No Excuses!

I was in Barnes & Noble the other day.  Of course, putting me in a bookstore is like putting an alcoholic in a bar.  We’re both going to get something!  I had gone specifically to get David McCullough’s newest book The American Spirit, but while I was in the building I couldn’t resist wandering towards the bargain bins to see what I might find.

And what I found was a real bargain.  I read Brian Tracy’s Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life with immense pleasure and interest, so seeing another book by him in hardcover for $6 was too hard to pass up.  No Excuses! is a treatise to self-discipline, describing why it is important and providing specific ways in which the reader can exercise more self-discipline to achieve more success in any area of life.

Reading this book and thinking back on my own career experiences, I found myself nodding my head in agreement and saying “Yep!” over and over again.  I wish I had this book when I was starting out so that I didn’t have to learn those lessons in the School of Hard Knocks.  I might also have had a very different career as an engineer, since some of the hard knocks that taught me important lessons also closed the door of opportunity to me on occasion.  Now that I have a new career, I can learn from the past and then put it behind me.

Perhaps the best idea I gained from this book was the need to be more careful in who surrounds me.  We all tend to become our social orbit, because we are biologically hardwired to acclimate our sense of “normal” from the people immediately around us.  Mediocre performers often are surrounded by others who think that mediocre performance is good enough.  If you want to be more successful, then surround yourself with the people who have the type of success that you want.  Do what they do long enough, and the success they enjoy will be yours to enjoy as well.

Given my recent retreat, which I continue to hail as my best vacation ever, I found this book refreshing and energizing.  I give the book only 4 out of 5 stars, though, because the ending was . . . well, not really there.  There’s no epilogue or final chapter that brings everything together or provides a summary.  The book just ends.  Ironic indeed that an author writing such a great tome on self-discipline couldn’t muster a little more of that virtue to “finish the job.”

Be that as it may, I still recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about specific ways to become more successful in any area of life, be it professional or personal.  It’s definitely a quick read (well, at about 300 pages, quick for me) but packed with powerful information.  I’m glad to add this tome to my library and even happier to get it in hardcover for such a bargain price!

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