Brian Johnson’s

PhilosophersNotes
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More Wisdom in Less Time

Focal Point
THE BIG IDEAS A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity,
and Achieve All Your Goals
“I Am Responsible”
BY BRIAN TRACY · AMACON © 2001 · 224 PAGES
Yah, you are!

Everything Is Hard
... Before it’s easy.
“You can dramatically improve the overall quality of your life far faster than you
Zero-Based Thinking
Would you start it again? might think possible. All you need is the desire to change, the decision to take
action, the discipline to practice the new behaviors you have chosen, and the
Flexibility:
Most important quality. determination to persist until you get the results you want.”
Every Minute Counts ~ Brian Tracy from Focal Point
(For ten)!
I’ve learned a *LOT* from Brian Tracy.
Single-Mindedly
One touching. He’s been doing his self-development and sales training work for decades now and I’ve enjoyed
Visualization a variety of his books and audio programs and newsletters (highly recommend his newsletter if
+ Idealization. you’re looking for some great practical, motivational wisdom).
Time Management
= Life management.
Some of my favorites include his books Goals! and Eat That Frog! (great little book about
training yourself to the hardest thing FIRST; once you’ve “eaten your frog” for the day, the rest
What Do You Think
About most of the time?
of the day is a breeze :), and audio programs on creativity.

How’s Your Optimism? This book, Focal Point, is all about focusing our energy to, as the sub-titles suggests: “Simplify
Filling glasses, baby! your life, double your productivity, and achieve all your goals.”
The Great Truths of Life Tracy is a treasure-trove of Big Ideas and I trust you’ll dig the handful I’ve mined here. If you’re
Are simple.
feelin’ it and looking for a roll-up-the-sleeves and rock it guidebook, get the book!
“Why Aren’t I
At my goal already?”
“I AM RESPONSIBLE”
Sharpen Your Focus
Now. “Among the most important personal choices you can make is to accept complete responsibility
for everything you are and everything you will ever be. This is the great turning point in life. The
acceptance of personal responsibility is what separates the superior person from the average
person. Personal responsibility is the preeminent trait of leadership and the wellspring of high
performance in every person in every situation.

Accepting complete responsibility for your life means that you refuse to make excuses or blame
others for anything in your life that you’re not happy about. You refuse, from this moment
“Every great man has become forward, to criticize others for any reason. You refuse to complain about your situation or about
great, every successful what has happened in the past. You eliminate all your if-onlys and what-ifs and focus instead on
man has succeeded, in what you really want and where you are going.
proportion as he has
This decision to accept complete responsibility for yourself, your life, and your results, with
confined his powers to one
no excuses, is absolutely essential if you want to double your income and double your time off.
particular channel.” From now on, no matter what happens, say to yourself, ‘I am responsible.’”
~ Orison Swett Marden
Can I get a chorus of “Amen”s and “Hallelujah”s, please?!?

(Thank you.)

If you haven’t noticed, this is RULE #1 for success. The willingness to take 100% responsibility
for our lives. The willingness to be response-able. To be pro-active and not re-active. To have an

