Wisdom from time immemorial—take it a day at a time and moderation in all things—reworked by Arnold to morph broad goals...
Goldman Sachs managing director and technology leader Arnold tenders some advice you may have heard from your kindergarten teacher: Focus, and take smaller bites.
The author does not claim to be offering revolutionary insights—indeed, at times, it feels as though she is reinventing the wheel—but she does have a calming and anecdotally rich way of presenting the idea that small changes lead to big change. Why do we fail to attain our well-intentioned resolutions? Why do, according to one study, 88 percent of resolutions falter and fizzle, raining guilt and demoralization down on our heads? Very simply, writes Arnold, we fail to be strategic and targeted. The author is low-key in an encouraging way, and she lays out a method of conduct that is small but meaningful, a compact commitment designed to overpower a precise target and deliver the immediate benefits of achievement—in other words, a sustainable act of willpower, working from the edge of the issue to the heart of any matter. “Microresolutions,” writes the author, “are designed to help you repeat a behavior until it becomes habit.” Arnold presents a number of guiding lights: Micro moves must be easy and explicit (you up the ante when you are ready—don’t let “scope creep” make you take on too much too early); an immediate payoff is important, and it resonates with satisfaction; and it must be personally achieved without relying on others. Then comes anecdotal material about how Arnold and others went about various projects: getting more sleep, getting fit, controlling eating and honest communication (though not necessarily the art of honest conversation—that’s a whole book in itself).
Wisdom from time immemorial—take it a day at a time and moderation in all things—reworked by Arnold to morph broad goals into manageable, measurable microresolutions.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01534-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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