Prudent, pragmatic guidance for those who can weather the author’s bombastic writing.
A myth-busting account of the hard realities of successful entrepreneurship.
Winget loves entrepreneurism—he’s devoted his professional life to it—but most people aren’t prepared for its demands. Unfortunately, owning one’s own business has become overly romanticized, and the author takes an uncompromising if rhetorically strident aim at “woo-woo thinking”; i.e., the language of self-empowerment that engenders unrealistic goals. Running a successful business, the author implores, is not about passion or love or a visionary idea. Neither is it about freedom—business owners generally don’t have any. And a desire to change the world is quixotic hubris—the world is intractably resistant to reform. The only sound motivation is profit, achieved by delivering a product that customers will buy or solving a problem painful enough they will pay to make it disappear. The author combines an unflinching wake-up call to idealistic dreamers with an overview of the onerous obligations of the business owner—this book is meant to edify and instruct and also scare off those who are unlikely to succeed. For example: “Love cannot be the reason you go into business.” Also, Winget provides a wealth of sound entrepreneurial counsel customized for the beginner and covering everything from social media to time management. An experienced and successful business owner, the author incisively analyzes the differences between an entrepreneurial hit and miss; the former is a salable response to a real consumer need, and the latter is a response to the business owner’s personal needs. The tone here sometimes veers toward tendentious, and the book isn’t free of empty clichés. “Lighten up! Don’t get your panties in a wad over every little thing that happens.” Still, for the reader thinking of launching their first business, this could be a helpful splash of cold water.
Prudent, pragmatic guidance for those who can weather the author’s bombastic writing.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-72-250511-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: G&D Media
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
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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