thought of before. They put it together and it was the one thing they needed to know somewhere. And they became wealthy. And one gentleman did it in one year. So imagine that. He took my program, 21 Great Ways to Become a Self-Made Millionaire, and I put it on cassette. I put it on CD and he listened to it every day for a year. And at the end of the year, he was a millionaire.

Wow.

He just, he drove in his car. He just fed it into his mind every single day for a year. And by that time, he was just a walking money-making machine. He had so many ideas on how to make and keep more money. So, Today, we have so much information available that if you're going to waste your life learning it all by yourself, that's one of the dumbest things you can do in the whole world. If, if, if I say, you know, if only one person has ever done it, then, then that is a rare event. But in the US today, we have 30 million millionaires. 87% are self-made. They started with nothing. So, and there's countless books have been written on the subject. So if you want to become wealthy, then just learn how. And just do it over and over again. Learn how. And wonderfully enough, people who are successful, first thing they want to do is write a book about it. So what you do is you find out what are the most popular books on this subject, and you buy them and read them. All accomplishment requires time, according to Peter Drucker. All success requires time. And time is limited. And so therefore, you have to be thinking about time management and accomplishing more in the limited time that you have if you want to be successful. And the reason I wrote this is I found that, as I explained in the book, time management— I used to think it was a peripheral subject to my life, and then I realized it is the core subject. That if you can manage your time very well, you can accomplish vastly more than the best-educated geniuses in our society. And so therefore, time management is, is a wonderful skill that you can do, and it shows you how you can accomplish vastly more than the average person. For example, one of the things I learned way back in the day was speed reading, and everybody's heard about speed reading. And, but how many people have actually taken a course in speed reading? So I became an expert in speed reading. And then I realized, what about memorizing? Well, that's important too. So I wrote a program and it was called 21 Great Ways to Learn and Remember Any Skill. And so learning speed reading teaches you speed skill development. And it saves you an enormous amount of time out of your life. And once you've learned it and practiced it, you own it. It's like riding a bicycle. It's like driving a car. I mean, you own it. You own this particular skill. This book helps you to manage time so that you can accomplish vastly more in your life. You have— you can trade your time for a much higher level. than most other people.

Yeah, there's a quote that I'll read out of the book and then we can, we can wrap up because I know that I'm pushing the time a little bit here. But there's a quote that says, 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 who gets little done. And I thought that was a genius way of putting it.

Thank you. And it's so true. It's so true. And wonderfully enough, it's just, it's just like a skill. Again, I say to people, if you can ride a bike or drive a car or use a keyboard, you can learn any skill. And when do you learn the skills? You learn them at the beginning.

I love all of that advice. I was, I was looking through a couple of the last fan questions because I posted that we were going to have a conversation on Instagram. And about 50 people asked questions, and then I forgot about them because we were having such a good conversation and I got into the moment listening to you. Do you have time for 1 or 2 more questions?

Yes, let's take 10 minutes more.

Okay, perfect. Well, it's interesting because somebody, somebody did ask you about the accelerated learning program, and I think that ties well into what you were just saying, that Today, your learning is only limited by whether or not you're going to put effort into it. If you're going to put effort into it, you can learn literally anything on the planet. And so that's a, that's a good subject just to talk about for another minute or two.

Yes, it is. So in accelerated learning, we find that your mind is very much like a muscle, but if you could learn any skill, any physical skill, then you can learn any mental skill. Now, some people can learn faster and some people learn slower, but all people can learn. And referring to World War I, none of these people who went off to World War I had any military experience at all, but they trained a million of them in less than a year and they all marched into war. And it's the same for on the German side. And it shows them getting together. And sharing cigarettes and talking. And they were talking about how they were just the same as us, the same age, around 19 or 20. Many of them spoke English. And so they were talking and sharing ideas. And when they caught them as prisoners and so on, he said, and we didn't hate these people, they didn't hate us. We just very quickly learned that war is a terrible thing because here you are trying to kill these people and you had nothing against them at all. It was a terrible war. But the thing is that you can learn any skill that you need to learn. And so if somebody wants to learn accelerated learning, that's a subject I decided to learn.

Why?

It's because if I'm going to learn skills that will help me to be financially successful, well then I might as well learn how to learn them fast and quickly. And so I went and I took very high-level courses on accelerated learning. And there's very good courses out there, 2 or 3 day courses, and there's all kinds of books on the subject and all kinds of audio programs. So therefore, if you're not learning these skills, You're not learning how to learn. Start. Because your brain is a phenomenal thing. If you train it, basically you can learn. I speak French, German, and Spanish, plus I speak bits of Chinese, bits of Portuguese, bits of Russian, and bits of Italian. I speak Italian as well. And on my way there, I get a book on the subject, I have books here: Spanish Made Simple, French Made Simple, French for Dummies, German Made Simple. It's quite, quite amazing. You read through these books, you go chapter by chapter, pronunciation by pronunciation, and when you get there, you begin to practice. And they help you because they understand you're trying to learn. I remember when I went to Mexico for the first time. I didn't speak Spanish, but I was on my way to South America. So I bought a book called Spanish Made Simple. And when we arrived in Mexico, driving a big old van, a big old vehicle, like a, like an SUV. And I sat down for 5 hours studying this book on Spanish. And I got out and I began speaking Spanish. And from then on, my Spanish got better and better. When I went to French-speaking countries, starting with France, but also throughout French-speaking Africa, I invested 5 or 10 intense hours to grasp the fundamentals. Same with German. It's really quite an amazing thing. And once you have the fundamentals, well, then you can speak. And then you can just start to build on top of your fundamentals.

