In one sentence: Get Smart! argues that success is not a matter of inborn intelligence but of trainable thinking habits, and it lays out ten pairs of contrasting mental styles, showing that high achievers consistently choose the more effective one in each, from long-term over short-term thinking to deliberate over hasty, goal-oriented over reactive, and creative over mechanical.
At a Glance
Author: Brian Tracy
First published: 2016 (Tarcher / Perigee)
Category: Self-Help / Personal Development / Business
Length: 208 pages, about 40,000 words (Tarcher/Perigee hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-0-399-18378-2 (Tarcher/Perigee hardcover)
Summary reading time: about 10 minutes
Book reading time: about 3 hours
Notable adaptations: none
Brian Tracy is one of the most prolific self-help and success authors of the past few decades, having written dozens of books and given thousands of talks on achievement, productivity, and personal development. Get Smart! distills a career’s worth of that material into a single compact framework, organizing the difference between high and low achievers around how they think. It draws on well-known research and thinkers, from Kahneman to Aristotle, and repackages them into ten practical contrasts with exercises.
Read it if you want a concise, practical tour of the mental habits associated with success, delivered in Tracy’s brisk, encouraging, no-nonsense style. It is a distillation of familiar success principles rather than an original work, and best used as a quick refresher and a source of actionable exercises rather than as new or deep ideas.
The Big Idea
Tracy’s premise is that you use only a small fraction of your mental capacity and that the quality of your life follows directly from the quality of your thinking, because, as he repeats, you become what you think about most of the time. Success, in his view, is not a matter of raw IQ but of habitual thinking patterns that anyone can learn. He reframes intelligence itself as a way of acting: an intelligent act is simply one that moves you toward what you want, so the measure of smart thinking is the consequences it produces, not how clever it feels.
The book’s structure is its argument. Tracy identifies ten pairs of opposing thinking styles and contends that successful people reliably choose the more effective one in each pair, while everyone else defaults to the weaker. Learning to recognize and switch to the better style in each case, he argues, is like supplying the last missing number to a combination lock: the same person, thinking differently, produces dramatically different results. The ten contrasts, from long-term versus short-term to rich versus poor thinking, are offered as a complete toolkit for upgrading how you think and therefore what you achieve.
Key Ideas
1. Long-term versus short-term thinking
Tracy opens with what he considers the single most important contrast. Drawing on research identifying time perspective as a key determinant of upward mobility, he argues that successful people are intensely future-oriented, willing to delay gratification and sacrifice in the present for a larger payoff later, while the unsuccessful chase immediate rewards. His practical tool is to think back from an idealized future, imagining your career, family, health, and finances as you want them to be, then take the first step toward that vision today.
2. Slow versus fast thinking
Building explicitly on Daniel Kahneman’s work, Tracy urges putting a deliberate gap between stimulus and response, especially for high-consequence decisions like careers, marriage, money, and hiring. Fast, reactive thinking leads to costly errors, so he recommends tools like a seventy-two-hour rule before big commitments, thinking on paper, and seeking solitude to reflect. The underlying point is that the most important decisions deserve the most careful, unhurried thought, and that success is not an accident and failure is not an accident either.
3. Informed versus uninformed thinking
Good decisions require good information, and Tracy stresses due diligence: getting the real facts, validating assumptions, guarding against confirmation bias, and actively hunting for the hidden flaw in any plan. He borrows Warren Buffett’s first rule, don’t lose money, to underline the cost of acting on incomplete or wishful information. Ignorance, he insists, is not bliss, and taking the time to become genuinely informed before acting is a habit of the successful.
4. Goal-oriented versus reactive thinking
Tracy returns to a lifelong theme, the power of written goals. Citing the claim that only a small minority of people have clear written goals and that they vastly out-earn everyone else, he argues that clarity, focus, and concentration on specific objectives separate achievers from drifters. His process is straightforward: decide what you want, write it down with a deadline, make a plan, and act on it every day. Those without goals, he warns, are doomed to work for those who have them.
5. Results versus activity orientation
The fifth contrast distinguishes being busy from being productive. Tracy defines earning ability as the ability to get results that people will pay for, and urges readers to focus relentlessly on high-value tasks rather than mistaking motion for progress. He offers familiar productivity tools, the 80/20 rule, prioritized task lists, single-handling a task until it is complete, and his blunt instruction to work all the time you work rather than letting the day dissolve into distraction.
