A college administrator discusses the mindset and actions needed for a successful college and post-college life in this debut self-help guide.
As part of a task force assessing at-risk students early in his career, Clark was “amazed…there was no correlation between those considered at-risk and those that actually dropped out” and eventually determined that there was “a common thread in those who stayed versus those who quit…students who had or acquired a sense of purpose.” In this guide, he provides discussion, tools, and exercises to develop such purpose, using a business model as a starting point, noting “that the average student has never sat down to write out a plan defining what they want to get out of their college education, their college experience and, more broadly, their life.” His chapters alternate between “Core Matters” and “Practical Matters,” with emphasis on the former, which include discovering and creating one’s “reality,” determining one’s belief and value systems, and building a vision for one’s life. “Practical Matters” include getting started at college by understanding how one learns best; networking with peers; avoiding unprotected sex while in college; and preparing to graduate by beginning a job search and practicing interviews at least six months beforehand. Clark also dedicates a chapter to leadership that defines its qualities (including empathy and trust) and underscores that one must be a decisive leader in one’s own life. Debut author Clark offers inspiring springboard guidance that applies to aspiring college students as well as other striving applicants in life. Although this book is mostly formatted as a narrative essay, Clark also provides helpful information boxes that highlight key precepts, illustrations that showcase life road maps, and exercises that allow readers to engage with his ideas, including one on “taming your words.” Although readers may need to consult other college-related guides to get more information regarding “practical matters,” Clark provides useful, universal foundational guidance here while also offering endearing, relatable revelations from his own life story.
Motivating, big-picture advice for college and beyond.Pub Date: March 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5076-8396-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SELF-HELP
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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. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Categories: PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP
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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 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Categories: PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP
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