A winningly personal and uplifting call to believing in your own inner underdog.
Pham discusses the benefits of setbacks and being underestimated in this business/motivation guide.
The author, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and pharmaceutical CEO, observes that “being an underdog means people don’t expect much from you—certainly not a success story.” To be an underdog is to be counted out and to be equated with failure; drawing on his own history as a refugee from war-torn Vietnam, a trailblazing Vietnamese-heritage U.S. military figure, and a successful entrepreneur, Pham makes a convincing argument for the familiar business-literature notion of failure as a blessing in disguise. “If failure makes you more resilient, then it becomes a source of gratitude,” he writes. “If failure teaches you the greatest lesson of your career, then it becomes a source of gratitude.” In the author’s view, underdogs enjoy an unexpected creative latitude because they free themselves from the ways other people define success—they’re free to chart their own courses, using the tools that failure has sharpened. “None of your own experiences are wasted if you see them as resources for confidence and credibility,” Pham asserts, referencing, among many other personal memories, the traumatic loss of his father to cancer. “For him to fight and survive the prison camps for so long only to succumb to the world’s top killer—without an alternative treatment,” he writes, “felt like an immense injustice”; this experience fostered a sense of mission that helped to push the author into achieving pharmaceutical breakthroughs. The moving personal stories intertwine very effectively with the more generalized insights Pham draws from them; he’s got the on-page charisma of a born storyteller, and his example will doubtlessly encourage other underdogs. “If I could fly into an active combat zone,” he writes, “I could certainly walk into a doctor’s office and handle a difficult receptionist.” Readers will feel they can do likewise.
A winningly personal and uplifting call to believing in your own inner underdog.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882157
Page Count: 199
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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