Brian Tracy (5 January 1944 – 12 November 2026) was a Canadian-American author, speaker and business trainer best known for Eat That Frog!, The Psychology of Achievement and Maximum Achievement. He died on 12 November 2026, aged 82, according to reports published on 13 November. He left school without graduating, worked as a labourer, found his way into sales, and spent more than four decades teaching people to set written goals, do their most important task first and keep learning. This tribute covers his life and company, then sets out his philosophy and 19 of his techniques in detail, each with its source, step-by-step instructions, a worked example, the research evidence and common mistakes.

Tribute and biography · Themes: personal responsibility, goal setting, time management, procrastination, self-concept, self-discipline, sales and lifelong learning

Last updated: 13 November 2026

Written by Saj Ali

Reading time: about 50 minutes

How we wrote this article: this tribute draws on Brian Tracy’s own books, articles and interviews, publishers’ and library records, and published research. Figures that come only from his company or publishers are labelled. Every quotation is taken from a source listed at the end. Reports of his death appeared on 13 November 2026; at the time of writing, his family and company had not issued a public statement and no cause of death had been given. We will update this page when they do.

Brian Tracy: Key Facts

Contents

1. Who Was Brian Tracy?
2. How His Death Was Reported
3. Early Life: From Charlottetown to Labouring Jobs
4. The Sales Breakthrough That Shaped His Life
5. Education and Business Career Before 1984
6. Building Brian Tracy International
7. Family and Public Life
8. His Philosophy: The Ideas Behind Every Technique
9. His Techniques and Methods, Step by Step
10. His Major Books, With Publication Years
11. How His Advice Compares With Research: At a Glance
12. Reception and Criticism
13. In His Own Words: Verified Quotes
14. Legacy and Influence
15. How to Apply His Ideas Today: A 30-Day Plan
16. Frequently Asked Questions
17. Explore More on Self Help Supermarket
18. Books and sources

Who Was Brian Tracy?

Brian Tracy was one of the most widely read writers on productivity and success of the past 40 years. Born in Canada, he worked for most of his career in the United States, teaching through books, audio programmes, seminars and corporate training. His company describes him as chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, “a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations”. His books, videos and key ideas are collected on our Brian Tracy expert profile.

His best-known idea is in the title of his most successful book. In Eat That Frog! (2001), your “frog” is the biggest, most important task on your list, the one you are most likely to put off. His advice was to do it first. The phrase has since become everyday shorthand for doing the hard thing first.

Around that image he built a practical system for setting goals, ranking tasks and improving a little every day. What set him apart was structure: he rarely offered inspiration without a list, a method and an exercise. His company says he wrote more than 70 books and spoke to more than 5 million people; his publisher says Eat That Frog! alone has sold more than 4 million copies.

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How His Death Was Reported

Reports that Brian Tracy had died began to circulate on 13 November 2026. An obituary published that day by RFG News said he died on 12 November 2026, aged 82, and that no cause of death had been stated. On the same day, readers, former students and fellow speakers posted tributes on X, many of them describing the first Tracy book or cassette they ever picked up. His Wikipedia entry was also updated to give 12 November 2026 as his date of death.

At the time of writing, we could not find a statement from his family or from Brian Tracy International on the company’s website or official social media accounts, so this page uses the wording “according to reports”.

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Early Life: From Charlottetown to Labouring Jobs

A working-class childhood

Brian Tracy was born in Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island on Canada’s east coast, on 5 January 1944. On a page for his Power of Personal Achievement programme, he described his start in life plainly. “I came from humble beginnings,” he wrote. “My parents were good people, but they were often out of work. Growing up, we never seemed to have enough money for anything”. In a 2012 interview he said he “grew up in a working class family with parents who were not regularly employed”.

Leaving school without a diploma

He did not graduate from high school. Instead of a diploma, he wrote on that programme page, he received a “Leaving Certificate” at the commencement ceremony. In a 2021 podcast interview he put it more bluntly: “I didn’t graduate from high school, I failed out of the 12th grade”. It became central to his teaching: if he could change his life by learning, so could almost anyone.

Dishes, cars, floors and sawmills

What followed was a run of labouring jobs. On that programme page, and again in the 2021 interview, he said his first full-time job was washing dishes in a hotel. When he lost that, he washed cars; when he lost that, he washed floors for a janitorial service. He also listed work in a sawmill, at a service station, on a logging crew and as a well digger, and in the 2012 interview mentioned mills, factories, farms, ranches and construction. “I slept in my car in the wintertime, I slept next to it in the summertime,” he recalled in the 2021 interview.

Travelling the world on very little money

In his early twenties he set out to see the world. In the introduction to The Psychology of Selling he describes working his passage across the North Atlantic on a Norwegian freighter, then travelling by bicycle, bus, truck and train around Europe, across Africa and on to the Far East. “I never missed a meal,” he wrote, “but I did postpone a lot of them indefinitely”.

One part of that journey, a crossing of the Sahara by Land Rover, later became a chapter of Eat That Frog! (see one oil barrel at a time).

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The Sales Breakthrough That Shaped His Life

Six hard months on straight commission

In The Psychology of Selling and in later interviews, he described how, when he could no longer find labouring work, he took a job in straight-commission sales, going door to door with small products and living on whatever commission he earned. He knocked on office doors by day and house doors in the evening. His training, as he later joked, was three sentences long: “Here’s your cards; here’s your brochures; there’s the door!”

For six months he struggled, earning just enough to rent a single room in a small guesthouse. He was not short of effort. He described waiting in a car park at 7:00 in the morning for his first prospects and still knocking on doors at nine or ten at night. “Survival is a great motivator,” he said in 2012. “I had no money, no contacts, no friends and no opportunities”.

The question he asked

Then he did the thing that shaped the rest of his life. He went to the most successful salesman in the company, a man only a few years older, and asked what he was doing differently. The answer was a professional sales process: ask questions, understand the customer’s needs, then show how the product meets them. “I still remember being amazed that there was a methodology and a system to professional selling,” Tracy said in the 2012 interview. “It changed my life”.

He applied what he had learned, then began reading books, listening to audio programmes and attending seminars, trying each useful idea in practice. By his own account in the 2021 interview, his sales rose tenfold, and within a year he was in charge of sales in six countries and earning more than ever before. From that experience came the belief he repeated for the rest of his career: “You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself,” he said in 2012.

Cause and effect

He later found a name for the lesson in Aristotle’s principle of causality, which, in The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, he called the Law of Cause and Effect and described as “the first big breakthrough for me”: “Everything happens for a reason; for every effect there is a specific cause.” It became the base of his whole philosophy, described below.

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Education and Business Career Before 1984

Although he had left high school without a diploma, Tracy later went to university. The University of Alberta lists him as an alumnus who graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce in 1978. He was 34.

Before he started his own company, Tracy worked across a wide range of businesses. His company lists careers in sales and marketing, investments, real estate development and syndication, importing, distribution and management consulting. It also says he was chief operating officer of a development company with USD 265 million in business, and that he carried out consulting assignments for several corporations worth more than USD 1 billion. We could not find independent records for these roles, so they are given here as his company describes them.

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Building Brian Tracy International

Founding the company in 1984

In 1984 Tracy founded Brian Tracy International in Vancouver, British Columbia. The company trained individuals and organisations in leadership, selling, self-esteem, goals, strategy, creativity and what he called success psychology. He later ran his companies from Solana Beach, California, north of San Diego.

“After 10 years of speaking, I took the speech and put it into audio programs and video programs. And then books,” he explained in the 2021 interview. He also taught a long-form classroom course called the Phoenix Seminar on the Psychology of Achievement, which survives in recorded form in library catalogues.

The Psychology of Achievement (1984)

The same year he founded his company, the audio publisher Nightingale-Conant released his programme The Psychology of Achievement. Nightingale-Conant had been co-founded by Earl Nightingale, whose 1956 recording The Strangest Secret was an early landmark of spoken-word self-improvement, so Tracy’s programme reached an audience already used to learning from tapes in the car. His company says it was translated into more than 28 languages. It covered the self-concept, personal responsibility, goals and relationships, themes he expanded nine years later in the book Maximum Achievement (1993).

Speaking, consulting and the size of his reach

Over the following decades, his company says, he consulted for more than 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5 million people in about 5,000 talks and seminars across the US, Canada and some 70 other countries, and that he addressed more than 250,000 people each year as a keynote speaker and seminar leader. It says he travelled or worked in 107 countries on six continents and spoke four languages. These figures come from the company itself and have not been independently audited.

