Goals! by Brian Tracy
Goals! — Brian Tracy
Tracy wrote this after years of studying why some people achieve extraordinary things while others with equal ability achieve very little. The answer, consistently, was goals. Not talent, not luck, not connections — the habit of setting clear written goals and working on them every day.
The Core Idea
Most people drift. They have vague wishes — to be happy, to earn more, to get fit — but no system for turning those wishes into reality. Tracy's argument is simple: your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. What you think about, plan for, and act on consistently is what your life becomes.
"Living without clear goals is like driving in a thick fog. No matter how powerful or well-engineered your car, you drive slowly, hesitantly, making little progress on even the smoothest road."
Part One — Get Your Mindset Right
Do this work before setting a single goal. Most goal-setting fails here.
1. Unlock Your Potential
You have more natural potential than you could use in several lifetimes. Most people operate at a fraction of their capacity not because they lack ability, but because they have never been shown how to access it. The starting point is to accept, genuinely and completely, that you are capable of far more than you have yet achieved.
"The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good."
2. Take Charge of Your Life — Accept Total Responsibility
Stop blaming circumstances, other people, or bad luck. You are exactly where your choices have brought you. Nothing changes until you own that completely, with no excuses and no blame. This is not a comfortable idea but it is the most liberating one in the book.
"The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life."
3. Create Your Own Future
Imagine your ideal life five years from now with no constraints — what would it look like? Tracy calls this the magic wand exercise: if you could wave a magic wand and have your life be perfect in every area, what would it look like? Write it down. People who think long-term and hold a clear picture of where they are going consistently make better daily decisions than those living reactively.
4. Clarify Your Values
Before setting goals, know what actually matters to you — not what your parents wanted, not what society expects. What do you genuinely stand for? Goals built on someone else's values never last because the motivation underneath them is borrowed. Values are the foundation. Build everything on top of them.
5. Determine Your True Goals
Most people have never sat down and honestly asked: what do I really want? In every area of life — work, finances, health, relationships, personal development. Do not let any area drift on autopilot. Write it all out. This exercise alone, done thoroughly, produces clarity that most people never experience.
6. Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose
Of all your goals, one matters more than the others. Tracy calls it your Major Definite Purpose — the single goal that, if achieved, would do more to improve your life than anything else. Find it. Once identified, organise your daily activities around it. Everything else becomes secondary.
"Your ability to set goals is the master skill of success. Goals unlock your positive mind and release ideas and energy for goal attainment. Without goals, you simply drift and flow on the currents of life. With goals, you fly like an arrow, straight and true to your target."
7. Analyze Your Beliefs
Your strongly held beliefs act as a filter for everything you perceive and everything you attempt. If you believe you cannot do something, you will not try, or you will sabotage the attempt. Catch self-limiting beliefs and question them directly: is this actually true, or is this a story I inherited and never examined? Act as if you already have the quality you want to develop. Behaviour shapes belief just as much as belief shapes behaviour.
8. Use the 3P Affirmation Formula
Tracy's affirmations are not wishful thinking — they are deliberate instructions from the conscious mind to the subconscious. Every affirmation must be Personal, Positive, and Present tense.
- Start with I — "I am confident, disciplined, and focused"
- State what you want, never what you want to avoid
- Speak it as already true — "I earn X per month"
- Morning ritual: "I like myself and I love my work" — repeat until you mean it
Part Two — The 21-Chapter Action System
Step 1. Start at the Beginning — Write It Down
Be ruthlessly specific. A wish is vague. A goal is precise, measurable, and time-bound.
"A goal is something distinctly different from a wish. It is clear, written, and specific. It can be quickly and easily described to another person. You can measure it, and you know when you have achieved it or not."
Spend five minutes every morning writing your 10 to 15 most important goals in the present tense as if already achieved. This single habit, done consistently, will change what you accomplish.
"Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines."
Also write your goals in the evening before sleep. Your subconscious then works on them overnight.
Step 2. Measure Your Progress — Assess Your Starting Point
Know exactly where you are now. Be honest about the habits, relationships, and patterns that have produced your current results. You cannot navigate to a destination without knowing your starting point. Set intermediate milestones so you know whether you are on track. What gets measured gets improved.
Step 3. Find Your Why — List Every Reason
For each goal, write every reason you want it. The strength of your motivation is proportional to the number and depth of your reasons. When obstacles appear — and they will — your reasons are what keep you moving.
"The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire, not things we fear."
Step 4. Set a Deadline
A goal without a deadline has no urgency, no beginning, no end. Assign a specific date. If you miss it, set a new one immediately. The deadline is not a judgment — it is a mechanism for creating forward motion.
Step 5. Remove the Roadblocks — Identify Your Biggest Obstacle
Ask: what is the one thing standing between me and this goal? In most cases the honest answer is internal — a habit, a fear, a skill gap, a belief. Find it and name it. Removing the primary obstacle typically unlocks progress faster than any other action.
"Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goals."
Step 6. Become an Expert in Your Field
The world pays exceptional rewards to people who are exceptionally good at what they do. Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning in your field. Read for one hour every day. Attend seminars. Listen to educational material when driving. Identify the one skill that, if you developed it to excellence, would have the greatest impact on your results — and work on it deliberately every day.
Step 7. Associate with the Right People
You become like the people you spend most time with. Actively seek out people who are where you want to be, who are positive, goal-oriented, and ambitious. Reduce time with people who are negative, directionless, or who discourage your ambitions. Mentors and mastermind groups accelerate progress dramatically.
