Review of Brian Tracy’s Maximum Achievement

One of the most motivational books I've read for intentional living.

For my inaugural post here on Substack, I’m reviewing personal success legend Brian Tracy’s magnum opus, Maximum Achievement. This book is now over 30 years old but its principles are timeless and powerful. The title might sound like it’s about productivity hacks or time management tricks, but at its core, this is about locking into absolute alignment with your goals—and backing it with concrete action to make them real.

This book found its way to me about a year ago through a conversation with a respected friend and highly accomplished, 30+ year business consultant. I was asking him how he started his consulting firm and what some of the formative influences were, and he cited this book. For me, this was the equivalent of the teacher appearing when the student is ready. Even as someone in my 40s, I still feel a hunger to step into my full potential professionally. This book helped show me the path by being radically intentional in every area of my life.

Professional and financial success are major topics of focus for the book, but I appreciate that the author frames financial well-being as just one dimension of a successful life. This is not a “get rich and be happy” book. The subject matter extends to psychology, emotional well-being, relationships, and metaphysical wisdom principles.

A big part of what makes Maximum Achievement so inspiring is Brian Tracy’s own remarkable story. He overcame a whole array of early-life challenges, including a difficult upbringing, dropping out of high school, not attending college, and working aimlessly for much of his 20s. Tracy hit rock-bottom and developed an intense, burning desire to find the principles of success and turn his life around. It worked. He found his way into sales and built a lucrative career based on the application of his success principles.

Tracy’s story has echoes of the archetypal hero’s journey, in both his young adult travels in search for answers and then later in his decision to eventually take the gifts of what he discovered about success and share them with the world through his books and seminars.

In the sections below, I offer a summary of some of the book’s high points for me personally – but I’ll emphasize this only scratches the surface of the book’s scope and content.

Ingredients of Success

Success can be a fuzzy term. One person’s “success” is another person’s misery. Tracy leaves the exact definition of success in the reader’s hands, but what he emphasizes is that a person must start by getting a razor-sharp mental picture of what their own success looks like. He writes:

“You must first become absolutely clear about what you want if you are serious about unlocking the extraordinary power that lies within you.… You have to decide exactly what ‘success’ means to you. You have to decide what your life would look like if you made it into a masterpiece.”

He then goes on to unpack seven ingredients of success that are consistent with a life of happiness and accomplishment. Not every successful person will have every one of these seven ingredients, but he offers these as “targets to aim at.” What I appreciated is the breadth of his perspective which encourages the reader to not just fixate on one single goal but rather to visualize a full, integrated picture of overarching success across all of life’s dimensions.

Here are Tracy’s 7 Ingredients of Success:

1. Peace of Mind: “Achieving inner peace must be a central organizing principle of your life.”

2. Health and Energy: “If you achieve all kinds of things in the material world, but you lose your health or your peace of mind, you get little or no pleasure from your other accomplishments.”

3. Loving Relationships: “These are relationships with the people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how well you are doing as a human being.”

4. Financial Freedom: “A feeling of freedom is essential to the achievement of any other important goal, and you cannot be free until and unless you have enough money so that you are no longer preoccupied with it.”

5. Worthy Goals and Ideals: “To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need a commitment to something bigger and more important than yourself.”

6. Self-Knowledge and Self-Awareness: “Throughout all of history, self-knowledge has gone hand in hand with inner happiness and outer achievement.… To perform at your best, you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do.”

7. Personal Fulfillment: “This is a feeling of becoming everything that you are capable of becoming. It is the sure knowledge that you are moving toward the realization of your full potential as a human being.”

Laws of Mental Mastery

Next, Tracy turns to the topic of self-mastery which involves the inner work of rigorously aligning one’s life with the principles of success. Here too we have a list of seven – this time seven mental laws which are drawn from ancient esoteric wisdom. Although ancient, these laws couldn’t be more relevant. As Tracy says, “Whenever you are having problems of any kind, it is almost invariably because you are violating one or more of these laws, whether you know about them or not.”

