A well-written guide to establishing confidence.
An entrepreneur advises colleagues suffering from imposter syndrome.
In this debut business book, Kelso acknowledges his own battles with imposter syndrome (or “The Impostor,” as he dubs it) and offers advice for others facing the same challenges to personal and professional success. The author, who founded a consulting business, vividly describes the feeling of being out of his depth, which he confronts even after years at the helm of a company: “I suspected they were just being nice, the way a group of football players lets a little kid run with the ball and everyone pretends to be unable to tackle him.” With examples from his own career and those of others, the book explores how imposter syndrome manifests, its primary causes, and strategies for mitigating its effects. Kelso explains how developing a network of mentors, mentees, and peers in similar circumstances can help entrepreneurs deal with valid concerns and move past their insecurities while not overcorrecting for imposter syndrome and suffering instead from clueless overconfidence. Each chapter concludes with a concise bulleted list summarizing the main takeaways, making the volume useful for quick reference as well as in-depth reading. Kelso is an animated and enthusiastic writer, and the text is full of motivational lines (“When you hear The Impostor saying, ‘You’re about to fake something,’ you should translate that to mean, ‘You’re about to learn something’ ”). While the author is explicit about writing a book aimed at fellow entrepreneurs, with the examples drawn from the leaders of small and growing businesses and advice targeted to them, readers in other fields are likely to find the content helpful as well. Despite the focus on business, Kelso encourages readers to discover a definition of success that extends beyond the boardroom and the bank account, arguing that a holistic approach to achievement is crucial in coping with imposter syndrome. Readers already familiar with strategies for managing the syndrome may find the work too heavy on the basics, but for many, the author’s empathetic and energetic approach does an effective job of concisely presenting valuable and actionable information on a relevant topic.
A well-written guide to establishing confidence.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-947297-23-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dexterity
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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