Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictions. Her home was happy and creative but also shadowed by debt and her father’s alcoholism. When her father was killed by teenagers on the streets of their public housing project, her family developed a deep and dysfunctional reliance on the born-again Christian church to which they belonged, and Tracy stopped attending school. Over the years, in a bid to balm her grief and poverty, she journeyed through multiple belief systems, from extreme religion to the occult and paranormal, and eventually conspiracy theories. Amid this chaos, on the shelves of a Birmingham bookshop, she discovered an old copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, the book that taught her how to, finally, think critically—and for herself. Eloquently written and brimming with surprisingly sharp humor, Learning to Think is a battle cry for imaginative freedom and taking charge of one’s own education.

Competitive Advantage helps leaders create a reliably profitable and sustainable learning portfolio that generates the sought-after impact. Based on a proprietary 25-driver Scoreboard created by Tracy King CAE, Competitive Advantage helps clients develop a profitable and sustainable business that makes a measurable impact on the industries they represent. Workforce disruptions, new technologies, and tight budgets place enormous pressure on professional association continuing education teams. Old learning formats and pricing models are failing. The risk of irrelevance is imminent as competitors step into the market, creating targeted learning programs faster and cheaper. Not to mention that learner expectations are changing: what they want, when they want it, and how much they are willing to pay for it. Competitive Advantage serves the professional association industry's leadership. Tracy helps leadership determine what investments to make with a limited budget, learn the common mistakes associations make managing their learning portfolio, find key investments that differentiate a program from competitors, identify partnership opportunities that result in passive revenue streams, and so much more. Quick fixes feel good, but never produce lasting results. Competitive Advantage focuses on the things that do produce lasting results and the commitment required to develop a successful learning design.

Poverty and superstition go hand in hand, When you have nothing, you cling to whatever gives you hope. Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictions. Her home was happy and creative but it was marked by debt, by her father's alcoholism and her mother's agoraphobia. When her father died at the hands of a local teenage gang on the streets of their Midlands council estate, superstition gave way to a deeper and more dysfunctional reliance on the born-again Christian church to which Tracy and her family belonged. In the chaos of loss, the paranormal became paranoia. In a bid to find definitive answers, Tracy followed one belief system after another until, accidentally, she stumbled across a book by scientist Carl Sagan. It opened the door to scientific thinking. Ultimately, it taught her to think for herself. And it was only when she applied the tools of critical thinking to this exploration of her past that she uncovered a very different kind of story. Learning to Think is a memoir about belief. It's about poverty, religion and superstition, grief and healing. But most of all, it's about the liberating power of a scientific view of the world.

When Tracy King was twelve she was exorcised.
Unfortunately, the demons that beset Tracy could not be so easily displaced.
While her life was filled with creativity, curiosity, and love, it was also constricted by poverty, by Tracy’s father’s alcoholism and her mother’s agoraphobia.

By the time she turned twelve Tracy’s father had been killed, her sister taken into care and her mother ensnared by the promises of born-again Christianity.
This is the story of an ordinary family trapped in a broken system. It is a story that could happen to anyone without the tools to transform their circumstances.

But it is also a tale with a twist. And one full of humour and hope.
Because with courage, perseverance and self-education, Tracy learnt to think for herself and found her way out.