THE SUCCESS GUIDEBOOK

Life coachand entrepreneurHamilton-Guarino offers a motivational guide for achieving success.

Hamilton-Guarino, the founder of the Best Ever You Network—which produces motivational guidebooks, podcasts, and magazines—aims to inspire readers to “Create awesomeness within” in this book. She begins with her own family’s rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story, which led to her decision to quit her jobin the finance sector and create the Best Ever You brand. Her strategies for success fall into three categories (“Visualize Your Success,” “Actualize Your Success,” and “Amplify Your Success”) and consist of 10 factors, including imagining what success looks like; believing in oneself; focusing one’s vision and energy; taking action toward achieving one’s goal; and six others, ending with toasting one’s success. Hamilton-Guarino illustrates her concepts with real-life anecdotes about successful people, such as Jesse Cole and Emily Cole (the founders of the exhibition baseball team, the Savannah Bananas) and Georgetown University baseball head coach Edwin Thompson. A recurring “Stories from the Heart” section features first-person accounts by others with impressive achievements, and “Points to Ponder” and journal prompts provide encouraging thought exercises. Hamilton-Guarino’s most notable contribution is her broadening of the definition of success; rather than using “conventional measurements such as data or the dollars in your bank account,” she asserts, one can see success “reflected in the smiles that brighten our faces and the peace that settles in our hearts.” Readers looking for an introduction to basic self-help ideas will find that this book does the job. However, those who are already familiar with the genre may feel that much of the advice draws on clichés, such as “Reach for the stars!” and “Believe in yourself.” Other encouragements, such as “Live your superpowers,” may strike some readers as saccharine. The text also suffers from excessive verbosity at times: “Success to me is in the relationships you have, the bonds you create, the network, and collaborations, and treating everyone you encounter with a sense of grace, compassion, elegance, kindness, peace, and genuine interest.”

An earnest self-help manual that treads overly familiar ground.