A short collection of truisms that only the most terminally lost might find useful.
Singh proposes keys to success in this brief business guide.
The author, a consultant in the trading/investing industry, orients his motivational book around four central principles—knowledge, patience, confidence, and discipline—and ties them to 10 “success keys” under headings including “Invest in Yourself,” “Keep Your Word,” and “Choose Happiness.” “Right here, right now I’m going to share with you the qualities and attitudes you need to have in order to acquire the knowledge and skills you need to win,” Singh writes, assuring his readers that they may already possess such qualities lying dormant within themselves. “Let’s wake them up,” he continues, “and see what happens.” He expands on each of his general headings, touting the benefits of the characteristics he’s encouraging: “Patience draws the line that keeps you from crossing over from calmness to anger,” he writes, “a place where hypertension, ulcers, heart diseases, and other disagreeable maladies await.” Each of the book’s sections includes both a to-do list of simple tasks to try (“Make a small promise to yourself and keep it every day for the next week”) a “big challenge” designed to push the limits of the precepts that have been laid out. Some of the author’s observations have the pleasant ring of common sense. But all of the common sense in the world can’t save the bulk of the book from reading like a parody of shallow self-help motivational guides: Singh tells readers to Google self-discipline and see if any articles appeal to them, instructs them to write down five things that they’re grateful for, and repeatedly admits that they already know all of the platitudes he’s going to impart. It all gives the book the feeling of the first draft of a bad PowerPoint presentation.
A short collection of truisms that only the most terminally lost might find useful.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2018
ISBN: 9781642370942
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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