A warm, engaging guide that inspires readers to look at the concept of busyness in a whole new way.
Sullivan argues that busyness can be the enemy of productivity and shows readers how to streamline their efforts for maximum impact.
The author, a self-admitted “recovering Busyness addict,” details how her own sense of having to always be occupied negatively affected her life. Sullivan shares both personal and professional stories ranging from the serious (“destroyed my marriage”) to the laugh-out-loud funny (“accidentally ate cat food, mistaking it for pistachios”) about the journey that led to her current role as a keynote speaker, trainer, and thought-leader for her SheCAN! nonprofit organization. She cites various negative consequences of being overly busy, including compromised thinking, a tendency toward small-picture reasoning, and added stress. Sullivan encourages too-busy readers to change tactics, such as focusing on values instead of goals: “You can’t be accountable for a goal because a goal only comes at the end. You can only be accountable to the daily actions that lead to it. But actions are not inspiring on their own. You need to be inspired first to take action. And you get inspired when the actions align with your values.” Interactive charts allow readers to participate in the lessons, which ultimately culminate in the three-step “Busy-Busting Process” (which includes “Subtraction,” “Mojo Making,” and “Values Vibing”) that Sullivan details in-depth. While some suggestions may come across as easier said than done (her solution to excessive multitasking being “just DON’T”), the vast majority of the author’s advice is practical, educational, and, most importantly, manageable. Sullivan is able to tackle both big and small changes with equal vigor; her “happiness rituals” represent minor daily changes, while her suggestions on how to determine your values (and what to do with them once you do) obviously take a bit more time and effort. Through it all, the author’s amiable tone conveys an ideal blend of authority and self-deprecation that makes self-improvement a pleasure.
A warm, engaging guide that inspires readers to look at the concept of busyness in a whole new way.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798891382657
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
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