A passionate but somewhat shortsighted book about maximizing one’s time and money.
Krohn’s self-help book outlines time- and wealth-management strategies.
The author, using a time machine analogy, advises readers on growing their wealth and making better use of their time; Krohn asserts that “time is the most precious commodity, meaning that TIME MASTERY should be the goal, not money mastery.” Thus, one must “find a mathematically superior way to value time and determine how to spend it.” By harnessing the power of hindsight and time “arbitrage,” Krohn asserts that readers can “live a thousand lives.” He introduces his three phases of money progression: Save (20% of your income), invest, and spend (on both yourself and in giving to others). The author posits that, by taking control of one’s “yeses” and “nos,” one can better leverage one’s time and create more happiness, health, and wealth. Krohn conjures a phoropter (readers will be familiar with these devices from visits to the optometrist) that views decisions through five lenses: logic, money, joy, energy, and intuition. Throughout the book, Krohn provides scenarios, algorithms, and worksheets for implementing his strategies. However, some of his arguments ignore the many ways successful people may have benefitted from privilege, nepotism, or other inequitable means of wealth-building that trump simple time-management hacks. Assertions that “material wealth is simply a by-product of the right yeses and nos” fail to recognize that not every person gets a say in their circumstances (per the author, “there is no room for victims at the highest levels”). Krohn’s perspective is dyadic: People are either rich or poor, “frugal savers,” or “reckless spenders,” overly busy or balanced. That said, there are useful analytic tools here that may help people plagued with “analysis paralysis” or those stuck on the hamster wheel of regrettable decisions.
A passionate but somewhat shortsighted book about maximizing one’s time and money.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798891381223
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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