Focal Point: A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals [Paperback]

Brian Tracy is a master in the field of personal and professional development. His speeches, seminars, and consulting around the globe have contributed to Tracy's reputation. He is highly respected and quite influential, particularly among the thousands who attend his presentations each year. As Tracy lived his life, then taught others his system, his approach was continually refined. In Focal Point, it all comes together for anyone who reads the book.

Focal Point explains how users of this tool (you'll do more than just read the words in this book to get its powerful total value) can unlock their full potential. At the same time, using the system will enable you to double your productivity and simplify your life. Of course, this sounds like the makings of a fine motivational speech; Tracy is a motivator. But, this book invests most of its pages in the how-to.

The chapters are filled with the knowledge of the sages in this field. Many teachings will sound familiar-good! In Focal Point, all that advice is pulled together into one place, one system to learn and apply. A listing of the chapter headings will reveal what you will explore in these pages: Tap Your Most Precious Resource, Practice Personal Strategic Planning, Supercharge Your Business and Career, Improve Your Family and Personal Life, Achieve Financial Independence, Enjoy Superb Health and Fitness, Become Everything You Are Capable of Becoming, Make a Difference in Your Community, and Spiritual Development and Inner Peace. Note that these are how-to chapters, filled with things like "Six Steps to Doubling Your Income and Doubling Your Time Off" and "Seven Keys to Higher Productivity." Each chapter includes challenging questions to help you see where you still have some work to do.

Tracy's Focal Point process consists of seven steps to be applied in each area of concern:
values, vision, goals, knowledge and skills, habits, daily activities, and actions. The whole valuable system is explained so you can use the book as a tool to make a substantial difference in yourself, your success, and your personal satisfaction. The book concludes with a chapter on Seven Lessons for the Twenty-First Century, a List of Values, a Recommended Reading list, and an index.

If you want to strengthen your life, your effectiveness, and your happiness, you'll discover a great friend in Focal Point. And you'll probably recommend it to your friends. It's just that kind of a book: it bothers you, makes you uncomfortable, but shows you how to make the improvements you want to need and desire. Go for it!

For a book on one's 'focal point', there seems to be a lot of cliches widely dispersed throughout the book, e.g., the 20/80 rule, "commit to excellence," "Work harder at what you do," "Identify your customers," and then "Fire your customers." Tracy includes what he calls "Perhaps the most famous mission statement of the twentieth century," as George Marshall said to Dwight Eisenhower, "Proceed to London. Invade Europe. Defeat the Germans." I prefer the Hollywood version of Marshall, from "Saving Private Ryan": "He's alive. We're going to go in there and get him the he** out of there."

Tracy offers "The Seven Rs of Simplification," which are actually seven "Res": Rethink, reevaluate, reorganize, restructure, etc. All this simplification sees to get pretty repetitive, and complicated. It is good to simplify and to control, but it is not clear that simplification comes from redoing anything and/or everything. And offering "Six steps to doubling your income and doubling your time off" seems like a pretty simple, powerful idea, but it includes steps like "Decide today to take at least one full day each week off work..." Nice work if you can get it.

Tracy tells a story about his dentist who "made a great sacrifice" to attend a seminar in Hong Kong and, as a result of what he learned there, retired five years later a multimillionaire. We should all wish that life and wealth could be that easy. What about all the other people who attended the seminar? When will they offer it again?

To cut to the chase: The focal power of goals does work. Let's face it, if we really want to simplify, control and focus, success comes down to three things: desire, direction and discipline. "Focal Point" is a bit about the first, a lot about the second, and not much about the third. And it is all over the place. If you are looking for focus, look elsewhere.