Genuinely thought-provoking strategies for the various stages of life.
A life guide organized around five major stages.
Danon, a Columbia University Certified Life Coach and founder of a successful consulting company, puts forward a new vision for personal development, one that flies in the face of many rise-and-grind business motivation books by drawing a broader, longer map of what constitutes success. Danon makes no small claims about his system, which he says will “minimize your regrets, decrease your worries, and enable you to lead a joyous, meaningful life.” Whether this is warranted or not, Danon’s outline is intriguingly blocked off into five 18-year segments—“The Dreamer,” “The Explorer,” “The Builder,” “The Mentor,” and “The Giver”—each of which has its own restrictions, priorities, and joys. But Danon stresses that the positives of his system hold true at every stage. “One of the key benefits of allowing yourself to explore your options for 18 years is that it will minimize your regrets—and the fewer regrets, the better, since you never know what life may throw at you,” he writes. “If you wait around for something important to happen to you, you may never get to do it.” In keeping with Danon’s long experience as a coach and motivator, his prose is bright and compulsively readable. And the main strength of his approach is that it far more closely conforms to everyday lived experience than most of the more hustle-oriented volumes of this kind. He reiterates that learning takes time, and opportunities flow as much from chance and experience as from blue ocean strategy (creating new demand rather than battling for market share). Danon is at his most interesting when he’s leaning into this individualistic bent, declaring business-world heresies like: “There is no need to try to make serious money before you turn 36.” This is a skillful rearrangement of the paradigm.
Genuinely thought-provoking strategies for the various stages of life.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73629-944-9
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Blue Branch Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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