This is one of my favorite sections of the book as Tracy does a masterful job connecting the dots between our thinking and its impact upon our success and happiness. You’ll quickly see these laws are overlapping and work together to reinforce the same central message – that the quality of your thinking has a dramatic influence on the quality of your life.

1. Law of Control: This law “says that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life, and you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel that you are not in control, or that you are controlled by some external force, person or influence.” Tracy focuses on how this law applies to our thinking: “In every case, control over your life begins with your thoughts, the only thing over which you do have complete control.”

2. Law of Cause and Effect: This disarmingly simple law states that “for every effect in your life there is a specific cause.” As a mental law, the emphasis is that “thoughts are causes and conditions are effects.” Everything in your life started with a thought, either yours or someone else’s. The conclusion follows that, “If you change the quality of your thinking [the cause], you change the quality of your life [the effect]."

3. Law of Belief: This law says that “whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality.” This forms the basis for why self-limiting beliefs are so pernicious. He writes: “Most of your self-limiting beliefs are not true at all. They are based on negative information that you have taken in and accepted as true. Once you have accepted it as true, your belief makes it a fact for you.”

4. Law of Expectations: This law builds on the last one, saying that “whatever you expect with confidence becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy.” Tracy endorses becoming an “inverse paranoid,” meaning “someone who believes that the universe is conspiring to do him good.” He adds, “An inverse paranoid sees every situation as being heaven-sent either to confer some benefit or teach some valuable lesson to help make him successful.”

5. Law of Attraction: This one sometimes gets waved around like a manifestation wand, but Tracy here grounds it in the discipline of maintaining goal-aligned positive thoughts: “The Law of Attraction says that you are a living magnet. You invariably attract into your life people and situations in harmony with your dominant thoughts. Like attracts like.”

6. Law of Correspondence: This law, which Tracy points to as one of the most important, states that “your outer world is a reflection of your inner world.” The takeaway is, “You must become a different person on the inside before you see different results on the outside.” Tracy backs this up with a quote from psychologist William James who once said, “The greatest revolution of my life is the discovery that individuals can change the outer aspects of their lives by changing the inner attitudes of their minds.”

7. Law of Mental Equivalency: This law is a summation of all the previous laws, saying, “Your thoughts, vividly imagined and repeated, charged with emotion, become your reality.” The opportunity presented by this law is to choose one’s thoughts as the mental equivalent of what you want to experience in your reality.

Taken as a whole, Tracy shows us how these mental laws work together as a cohesive Law of Mind:

“When you begin thinking in a positive, confident way about the main aspects of your life, you take control over what is happening to you. You bring your life into harmony with cause and effect. You sow positive causes and reap positive effects. You begin to believe more intensely in yourself and your possibilities. You expect more positive outcomes. You attract positive people and situations, and soon your outer life of results will begin to correspond to your inner world of constructive thinking. This entire transformation begins with your thoughts. Change your thinking and you will, you must, change your life.”

Essential Conditions For Change

These mental laws provide a foundation for all of Tracy’s subsequent guidance on creating positive life change. I want to point out, however, he doesn’t sugarcoat this as an easy process. At times, he is quite direct and even stern in saying it will be hard. I appreciate this because, for me, Tracy passes the no-BS test. He’s not just offering a bunch of feel-good, happy-clappy ideas. These are wisdom principles that have to be applied with discipline in order to work.

Here are three of his no-nonsense, essential conditions for changing the direction of your life:

1. Have burning desire: “First, you must sincerely want to change. You must really want to become totally positive toward yourself and your possibilities. You must have an intense, burning desire to be more than you’ve ever been before.”

2. Release old habits: “You must be willing to let go of the old person in order to become the new person.” Tracy frames this in terms of letting go of old habits: “Changing habits that are no longer consistent with your higher purposes is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, and one of the most essential to the quality of your life. But unless you’ve already reached some level of excellence or perfection, you are living today with habits that you must discard if you are going to move forward.”