A family business

In later years the company became a family business. His son Michael Tracy and his daughter Christina Tracy Stein speak and teach through Brian Tracy International, and the company’s website lists them alongside their father. In 2025 the company promoted a podcast, The Brian Tracy Experience, featuring Brian with his children Christina, David and Michael. Christina co-wrote two books with him: Kiss That Frog! (2012) and Find Your Balance Point (2015).

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Family and Public Life

Tracy married Barbara Tracy in 1979, and the couple had four children: Christina, Michael, Catherine and David. His company’s biography describes him as “happily married” with four children.

He had a brief and unusual moment in politics. In 2003 he was one of 135 candidates in the California gubernatorial recall election, standing as an independent, and received 729 votes. His campaign was followed on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House (UK), where presenter Eddie Mair phoned him each week for an update on how the race was going. Wikipedia also records that he served as a trustee of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., from 2003.

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His Philosophy: The Ideas Behind Every Technique

Tracy’s techniques are easier to use once you see the few beliefs they all rest on. He repeated these beliefs, often in the same words, across four decades of books, audio programmes and seminars. Taken together they form a complete, if simple, philosophy of how a person gets from where they are to where they want to be.

1. Personal responsibility: “I am responsible”

Everything in Tracy’s system starts with taking responsibility. He dated the idea to a winter night when he was 21, working as a construction labourer in a small apartment with no car, no savings and no television, at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Sitting alone at his kitchen table, he wrote in No Excuses! (2010), “it suddenly dawned on me that ‘this is my life’”, and that “unless I changed, nothing else was going to change”. “I realized at that moment that, from that day forward I was completely responsible for my life and for everything that happened to me,” he wrote. “I could no longer blame my situation on my difficult childhood or mistakes I had made in the past”. The very next day he went to a bookstore during his lunch break and began the habit of buying books that could help him, a habit he kept for the rest of his life.

He turned this into a teaching. In Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (2003) he told readers to see themselves as “the president of your own personal services corporation”, and put the idea at its plainest: “You are where you are and what you are because you have decided to be there”. In The Psychology of Achievement he linked responsibility to emotions. Negative emotions, he taught, depend on blaming someone or something else; “the instant we stop blaming, our negative emotions stop.” His remedy was to say “I am responsible, I am responsible” whenever something made you angry or upset, which he called, after “I like myself”, “the most powerful positive affirmation we can use”.

In practice, responsibility for Tracy meant three things: no excuses, no blaming and no complaining; deciding what you want; and accepting that your future depends mainly on what you do next. He held this view firmly. “Successful people accept complete responsibility for their situation, good or bad,” he said in a 2012 interview. “They don’t make excuses or blame others”. Psychologists describe a related idea as an internal “locus of control”, the belief that outcomes depend on your own actions rather than on luck or other people, a concept introduced by Julian Rotter in 1966. If you find that blame and resentment take up a lot of your energy, our guide to self-sabotage looks at the patterns that keep people stuck.

2. Cause and effect: success is predictable

The second pillar is the Law of Cause and Effect, which Tracy traced to Aristotle. In Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life he wrote that Aristotle “first articulated the foundation principle of Western philosophy in about 350 B.C. It became known as the Aristotelian Principle of Causality. Today, we call it the Law of Cause and Effect”. In 2021 he described what it meant to him as a young salesman: “whenever I wanted to accomplish something, I went out and I buried myself in the cause and effect relationships. If you do A you get B”.

From this he drew his most practical conclusion. In The Psychology of Selling he called learning the law “one of the turning points in my life” and summed it up: “If you do what other successful people do, you will eventually get the same results that they do”. Success, in other words, was not luck or talent but a set of causes that could be found, studied and copied. That belief explains why nearly every Tracy book is a list of methods. If results have causes, the job of a teacher is to name the causes and show people how to practise them.

He pushed the law inwards as well. In The Psychology of Achievement he taught that “our thoughts are the primary causes” and our circumstances largely the effects. That is why so much of his teaching is about thinking: change the cause, and over time the effect changes too. The same idea is at the heart of As a Man Thinketh (1903) by James Allen, a writer Tracy quoted in Eat That Frog!.

3. You become what you think about

Tracy borrowed one sentence from Earl Nightingale more than any other. In his article on the “golden hour” he put it this way: “you become what you think about, most of the time. You become the sum total result of all the impressions you take into your mind”. Nightingale had built his 1956 recording The Strangest Secret around the line “we become what we think about”, and Tracy’s first great success, The Psychology of Achievement, was published by the audio company Nightingale had co-founded. You can read more about the recording in our piece on The Strangest Secret and about the man himself on our Earl Nightingale page.

For Tracy this was not mysticism but a matter of attention. If you think most of the time about your goals and how to reach them, you notice more opportunities, make better choices and take more of the right actions. Many of his techniques, from rewriting goals every morning to filling the car with educational audio, are ways of controlling what goes into your mind.

4. Everything is learnable

The fourth belief came straight from his own sales breakthrough. Once he discovered that top salespeople followed a method, he concluded that any skill could be learned. “You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself,” he said in a 2012 interview. In Eat That Frog! he called upgrading your skills “one of the most important personal productivity principles of all”, and in The Psychology of Selling he told readers that every sales skill, from prospecting to closing, could be mastered the same way: “You can learn anything you need to learn through practice and repetition”. This is the root of his advice to read for an hour a day and to listen to audio programmes while driving.

5. Success is broader than money

Tracy wrote often about income, but his definition of success was wide. The Psychology of Achievement listed six requirements for success: peace of mind, health and energy, loving relationships, financial freedom, worthy goals and ideals, and personal fulfilment. In Maximum Achievement (1993) he expanded this to seven ingredients by adding self-knowledge and self-awareness. He put peace of mind first. In No Excuses! he quoted Aristotle on the same point: the great question each person must answer is “How shall we live in order to be happy?” Our Wheel of Life tool is a practical way to score yourself on several of these areas at once.

6. Where his ideas came from

Tracy was open about his teachers. Asked in 2012 who inspired him when he started out, he said: “I first began with the books of Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, and others. Later, I migrated to Peter Drucker, Ludwig Von Mises, and hundreds of other thinkers”. The acknowledgements of Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life name a longer line of success writers, including Napoleon Hill, Maxwell Maltz, Claude Bristol, David Schwartz, W. Clement Stone, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Denis Waitley.

• Napoleon Hill. On a list of favourite self-improvement books on his website, Tracy named Think and Grow Rich (1936) first, wrote that he had read it “over and over again”, and described his own Maximum Achievement as its modern counterpart: “the right hands and the left hands of the best personal development books.” Hill’s ideas of a “definite purpose” and of persistence run through Tracy’s goal-setting work, and Tracy opened chapters of The Psychology of Selling, Eat That Frog! and No Excuses! with quotations from Hill.
• Earl Nightingale. Nightingale supplied the idea that you become what you think about, and his company published the programme that made Tracy’s name.
• Maxwell Maltz and Psycho-Cybernetics. Maltz, a plastic surgeon, argued in Psycho-Cybernetics (1960) that people act in line with their mental picture of themselves. Tracy wrote that “the discovery of the self-image, pioneered by Maxwell Maltz, is a major breakthrough in understanding human performance”. Maltz’s self-image became one of the three parts of Tracy’s self-concept model, described below. Our Psycho-Cybernetics hub collects our guides to the method.
• Aristotle. Tracy took the principle of causality from Aristotle, and often quoted him on character and happiness, for example “The ultimate end of life is the development of character”, in No Excuses! and Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.
• Norman Vincent Peale. On the same list, Tracy listed The Power of Positive Thinking among his three favourite self-development books and said he had worked with Peale before Peale died.
• Peter Drucker. Many of Tracy’s time-management questions come from Drucker, including “What can I and only I do, that if done well, will make a real difference?”, which he credited to “the late Peter Drucker, the management guru”. In No Excuses! he quoted Drucker’s line “You cannot manage time; you can only manage yourself”.
• Fellow speakers. Tracy belonged to the same generation of American success speakers as Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar. In Eat That Frog! he also listed time-management writers he had studied: Drucker, Alec Mackenzie, Alan Lakein and Stephen Covey.

What Tracy added to this tradition was a habit of turning each principle into a procedure. Hill told readers to have a definite purpose; Tracy gave them a seven-step method and a sheet of paper. That habit is why the techniques below can be set out step by step.

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His Techniques and Methods, Step by Step

This is the practical core of Tracy’s work. Each technique below follows the same pattern: where it comes from, exactly what he taught, how to do it, a worked example, what research says, the most common mistakes and where to go next on Self Help Supermarket. Quotations and chapter titles for Eat That Frog! are from the third edition (2017) unless stated. Tracy usually told readers, in his writing on the golden hour, to try a method for a set period, often 21 days, before judging it.