6. Positive versus negative, and flexible versus rigid thinking
Two further pairs address emotional and adaptive habits. Positive thinking, for Tracy, is largely a matter of eliminating negative emotions, whose root he identifies as blame, and the cure is accepting complete responsibility for your own life and practicing forgiveness. Flexible thinking, meanwhile, is the willingness to admit error, abandon sunk costs, and change your mind as circumstances change, which he calls the number one quality for success in a fast-changing world, aided by continuous learning and zero-based thinking that asks whether you would start something today knowing what you now know.
7. Creative, entrepreneurial, and rich thinking
The final contrasts turn to generativity and wealth. Creative thinking means continuously seeking better, faster, easier ways and treating problems as solvable, holding that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Entrepreneurial thinking means obsessing over the customer and taking ownership rather than the disengaged, blame-shifting stance Tracy attributes to bureaucratic thinking. Rich thinking, finally, ties wealth to self-concept and habits, cataloging the mindsets and routines, from continuous learning to going the extra mile, that he associates with people who build wealth over time.
Context and Analysis
Get Smart! works well as a concise, practical synthesis of success psychology, and that is both its strength and its limitation. Its strengths are clarity and usability: Tracy organizes a large amount of familiar wisdom into ten memorable contrasts, each with concrete exercises, and his brisk, motivating voice makes the material easy to absorb and act on. For a reader new to the genre, the book is an efficient one-stop tour of the thinking habits that self-help literature associates with achievement, and the framing of intelligence as trainable and behavioral is genuinely empowering. As a refresher or a source of actionable prompts, it delivers.
The fair criticisms are significant for more experienced readers. Almost nothing in the book is original, since it repackages ideas from Kahneman, Banfield, classic goal-setting research, and Tracy’s own earlier work, and readers steeped in self-help will find it well-worn. Its evidence is thin and anecdotal, leaning on oft-repeated statistics of uncertain provenance, such as the claim about the tiny percentage of people with written goals, and its tone is relentlessly upbeat in a way that can gloss over how much circumstance and luck shape outcomes. The advice is sound but generic, and the ten-pairs structure, while tidy, can feel formulaic. Taken as a clear, motivating distillation of conventional success thinking rather than a source of new insight, though, it is competent and useful.
On this site it pairs naturally with Thinking, Fast and Slow, whose rigorous account of the two systems of thought is the research foundation Tracy borrows for his slow-versus-fast contrast, and with Eat That Frog!, Tracy’s own shorter classic on beating procrastination and focusing on high-value work, which develops the results-orientation theme in more depth.
How to Apply It
The book is built around habits to practice, one contrast at a time:
1. Adopt a long-term perspective, imagining the future you want across career, family, health, and finances, and take the first concrete step toward it today. 2. Slow down for high-consequence decisions, putting a deliberate gap between stimulus and response and getting the real facts before you act. 3. Set clear written goals with deadlines and act on them daily, since clarity and focus separate achievers from those who merely react. 4. Focus on results rather than activity, concentrating your effort on the highest-value tasks and finishing them rather than staying merely busy. 5. Take complete responsibility for your life, stay flexible and willing to change your mind, and treat setbacks as feedback while continually learning new skills.
Memorable Lines
“You become what you think about most of the time.” (Brian Tracy)
“Those who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do.” (Brian Tracy)
“You can’t hit a target that you can’t see.” (Brian Tracy)
“There is no such thing as failure. There is only feedback.” (Brian Tracy)
“There are never any traffic jams on the extra mile.” (Brian Tracy)
“Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident, either.” (Brian Tracy)
Should You Read the Full Book?
Verdict: Recommended
This summary carries the book’s whole framework, the ten contrasting thinking styles, from long-term versus short-term and slow versus fast through goal-oriented, results-oriented, positive, flexible, creative, entrepreneurial, and rich thinking, along with the core claim that these habits are trainable and that how you think determines your results. Because the book is essentially a structured list of these contrasts, a summary conveys the substance of it quite fully. That said, the full book adds value for readers who want to actually work the program: each chapter comes with specific exercises, checklists, and worked examples, the seventy-two-hour rule, the goal-setting steps, the zero-based-thinking questions, that turn the principles into practice. Read the whole book if you are newer to success literature and want the exercises and Tracy’s motivating delivery, and read it aware that the ideas are familiar and lightly evidenced. As a clear, practical distillation of conventional success thinking, it is a worthwhile quick read for those who want the toolkit rather than new insight.
You can find the Get Smart! book page here, with the full list of people who recommend it.