1 PhilosophersNotes | Focal Point


“Good habits are hard to
develop but easy to live
with; bad habits are easy
to develop but hard to live
with. The habits you have
and the habits that have
you will determine almost
everything you achieve or
fail to achieve.”
~ Brian Tracy
“Continually ask yourself
whether there is anything
you should do more of or
less of, start doing, or stop
doing altogether? These
are questions you should
ask and answer every day.
They are important keys
to simplification.”
~ Brian Tracy
2 PhilosophersNotes | Focal Point
internal rather than an external locus of control. To be a creator and not a victim.
If we want to enjoy life and expand into our highest potential, it’s clear we’ve gotta stop our
criticizing, blaming, complaining and overall whining and eliminate all the “if-onlys and what-ifs.”
Starting now.
Sound good? Sweet.
“EVERYTHING IS HARD BEFORE IT IS EASY.”
“German philosopher Goethe once wrote, ‘Everything is hard before it is easy.’ You may need to
exert tremendous discipline to develop new habits of thought and behavior. But once you have
them firmly locked in, they enable you to accomplish vastly more, with less.”
The only real questions are: What habits of thought and behavior do you need to build? AND (!)
Are you willing to do the work to establish the new habits into your life?
(Oh, and those aren’t rhetorical questions. :)
—> What habits do I need to build? I will build these new habits of thought and behavior:
1. _______________________________________________________________
2. _______________________________________________________________
3. _______________________________________________________________
4. _______________________________________________________________
5. _______________________________________________________________
—> Am I willing to do the work necessary to establish these new habits in my life? __YES__
(Good answer. :)
Let’s rock what needs to be done and watch the quality of our lives skyrocket!
ZERO-BASED THINKING
“To simplify your life, zero-based thinking is one of the most powerful strategies you can learn and
apply on a regular basis. Here’s how it works. Ask yourself, ‘Is there anything I am doing right now
that, knowing what I now know, I wouldn’t get into again if I were starting over today?’”
THAT is a powerful question.
And “zero-based thinking” is a Big Idea.
So, how about it? “Is there anything you are doing right now that, knowing what you now
know, you wouldn’t get into again if you were starting over today?”
Ponder that one and then “If your answer is ‘yes,’ then your next question is, ‘How do I get out of
this situation, and how fast?’”
It takes clarity and courage to open yourself up to the question and even more to take action
that’s in integrity with your answers.
FLEXIBILITY: THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT QUALITY
“According to reports generated from the Menninger Institute in Kansas City, flexibility is the
most important single quality you can develop to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century.
Flexibility entails openness, receptivity, and the willingness to try new methods and techniques.
Flexibility means that you practice zero-based thinking continually.”
Flexibility. It’s the hallmark of healthy humans.