Time and productivity: Eat That Frog · planning and the 10/90 rule · ABCDE · 80/20 · creative procrastination and zero-based thinking · Law of Three · key result areas and constraints · salami slice and Swiss cheese · single handling and time blocks
Goals: seven-step goal method · ten-goals exercise · mindstorming
Growth and mindset: 1,000 percent formula · golden hour · university on wheels · the mental laws · self-concept · self-discipline · The Psychology of Selling

Technique 1: Eat That Frog

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time (Berrett-Koehler, 2001; later editions 2007, 2017 and 2025).

What he taught. “Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it,” and also “the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment”. He gave two rules. “The first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.” And: “If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long”. The aim is a habit: “tackling your major task first thing each morning” and staying with it until it is finished. He added a reason it feels good: finishing an important task, he wrote, triggers a release of endorphins and a feeling of energy and self-esteem, which he called a “positive addiction”. The book opens with an old saying about eating a live frog first thing in the morning, which he credited to Mark Twain; Quote Investigator traces it to the French writer Nicolas Chamfort.

How to do it.

1. The evening before, write down everything you have to do tomorrow.
2. Ask which single task would make the biggest difference if you completed it. That is your frog.
3. If two tasks qualify, choose the harder or less pleasant one.
4. Get everything you need for it ready, so you can start without delay.
5. Start on it first thing, before email, messages or news.
6. Work on it until it is finished, or until a planned stopping point.

Worked example. A freelance designer has invoices to send, a client brief to answer and a pitch deck due on Friday. The deck is the frog: it is worth the most and is the task she keeps avoiding. She opens the deck file at 8:30, before her inbox, and gets the structure and first five slides done by 10:30. The invoices and email still get done, but after the frog.

What research says. A meta-analysis by Piers Steel found that people put off tasks most when they find them unpleasant, when the reward is distant and when they are more impulsive. That matches Tracy’s description of the frog. The research does not show that the hardest task must always come first in the day; Tracy himself told readers to find the hours when they have most energy and schedule demanding work then.

Common mistakes.

• Picking the most urgent task rather than the most important one.
• Choosing a frog so big that it cannot be started. Break it down first (see salami slice).
• Checking messages “just for a minute” first, which Tracy warned can swallow the morning.

Full guide: Eat That Frog: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: our procrastination guide explains why we put things off, and the productivity hub gathers methods from other teachers. If time slips away without you noticing, see time blindness.

Technique 2: Plan every day in advance (the 10/90 rule)

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 2, “Plan Every Day in Advance”; also his article “Dare to Dream”.

What he taught. “Think on paper” and “always work from a list.” He claimed that “every minute you spend in planning can save you five or ten minutes in execution”, and named the 10/90 rule: “the first 10 percent of time that you spend planning and organizing your work before you begin will save you as much as 90 percent of the time in getting the job done”. He recommended four lists: a master list of everything you might want to do in the future; a monthly list made at the end of each month; a weekly list planned in advance; and a daily list for tomorrow, drawn from the others.

How to do it.

1. Keep one master list and add every new idea or task to it.
2. At the end of each month, draw up next month’s list from it.
3. At the end of each week, plan the coming week. Tracy said many readers told him a couple of hours of weekly planning changed their productivity.
4. Each evening, write tomorrow’s daily list, then rank it with the ABCDE method.
5. Tick items off as you finish them, and add new tasks to the list before you act on them.

Worked example. On Sunday evening a sales manager spends 40 minutes on her weekly list: two client reviews, a hiring interview, a quarterly forecast. Each evening she writes the next day’s list from it. On Wednesday, when an urgent request arrives, she writes it on the list and ranks it rather than dropping everything.

What research says. Specific plans of the form “when X happens, I will do Y”, which psychologists call implementation intentions, make people more likely to act on their goals; a meta-analysis of 94 studies by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found a medium-to-large effect. A daily list with a set start time for each key task is close to this. Tracy’s 10 and 90 percent figures are his own rules of thumb, not measured results.

Common mistakes. Writing lists that are too long to finish; planning in your head rather than on paper; and planning in the morning when the day has already started, rather than the night before.

Full guide: Time blocking and single-tasking: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Productivity and, for writing plans down regularly, journaling.

Technique 3: The ABCDE method

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 6, “Use the ABCDE Method Continually”, and his article on the method.

What he taught. Start with a list of everything you have to do for the day, “think on paper”, and put a letter next to each item before you begin:

• A – “something that is very important, something that you must do”, with serious consequences either way. Number several A tasks as A-1, A-2, A-3. “Your A-1 task is your biggest, ugliest frog of all.”
• B – a task you should do, but with only mild consequences: “the tadpoles of your work life.”
• C – something “nice to do but for which there are no consequences at all.”
• D – something you can delegate. “Delegate everything that someone else can do.”
• E – something you can eliminate altogether, often a task you keep doing “out of habit or because you enjoy it.”

The rule: “you should never do a B task when an A task is left undone”. Then “start immediately on your A-1 task and then stay at it until it is complete”.

How to do it.

1. List every task for tomorrow.
2. Mark each one A, B, C, D or E. Be strict: an A task must have serious consequences.
3. Number the A tasks in order of importance.
4. Hand off the D tasks and cross out the E tasks.
5. Begin with A-1 and do not touch a B task until the A tasks are done.

Worked example. A team leader’s list has eight items. The budget submission due tomorrow is A-1; preparing for a client call is A-2; replying to non-urgent email is B; lunch with a colleague is C; booking the meeting room goes to an assistant (D); and the weekly report nobody reads is E, so she raises it with her manager and stops writing it.

What research says. No controlled trial has tested the ABCDE method itself. It applies the general finding that specific goals and plans improve performance. Its distinctive step, eliminating E tasks, is supported more by common sense than by data.

Common mistakes. Marking too many tasks A; never using D or E; and re-sorting the list instead of starting A-1.

Full guide: The ABCDE method: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Productivity, and overthinking if ranking the list turns into a reason to delay.

Technique 4: The 80/20 rule

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 3, “Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything”; Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (2003); No Excuses! (2010); his article on the Pareto principle.

What he taught. The rule is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, as Tracy told it, wrote about it in 1895 after noticing that society divided into the “vital few”, the top 20 percent in money and influence, and the “trivial many”. Applied to work: “20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results”. “If you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth much more than the other eight items put together”. The tasks in the valuable 20 percent, he observed, are usually “big, difficult, and daunting”, while the other 80 percent are “fun, easy, and enjoyable”, which is why people drift towards them. He was clear that the ratio “is not a hard and fast mathematical law. It is a concept”.

How to do it.

1. Take any list of ten tasks.
2. Ask which two would produce the most value if done well.
3. Do those first, even if they are hard and the other eight are quick.
4. Apply the same question to customers, products and activities: which few produce most of the results?

Worked example. A shop owner finds that a small group of regular customers produces most of her revenue. She stops spending equal time on every enquiry and calls her top customers personally each month.

What research says. Skewed distributions of this kind are common in economics and business, but the exact 80/20 split is a rule of thumb, as Tracy said himself. The value of the rule is the question it makes you ask.

Common mistakes. Treating 80/20 as a precise ratio; choosing the “top 20 percent” by what is pleasant rather than by results; and ignoring routine tasks that, though low in value, still need to be done.

Full guide: The 80/20 Pareto principle: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Tim Ferriss uses the same principle in The 4-Hour Workweek, and our productivity hub covers related methods.

Technique 5: Creative procrastination and zero-based thinking

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 5, “Practice Creative Procrastination”; Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life, on personal strategic planning.

What he taught. “You can’t do everything that you have to do. You have to procrastinate on something. Therefore, deliberately and consciously procrastinate on small tasks.” His summary: “Do the worst first!” He called the things you decide not to do “posteriorities”, the opposite of priorities. To find them he used zero-based thinking: “If I were not doing this already, knowing what I now know, would I start doing it again today?” If the answer is no, the activity is “a prime candidate for abandonment or creative procrastination”. In Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life he described drawing “a line under all your current activities” and imagining you are starting over.

How to do it.

1. List your regular commitments: projects, meetings, subscriptions, routines.
2. For each one ask: knowing what I now know, would I start this today?
3. For every “no”, decide whether to stop it, delegate it or deliberately put it off.
4. Pick at least one activity to drop or postpone straight away, as he suggested in Eat That Frog!.

Worked example. A manager realises he would not start his weekly status meeting today; a shared document does the job. He replaces it and gains an hour a week for work on his A tasks.

What research says. Zero-based thinking is a practical guard against what economists call the sunk-cost effect, the tendency to keep investing in something because of what you have already put in. Tracy did not cite research for it.

Common mistakes. Postponing important tasks and calling it creative procrastination; and using the question once instead of regularly.

Full guide: Zero-based thinking: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Procrastination and perfectionism, which often keeps low-value tasks on the list.

