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THE ABUNDANCE HABIT

120 DAILY EXERCISES TO CULTIVATE JOY AND SUCCESS

Inspiring and actionable advice to help readers envision and achieve desired goals.

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A self-empowerment guide offers a framework to develop an abundance mindset that will “make you a magnet for the things you want most in life.”

In this book, Hamm details her four-step system—“Say It, See It, Write It, Do It”—to “teach your brain how to think with a mindset of abundance.” The author shares how the framework can be used in “nine types of abundance that can affect every area of your life...abundances of self-worth, wealth, health, time, energy, love, joy, creativity, and career.” The “Say It” step requires saying out loud and with a smile both “I do” and “I am”–type “affirmations (programming statements)” and “I don’t” and “I am not”–type “cancellations (deprogramming statements),” with samples for each area. “See It” and “Write It” involve creating vision boards and journaling to explore abundance using these tools. For “Do It,” Hamm provides “a series of exercises that will help you behave in a manner favorable to your mindset goals,” such as having “Mindset Money” (keeping but not spending cash in your wallet to motivate saving and the envisioning of future wealth) and writing a “Love List” of worthy qualities in people. “When you appreciate the people around you, they subconsciously reciprocate,” the author asserts. Hamm acknowledges upfront that hers is “not a new concept” and refers to authors Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield, and others for further reading. But her system stands on its own merits as a practical and powerful method, having been road-tested by Hamm’s own mindset shift to build a thriving martial-arts business with her husband and transform their turbulent relationship. The “Do It” exercises, for example, are among the ones that she and her husband implemented as they “reprogrammed our thinking to stop avoiding failure and, instead, envisioned our success.” Her book delivers an array of useful prompts, examples, and exercises for readers to chart their own “path to abundance” journeys.

Inspiring and actionable advice to help readers envision and achieve desired goals.

Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023

ISBN: 9798988635338

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Mad Muse Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2023

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GREENLIGHTS

A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.

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All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.

“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.

A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020

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THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.

A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.

Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”

The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5

Page Count: 580

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018

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