3. Persevere with patience: “You must be willing to persevere for a long time without much evidence of progress. What you are aiming for is a fundamental long-term improvement in your life. It’s taken you many years to become the person you are. You must be willing to work very hard to become someone different.”

Activating the Subconscious and Superconscious Mind

Change requires discipline and perseverance, yes, but Tracy offers insights and practices that can accelerate that process of change. Specifically he focuses on how we can unlock the mind’s subconscious and superconscious powers to align with and support our goals.

Here’s what he says about the subconscious mind: “Your subconscious mind is the seat of the Law of Attraction, the sending station of mental vibrations and thought energy. When you begin to believe that something is possible for you, your subconscious mind begins broadcasting mental energies and you begin to attract people and circumstances in harmony with your new dominant thoughts.”

So how do you activate your subconscious mind to this effect? By saturating your mind with positive messages that are aligned with your goals. Tracy prescribes and explains various techniques for visualization, affirmations, and feeding your mind with every type of media that’s aligned with the person you want to become. He offers a wealth of how-to ideas and suggestions on this front. The central theme of all these ideas is to put your mind on a positive mental diet, ruthlessly substituting negative thoughts for positive ones, so that your subconscious is flooded with a coherent positive signal.

Turning to the superconscious mind, which Tracy calls the “Master Power,” he enters terrain that’s more deeply esoteric. Sometimes called “universal mind” or the “collective unconscious,” this is a topic discussed by Carl Jung who said it “contained within it all the wisdom of the human race, past, present, and future.” Here is where the line between psychology and spirituality begins to blur. I imagine some readers may encounter these ideas with skepticism, but I encourage keeping an open mind.

Here’s how Tracy describes the superconscious and its potential to activate your highest potential:

“The superconscious mind is the source of all inspiration, all motivation, and the excitement that you feel when aroused by a new idea or possibility. It is the source of hunches, of intuition, and of flashes of insight – the ‘still small voice’ within. Whenever you have been wrestling with a problem and have suddenly come up with a great idea that turned out to be the perfect solution, you were tapping into your superconscious mind.”

The key to activating these superconscious capacities comes back to the first principle of having a crystal-clear goal held with passion. Tracy says there is a handoff of that goal from your subconscious mind to the superconscious. He writes: “Once you have programmed a goal or problem into your subconscious mind, and then released it, it is transferred to your superconscious mind and your superconscious goes to work on it.”

Tracy’s main prescriptions for activating the superconscious mind are simply to hold your goal in mind clearly and with a relaxed, positive mindset. He writes: “The attitude of confidently expecting that your problems will be solved, obstacles removed, and your goals achieved is the mental state that intensifies the rate of vibration of thought and causes your superconscious mind to function at its best.”

He cautions that any negativity can short-circuit the superconscious: “Any kind of negativity, anger, worry or impatience shuts down your superconscious mind…. Destructive emotions of any kind interfere with the calm, positive attitude your superconscious requires for optimal functioning.” If this sounds like faith, you’re not wrong. Tracy endorses faith in “the goodness of the universe” as a key part of activating the superconscious.

Final Impressions

I covered here just the tip of the iceberg of what Maximum Achievement has to offer, which is ultimately a framework for applying positive intentionality to every corner of your life – work, relationships, parenting, inner peace, and personal fulfillment.

Granted, if your worldview is that of a scientific materialist, then Tracy’s mental laws and convictions about the unseen realm may not land for you. But if you’re either of a spiritual bent or simply open to mystery that extends beyond the current understanding of mainstream science, then Tracy’s ideas may resonate. They certainly did for me.

In terms of impact, this book has done more to motivate a systematic approach to success in my life than any other book I’ve read to date. I keep coming back to the first chapter’s subtitle, Make Your Life a Masterpiece, which is a phrase that stirs something within me. Maybe it’s the fact that mid-life tends to be a season for introspection and self-assessment. Whatever the case, for me this book has provided an upgrade in the quality of my thinking and goal-setting for how I intend to make the second half of my life the best half.

If you’ve read Maximum Achievement, or decide to read it based on this review, I’d love to hear any feedback or thoughts you may have.