Technique 6: The Law of Three and the Quick List

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 8, “Apply the Law of Three”; Motivation (2013), where he called it the Rule of Three.

What he taught. “Three core tasks that you perform contain most of the value that you contribute to your business or organization”. He told the story of a coaching client, Cynthia, who listed 17 tasks she was responsible for. He asked her: “If you could do only one thing on this list all day long, which one task would contribute the greatest value to your company?”, then the same question for a second and third task. He told her that “fully 90 percent of the value that you contribute to your company is contained in those three tasks”. With her boss’s help she delegated the rest and, by her account in the book, doubled her output and her income. The 90 percent figure is his estimate from coaching, not a measured result.

The same chapter has a second exercise, the Quick List: “In thirty seconds, write down your three most important goals in life right now.” He reported that in 80 percent or more of cases people wrote a financial or career goal, a family or relationship goal, and a health or fitness goal, and suggested grading yourself from one to ten in each area.

How to do it.

1. List everything you do in a typical week or month.
2. Circle the one task that adds most value; then the second; then the third.
3. Talk to your manager, or plan for yourself, how to delegate, reduce or drop the rest.
4. Do the Quick List: three life goals in 30 seconds, then grade each area from one to ten.

Worked example. A marketing lead lists 22 activities. Her big three are campaign strategy, the monthly results report to the board and managing her two agencies. She moves social posting and event logistics to a junior colleague.

What research says. No study has tested the Law of Three directly. Its logic is the same as the 80/20 rule and of setting a small number of clear goals.

Common mistakes. Picking the three tasks you like best; and naming three tasks without changing how your time is actually spent.

Full guide: The Law of Three and key result areas: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: the Wheel of Life is a fuller version of the Quick List grading, and our personal values quiz helps when it is unclear what matters most.

Technique 7: Key result areas and key constraints

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 7, “Focus on Key Result Areas”, and chapter 12, “Identify Your Key Constraints”.

What he taught. Ask yourself, “Why am I on the payroll?” Every job, he wrote, breaks down into “about five to seven key result areas, seldom more”, the results you are completely responsible for. For managers he listed planning, organising, staffing, delegating, supervising, measuring and reporting; for salespeople, prospecting, building rapport and trust, identifying needs, presenting, answering objections, closing, and getting resales and referrals. Score yourself from one to ten in each. His rule: “Your weakest key result area sets the height at which you can use all your other skills and abilities”. The constraints chapter applies the same idea to goals: between you and any goal there is usually one limiting factor, and he held that 80 percent of constraints are internal, in your own skills, habits or organisation, and only 20 percent external.

How to do it.

1. Write down the five to seven results your job exists to produce.
2. Score yourself from one to ten in each, and ask a colleague or manager to do the same.
3. Take the lowest score and make a plan to improve it.
4. For your main goal, ask: what one factor sets the speed at which I reach it? Look inside first.

Worked example. A salesperson scores himself 8 on presenting but 3 on prospecting. However good his presentations, he rarely has enough meetings. He sets aside an hour each morning for prospecting calls.

What research says. The approach matches the goal-setting finding that people improve fastest with specific targets and feedback on progress.

Common mistakes. Listing activities (“answer email”) instead of results; and working on your strongest area because it feels good.

Full guide: The Law of Three and key result areas: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: the GROW model is a simple way to turn a weak area into a coaching plan, and our leadership style quiz helps managers see their own patterns.

Technique 8: The salami slice, the Swiss cheese and one oil barrel at a time

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 18, “Slice and Dice the Task”, and chapter 10, “Take It One Oil Barrel at a Time”.

What he taught. Two ways to start a task that feels too big. In the salami slice method, “you lay out the task in detail, writing down every step in order, and then resolve to do just one slice of the job for the time being”. In the Swiss cheese method, you “punch a hole in the task” by resolving “to work for a specific time period on it. This may be as little as five or ten minutes, after which you will stop and do something else”. Both work, he wrote, because once you start you feel momentum and an “urge to completion”, a “compulsion to closure”. The oil-barrel chapter tells how he crossed the Sahara by Land Rover as a young man, steering from one oil barrel to the next, placed five kilometres apart: “Your job is to go as far as you can see. You will then be able to see far enough to go further”.

How to do it.

1. Write every step of the big task on paper, in order.
2. Salami slice: commit to just the first step, nothing more.
3. Swiss cheese: set a timer for 5 to 10 minutes and work on any part of it until the timer goes.
4. When you finish, decide whether to do one more slice.

Worked example. A student facing a 10,000-word dissertation lists 14 steps, from “agree title” to “final proofread”. Today’s slice is to write the three research questions. Tomorrow, she gives the literature review 10 minutes, and ends up working for an hour.

What research says. Steel’s review found that tasks feel more aversive, and are delayed more, when they are vague and distant. Breaking a task into concrete, near-term steps addresses both.

Common mistakes. Making the slices so small that progress stalls; and treating the Swiss cheese timer as permission to stop for the day every time.

Full guide: The salami slice and Swiss cheese methods: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: overcoming obstacles, overcoming motivation blocks and, for starting with others alongside you, body doubling.

Technique 9: Single handling and large chunks of time

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 19, “Create Large Chunks of Time”, chapter 17, “Focus Your Attention”, and chapter 21, “Single Handle Every Task”. The same rule is step 4 of his 1,000 percent formula in No Excuses!.

What he taught. “Single handling requires that once you begin, you keep working at the task without diversion or distraction until the job is 100 percent complete,” repeating “Back to work!” whenever tempted to stop. He claimed that concentrating on one task can reduce the time it takes “by 50 percent or more”, and cited an estimate that starting and stopping can increase it “by as much as 500 percent”. To make this possible, he told readers to “set aside thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-minute time segments” and to “make work appointments with yourself”. He also warned against the “attraction of distraction”, the habit of reacting to every email and alert.

How to do it.

1. Book a 60- or 90-minute block in your calendar for your A-1 task.
2. Close email and messaging, and silence your phone.
3. Prepare everything you need before the block starts.
4. Work on the one task until it is finished or the block ends; when your mind wanders, say “Back to work!”

Worked example. An accountant blocks 9:00 to 10:30 every morning for client accounts, with notifications off. He answers email at 10:30 and 3:00. His finished files per week rise, and he stops working late to catch up.

What research says. Laboratory studies by Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans find that switching between tasks costs time, and more so for complex tasks. A study of interrupted office work by Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke found that people made up for interruptions by working faster, but reported more stress, frustration and time pressure. Tracy’s 50 and 500 percent figures are estimates, not measured results.

Common mistakes. Booking blocks but leaving notifications on; scheduling every hour so that nothing is left for the unexpected; and single handling a low-value task.

Full guide: Time blocking and single-tasking: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Cal Newport on deep work, the flow state (Tracy described “flow” in chapter 20 of Eat That Frog!), and hyperfocus.

Technique 10: The seven-step goal-setting method

Where it comes from. Eat That Frog!, chapter 1, “Set the Table”; Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life; his article “Seven Steps to Success”. His fullest treatment is Goals! (2003), whose 21 chapters run from “Unlock Your Potential” to “Persist Until You Succeed”.

What he taught. Goal setting, he wrote in Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life, is “the master skill of success”. In Eat That Frog! he wrote that a goal not in writing “is merely a wish or a fantasy. It has no energy behind it”. His seven steps there:

1. Decide exactly what you want. If you work for someone, agree your goals and their order of priority with your manager.
2. Write it down. “Think on paper.”
3. Set a deadline, with sub-deadlines if needed. “A goal or decision without a deadline has no urgency.”
4. List everything you will have to do to achieve the goal, adding to it as new tasks occur to you.
5. Organise the list into a plan by priority and sequence. He suggested drawing it as boxes and arrows.
6. Take action on your plan immediately. “An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done.”
7. Do something every single day that moves you towards your major goal.

In Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life he added a step on cost: “Determine the price you are going to have to pay to achieve your goal”. Summaries of Maximum Achievement describe a longer, twelve-step version that begins with desire and belief; we have not checked that version against the book, so we set out the seven steps he published most often.

Worked example. Goal: “I have $10,000 in an emergency fund by 31 December.” The list includes opening a separate savings account, setting up an automatic transfer of $800 a month, cancelling two subscriptions and selling unused equipment. Today’s action: open the account. Every day after: one small step, even if it is only checking the balance and moving $10.

What research says. Specific, challenging goals lead to better performance than vague aims to “do your best”, especially with feedback, according to Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s review of 35 years of research. In a study by Gail Matthews, people who wrote their goals down achieved more than those who only thought about them, and those who also sent weekly progress reports to a friend did best.

Common mistakes. Setting goals without deadlines; writing a plan and never taking the first step; and setting so many goals that none gets daily attention.

