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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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