Review: Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog!

Eat That Frog!

There are certainly a fair share of readers who feel that this book “offers nothing new” – and while one could argue that most motivational books are rehashed versions of previous ideas, Eat that Frog gets right to the heart of the matter – habits can make or break productivity, and discipline means developing and sticking to productive habits. What we all need is motivation and a logical purpose for doing (and continuing to do) the things we’ve developed habits around procrastinating.

Brian Tracy gives us a brief and easy read but one that is designed to be a reference much more than a mantle piece. This book was written in bullet points and has exercises designed to be repeated on a daily basis – a foundation for the creation of new, productive habits.

In theory the 21 habits Tracy outlines, repeated daily, can change a person behaviors in 21 days (which seems oddly convenient to me.) Of course advanced techniques like NLP offer faster roads to establishing behavior change, but for me, “developing positive habits” has much less psychobabble patina than “neurolinguistic reprogramming.” A central point is that habits must be conditioned and kept to with discipline – or they can be lost.

Brian Tracy gives this habit change solid motivation and reasoning. This is a quick, information-filled read which skips the psychology lessons and gets right to the tips that will actually make change happen for you. The book covers a wide range of critical topics, like establishing priorities, task delegation and elimination, appropriate procrastination, and when to tackle your “frog” (I’ll let you find out just what the frog is.)

This is an insightfully clear, concise book that helps the reader understand that by starting with eating your frogs one develops a habit that enables them to accomplish more than someone without the discipline to tackle the hard stuff up front. An excellent, worthwhile book which should make it on your annual reread list.

Review: John Carter’s Mastering The Trade

Mastering the Trade: Proven Techniques for Profiting from Intraday and Swing Trading Setups (McGraw-Hill Trader’s Edge Series)

The son of Morgan Stanley stockbroker, John Carter was introduced into trading as a sophomore in high school. In this book he’ll let you know he made a killing on 1987′s Black Monday (apparently hew had some puts on the S&P) and he’s studied international finance at the University of Cambridge in England (apparently these are the perks available to you when you’re the son of a stockbroker.)

Mastering the Trade
This book is an interesting read, and I like John Carter – he writes well enough and obviously lives and breathes this stuff. But I was continually disappointed by the book. There are a number of chapters that serve as little more than sales tools for various proprietary indicators he uses. In fact, at some points nearly all the setups John references make use of these same indicators (the TTM Squeeze being the most egregious.) He also mentions tradethemarkets.com (his website) but kinda fails to mention the costs of the (apparently critical) indicators and tools. The indicators certainly expensive at $400 to $500 each – couple that with the $100+ monthly subscription to his “trading room” and you start to get the sense there’s more salesmanship going on here than you may have initially envisioned with a title like “Mastering The Trade.”

While Carter’s an effective writer and a lot of what he details make sense, I’m puzzled by how he expects us to take this book seriously when he pushing so hard on a “black box” system of proprietary indicators. Consider me stumped.

I would have loved to come away from reading this with a feeling that I was indeed prepared to tackle day trading like a pro, but I felt more like I was at the bottom of a very common pyramid scheme. I still like Carter – and think he’s brilliant at what he does – but after reading this I’ve turned up the bullshit detector a few clicks.

Hopefully he’s addressed these shortcomings in the second edition, which is available now:

 Check it out on Amazon >>