Full guide: Goal setting: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: our SMART goals guide has templates, and The Success Principles summary covers Jack Canfield’s version of the same ideas.

Technique 11: The ten-goals exercise and rewriting goals daily

Where it comes from. Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life, chapter exercises; The Psychology of Selling, chapter 8; No Excuses!, step 2 of the 1,000 percent formula; his “golden hour” article.

What he taught. “Make a list of 10 goals you would like to accomplish in the next year. From that list, select the one goal that would have the greatest positive impact on your life if you could achieve it right now”. Write that goal on a separate sheet, make it measurable with a deadline, write a plan and take action. In his morning routine he went further: write your top 10 to 15 goals each morning in a spiral notebook, “in the present tense, exactly as if you have already achieved them”, for example “I earn $100,000 per year”, “without referring back to the goals you wrote the day before”. He explained why: “This writing and rewriting is the process of programming instructions into the guidance mechanism of your mind”.

How to do it.

1. Write ten goals for the next 12 months, in the present tense and first person.
2. Circle the one that would make the biggest difference.
3. Give it a deadline and a written plan, using the seven steps.
4. Each morning, rewrite your goals from memory in a notebook.

Worked example. A nurse writes ten goals, including “I complete my advanced practice qualification by June” and “I run a 10 km race in under an hour”. She circles the qualification, books the application deadline in her calendar and rewrites the list each morning before her shift.

What research says. Writing goals down helped in the Matthews study. Present-tense statements work partly like affirmations, and the evidence there is mixed: Joanne Wood and colleagues found that repeating positive self-statements helped people with high self-esteem but made people with low self-esteem feel worse. If “I earn $100,000” feels false, write it as an intention with a deadline instead.

Common mistakes. Copying yesterday’s list instead of writing from memory; and writing goals that depend mainly on other people.

Full guide: Goal setting: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: SMART goals, life purpose and meaning for choosing goals worth having, and money and abundance mindset for financial goals.

Technique 12: Mindstorming, the 20-idea method

Where it comes from. Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (2003), chapter 9, “Unleash Your Mental Powers”.

What he taught. “The process of ‘mindstorming’ is often called the ‘20-idea method’,” he wrote, adding that he had taught it “to many tens of thousands of people”. Write your problem or goal at the top of a page as a specific question; instead of “How can I make more money?”, write “What can I do to double my income over the next 24 months?” Then “discipline yourself to generate at least 20 different answers.” The first answers come easily; “the last 10 answers will be excruciatingly difficult, like squeezing water out of a stone”. Finally, “select at least one answer that you are going to take action on immediately”. He also suggested writing opposite or even ridiculous answers to push your thinking.

How to do it.

1. Write a specific question with a number and a deadline.
2. Write at least 20 answers without judging them.
3. Read the list and choose one idea to act on today.
4. Repeat with a new question when you are stuck.

Worked example. A café owner writes: “How can I get 50 more customers a week by March?” Answers 1 to 8 are obvious (flyers, social media). Answer 17 is to offer the meeting room free to local clubs in the quiet hours. She calls two clubs that afternoon.

What research says. The method has not been tested as such. Research on creative thinking by Roger Beaty and Paul Silvia has found a “serial order effect”: in idea-generation tasks, later ideas tend to be more creative than early ones. That fits his advice to push past the easy first answers.

Common mistakes. Stopping at ten; writing vague questions; and filing the list without acting on any of it.

Full guide: Mindstorming: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Creativity, Six Thinking Hats and Win Wenger, whose idea-generation methods share the same aim.

Technique 13: The 1,000 percent formula

Where it comes from. No Excuses! The Power of Self-Discipline (2010), chapter 5, “Self-Discipline and Personal Excellence”; earlier in his audio programme Maximum Performance and in The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success (2000).

What he taught. The formula promises to raise “your productivity, performance, output, and income by 1,000 percent over the next ten years”. The arithmetic starts small. Could you become one tenth of 1 percent more productive in a day? Then half of 1 percent in a five-day week, 2 percent in a four-week month, and, over 13 such months, 26 percent in a year. Compounded at 26 percent a year for ten years, he wrote, “you would be 1,004 percent more productive. Your income would increase at the same rate”. (Strictly, 1.26 to the power of ten is about 10.1, so output would be roughly ten times its starting level.) He called the principle behind it the Law of Accumulation, or the Law of Incremental Improvement. His seven steps:

1. Get up two hours before your first appointment and invest the first hour in reading “something educational, motivational, or spiritual.”
2. Rewrite your major goals every day, in the present tense, in a spiral notebook.
3. Plan every day in advance, and set priorities before you start.
4. Concentrate single-mindedly on one thing: your most important task, until it is 100 percent complete.
5. Listen to educational audio in your car.
6. Ask two “magic questions” after every call or event: “What did I do right?” and “What would I do differently?”
7. Treat every person you meet like a million-dollar customer, starting with your own family.

How to do it. Adopt one step at a time. A practical order is 3 and 4 first (planning and focus), then 2 (daily goals), then 1 and 5 (learning), then 6 and 7 (review and relationships). Keep a weekly note of which steps you actually did.

Worked example. An estate agent starts by planning each evening and doing her A-1 task first. A month later she adds morning goal rewriting; after three months, 30 minutes of reading before work and podcasts on her drives between viewings. After each viewing she jots down her answers to the two questions in her phone.

What research says. The two questions closely match the “after-event review”. In a study by Shmuel Ellis and Inbar Davidi, soldiers who reviewed both what went well and what went wrong after each training exercise improved their performance more than those who reviewed failures only. The tenfold income figure is a projection, not an observed result; Tracy presented it as what was possible, and the answer depends on your field and circumstances.

Common mistakes. Trying all seven steps at once and quitting after a week; and focusing on the income figure rather than the daily habits.

Full guide: The after-action review and the two magic questions: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: James Clear makes a similar point about small gains adding up in our Atomic Habits summary; see also breaking bad habits.

Technique 14: The golden hour and the 21-day mental diet

Where it comes from. His article “The Golden Hour: My Most Powerful Success Factor in Personal Development”; No Excuses!; and, earlier, The Psychology of Achievement.

What he taught. “The thoughts with which you flood your mind in the first hour of the morning, the golden hour, have a strong influence on how you think, feel and act for the rest of the day”. He set out a “21 Day Mental Diet”:

1. Get up at least two hours before you have to be somewhere and invest the first hour in yourself.
2. Before television, radio or news, read something motivational or educational for 30 to 60 minutes.
3. Write out your top 10 to 15 goals in the present tense.
4. Plan the day, listing everything and ordering it by priority.
5. Start immediately on your most valuable task.
6. Listen to educational audio as you drive.
7. Develop a sense of urgency: “The faster you move, the more energy you will have.”

His summary line, “The golden hour is the rudder of the day”, echoes a saying he credited elsewhere to the American preacher Henry Ward Beecher: “The first hour is the rudder of the day”. In The Psychology of Achievement he suggested saying “I feel terrific!” on waking, then spending 20 to 30 minutes reading something inspirational, motivational or educational.

How to do it. Decide your wake time and keep your bedtime to match. Put a book and a notebook where you will see them, and leave your phone in another room until the hour is done. Follow the seven steps for 21 days, then review.

Worked example. A teacher who leaves home at 7:30 sets her alarm for 5:45. From 6:00 to 6:30 she reads; from 6:30 to 6:45 she rewrites her goals and plans the day; then she exercises and gets ready. News and messages wait until she is on the train.

What research says. There is no trial of the golden hour as such. Its parts draw on better-tested ideas: daily planning and written goals. Two cautions come from sleep research. People differ in natural timing, or “chronotype”, and forcing an early schedule on a late chronotype can create a mismatch between body clock and social clock that researchers call “social jetlag”. And Tracy’s “21 days” is shorter than the evidence suggests for a new habit: in a study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues, it took a median of 66 days for a new daily behaviour to become automatic, with a range of 18 to 254 days.

Common mistakes. Getting up early by cutting sleep; filling the hour with email; and giving up after 21 days if the habit is not yet automatic.

Full guide: The golden hour and morning routine: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Sleep, Daily Motivation Strategies and positivity.

Technique 15: The university on wheels

Where it comes from. No Excuses!, step 5 of the 1,000 percent formula; his “golden hour” article; and his own career, which began with sales tapes in the car.

What he taught. “The average businessperson who drives spends 500–1000 hours per year behind the wheel of a car. When you turn your car into a ‘university on wheels’ or a ‘mobile classroom,’ you get the educational equivalent of one to two full-time university semesters as you drive around”. In the golden-hour plan he put it simply: “Leave the radio off”. Reading counted too. One hour a day in your field, he wrote, comes to about a book a week, about 50 a year and 500 in ten years, and “will make you a national authority in three to five years”.

