Helpful traditional and contemporary techniques for experiencing more joy in life.
A guide offers daily practices for cultivating more cheerfulness in everyday life.
Shah presents himself as a driven overachiever and successful executive living a busy, stress-filled existence and lamenting that “life became serious work, and fun was the exception” until his father’s sudden death in 2013. At the funeral, the memories shared by others as well as his own highlighted his father’s unusually joyful, giving personality. Struck by the metaphor of life as the mere “dash” between birth and death dates, the author made an immediate, personal commitment to revive the experience of joy in his own life and help others do the same. He observes that despite being essential to human well-being, “joy in life” is the one area that has not improved despite all the amazing technological and medical advances of the past century. Instead, people are caught up in an endless “STORM” cycle, struggling with “stress, tiredness, overwhelmedness, resignation, and misery.” To address the problem, Shah has developed “Joynetix,” a series of concepts and practices to reduce stress and anxiety and improve physical and mental well-being by intentionally reconnecting with inner joy. Thirteen chapters cover practices ranging from traditional breathwork and yoga, through smiling, listening, and dancing, to energy medicine and tapping, with detailed explanations and instructions. A “Jolt” is a small daily practice to “unlock your joy potential” in three steps: “notice—reset—generate.” Shah’s clear, businesslike style, with numerous scientific references, will likely appeal to readers who don’t usually enjoy the self-help genre. Like many popular motivational authors, he sprinkles inspirational quotations; catchy acronyms, like “FEAR: Fictional Experiences Appearing Real”; and wordplay, including “joy-firmation, “joy-cabulary,” “joy-nal” and “we are human beings, not human doings,” throughout the text. Much of his philosophy is drawn from well-established sources, including insight meditation, “laughter is the best medicine,” and active listening principles, along with some more New Age–y material, such as assigning precise resonance frequencies in Hertz to different emotions. Readers will take away a broad selection of uplifting ideas and useful techniques whether or not they choose to implement the full Joynetix program. A final section titled “Inspiration” provides a seven-page list of recommended books for further reading.
Helpful traditional and contemporary techniques for experiencing more joy in life.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982284-76-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: BalboaPressUK
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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