A stirring success guide that combines practical wisdom with colorful and rousing prose.
Success in sports, business and other aspects of life depends on your mental outlook and habits of thought, according to this muscular self-help book.
Arguing that “life is 90% above the shoulders”—that is, determined by what’s in your head, not your body or external circumstances—Nacey, a sports marketing executive, contends that it’s mainly our own lassitude, fear, lack of focus, and self-defeating thoughts that prevent us from achieving our dreams. He draws on the insights of Olympic athletes and from his own experiences in Ironman Triathlons and other competitions to construct a Mental Mastery Pyramid of techniques to enable readers to power through obstacles and pain when their instincts are begging them to stop. The author recommends breaking down seemingly insurmountable problems into small, manageable chunks as a way of getting over the hump of inertia (he found that setting a goal of simply putting on his running shoes in the pre-dawn darkness generated enough momentum to carry him into hitting the road). Nacey suggests undertaking measured doses of discomfort—like a cold shower in the morning—to accustom the mind to doing hard things, and to rewire the brain and improve its plasticity by embracing new cognitive challenges. (He notes that the fiendishly difficult navigational training given to London taxi drivers causes their brain’s memory centers in the hippocampus to grow.) The author urges readers to replace anxieties about failure and inadequacy with positive narratives and to visualize success in vivid, concrete scenarios. (“I visualized the gold around my neck every night until my brain couldn’t imagine any other outcome,” recalls skier Alex Ferreira.) Nacey also enjoins his audience to cultivate a sense of gratitude for opportunities and a sense of obligation to give back to others.
Nacey grounds his ideas in an erudite but lucid mix of neurobiology, performance science, and cognitive behavioral therapy, applying them to a range of problems from athletic training to meeting workplace deadlines to overcoming stage fright in public speaking. The author distills his advice into snappy aphorisms—“Life Rewards Action, Not Overthinking”—and provides readers with practical regimens for calming anxieties, exiting ruts, or switching from downbeat ruminations to optimistic hopes. Nacey writes with nuance and insight about the ordinary but powerful psychological barriers that paralyze resolve: “The snooze button sits there, smug, whispering, Come on. Just five more minutes,” he writes of the universal struggle to get up in the morning. “Your mind joins the mutiny: No one will know. It’s too early. Too cold. Too much.” When he recounts his tougher ordeals, his writing takes on an epic, visceral intensity: “My legs felt like concrete pillars, each step a negotiation between a body desperate to stop and a mind that refused to listen,” he writes of an Ironman contest. “Each breath burned. Salt crystals formed white patterns on my skin. My heartbeat pounded in my ears like a tribal drum, drowning out everything but a single thought: One more step. Just one more step.” The result is a captivating homage to true grit and the drive to overcome one’s own limitations.
A stirring success guide that combines practical wisdom with colorful and rousing prose.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798998617409
Page Count: 262
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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