An inspirational—and more than a little grandiose—series of business world insights.
A guide offers advice on achieving success in business and life.
In his book, Proctor (It’s Not About the Money, 2018) invites readers to imagine traveling around the world and talking to the wealthiest, happiest people. If they asked all these folks the same question—what is the key to your success?—their answers would always boil down to the same things. The author then asks: Wouldn’t you like to know what those things are? Proctor lays out those answers in his manual, broken down into 12 “principles” grouped around core ideas. The author opens by assuring his readers that they were born with the keys to success and only need to realize that in order to begin living their best lives. “Misunderstanding this part keeps the masses in the foothills,” he writes, “wandering aimlessly, never climbing their mountains, frequently frustrated, often angry, and too often miserably disappointed with themselves and their accomplishments.” This delineation between winners and losers runs throughout the work, with Proctor asserting that “decision makers go to the top, and those who do not make decisions seem to go nowhere.” He raises several key general concepts, like “goals,” “persistence,” and “creativity,” and in each case quotes from business inspiration standards like Winston Churchill and delivers wide-reaching insights and encouragements. Some of these will strike longtime readers of business books as very familiar—things like “risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing” and “you cannot escape from a prison if you do not know you are in one.” Less familiar—and more questionable—are much broader claims like “We are all spiritual beings. There is no one person who has more power, more knowledge or access to greater resources than any other person.” Or “I am responsible for my life, for my feelings, and for every result I get.” These extravagant contentions are perhaps not out of line with a book that asserts: “You are one with the infinite.”
An inspirational—and more than a little grandiose—series of business world insights.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72250-191-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: G&D Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2019
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
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