A thorough, sometimes overoptimistic tool kit for overcoming self-sabotage.
An unflinching self-help guide urges readers to actively guide their own stories.
Daniel, the director of the Center for Cinesomatic Development, wants readers to acknowledge that they are stuck. The software entrepreneur and author doesn’t mean physically; rather, he believes that life’s experiences are shaped, even burdened, by the mythologies and excuses we create for ourselves: “Your story is a filter of perception itself. It distorts what you see because you’re looking through the world through the lens of the story. All the problems you see are seen through the beliefs of your story.” His intention here is to help readers rewrite their scripts. There is no coddling; Daniel lays out in 18 chapters split into two parts—“How You Got Here” and “Moving Forward”—several methods for not only changing bad habits, but also for serious self-examination. He uses psychology, spirituality, and even mathematics to force readers to confront various mental obstacles—narcissism, self-delusion, etc. There are refreshing suggestions that challenge self-help tropes and include ways to counter the darker side of self-love and to rethink the value of failure. Daniel encourages annual rereadings of the book, which is useful; at 400 packed pages, it may require some note taking. The weakest aspects of the book are Daniel’s own anecdotes of victimhood and self-growth, which don’t read as inspirational: Daniel, a White, cisgender, straight man, was bullied for having warts on his fingers as a child, and, for a while, smiling fully made him “feel gay.” Readers of marginalized identities who face structural or systemic obstacles may not always agree with his rationale nor escape their suffering as easily as he suggests.
A thorough, sometimes overoptimistic tool kit for overcoming self-sabotage.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953617-03-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Metaheal
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