Step 8. Make a Plan of Action — Apply the 6P Formula
"Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance."
Before you begin working toward any goal, write your plan on paper. Organise tasks by priority and sequence. Know what needs to happen before what else can happen. Every minute of planning saves ten minutes in execution.
- Write the plan before you begin, not during
- Prioritise ruthlessly — most important tasks first, always
- Review and adjust as you go, but keep moving
Step 9. Manage Your Time Well
Time is your most precious and irreplaceable resource. Every minute spent on a low-value activity is a minute stolen from a high-value one. Apply the 80/20 rule constantly — 20% of your activities produce 80% of your results. Identify that 20% and protect time for it. Learn to say no to everything that does not move you toward your Major Definite Purpose.
"If what you are doing is not moving you toward your goals, then it is moving you away from them."
Step 10. Review Your Goals Daily
Review your written goals every morning when you begin your day, and again every evening. Read them out loud. This daily review keeps your goals alive in your conscious mind and feeds them continuously into your subconscious, which works on them around the clock.
"When you rewrite and review your goals in the evening, your subconscious mind then has an opportunity to work on your goals all night long while you are sleeping."
Step 11. Visualise Your Goals Continually
Create clear, vivid, emotional mental pictures of your goals as already achieved. See yourself in the picture. Feel the emotions of having accomplished it. The more sensorially rich and emotionally charged the mental image, the more powerfully it is accepted by the subconscious as an instruction. Combine visualisation with your 3P affirmations for maximum effect.
Step 12. Activate Your Superconscious Mind
Tracy distinguishes three levels of mind: the conscious, the subconscious, and the superconscious. The superconscious is a higher creative intelligence that goes beyond ordinary thinking — the source of insight, intuition, sudden breakthroughs, and inspiration that arrives apparently from nowhere. It activates when you have a clear goal, intense desire, and a relaxed, optimistic mental state.
"Your superconscious mind operates best when you are in a mental state of calm, confident, relaxed expectation."
"Worry is a form of negative goal-setting."
To access it: write your goal clearly, affirm it, visualise it, then release it and get busy with action. The moment you stop straining after the answer and simply move forward, the superconscious delivers solutions.
Step 13. Remain Flexible at All Times
Be absolutely clear about your goals and absolutely flexible about how you get there. The path from here to your goal is rarely the one you originally planned. New information arrives. Circumstances change. The person who insists on the original route when the road is blocked wastes time. The person who adjusts the method while holding firm to the destination keeps moving.
The only real question to ask about your current approach is: does it work? If yes, continue. If no, change something. There is no failure — only feedback.
"Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it."
Step 14. Unlock Your Inborn Creativity — Mindstorming
You are more creative than you know. Creative ability is not fixed — it expands with use. Every problem contains a solution, and your mind is capable of generating it if given the right conditions.
The most powerful technique Tracy offers here is Mindstorming, also called the 20 Idea Method.
How to do it:
- Take a clean sheet of paper
- Write your goal or problem as a question at the top — specific and simple: "How can I double my income in the next twelve months?"
- Force yourself to write 20 answers to that question — without stopping, without judging
- Write each answer using the 3P Formula — personal, positive, present tense
- The first few answers will be obvious. The answers from 10 onwards will surprise you
- Take the best answer and act on it immediately
The discipline of generating 20 answers forces the mind past its comfortable, obvious responses into genuinely new territory. Do this for every major goal and every significant obstacle.
Step 15. Do Something Every Day
The daily habit of action toward your goal is more important than the size of any single action. Something every day — however small — keeps momentum alive, signals to your subconscious that this goal is real and current, and compounds over time into results that seem extraordinary from the outside.
"Develop a sense of urgency. Get into the habit of moving fast on your goals."
Step 16. Persist Until You Succeed
Every great achievement required persistence through setbacks, disappointments, and failures that most observers never see. Persistence is not stubbornness — it is the decision, made in advance, that you will not stop. Each time you persist through a difficulty you become stronger, more capable, and more certain that you will eventually succeed.
"Resolve in advance that no matter what happens, you will never give up. Persistence is self-discipline in action."
"The only guarantee of failure is to stop."
Daily Power Habits
These are the practical rituals that hold the whole system together.
Morning — write your goals in present tense, speak your 3P affirmations, spend two minutes visualising your most important goal as already achieved. This programs your entire day before anything external interferes.
Evening — rewrite your goals, plan tomorrow using the 6P formula, review your priority task list before you sleep. Your subconscious works on problems overnight.
Mindstorming session — whenever you face an obstacle or need new ideas, take 20 minutes and generate 20 written answers to a specific question. Act on the best one immediately.
Keep goals private — do not announce them before you have results. Telling people too early dissipates energy and invites discouragement.
Apply the 80/20 rule everywhere — 20% of your actions produce 80% of your results. Identify and protect that 20%.
Eat the frog first — your hardest, most important task first every morning.
Quotes Worth Keeping
"A goal is something distinctly different from a wish. It is clear, written, and specific. You can measure it, and you know when you have achieved it or not."
"Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines."
"You become what you think about most of the time. Your outer world ultimately becomes a reflection of your inner world."
"People with clear, written goals accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine."
"Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goals."
"If what you are doing is not moving you toward your goals, then it is moving you away from them."
"Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it."
"The act of taking the first step is what separates the winners from the losers."
"Resolve in advance that no matter what happens, you will never give up. Persistence is self-discipline in action."