Flight Plan

Brian Tracy makes a claim near the start of Flight Plan that should bother anyone who has ever felt behind in their own life. A commercial airliner, he says, is off course roughly ninety-nine percent of the time it spends in the air. Updrafts push it up. Downdrafts pull it down. Crosswinds shove it sideways. The earth's magnetism tugs at the compass. Turbulence rattles everything inside. The plane is, in any honest sense of the word, lost — almost the entire trip — and yet it lands at the right airport, on roughly the right schedule, with the passengers convinced the whole thing was a matter of routine.

That picture is the whole book. Success, Tracy argues, doesn't look like a clean arc from intention to outcome. It looks like a long, slightly embarrassing sequence of corrections. Pilots aren't superhuman. They have a destination, they have instruments, and they refuse to let the inevitable drift become permanent. Everything else Tracy teaches in this small book is downstream of that single image.

He sets out twelve steps — a flight plan, naturally — for moving from where you are to where you say you want to be. He also takes a shot at the genre he sits inside. Right at the top, he dismisses The Secret as a story for people unwilling to do the hard work. The real secret of success, he writes, is that there are no secrets — only universal principles and timeless truths. Cause and effect. Sow and reap. Action and equal-and-opposite reaction. Newton's physics, Confucius, the Bible, Goethe, all repackaged for someone trying to launch a business or save a marriage or get back into shape. It's an oddly humble framing from a man who has sold tens of millions of books on the topic.