When all the self-help and success-books came together and appear in one book: this one contains everything what you can ever read around.
There are many clever and useful books about how to be rich and successful and how to improve your personal and professional life. Brian Tracy summarized basically all of them in this book: he touched and collected everything what can be known about these topics. There’s a common point in the chapters: “habits”, but it’s only a guideline, a word, which can be used for anything…
The first chapter is about how to think about yourself, how to imagine your life in the future – the more clear is this image, the more chance you have to achieve it. After that Tracy repeats the esoteric “law of attraction” – you need to think about much what you want. The more you think about it, the more chance you have to get it…
The first third of the book is the best, because he gives really useful advices. There are seven points how to form a habit in your daily life (write it down, share it with others, not to make exceptions etc.). He gave advices how to set up and achieve goals, how to improve your skills, how to use your time – good thoughts all. There’s a chapter about finances as well, how to save money and finally how to become wealthier – clever and useful again. There’s nothing new around here, but Tracy summarizes many other sources, books and researches from these areas.
The middle of the book is for “business”: about your office behavior and work, how to get promoted faster, this is great again. But the next chapters are for entrepreneurs or sales guys only, and nothing about average people’s daily habits. How to satisfy your customers, how to overcome their expectations… it’s nothing about a worker on a regular payroll.
Notice that you need to think continually to too many things at a time: to like yourself, that you “can do” it, to think to your future yourself, to your customers, your improvements, and how to make more sales… And it’s not just thinking, but you have to do too many things as well: work more hours, be more with your family, learn every day, sport every day, meditate every day… How many hours he thinks we have in a day? There are repeated topics too: that you can achieve everything, just think about your future, set up daily goals, work hard, work long, prioritize – good points, but unnecessary to repeat them so many times.
But apart from the page-filler sales chapters, what you can connect to your daily life is useful, well-established and well-developed. You don’t need to read many self-helper success-books anymore, because this one summarized them all, so if you want to read only one, I suggest to select this one!
Brian Tracy: Million dollar habits
Entrepreneur Press, 2017.
I got an advanced copy through Netgalley