The Real Secret of Success

Brian Tracy has produced another level-headed book with Flight Plan. He correctly asserts that “Every year or two, someone comes along with a book like The Secret, suggesting that there is a quick and easy way to be happy and make a lot of money. According to The Secret, all you have to do is to think and visualize positive thoughts and you will attract into your life all the good things you want. This idea appeals to people who are unwilling to do the hard work that is necessary to achieve anything worthwhile.”

Success happens for a reason and it’s not wishful thinking. We are all subject to the Law of Cause and Effect: For every effect, there is a cause or causes. You get what you put in. It’s as simple as that. It’s not luck or mysterious forces. Actually, that should provide some comfort. It means that it is up to you. You’re in the driver’s seat. Tracy applies the principle well: “If you do what other successful people do, over and over again, nothing can stop you from eventually getting the same results that they do. Conversely, if you don’t do what other successful people do, nothing can help you.” That’s pretty straightforward.

Tracy lays out twelve steps to follow to help you determining and responding correctly to the many hundreds of choices in your journey through life that will help to create the results you’re looking for.

1. Choose Your Destination: What contribution will you make?
2. Review Your Flight Plan Options: You are only as free as your well-developed options. Continually develop options. Hope is not a strategy.
3. Write Your Flight Plan: Write down your goals and then resolve to do something every day, without exception, until your goal is achieved.
4. Prepare for Your Journey: Leave nothing to chance; plan for every eventuality.
5. Take Off at Full Throttle: This is the turning point. Your get out what you put in.
6. Plan for Turbulence: Don’t be surprised if you run into problems—everyone does.
7. Make Continual Course Corrections: You will have to make changes to deal with problems and opportunities that come up. It’s okay to change your mind.
8. Accelerate Your Learning and Progress: Never stop learning and upgrading your knowledge. Learning new skills that can increase your contribution is like stepping on the accelerator of your own potential.
9. Activate Your Superconscious Mind: When you relax completely and let your mind go blank, very often a superconscious idea emerges.
10. Avoid Shortcuts and Other Mirages: Be prepared to pay the full price for success.
11. Master Your Fears: The mastery of fear and the development of courage are essential prerequisites for a happy successful life.
12. Persist Until You Succeed: Persistence is the hallmark of success.

He writes, “Character is the ability to follow through on a resolution after the enthusiasm with which the resolution was made has passed.”

The Four Rules of Influence

Chris Widner’s new book, The Art Of Discipline gives the proper emphasis regarding the topic of influence. He says in this entertaining short story, that influence is a gift followers give you because you have become the kind of person they want to follow and be influenced by. He provides four rules of influence:

1. Living a Life of Undivided Integrity. Notwithstanding that integrity is in fact being undivided, he writes that while leaders do make mistakes, followers “do expect their leaders to admit and correct their mistakes, mend the cracks in their integrity, if you will. Left unchecked, eventually a lack of integrity erodes the trust that is needed between a leader and a follower.”


2. Always Demonstrate a Positive Attitude. People respond to optimism. Bad things happen. And when they do, you need to ask not “Why did this happen to me?” but “What’s next?” or “What good can come from this?” “You are choosing to believe that something good can come from negative circumstances and that the future will be better than the present.”


3. Consider Other People’s Interests as More Important Than Your Own. “Even more important than being interesting, is being interested.”


4. Don’t Settle For Anything Less Than Excellence. Widner encourages us to grow our influence by improving ourselves around seven areas of excellence: physical appearance, emotional health, intellectual growth, spiritual depth, relationships, financial success, and charitable giving. Excellence is in the details.