A compassionate and thoroughly involving guide to handling your dreams when they come true.
Gassner Otting, founder and CEO of Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, provides a systematic look at what does—and doesn’t—come after achieving success.
“Wonderhell” is the author’s term for a phenomenon that’s probably widespread despite seldom being discussed: the strange gap that sometimes opens up between the achievement of a goal and whatever comes right after it. “Wonderhell is the self-taught sales rep who wasn’t sure she could close even one deal and now is striving to reach the platinum-level corporate award she thought was reserved only for others,” Gassner Otting explains. “It’s the eager entrepreneur who started his own business only to realize that its explosive growth demands an understanding of infrastructure and operations that he doesn’t yet possess.” Wonderhell is you, she clarifies, “in the space between your past success and your next accomplishment—between who you were and who you just realized you can become.” This is a tricky idea to pin down, and the author places a good deal of emphasis on the individual case studies she provides, relating stories of people who strove to build something at great personal cost and who faced many future challenges. One such story comes from Melissa, who was spurred by the illness of her son to found a successful cancer foundation even though this meant she “held a lot of little hands in dying days, consoled a lot of parents in their worst hours, attended a lot of devastating funerals.” Gassner Otting counterbalances these personal stories with her own insights about the illusions people tend to embrace about meeting their goals and gives advice on how to dispel them.
The personal profiles the author includes are uniformly fascinating reading, but her analyses of them are the consistent highlights of the book. Time and again in these pages, she stresses personal accountability and the need to be completely cleareyed about what is and isn’t being said. She cautions her readers about the dead ends triathlete Travis McKenzie refers to as “look-good goals,” which aren’t sincerely motivated. Pursuing such goals, she warns, will likely be self-defeating. “The truth is that when you find yourself running toward what you want instead of running away,” she writes, “you will miraculously find the time. The stress will turn to excitement.” Gassner Otting offers advice on scaling, perspective, humility, and a wide array of other elements that come into play in wonderhell, including the nagging perfectionism that can, if not properly controlled, lead to high levels of burnout, loneliness, stress, and depression. This spotlight on the very human self-care aspect of handling unexpected success is also illustrated by the profiles she shares, in which one entrepreneur after another is blindsided to some extent by their own success and must figure out what to do when things are suddenly breaking their way. This is a risky narrative move on the author’s part—accidental millionaires seldom make for relatable protagonists—but through a combination of strong storytelling skills and an unfailing instinct for drawing the right lessons from any scenario, she delivers the invaluable business and personal advice every budding entrepreneur hopes to need one day. A compassionate and thoroughly involving guide to handling your dreams when they come true.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781646871223
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
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
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