Well, we both, we both love traveling all over the world. What are some of the best What are some places in the world that you'd recommend me to visit?

Well, when I started off traveling, I didn't have any money and I had 2 friends. We got average in school. We decided we'd go off and see the world and everybody we knew was going off to travel around Europe in backpacks and we didn't have a lot of money. So we decided that we would go to Africa because nobody was going to Africa and we wanted to do something different. And we soon learned why nobody was going to Africa. But what we did is we traveled in an old vehicle all the way across the US and Canada, all the way to Halifax where I got a job on a ship. Went all the way across, a long story, it's in my book, Success Is a Journey. Crossed to Britain and then we got bicycles and rode down to Gibraltar Then we sold the bicycles and borrowed money and drove a Land Rover all the way across Africa, across the Sahara Desert. And in retrospect, it was unbelievable that anybody would do that, but we did. We crossed the Sahara Desert. 1,300 people had died in the Sahara Desert trying to make the crossing without knowing what they were doing, and we almost died in the desert.

It was amazing experience.

But boy, was that an educational experience. And I've done the same things. I went back up to London. I traveled— it was 17,000 miles from Vancouver, British Columbia, where we started, to Johannesburg by land. And we got back up eventually to London again. And I set off and I went all the way to Singapore. Another 17,000 miles. And quite an interesting trip. And then I started off in Vancouver again and I went down to South America, another 12,000 miles. And it just went on and on and on. So is it possible? Yes. You just get up and go. You're going to have more experiences than you can imagine, but you just keep going. You just keep going. You learn all about persistence and self-discipline. And so on.

Yeah, I love, I love hearing the travel stories. I love traveling as well. It's one of my favorite things to do. Well, hey, we had an amazing conversation today. So thank you so much for taking the time to sit with me. And I'll put a link to the book in our show notes. For those that want to learn a little bit more about you, where should they go? What should they do?

MrBrianTracey.com. BrianTracey.com.

Easy enough.

Leave you with anything, which I've repeated several times, is that this is the greatest time in all of human history to be alive. Irrespective of the coronavirus, which— what we've accomplished in terms of the vaccine is really phenomenal. It takes an average— it has taken an average of 8 years to develop a vaccine in the past. Sometimes they've never developed a vaccine, the virus has just gone through and passed. So this is a good time to be alive. There are no limitations on what you can accomplish. And I have what I call a golden triangle. I do everything in threes. A golden triangle for success, the peak of the golden triangle is accepting responsibility. Accepting responsibility for your life and for everything that happens to you. One of the most interesting things I learned is that until you accept responsibility for your life, you remain a child. You remain a child. But once you accept responsibility, like stepping over a line, you become an adult. And so you recognize that you have problems in your life, but these are all problems that you can solve. And that's the starting point, because if you don't accept responsibility, you remain a child. The second part of the triangle, second point of the triangle, is goals and written goals, which you teach in this book. And this, this is so important to write down your goals exactly the way I explain to do it and set priorities on your goals. And then the third part is continuous learning. So if you have those 3, and I've read Hundreds of biographies and autobiographies of men and women who have become great successes. If you have those 3, accept responsibility, no blaming, clear goals for what you want to accomplish, and then the third one is continuous learning. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. Then you can have a fabulous life. And of course, read and read and read and read and read and read and read. Because everything that you could ever need to know has been written down by someone somewhere, many of them by myself for that matter. But there's absolutely nothing that can stop you if you make a decision to, I say, get going and keep going. Get going and keep going.

Amazing words of advice. And in our community, we have so many people that are just so thankful that you took the time to write these books and open up your life and share the wisdom. So thank you so much, Brian. Hopefully we can catch each other on some international excursion someday and, uh, stay up to date on your work.

Thank you very much. Been a great pleasure.

Yeah, thank you. Next time, uh, for the next book, we'll have to have another conversation. Come on and talk about it.

Your pleasure, Nick. Thank you.

That is a wrap.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. It would mean the world to us if you could write a review and share this episode with a few of your friends. I mean, these books truly have the power to change people's lives, and by reviewing or sharing our podcast, you're helping us make an impact. If you have any recommendations for future guests or any constructive feedback for us on how we can improve our show, please Please feel free to submit a form on our website, www.bookthinkers.com, or send us a direct message on Instagram @bookthinkers. With that, I am signing off, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Don't forget, go read something.