How to do it.

1. Choose one skill that would most help your work this year.
2. Pick two or three audiobooks or podcast series on it.
3. Load them before you set off, so the choice is made in advance.
4. After each trip, note one idea you will try.

Worked example. A regional manager drives 90 minutes a day. In a year he gets through about a dozen business audiobooks, and keeps a running list of ideas to test with his team on Monday mornings.

What research says. A study by Beth Rogowsky, Barbara Calhoun and Paula Tallal found no significant difference in comprehension between reading a passage, listening to it, or doing both. Listening is a reasonable substitute for reading when your eyes are busy, as long as you can give it attention safely.

Common mistakes. Listening passively without noting anything to apply; and choosing entertainment rather than material in your field.

On Self Help Supermarket: Best Self-Help Podcasts, Best Self-Help Books and, for getting through more reading, speed reading.

Technique 16: The Law of Cause and Effect and the mental laws

Where it comes from. The Psychology of Achievement (1984); Maximum Achievement (1993); The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success (2000); Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (2003).

What he taught. Tracy organised his ideas about the mind as a set of “laws”. They are best read as principles he found useful, not scientific laws. The main ones, in his words:

• Cause and effect: “for every effect in our lives, there is a specific cause”, and “our thoughts are the primary causes”, in The Psychology of Achievement.
• Control: “we feel good about ourselves to the degree to which we feel we are in control of our lives”, in The Psychology of Achievement.
• Belief: “whatever we believe with feeling becomes our reality”, in The Psychology of Achievement.
• Expectations: “whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy”, in The Psychology of Achievement.
• Attraction: “each human being is a living magnet” who draws in people and circumstances “that harmonize with our dominant thoughts”, in The Psychology of Achievement.
• Correspondence: “your outer world is a mirror of your inner world”, in Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.
• Concentration: whatever you dwell on grows in your life, in The Psychology of Achievement.
• Substitution: “Your mind can hold only one thought at a time”, so you can replace a negative thought with a positive one, a point he made in both Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life and The Psychology of Achievement.
• Habit and repetition: “Any thought or action that you repeat over and over will eventually become a new habit”, in Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.
• Subconscious activity: whatever you repeat in your conscious mind “will eventually be accepted by your subconscious mind”, in Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.
• Relaxation: “in all mental working, effort defeats itself”, in The Psychology of Achievement.

How to do it. Use the laws as questions. Cause and effect: what are people who get the result I want doing that I am not? Substitution: when a worrying thought comes, what positive thought or action can replace it? Expectations: what am I expecting of myself and others, and is it helping?

Worked example. A new manager keeps thinking about a meeting that went badly. Using substitution, she switches to planning the next meeting in detail. Using cause and effect, she asks an experienced colleague what he does in difficult meetings, and copies his habit of sending an agenda the day before.

What research says. Some laws match established findings. Expectations shape behaviour: Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy showed that people’s belief in their ability to succeed affects whether they start and how long they persist. Others, such as the Law of Attraction, are not supported by evidence as literal mechanisms. Research by Gabriele Oettingen found that positive fantasies about the future predicted less effort and success than positive expectations based on past experience, a useful caution when applying the belief and attraction laws.

Common mistakes. Treating the laws as guarantees; and using them to blame yourself for events outside your control.

On Self Help Supermarket: the Law of Attraction, James Allen and CBT, which works with thoughts in a tested way.

Technique 17: The self-concept: self-ideal, self-image and self-esteem

Where it comes from. The Psychology of Achievement (1984), the programme built around it; Maximum Achievement; The Psychology of Selling, chapter 1, “The Inner Game of Selling”; Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.

What he taught. In Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life, Tracy called the self-concept, your bundle of beliefs about yourself, one of the great breakthroughs in understanding human potential. It has three parts, which he set out in The Psychology of Achievement:

• The self-ideal: the person you would most like to be, “usually a composite of all the people we have admired.”
• The self-image: “the way we see and think about ourselves; it’s our ‘inner mirror.’” We act in line with it, so “if we wish to change our external performance, we have to change this inner picture.” Here he followed Maxwell Maltz.
• Self-esteem: “the root of self-concept and the core of human personality”, best defined as “how much you like yourself”, in The Psychology of Selling and The Psychology of Achievement. He called it the “reactor core” of the personality in Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.

He applied the model to money. In The Psychology of Selling he described a “self-concept level of income”: if you earn much more than you think you are worth, he claimed, you tend to spend or lose the excess; if you earn much less, you scramble to get back into your “comfort zone”. He presented the 10 percent band he gave for this as a finding of psychologists, without naming a study. His tools for raising the self-concept were affirmations (“I like myself”, “I am responsible”, “I feel terrific”), visualisation, and a “positive reference group” of people who are going somewhere.

How to do it.

1. Describe your self-ideal: list the qualities of three people you admire.
2. Compare it with your self-image: where do you see yourself falling short?
3. Choose one quality to build, and act as if you already had it in one specific situation each day.
4. Before an important event, picture yourself handling it well.
5. Spend more time with people who are working towards goals of their own.

Worked example. A junior lawyer admires calm, well-prepared senior colleagues. She sees herself as someone who “goes blank” in meetings. She prepares three points before each meeting, rehearses them in her mind on the way, and makes one contribution each time. After two months she sees herself differently.

What research says. A major review led by Roy Baumeister found that high self-esteem is linked to happiness and initiative but found little evidence that raising self-esteem on its own improves performance. Self-efficacy, confidence about a specific task, is a better predictor of effort and persistence. The positive-statement findings of Wood and colleagues apply here too. A different kind of affirmation, writing about your core values, has helped people cope with stress and threat in a range of studies reviewed by Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman.

Common mistakes. Repeating affirmations that feel false; trying to change your self-image without changing behaviour; and mistaking self-liking for arrogance, a difference Tracy himself drew in The Psychology of Achievement.

Full guide: The self-concept: the complete guide and Affirmations: how to use them well, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Self-Esteem, Self-Confidence, Psycho-Cybernetics, visualisation, Émile Coué on affirmations, and self-compassion.

Technique 18: Self-discipline and “no excuses”

Where it comes from. No Excuses! The Power of Self-Discipline (Vanguard Press, 2010), 21 chapters in three parts: personal success; business, sales and money; and “the good life”.

What he taught. The book opens with a definition he credited to Elbert Hubbard: “Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not”. He applied it chapter by chapter to character, responsibility, goals, courage, persistence, work, leadership, money, time, health, marriage, children and friendship. Two ideas carry the book. The first is delayed gratification: he traced most financial problems to “the inability to delay gratification in the short term”. The second is long-term thinking. He cited the Harvard sociologist Edward Banfield, who, Tracy wrote, concluded that “long time perspective” was the most important single attribute of people who rose economically, and he called sacrifice “perhaps the most important word in long-term thinking”.

How to do it.

1. Choose one area where you know what you should do but don’t.
2. Define the behaviour exactly, such as “walk 30 minutes before breakfast”.
3. Decide in advance what you will do when you don’t feel like it.
4. Repeat it daily, tracking each day you keep it.
5. For each decision, ask how it looks five or ten years from now.

Worked example. A software developer wants to save for a deposit. He sets up an automatic transfer of 15 percent of his salary on payday, before he can spend it, and asks of each large purchase: will this matter in five years?

What research says. Strong evidence supports Tracy here. A study of about 1,000 children in Dunedin, New Zealand, followed to age 32, found that childhood self-control predicted adult health, wealth and criminal convictions. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman found that self-discipline predicted school grades better than IQ in a group of eighth-graders.

Common mistakes. Relying on willpower alone instead of designing routines; and taking on several disciplines at once.

Full guide: Self-discipline and delayed gratification: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: Perseverance, bad habits, David Goggins on mental toughness, and motivation.

Technique 19: The Psychology of Selling

Where it comes from. His sales seminars and audio programme of the 1980s, and the book The Psychology of Selling (Thomas Nelson, 2004), which he described as “the written version” of his audio sales programme. Its chapters are: The Inner Game of Selling; Set and Achieve All Your Sales Goals; Why People Buy; Creative Selling; Getting More Appointments; The Power of Suggestion; Making the Sale; and 10 Keys to Success in Selling.

