Flight Plan: The Real Secret of Success – How to Achieve More, Faster Than You Ever Dreamed Possible
By Brian Tracy
Berrett-Koehler, 2008
First, a note on the author: Brian Tracy has made a considerable living writing books that deliver everything you already know packed into pithy soundbites and organized as multi-step plans. By wrapping each book’s message into a metaphor so resonant it hums like a mantra in your mind, he guarantees his books’ positions atop bestseller lists. Thus fortified, readers are ready to succeed.
The Flight Plan is no different. As the title suggests, Tracy believes that achieving one’s goals is tantamount to a pilot filing a flight plan-he knows he will be off-course most of the time. Storms may drive him north or south, cloud cover might obscure his true position, and other pilots can force him to seek another course or crash, yet, almost always, a pilot reaches his goal.
Tracy likens his directives to a pilot’s careful plotting: methodical, practical, and achievable. He encourages the reader to make lists, consider every exigency, and prepare a fully fleshed out “Plan B.” This section of the book reads like a Cliff Notes’ version of Project Management 101. Tracy even includes a strategic planning formula that calculates the opportunity cost of every hour you are not heading closer to obtaining what you really want. He also points out this basic fact-if you don’t ask for what you want, the answer is always “NO.” So ask!
Next, this hard-hitting champion of the “just do it” school of pragmatism veers skyward into New Age territory. Seeking to speak to the “superconscious” mind, Tracy prescribes affirmations and creative visualization. He insists that goals must be couched in the present tense and emotionalized as having been achieved. All this stuffing of right-brain rhetoric into a left-brained book creates an odd, unsettling shift in tone; however, Tracy’s point is right on target. It takes a total mind commitment to make a genuine change in the direction of one’s life.
This is a turning-point book. If you are stuck off course and in need of a new direction, Flight Plan is a perfect “how-to” to get you going. If you are like the rest of us-happy but overwhelmed-I recommend you read Tracy’s motivational Eat that Frog instead.