“Benjamin Franklin once
said, ‘Man can either buy
his wisdom or borrow it.
By buying it, he pays full
price in personal time and
treasure. But by borrowing
it, he capitalizes on the
lessons learned from the
failures of others.’”
~ Brian Tracy
“My favorite organizing
principle for high
productivity is single
handling, in which you
concentrate single-mindedly
on one thing, the most
important thing, all day long.
Once you have programmed
this work habit into
yourself, you’ll be amazed
at how much you get done.”
~ Brian Tracy
“The first requisite of
success is the ability to
apply your physical and
mental energies to one
problem without growing
weary.”
~ Thomas Edison
PhilosophersNotes | Focal Point
Imagine flexibility as the river that flows between the banks of chaos and rigidity.
How can you be more flexible today?
In what ways are you TOO planned and therefore rigid?
In what ways are you TOO spontaneous and therefore chaotic?
Find the flow.
Stay open, receptive and willing to try new methods and techniques, yo!
EVERY MINUTE COUNTS (FOR TEN)!
“Every minute you spend in planning will save you as many as ten minutes in execution.”
Abraham Lincoln said that if he had 6 hours to chop down a tree, he’s spend 4 of ‘em sharpening
his ax.
How ‘bout you?
You rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off (saw that the other day… wacky!) or are
you spending time planning? Tracy tells us that for every ONE minute in planning we’ll save
TEN (!!!!) in actual work.
Let’s test it out!
SINGLE-MINDEDLY ONE TOUCHING
“Once you have thought through your work and decided on your most valuable task, you
must discipline yourself to start it immediately and stay with it until it is complete. When you
concentrate single-mindedly on a single task, without diversion or distraction, you get it done
far faster than if you start and stop and then come back to the task and pick it up again. You
can reduce the amount of time you spend on a major task by as much as 80 percent simply by
refusing to do anything else until that task is complete.”
This is simple but very, very big.
First step: Do some thinking/planning and figure out what THE most valuable use of your time
is in this moment.
Tracy is REALLY big on the idea that we constantly ask ourselves, “Is this the highest and best
use of my time?!?” Simply making that decision *consciously* rather than mindlessly plowing
through your email/whatever work shows up on your desk will make you a rock star within days.
(Seriously. :)
Alright. Now you know what THE most valuable use of your time is.
Next step: Remove ALL distractions and SINGLE-MINDEDLY (!) focus on that task until it’s
completed. He calls this “single handling”—where, once you start something, you FINISH it. No
phone calls, no spontaneous “gotta clean the desk” moments, no getting stuck and then letting
the little gremlin voice in your head say: “Oh, jeez! We better check email now… it’s been 4
minutes. Someone REALLY important might have just emailed and if we don’t get back to them
within 13 seconds we’ll look like we’re lazy!”
It’s impossible for me to overstate the power of these ideas. If you only did ONE of them
(discovering your #1 priority or focusing on a task exclusively till it’s done), you’d prolly crank
up your productivity by a factor of 10. When you consistently do BOTH? Well, that’s pretty much
a one-way ticket to world-classness.
* issues ticket * See you in paradise! :)
3
 “In 3,300 studies of
leadership, seeking
the common qualities
possessed by great
leaders through the ages,
researchers found that
the one quality all the
studies had in common was
vision. Leaders have vision.
Nonleaders do not. Leaders
have a vision of a better
future for themselves,
their families, and their
organizations. They can see
an ideal future in advance.
They then work to make it a
reality in the present.”
~ Brian Tracy
“If you had all the time and
money you wanted and you
could be or have anything at
all in life, what would you
really want? The greater
clarity you can achieve in
describing your ideal future,
the more likely you are
to create that future for
yourself, and usually faster
than you can imagine right
now However, you can’t
hit a target you can’t see.
Clarity is essential.”
~ Brian Tracy
4 PhilosophersNotes | Focal Point
VISUALIZATION + IDEALIZATION
“In this respect, clarity is terribly important. Successful people have tremendous clarity about
who they are, what they want, and how they are going to get it. Unsuccessful people usually
are unsure and confused about who they are, what they want, and where they are going. One
powerful exercise you can practice to supercharge your thinking and accelerate your results is
called idealization. In idealization you continually imagine the perfect outcome or solution for
any situation in your life. You project forward three to five years, or even further, and then create
a mental picture of the kind of life and career that would be ideal for you in every respect.”
Maslow says the same thing about psychologically healthy/successful people having clarity. He
says that whereas the average individuals “often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of
what they want, of what their own opinions are,” self-actualizing individuals have “superior
awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general.”
How about you?
You have a good sense of who you are/where you’re headed/all that jazz?
One tool we can use to help us rock any and every aspect of our lives is to practice “idealization.”
Fast forward three to five years and create an image of your ideal life.
What are you doing? Who are you around? What do you look like? How’s your health? How’s
your family? )And, what else do you need to be asking yourself?!? :)
And then let that vision guide your present performance!
TIME MANAGEMENT = LIFE MANAGEMENT
“Time management is really life management, personal management, management of yourself.
People who value themselves highly allocate their time carefully. They give their time usage a
lot of thought. When you love your life, you love every minute of it. You are very careful about
misusing or wasting any of the precious minutes and hours of each day.”
Benjamin Franklin, one of his day’s leading entrepreneurs, statesmen and scientists, said this:
“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.”
A couple thousand years before that, Aristotle said this: “We live in deeds, not years; In thoughts
not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs.”
How about you?
How highly do you value yourself?
One way to find out is how you allocate your time. Are you wasting precious minutes and hours
of each day? Is it time to throw away the remote control and spend more time with your spouse,
your kids, your art, your business plan, your journal, your …?
It’s a precious resource, this moment, this heart throb…
Let’s honor it by using each moment wisely, my friend.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MOST OF THE TIME?
“Over the years, thousands of successful people have been asked, ‘What do you think about most
of the time?’
Their answers tend to be the same worldwide. Successful people think about what they want and
how to get it most of the time. As a result of this mental focus, they accomplish much more than
the average person, even though they may have started with no particular advantages.