What he taught. Selling starts inside. His self-concept ideas, above, open the book: “Your self-esteem is best defined as ‘how much you like yourself’”, and “emotions are contagious”, so a salesperson’s confidence transfers to the customer. He named two mental obstacles: fear of failure, which in the customer is “the one greatest obstacle to buying”, and fear of rejection, made easier by accepting that “80 percent of sales calls will end in a no, for a thousand different reasons”. The method itself grew out of his own breakthrough, when a top salesman showed him a presentation built on “a series of logical questions, from general to specific”. He taught that “people buy for their reasons, not for yours” and that every customer has three choices: buy from you, buy from someone else, or buy nothing. He divided selling into seven key result areas: prospecting, building rapport, identifying needs, presenting, answering objections, closing, and getting resales and referrals. He described many closing techniques, including the trial close (“Does this make sense to you so far?”), the demonstration close, the approach close and the “hot-button” close, which focuses everything on the one benefit the customer cares about most. And he applied the 80/20 rule to the profession: “The top 20 percent of salespeople earn 80 percent of the money”.

How to do it.

1. Score yourself from one to ten on each of the seven key result areas, and work on the lowest.
2. Write a question-based presentation that moves from general questions to specific ones.
3. Listen for the customer’s main reason for buying, the hot button, and build the conversation around it.
4. Use trial closes throughout, such as “Is this what you had in mind?”
5. Expect most calls to end in a no, and after each one ask the two questions.

Worked example. A software salesperson used to open with a product demonstration. Now she starts by asking how the client handles invoicing today, what goes wrong and what it costs. The client’s hot button turns out to be month-end overtime. She shows only the features that remove it and asks, “Would this solve the month-end problem?”

What research says. Tracy’s emphasis on questions is in line with Neil Rackham’s research for SPIN Selling (1988), based on a study of 35,000 sales calls, which found that successful salespeople in larger sales asked more questions, especially about the implications of a customer’s problems. Rackham also found that many classic closing techniques worked less well in large, complex sales than in small ones.

Common mistakes. Using closing techniques as tricks rather than as natural questions; talking more than listening; and taking a no personally.

Full guide: Sales psychology: the complete guide, with step-by-step instructions, a worked example and the research.

On Self Help Supermarket: fear of rejection, emotional intelligence, public speaking and stage fright, social skills and Dale Carnegie.

How the pieces fit together: Focal Point, Maximum Achievement and his time system

Tracy’s books often repackage the same core methods for a different audience, which is why the techniques above appear in many titles. Maximum Achievement (1993) is the complete philosophy: the seven ingredients of success, the self-concept, the mental laws, goals, and habits. Focal Point (2001) applies the same focus on the few things that matter most to the whole of life, with chapters on doubling productivity, simplifying your life, personal strategic planning, family, money, health, personal growth, community and spiritual development. His time-management books, from Eat That Frog! (2001) and Time Power (2004) to Master Your Time, Master Your Life (2016), share one sequence: decide what you want, plan on paper, rank with ABCDE and 80/20, eat the frog, and single handle it to completion. In No Excuses! he summed up the thinking behind all of them: “Time management is really life management, personal management, management of yourself rather than of time or circumstances”.

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His Major Books, With Publication Years

Tracy wrote more than 70 books by his company’s count, and more than 80 by later counts in Wikipedia and the RFG News obituary. Many are short, practical titles on a single skill. The table below lists the major works most readers meet first, with the year of first publication and the original publisher, taken from Wikipedia’s bibliography, publishers’ catalogues and library records.

His publisher’s own sales list gives a sense of how far these books travelled. In its 2025 bestsellers list, Berrett-Koehler reported more than 4 million copies of Eat That Frog! in 57 languages, more than 1 million copies of Goals! in 40 languages, more than 310,000 copies of The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires, more than 250,000 copies of The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success and more than 200,000 copies of Kiss That Frog!. These figures cover all US and foreign editions in all formats.

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How His Advice Compares With Research: At a Glance

Tracy was a practitioner, not a researcher. Each technique section above includes what research says; this table brings those findings together.

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Reception and Criticism

How readers and reviewers received his work

Tracy wrote mainly for people at work: salespeople, managers and business owners, and in later years students as well. Reviewers quoted by his publisher tend to praise the same quality, that he tells readers what to do. The personal finance site The Simple Dollar wrote that Eat That Frog! “offers a concise and valuable collection of tactics to try” and noted that his tactics are “fairly diverse”. Business librarians at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said the book “distinguishes itself from others of the same type by laying out specific guidelines for developing the self-discipline that allows you to start and complete important tasks in sequence”. Sales figures point the same way: Eat That Frog! is the bestselling title in Berrett-Koehler’s history.

The goals “study” that never happened

The best-documented criticism concerns a statistic Tracy repeated. For decades, success writers cited a study said to have followed Yale’s (or Harvard’s) class of 1953: the 3 percent of graduates with written goals were said to have achieved more, 20 years later, than the other 97 percent combined. In 1996 the writer Lawrence Tabak, in Fast Company, traced the claim through Tony Robbins’s company to Brian Tracy, and from Tracy to Zig Ziglar. A Yale research associate who searched the alumni archives found no evidence that the study ever took place. Asked for his source, Tracy replied: “Heard this story originally from Zig Ziglar. If it’s not true it should be”. Gail Matthews later designed her own study partly because the non-existent one was so widely quoted. He continued to use a version of the 3 percent figure in later books: the third edition of Eat That Frog! (2017) says that “only about 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals”, and No Excuses! (2010) says that this 3 percent “earn more than all of the other 97 percent put together”, without citing a source. The episode is a useful reminder to check the numbers in any self-help book, including his.

Misattributed quotes

Many quotes credited to Tracy online cannot be traced to anything he wrote, and some lines he used came from others, such as the frog saying he credited to Mark Twain. Each quote in this article is attributed to its source.

Self-reported figures

Most of the large numbers attached to his career, such as the companies he consulted for, the people he addressed and the countries he visited, come from his own company. They have not been independently audited, while his book sales are reported by his publishers.

Responsibility and circumstance

Tracy’s philosophy put personal responsibility at the centre. “Virtually everyone in America and throughout the world starts off with nothing,” he said in a 2012 interview published by the Ayn Rand Institute, and “successful people accept complete responsibility for their situation, good or bad”. Readers who give more weight to circumstances such as health, money and opportunity can still use his methods while setting that broader claim aside.

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In His Own Words: Verified Quotes

Each of these lines can be found in his books, articles or recorded interviews, linked in the sources below.

“You are the architect of your own destiny; you are the master of your own fate; you are behind the steering wheel of your life. There are no limitations to what you can do, have, or be. Except the limitations you place on yourself by your own thinking.”

— The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires, p. 63

“You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself.”

— Interview with the Ayn Rand Institute, recorded in 2012

“There is no such thing as luck; there are only probabilities. The good news is that you can influence the probabilities on your behalf.”

— Interview with the Ayn Rand Institute, recorded in 2012

“You should never be distracted by a tadpole when there is a big frog sitting there waiting to be eaten.”

— “How to Set Priorities Using the ABCDE Method”, briantracy.com

“A goal that is not in writing is not a goal at all. It is merely a wish and it has no energy behind it.”

— “Seven Steps to Success”, briantracy.com

“You are where you are and what you are because you have decided to be there.”

— Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (2003)

“Your weakest key result area sets the height at which you can use all your other skills and abilities.”

— Eat That Frog!, third edition (2017)

“An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done.”

— Eat That Frog!, third edition (2017)

“The golden hour is the rudder of the day.”

— “The Golden Hour: My Most Powerful Success Factor”, briantracy.com. In No Excuses! he credited the original saying, “The first hour is the rudder of the day”, to Henry Ward Beecher.

“I never missed a meal, but I did postpone a lot of them indefinitely.”

— The Psychology of Selling, on his travelling years

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Legacy and Influence

Tracy belonged to a line of plain-spoken success teachers that runs through Earl Nightingale and Jim Rohn, and he shared their belief that ordinary people could learn what successful people already knew. What he added was structure. Where others offered inspiration, he usually offered a list, a method and an exercise.

That made his work easy to pass on. A sales manager could teach the ABCDE method in a team meeting; a student could “eat the frog” before opening their phone. Many people who use the phrase have never read the book.

His influence is also personal. Within hours of the first reports of his death, readers around the world were posting on X about the first Tracy book or tape they picked up, often decades ago, and the habits they still keep because of it. His son Michael and daughter Christina continue to teach through Brian Tracy International.

Perhaps his longest-lasting lesson is the one at the centre of his own story: that a young man who failed the 12th grade and slept in his car could change his life by asking a better question. He spent more than 40 years showing other people how to ask theirs.

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How to Apply His Ideas Today: A 30-Day Plan

The best way to honour a teacher is to use what he taught. This plan introduces his main techniques one week at a time, so each has a chance to become a habit before the next is added.

Week 1: decide what you want

1. Day 1: do the ten-goals exercise and circle your most important goal.
2. Day 2: apply the seven steps to it: deadline, list, plan, first action.
3. Days 3–7: rewrite your goals from memory each morning, and do one thing each day towards the main goal.

