Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy was born January 5, 1944 in Vancouver, Canada, into what he has described as a poor working-class family. He dropped out of high school, spent his late teens and early twenties traveling — at one point driving a Land Rover across the Sahara from Morocco to Nigeria — and working a succession of low-wage jobs including ship laborer, construction worker, factory hand, and door-to-door salesman.

The sales work is where the career began. In his mid-twenties Tracy systematically studied every sales-training book he could find, applied the principles methodically, and within a few years was one of the top-producing salespeople in his company. He went on to hold senior sales and management positions across multiple industries — real estate, investments, management consulting — and eventually built his own company, Brian Tracy International, in 1984.

Tracy published his first major book, The Psychology of Selling, in 1985. It became one of the best-selling sales training programs of the 20th century. He followed with Maximum Achievement (1993), Goals! (2003), Eat That Frog! (2001), Advanced Selling Strategies (1995), Focal Point (2001), No Excuses! (2010), The Power of Self-Discipline (2010), and more than 70 others. Eat That Frog! — his short, direct book on the single productivity principle of tackling your hardest task first thing in the morning — has sold over 2 million copies in 40+ languages and become one of the most-quoted productivity books of the past two decades.

Tracy has trained sales teams inside IBM, McDonnell Douglas, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Northrop Grumman, the US Army, and thousands of other organizations. He has spoken to audiences of 20,000+ people and delivered the keynote at hundreds of corporate conferences. His online courses on sales, goal setting, time management, and leadership have trained millions of students.

He has been active in politics and public policy alongside his commercial work, running for governor of California briefly in the 1990s. He has received multiple honorary doctorates and professional awards. He lives in Solana Beach, California with his wife Barbara; they have four children, most of whom are now involved in the Brian Tracy International business.

His central teaching, compressed: success is not an accident. It is the predictable output of a small number of specific skills — the ability to set clear goals, the discipline to do the most important thing first, the willingness to invest in your own learning every single day, and the capacity to act on what you know. Most people fail not because they lack information but because they never act on the information they already have. Eat the frog first. Do the hardest thing first. Everything else is easier after that.