Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy was born on January 5, 1944, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He left school early and worked a series of laboring and sales jobs before discovering, in commission sales, that asking why some salespeople far outperformed others would become his life’s question.

Studying the methods of top performers and reading widely in the success and self-image literature — including Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, and Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics — he rose rapidly in sales and management, then turned to teaching what he had learned.

From the 1980s onward Tracy built a large training and publishing business, authoring more than eighty books and producing extensive audio programs on success, sales, leadership, and time management. His best-known titles include Goals! and Eat That Frog!, the latter a widely used short manual on overcoming procrastination by tackling the hardest task first.

Tracy’s distinctive emphasis is the disciplined mechanics of achievement: writing goals down, breaking them into plans, and acting on priorities daily. He sits firmly in the practical, methods-driven wing of success literature, presenting the genre’s claims as a teachable system of habits and procedures rather than metaphysical promise.