The key ideas

Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field

Brian Tracy, 2016

Intelligence, according to Brian Tracy, is measured not by grades or IQ but by actions and their consequences. In this book he compares pairs of ways of thinking: slow and fast, tested and naive, flexible and rigid. You’ll learn when to slow down, how to test an idea before putting money into it, and how to walk away in time from what has stopped working.

Who it is for

For anyone who makes important decisions on the run, falls in love with their ideas without testing them or clings for years to what stopped working long ago. And for anyone curious about how successful people think differently from the usual way.

Intelligence is not a matter of IQ, grades in school, or years of study. Intelligence is instead a “way of acting.”

Dreams of a career, rushes home to the TV

Tracy describes a person everyone knows. He sincerely says he wants to succeed in his career. But he shows up at work at the last minute, leaves at the first chance and hurries home so as not to miss his favorite show. Judging by his actions, his real goal isn’t a career at all but an evening in front of the TV.

In Get Smart!, business trainer Brian Tracy asks an uncomfortable question: what is intelligence anyway? Intelligence, he answers, isn’t about IQ or grades. A smart action brings you closer to what you want, and a stupid one takes you further away. So thinking is best measured by its consequences, and the key question is always the same: did it work or not?

The book is built on pairs: slow thinking versus fast, tested versus untested, flexible versus rigid, and seven more like them. Five of them change everyday decisions the most: they tell you when to slow down, how to test an idea, how to find the real problem, what to do with resentment and when to honestly admit a mistake.

Three days for a big decision

Most people, Tracy believes, live in “stimulus, then instant response” mode, with no pause in between. For small things that’s fine. You can choose fish or a burger for lunch without thinking: it won’t affect your life.

Here Tracy draws on Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. The main mistake, as Tracy sees it, is that people quickly decide things that call for slow thinking: choosing a profession, a spouse, a business partner, an investment. The further the consequences reach, the more slowly it’s worth thinking.

For such cases Tracy has the Seventy-Two-Hour Rule: give yourself three days before you answer. If someone demands a decision right now, you can reply that the immediate answer is “no”, but after some thought it might be different. One sales manager told Tracy that before hiring he waits thirty days, no matter how much he likes the candidate. A month of meetings shows what you can’t see on the first day.

Another tool of slow thinking is silence. Tracy advises regularly sitting for half an hour to an hour in complete silence, with no music and no phone. For the first twenty minutes or so you’ll feel the urge to get up and do something, then the tension will fade and thoughts will start to come.

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About the author

Brian Tracy is a Canadian-American business trainer and the author of dozens of books on sales, goals and personal effectiveness. His company, Brian Tracy International, has been training employees and managers for many years.

All books by this author: Brian Tracy

Terms from the book

  • IQ
  • Kahneman
  • Confirmation bias
  • Hypothesis
  • Responsibility
  • Einstein
  • Princeton
  • Zero-based thinking
  • Sunk costs
  • Seventy-Two-Hour Rule: Advice from the book: before a major decision, give yourself three days to think. It is the author’s rule, not a scientific law.
  • Getty: J. Paul Getty, an American oil industrialist who was at one time one of the richest people in the world.
  • Hidden flaw: A phrase from the book: the weak spot in a decision that, if not found in advance, can sink the whole decision.
  • Negative emotion tree: An image from the book, not a scientific term: emotions grow on it like fruit, and its trunk, in Tracy’s view, is blame.

All terms

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