A modular and uplifting plan for making and reaching goals.
A debut book offers a step-by-step guide to achieving a wide variety of objectives.
In this work, Jones delivers a short, simple breakdown of seven key steps to attaining success. These range from finding a “goal partner” to help sort out the choice of paths (“Life is just easier when you have someone who genuinely loves and supports you,” she points out) to utilizing an array of methods, from yoga to prayer to meditation, to connect with a personal higher power “so that you are clear on your life’s purpose and the goals you should strive for while you are here on earth.” Every step is described in quick detail and followed up with clarifying review questions and a list of “assignments” designed to help readers feel directly involved in focusing on what they really want and how they wish to achieve it (“The assignment for step three is to visualize yourself achieving your goals. If you are very familiar with visualization, please tackle this exercise with a fresh new outlook”). Jones keeps her advice as broad-based as possible, stressing the basics of passion over the specifics of any particular aspiration (“It can be anything you desire,” she writes, “but it has to be something”). The counsel in these pages remains unfailingly upbeat and encouraging; Jones addresses the conflicts and worries of her readers directly, including dealing with those who are unsure they have the time or ability to remap their lives according to the kinds of steps outlined here. “You have time for things you choose to have time for,” she insists. “You are in charge of your destiny.” This element of empowerment, for instance, underscores one of the work’s most substantial segments, on managing money and debt. But the idea runs throughout the accessible book, from deciding on a life trajectory to finding the right people and inspirations to execute it. Everything Jones advises is grounded in simple common sense, but that trait is helpfully and enthusiastically presented, with all the usual self-help flab cut out.
A modular and uplifting plan for making and reaching goals.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4917-0806-4
Page Count: 82
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
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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