“We greatly overestimate
what we can do in one
year. But we greatly
underestimate what
is possible for us in
five years.”
~ Peter Drucker
“Your determination to
become a more optimistic
person in every part of your
life will do more to ensure
your success and happiness
than any other single quality
you can develop.”
~ Brian Tracy
“When you practice thinking
and responding optimistically
most of the time, this
positive attitude soon
becomes a conditioned
response. You will
eventually find yourself
reacting and responding
positively and optimistically
all day long.”
~ Brian Tracy
“Your level of optimism can
be equated with your level
of mental fitness. This
form of mental fitness can
be developed by practicing
specific mental exercises,
over and over, until you
automatically respond in a
positive and constructive
way to anything that
happens to you.”
~ Brian Tracy
PhilosophersNotes | Focal Point
Unsuccessful people, on the other hand, tend to think and talk about what they don’t want
most of the time. They think and talk about who they are mad at and who is to blame for their
problems most of the time. They don’t understand why their lives don’t improve even though
they have been working as long as others. They slip into the habit of thinking and talking even
more about their problems and who is to blame, thereby making the situation worse.”
What are you thinking and talking about these days?
Things you’re excited to create?!? Or things that are bothering you?
Choose (very) wisely.
HOW’S YOUR OPTIMISM?
“Your level of optimism is the very best predictor of how happy, healthy, wealthy, and long-lived
you will be. The more optimistic and positive you are, the more energy and enthusiasm you will
have. Your immune system will be stronger and more resistant to disease and infection. You will
seldom be sick. You will get along with less sleep, and you will have more mental and physical
energy throughout the day.”
Did you know that your level of optimism is the best predictor of how much of all the stuff you
want (health/wealth/happiness/etc.) you’ll actually have? Yepperz.
Tracy’s a big fan of Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism (see Notes) which goes off on
how your “explanatory styles” dictate your level of optimism/pessimism which then shapes your
life. Check out the Notes for a full description.
And, how about this vision of an optimist (I forget where I read it but dig it): an optimist is
someone who’s glass is half full and who is looking for a pitcher of water so they can fill up their
glass along with everyone else’s! :)
* raises my full glass to toast yours! *
THE GREAT TRUTHS OF LIFE ARE SIMPLE
“The great truths of life are simple. It is amazing how many problems, both personal and social,
could be resolved if everyone decided to treat other people the way they would like to be treated.
Listen to people the way you would like to be listened to. Sell your products and services the way
you would like others to sell their products and services to you. Be courteous and respectful to
other people, just as you would like them to be courteous and respectful to you. Be patient and
understanding with people when they make mistakes, just as you would like them to be patient
and understanding with you when you make mistakes.”
Amen.
Common sense that we need to make common practice, eh?
“WHY AREN’T I AT MY GOAL ALREADY?”
“Ask yourself, ‘Why aren’t I at my goal already?’ If you want to double your income, why aren’t
you earning twice as much already? If you want to spend more time with your family or friends,
why aren’t you doing it already? Often, forcing yourself to develop the answers to these questions
will enable you to see the critical constraint that is holding you back.”
That’s big.
So, why aren’t you at your goal already?
(Seriously. What constraints are holding you back?!? Identify. Remove. Enjoy. :)
5
 “Wolfgang von Goethe once
wrote, ‘To have more, you
must first be more.’ To
achieve more in your outer
world, you must go to
work on your inner world,
on developing yourself.
There are no lasting
shortcuts. There is no
other way.”
~Brian Tracy
If you liked this Note,
you’ll probably like…
The Success Principles
The 80/20 Principle
Secrets of the Millionaire
Mind
Constructive Living
Mastery
7 Havits of Highly
Effective People
Motivation and Personality
6 PhilosophersNotes | Focal Point
SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS
“Here are several additional questions that you should ask and answer regularly as part of your
personal strategic planning:
• If you could wave a magic wand and have whatever you wished for in any part of your life,
what would it be?
• If you could design your perfect lifestyle… what would it look like?
• How would you change your life if you received $1 million cash, tax free, today? What is the
first thing you would do?
• What parts of your work do you enjoy the most and do the best? Where do you excel? What
sorts of activities make you the happiest?
• What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned today that you had only
six months left to live?
• What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail? If you were
absolutely guaranteed success in any one goal, small or large, short term or long term, what
would it be?”
Tracy wins the award for coolest questions EVER.
I’ve answered dozens of his questions many, many times. I *know* the time I’ve invested
exploring these types of questions is one of the major reasons why my life is unfolding more and
more magically.
So, step on your remote control until it no longer works, bust out your journal and rock these
questions! (Pretty, please. :)
And, if you’re feelin’ it, grab the book, sign up for his newsletter at BrianTracy.com and get your
Focal Point mojo on, yo!!!
Brian Johnson,
Chief Philosopher
About the Author of “Focal Point”
BRIAN TRACY
Brian Tracy is one of the top professional speakers in the world. He addresses
more than 450,000 people each year throughout the United States, Canada,
Europe, Australia and Asia. To learn more about Brian, visit his web site:
BrianTracy.com!
About the Author of This Note
BRIAN JOHNSON
Brian Johnson is a lover of wisdom (aka a “Philosopher”) and a passionate
student of life who’s committed to inspiring and empowering millions of people
to live their greatest lives as he studies, embodies and shares the universal truths
of optimal living. He harts his job.