Brian Tracy (born in Vancouver, Canada in 1944) is a self-help author who has recorded many of his works as audio books. His presentations and seminar topics include leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness, and business strategy. He is now the Chairman of Brian Tracy International, a human resource company based in Solana Beach, California, with affiliates throughout the United States and thirty-one other countries.
After dropping out of school before graduation, Tracy spent several years as a laborer. He then got a job on a tramp steamer and traveled around the world for eight years, eventually visiting more than eighty countries on five continents.
Since he could no longer find a job as a laborer, he went into sales, struggling at first. He decided to ask other successful salesmen and then emulate them. By the end of his first year, he attained the status of top salesman. After his second year, he was made a Vice President in charge of 95 people. At the time he was only 25 years old.
Beginning in 1981, Tracy assembled his “success system”, which was initially called “The Phoenix Seminar.” Three years later, in 1985, he released an updated version of this seminar as a self-help audio tape entitled “The Psychology of Achievement”.
Tracy’s book Maximum Achievement was included as one of 50 success, motivation and leadership classics in the book 50 Success Classics (2004) by Tom Butler-Bowdon.
Tracy is a member of the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based public policy research institute.
His body of work is loosely based on a number of other success “gurus” such as Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn and Denis Waitley. He has recently launched Brian Tracy University, an online course of study which is designed to assist entrepreneurs, business owners and sales professionals.
The Brian Tracy College of Business and Entrepreneurship at Andrew Jackson University (a distance learning school based in Hoover, Alabama), is named after him and based on his teachings. At the New York headquarters of ALM Media, a legal publisher, a motivational quote of Tracy’s appears on the office wall: “excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends.”