This book presents a method to achieve all of your personal and professional goals.

In business, it has been said that 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your customers (or daily work tasks). Find your 20 percent and concentrate on them. Delegate to others, outsource or eliminate everything else. Everyone has work tasks that are urgent and important. Others are not urgent and not important. There are a lot of tasks that are somewhere in the middle. Concentrate on the urgent and important tasks. Eliminate the not urgent and not important tasks. Delegate or outsource all those tasks that are in the middle.

Imagine your perfect life, whether it involves your career, family, health or financial situation. How do you get from here to there? You are the only one who can change your life. You need to take a deep breath, focus on "it," whatever it is, and resolve to do at least one thing to get you closer to it, every day.

Even if you don't reach the level of "perfect," even if your situation improves by only a few percent, this book will have done its job. It is very easy to understand, and is highly recommended for people from all walks of life. ( )

It starts out reading like a how to on using a Franklin Covey Planner, but then continues on. The whole book impressed me, but the following about 0.1% daily improvement really impressed me. Page 169 of Focal Point: If every day you do 0.1% better in performance and output, then over the course of a year you will have a 43% improvement. Of course, in real life 0.1% would be impossible to measure, it would be down in the noise, but I like the idea.

Brian Tracey recommends 1) getting up two hours earlier each day & spending the first hour reading in one’s specialty. Every day rewrite your goals. Every day do planning. Start the day by doing your most important task. Keep learning. At the end of the day ask yourself two questions:

What did I do right?
What could I have done better?


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I am responsible
Whatever you concentrate on grows.

Simplify; Concentrate on the 20% of the activities that produce 80% of the value.
The grand SLAM formula.
S stands for simplify
L for Leverage your strengths & abilities, other people's knowledge; other people's energy; other people's energy; other people's money; other people's successes; other people's failure; other people's ideas; other people's contacts (or credibility)
A for Accelerate
M for multiply

Six Steps to doubling your Income and Doubling Your Time Off
1 Identify the few tasks that contribute the greatens value to your work
2 Identify the routine tasks and activities that consume so much time but contribute little or nothing to your long-term goals at work
3 Use the Grand Slam formula
4 Take at least one full day each week off work during which you spend time exclusively on your personal pursuits. (no employment related work)
5 Once you are comfortable... expand your time off to two days, a full weekend, every week. Schedule a three-day vacation every three months, and eventually every two months.
6 Start today to pay closer attention to the things you do.

"You are where you are and what you are because of yourself and nothing else. Nature is neutral. Nature doesn't care. IF you do what other successful people do, you will enjoy he same rewards and results as they do.. And if you don't, you won't." (p 58)

"Today, we call it the law of cause and effect. In biblical terms, it is the law of sowing and reaping. Sir Isaac Newton called it the law of action and reaction. This is the great law of Wester civilization. It underlies more than 2000 years of advances in science, medicine, technology, and business." (p59-60)

"You can be, have, or do anything you want in life if you simply find out how other people achieved it before you and then do the same thing yourself. ... if you do what other successful people do, you'll eventually get the same results they are getting. It is entirely up to you." (p 60)

So, Keith: What are other successful people doing?

As I continue reading in the book Focal Point, I am impressed that I should be doing these exercises on a regular basis. I am also impressed that these are not new things. These are the same exercises that I have had recommended to me before. Brian Tracy comments that when he got into sales he "searched out and applied every bit of information on sales methods and techniques that I could learn from other successful salespeople. And they worked. in no time at al, I was among the top salespeople in my organization." (p 61)

When I went into real estate development, I read more than twenty books on the subject, including... " (p 61)

Often when I explain this cause-and-effect principle, people dismiss it as being too simplistic to apply to their own situations, but the most powerful principles are almost always the simplest. That is why greater success and achievement are possible for almost everyone. (p 61)

"Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects. (p 61)

The key is asking the right questions. ( )

Average; nothing great ( )

Ed-here are some great ideas to make "the indispensable man" even more indispensable. You are doing a great job, best regards.