Book Review: Goals: How to Get Everything You Want

I have read books on creating goals before.  They always stress the importance of writing down your goals and reviewing them.  This book also stresses the importance of writing down your goals and reviewing them, but the discussion goes into so much more.  Tracy reminds us that people who start with seemingly nothing have been achieving great success for years and years.  How do they do it?

One of the major differences between successful people and unsuccessful people is that those who are successful constantly think about what it is they want to accomplish.  They have an intense desire for something and they think and talk about what they want all the time.  They realize that it is themselves, no one else, who is responsible for the life they achieve.  They stop blaming everyone else for hardships and they control their negative emotions.

Tracy lays out 21 strategies for creating and achieving your goals, no matter how large.  Through a series of questions and exercises, he shows you how to determine your personal strengths, increase your self-confidence, focus on what you truly want out of life, and how to overcome the obstacles that will block your path.  Let me share some examples.

Try what Charles Garfield calls “Blue-Sky Thinking”.  Imagine that all things are possible.  Imagine that your life, sometime in the future, is perfect in all respects.  Then come back to present day and ask yourself, “What would have to happen from this point onward for all my dreams and goals to come true?”  In the book, Tracy give you specific questions to ask yourself as you practice your “blue-sky thinking”.

Next, you are shown how to determine the true values by which you live by and how to clarify your goals from those values.  Again, Tracy has exercises to help you do this including: the Magic Wand, Imagining you have Six Months to Live, and the Instant Millionaire exercise.