A hardheaded, no-nonsense guide to living an attentive, effective life.
Vandervort notes that an unexamined life is not worth living and teaches readers how to pay attention.
“What is it that makes the top 1 percent of the population more successful than the other 99 percent?” They make it happen, says the author. What is “it”? Life, love, luck, family, health, wealth and happiness—the whole caboodle. But Vandervort doesn’t just get the blood pumping. He gives guidance and declares that the responsibility for leading a gratifying life belongs to the reader: “As the captain of your ship, you have set the course to your destiny.” Each chapter ends with a summary and what might be called a checklist/quiz: Are goals measurable, achievable and results-oriented? These action steps force one to focus. The guide also encourages readers to question their own assumptions. For example, Vandervort asks, “What are your political views, and why do you hold these particular views?” He encourages the reader to write these views down and offers guidance on other issues as well, including establishing a professional team within the workplace, considering estate planning, locating and reviewing insurance policies, analyzing when and when not to use technology and assessing friendships. The overall message is to remain vigilant, be aware. David Foster Wallace might have said those words with more empathy, but few have said them with more vehemence. Vandervort is a nuts-and-bolts man, even when talking about birth control, budgeting or recovering old skills. He believes it’s all up to the reader. “Make no excuses: you can achieve whatever it is that you want out of life, but it is up to you and only you to make it happen,” he says. Giving up is not an option, though everyone will fail time and again, suggests the author. The point is to learn from those failures and be that much more prepared for the next encounter.
A hardheaded, no-nonsense guide to living an attentive, effective life.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493713530
Page Count: 190
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2014
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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