Your Passport to HMT
by Prakash Shah
Shah presents a guide to achieving the most important things in life.
The acronym in the title of this nonfiction debut stands for “health, money, and time,” which are characterized by the author as the central aspirations of human life, the things that really matter. In discussing these things—specifically, how to get them and how to maintain them—Shah aims his advice principally at younger readers who are trying to sort out life’s priorities for the first time—but everything he writes is applicable to older readers as well. (The book has a concluding section specifically addressed to parents and teachers, although parts of other sections urge parents to “teach your kids about civic sense, moral values, honesty, respect, finance, leadership, and becoming active on all fronts.”) Virtually all of his guidance revolves around two other sets of initials: AUC (Areas Under a person’s Control) and ABC (Areas Beyond a person’s Control). Discerning the difference between these categories and adjusting one’s actions accordingly is, in the author’s contention, the single most important step toward securing health, money, and time. “Worrying about how others behave, act, or react is pointless—it’s an ABC,” he writes. “Instead, focusing on how you respond with a smile, kindness, and positivity is your AUC.” He maps these concepts onto various facets of life, from work to entertainment to health to relationships, stressing to his younger readers that they’ll find HMT unsatisfying if they get them too late in life to enjoy them; Shah cautions that it’s important that his readers get an early start in developing the knowledge and discipline they’ll need to take control of their lives.
The text’s formatting—a series of prose-blocks with no paragraph indentations and occasionally no clear breaks between them—can distractingly make the reading experience feel more like phone-scrolling. A great deal of Shah’s counsel takes the form of aphoristic truisms (about the virtues of hard work and the importance of healthy relationships, for example) that were already cliches centuries ago, many of them presented here as though nobody had ever taught them before. But the author’s simple, straightforward enthusiasm is also a strength of the book, which is, in part, aimed at readers who may not have had the basics spelled out to them in this kind of detail. These readers are presented with plenty of warnings about the dangers of indulging themselves in the present at the expense of the future. Shah writes, for instance, about a young woman named Jahnavi who neglected her studies in favor of her mountaineering passion, only to end up 10 years later “living in Bangalore, sitting at home taking care of her kids as a housewife while her husband works in a technology firm for 12 hours.” (The moral of the story: “If you can’t take the pain of preparation, you have to take the pain of consequences.”) Some of these examples might strike younger readers as odd or even self-contradictory, but Shah’s consistent message will no doubt do this audience good: Don’t waste time and energy worrying about things you can’t control, devote your energy to improving the things you can control, and keep the big-picture perspective about the things that matter most.A derivative but passionate call for establishing productive priorities.