A sweet, simple system to foster positive personal action.
A self-empowerment speaker shares techniques and stories about harnessing the power of thought in this debut self-help guide.
Colorado-based artist Elliott was “drowning with an issue in my life” when a woman named Judy Goodman introduced him to visualization and other psychological concepts to better manage his thoughts. Elliott then “sent” flowers and other gifts to people by visualizing them. He “had doubts like everyone else,” but soon realized that “Your thoughts create virtually every object and concept around you,” and that “what you are thinking directs the path of your life.” In this book, he outlines his system of fostering the “law of attraction,” beginning with the first step—envisioning one’s future as a “Movie” using these lead-in words: “I am in my future and in my future...” He encourages embracing gratitude and avoiding fear and worry, and offers advice on removing negativity from one’s language in the second step. As noted in this book’s title, Elliott doesn’t offer a third step because, he says, one’s thought power is “already happening” and his method merely helps to “increase the chances” of manifesting one’s desires. He shares several people’s stories of successful manifesting, including his own; in one example, when he was stressed about selling his house, Elliott envisioned selling it at a price he could find acceptable and then got an offer. Elliott brings an unsurprisingly cheerful tone to this positive-thinking tome but also some refreshingly nuanced elements, including a warning to expect the occasional “unexpected outcome” and to modulate or even delay one’s desires. His “Movie” concept is an easy, relatable exercise, as is his suggestion to list seven things for which one is grateful. Although this author remains a bit mysterious about details of his own life (such as the specific issue that he was “drowning with”), this doesn’t completely detract from the overall narrative. The book also includes several workbook pages at the end.
A sweet, simple system to foster positive personal action.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5148-7542-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Solace Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Clever and accessibly conversational, Manson reminds us to chill out, not sweat the small stuff, and keep hope for a better...
The popular blogger and author delivers an entertaining and thought-provoking third book about the importance of being hopeful in terrible times.
“We are a culture and a people in need of hope,” writes Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, 2016, etc.). With an appealing combination of gritty humor and straightforward prose, the author floats the idea of drawing strength and hope from a myriad of sources in order to tolerate the “incomprehensibility of your existence.” He broadens and illuminates his concepts through a series of hypothetical scenarios based in contemporary reality. At the dark heart of Manson’s guide is the “Uncomfortable Truth,” which reiterates our cosmic insignificance and the inevitability of death, whether we blindly ignore or blissfully embrace it. The author establishes this harsh sentiment early on, creating a firm foundation for examining the current crisis of hope, how we got here, and what it means on a larger scale. Manson’s referential text probes the heroism of Auschwitz infiltrator Witold Pilecki and the work of Isaac Newton, Nietzsche, Einstein, and Immanuel Kant, as the author explores the mechanics of how hope is created and maintained through self-control and community. Though Manson takes many serpentine intellectual detours, his dark-humored wit and blunt prose are both informative and engaging. He is at his most convincing in his discussions about the fallibility of religious beliefs, the modern world’s numerous shortcomings, deliberations over the “Feeling Brain” versus the “Thinking Brain,” and the importance of striking a happy medium between overindulging in and repressing emotions. Although we live in a “couch-potato-pundit era of tweetstorms and outrage porn,” writes Manson, hope springs eternal through the magic salves of self-awareness, rational thinking, and even pain, which is “at the heart of all emotion.”
Clever and accessibly conversational, Manson reminds us to chill out, not sweat the small stuff, and keep hope for a better world alive.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-288843-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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