Week 2: take control of your days

1. Day 8: list your work activities and find your big three with the Law of Three.
2. Day 9: run zero-based thinking on your commitments and drop one.
3. Days 10–14: each evening, list tomorrow’s tasks and rank them ABCDE; each morning, eat the frog in a protected block of time.

Week 3: feed your mind

1. Days 15–21: start a version of the golden hour without cutting sleep, and turn your commute or walks into a university on wheels.
2. After each important meeting or call, ask the two questions he set out in No Excuses!: “What did I do right?” and “What would I do differently?”

Week 4: work on yourself

1. Day 22: score your key result areas and pick your weakest.
2. Day 23: use mindstorming to write 20 ways to improve it, and act on one.
3. Days 24–30: describe your self-ideal (see self-concept), and choose one behaviour to practise daily as an exercise in self-discipline.
4. Day 30: review the month. Keep what worked. If you can, send a short weekly progress note to a friend, which is what worked best in the Matthews study.

Expect some habits to take longer than a month to stick; in a study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues the median was 66 days. Our complete guide to motivation covers what to do when energy drops.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Explore More on Self Help Supermarket

• Time and productivity: Procrastination, Productivity, Cal Newport and Flow State
• Goals: SMART Goals, GROW Model, Wheel of Life and Personal Values Quiz
• Habits and discipline: Atomic Habits Summary, Bad Habits and Perseverance
• Mindset: Self-Esteem, Self-Confidence, Psycho-Cybernetics and Visualisation
• Motivation: Motivation, Daily Motivation Strategies and The Complete Guide to Motivation
• Full guides to his techniques: Eat That Frog, ABCDE Method, 80/20 Principle, Law of Three, Zero-Based Thinking, Salami Slice Method, Time Blocking, Goal Setting, Mindstorming, Morning Routine, Affirmations, Self-Discipline, After-Action Review, Sales Psychology and Self-Concept
• Brian Tracy and his influences: Brian Tracy expert profile, Maxwell Maltz, Zig Ziglar, Stephen Covey, Peter Drucker and Norman Vincent Peale
• Teachers in the same tradition: Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn’s Philosophy, Bob Proctor, Dale Carnegie, Tony Robbins and The Success Principles
• Reading list: Best Self-Help Books and Best Self-Help Podcasts

Books and sources

• RFG News. “Brian Tracy Obituary: Canadian-American Motivational Speaker and Self-Development Author Dies Aged 82”, 13 November 2026. readyfundgrow.com.au
• Public tributes on X, 13 November 2026, for example Luke Belmar and Roy Prabhat Malkison.
• Wikipedia. “Brian Tracy”, accessed 13 November 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Tracy
• Brian Tracy International. “About Brian and Brian Tracy International”, accessed 13 November 2026. briantracy.com/about
• Brian Tracy. “Power of Personal Achievement Simulcast”, briantracy.com. briantracy.com
• Tracy, B. The Psychology of Selling. Thomas Nelson, 2004. Introduction, “My Own Story”. Library of Congress record
• Mendler, A. “Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Brian Tracy”, 12 January 2021. adammendler.com/brian-tracy
• Watkins, D. “Your Success Is Your Responsibility: An Interview with Brian Tracy”, Ayn Rand Institute, 5 August 2014 (recorded June 2012). ari.aynrand.org
• University of Alberta Alumni. “How to Achieve in a Highly Competitive World” (speaker biography: Brian Tracy, ’78 BCom), 21 October 2021. ualberta.ca
• Tracy, B. “How to Set Priorities Using the ABCDE Method”, briantracy.com. briantracy.com
• Tracy, B. “The 80 20 Rule – The Pareto Principle”, briantracy.com, 4 February 2022. briantracy.com
• Tracy, B. “The Golden Hour: My Most Powerful Success Factor in Personal Development”, briantracy.com. briantracy.com
• Tracy, B. The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success. Berrett-Koehler, 2000. Excerpt. leadershipnow.com
• Tracy, B. “Brian Tracy on the Psychology of Performance”, American Management Association, 10 April 2019 (from his book Motivation). amanet.org
• Tracy, B. “Seven Steps to Success” and “Dare to Dream: Seize the Day with 7 Simple Steps”, briantracy.com. briantracy.com; briantracy.com
• Berrett-Koehler Publishers. “2025 Berrett-Koehler Bestsellers List”, 8 October 2025. bkconnection.com
• Tracy, B. Eat That Frog!, 3rd edition (Berrett-Koehler, 2017), contents and chapter 8, “Apply the Law of Three”; 2nd edition (2007), chapter 10, “Take It One Oil Barrel at a Time”. oreilly.com; oreilly.com
• Penguin Random House. Eat That Frog!, Fourth Edition, published 29 July 2025 by Berrett-Koehler, with review extracts. penguinrandomhouse.com
• Quote Investigator. “Eat a Live Frog Every Morning, and Nothing Worse Will Happen to You the Rest of the Day”, 3 April 2013. quoteinvestigator.com
• Open Library catalogue records for Brian Tracy’s books. openlibrary.org
• WorldCat. The Psychology of Achievement, Nightingale-Conant, 1984; The Phoenix Seminar. worldcat.org; worldcat.org
• Tracy, B. Motivation (The Brian Tracy Success Library). AMACOM, 2013. “The Rule of Three”. oreilly.com
• Tracy, B. The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, “Maximum Performance” programme listing (“Your 1000 Percent Formula”); and article text attributed to Tracy, US Daily Review, 29 June 2014. oreilly.com; usdailyreview.com
• Tracy, B. Maximum Achievement. Simon & Schuster, 1993. simonandschuster.com
• Berrett-Koehler library catalogue. Eat That Frog!, Fourth Edition, and related titles including Goals!, Third Edition (2024). libraries.bkpub.com
• Brian Tracy International. “The Brian Tracy Experience” announcement, LinkedIn, 18 June 2025. linkedin.com
• Tracy, B. No Excuses! The Power of Self-Discipline. Vanguard Press, 2010.
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
• Matthews, G. “Goals Research Summary” and “The Impact of Commitment, Accountability, and Written Goals on Goal Achievement”, Dominican University of California, 2015. dominican.edu; scholar.dominican.edu
• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
• Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
• National Institutes of Health, Office of Research Services. Eat That Frog! workbook (summary of the book’s 21 chapters, including “Maximize your personal power”). ors.od.nih.gov
• Wood, J. V., Perunovic, W. Q. E., & Lee, J. W. (2009). Positive self-statements: Power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science, 20(7), 860–866. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02370.x
• Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(1), 1–44. doi.org/10.1111/1529-1006.01431
• Tabak, L. “If Your Goal Is Success, Don’t Consult These Gurus”, Fast Company, December 1996. fastcompany.com
• Tracy, B. The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires. Berrett-Koehler, 2001. Conclusion, p. 63, via Wikiquote. en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Brian_Tracy
• Tracy, B. Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, 3rd edition. Berrett-Koehler, 2017. Chapters 1–21. oreilly.com
• Tracy, B. Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement. John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Internet Archive library record
• Tracy, B. The Psychology of Achievement. Nightingale-Conant, 1984. Course workbook accompanying the audio programme.
• LA’s The Place. “How To Earn What You’re Really Worth: A Chat With Brian Tracy”, 10 March 2012. lastheplace.com
• Tracy, B. “Best Self Improvement & Development Books”, briantracy.com. briantracy.com
• Tracy, B. Focal Point: A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals. AMACOM, 2001. Contents. oreilly.com
• Tracy, B. Goals! How to Get Everything You Want, Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible. Berrett-Koehler, 2003. Google Books
• Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763–797. doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.27.4.763
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• Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
• Oettingen, G., & Mayer, D. (2002). The motivating function of thinking about the future: Expectations versus fantasies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1198–1212. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1198
• Moffitt, T. E., et al. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693–2698. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010076108
• Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939–944. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
• Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2016). Does modality matter? The effects of reading, listening, and dual modality on comprehension. SAGE Open, 6(3). doi.org/10.1177/2158244016669550
• Ellis, S., & Davidi, I. (2005). After-event reviews: Drawing lessons from successful and failed experience. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(5), 857–871. doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.5.857
• Cohen, G. L., & Sherman, D. K. (2014). The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 333–371. doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115137
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
• Rackham, N. SPIN Selling. McGraw-Hill, 1988.
• Beaty, R. E., & Silvia, P. J. (2012). Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6(4), 309–319. doi.org/10.1037/a0029171
• Wittmann, M., Dinich, J., Merrow, M., & Roenneberg, T. (2006). Social jetlag: Misalignment of biological and social time. Chronobiology International, 23(1–2), 497–509. doi.org/10.1080/07420520500545979