CHASING THE HIGH

An entrepreneur and addict shares the lessons he gleaned while getting his life back on track.

In this debut self-help book, Dash uses his experience with both addiction (gambling and drugs) and business (founding and running a company with international operations) as a case study in how to break bad habits, foster self-awareness, and develop a healthy attitude toward all aspects of life. His story is divided into themed chapters, each concluding with a “Lessons Learned” section that makes the readers’ takeaways explicit. The author explains how he spent years maintaining a successful facade, despite the financial and health challenges caused by his addictions, until he had a moment of epiphany and began to address the underlying issues in his life. With the help of supportive communities including Gamblers Anonymous and a collection of fellow entrepreneurs, Dash came to understand his troubled relationship with money, found positive results from cultivating a sense of “flow,” and decided that authenticity was one of his core values. But the path to self-awareness and stability was not a straight line, and the author’s openness about his backsliding (“Even though I stopped gambling, I made my situation worse with cross-addictions”) and frequent loss of perspective is one of the book’s strengths. The manual’s prescriptions are often standard elements of the self-help genre (“If you want results, you have to act when an opportunity for a new perspective presents itself”), but Dash’s engaging writing style makes him an effective messenger. Although the earnest volume deals more with personal growth than business topics, it effectively draws connections between problems in both spheres (“Enablers don’t just surround addicts; they can surround business people too”), giving readers clear opportunities to apply its lessons to their own lives. The author’s embrace of “flow” will please fans of the Law of Attraction (“I knew, living in flow, it would come together, and it did”), making the work most likely to appeal to readers of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. But even skeptics are likely to be won over by Dash’s endearing voice.

A useful and heartfelt guide to learning from a business executive’s mistakes.