Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field

Get Smart! is Brian Tracy's argument that intelligence, in the sense that actually predicts success, is less about raw IQ and more about a learnable set of thinking habits that most people simply never develop. Tracy opens with a provocative framing: the average person uses only a small fraction of their mental capacity, and the people who seem naturally brilliant are usually just using more of what everyone already has, through specific, repeatable patterns of thought rather than innate advantage.

The book moves through a series of practical mental disciplines rather than abstract cognitive theory. Early chapters focus on reframing how the reader relates to their own thinking capacity — using an extended metaphor of an inaccessible bank account to illustrate how much unused potential most people carry — before moving into structured tools for applying that capacity more effectively. Central to this is the GOSPA model, a goal-oriented planning framework (Goals, Objectives, Strategies, Plans, Activities) that Tracy presents as a way of forcing the "slow-thinking," deliberate part of the brain to do the strategic work that the fast, reactive mind tends to skip.

A significant portion of the book addresses obstacles to clear thinking rather than only techniques for it — most notably a chapter on negative emotions (fear, envy, resentment, jealousy, inferiority, hate, suspicion, hostility, distrust) that Tracy argues actively degrade decision-making quality by narrowing attention and triggering reactive rather than deliberate thought. He also introduces the "Seven Rs of Superior Thinking" — rethinking, reevaluating, reorganizing, restructuring, reengineering, reinventing, and regaining control — as a repeatable checklist for approaching stuck problems from new angles rather than repeating the same failed approach.

Throughout, Tracy grounds the material in familiar business contexts: idea validation through research and expert consultation, systematic problem-solving methods, and disciplined goal-setting, drawing on decades of his own consulting and speaking experience with successful individuals across fields. The book's throughline is that thinking well is a trainable skill with identifiable components — perspective, planning discipline, emotional regulation, and structured reevaluation — rather than a fixed trait, and that consistently applying these components, even simple ones, compounds into a meaningfully different quality of decision and outcome over time.