“Goals” by Brian Tracy, 2004

Brian Tracy is a very well known and well published business guru, speaking all over the world and writing dozens of books.  His track record and following is very strong, so I was looking forward to this book.  Particularly as the subtitle is How to get everything you want – faster than you ever thought possible.  Wow, what a compelling subtitle.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Alas, I couldn’t help but be a bit let down.  The book is organised into 21 chapters covering effectively 21 “rules” to create some sort of “system”.  Each chapter is split into sub-headings and then 1-2 paragraphs of text.  It’s like one gigantic bullet point list and it kind of reads that way too.   New topics come and go.  Anecdotes arise, are told and then forgotten.  It’s very much an Oh, and here’s another thing I thought of in this area.

I also found the content pretty basic.  Now I don’t think there is any need to overcomplicate goal setting, but this book didn’t offer any new insight or revelations.  I don’t really feel it offered a clear process or system to follow either.  It’s really just Set a goal, Write it down and Plan it’s completion.  The conclusion is a three page summary listing the 21 rules and giving a one paragraph summary of that rule/chapter.

The book is certainly all encompassing, but it really just felt like a summary of everything else that is out there.  Brian is very motivatinged, but you would need to be pretty self-motivated to work out where to begin and how to work your way through the chapters.  Some case studies would have really helped, rather than the simple one sentence examples he uses.

As you can probably tell, I don’t recommend the book.  But to be fair, 64 of the 79 reviews on Amazon give this book 5 stars (and another eight gave it 4 stars).  So perhaps there is something to it and I just wasn’t the right demographic...