THE PRINCIPLE OF 18

A life guide organized around five major stages.

Danon, a Columbia University Certified Life Coach and founder of a successful consulting company, puts forward a new vision for personal development, one that flies in the face of many rise-and-grind business motivation books by drawing a broader, longer map of what constitutes success. Danon makes no small claims about his system, which he says will “minimize your regrets, decrease your worries, and enable you to lead a joyous, meaningful life.” Whether this is warranted or not, Danon’s outline is intriguingly blocked off into five 18-year segments—“The Dreamer,” “The Explorer,” “The Builder,” “The Mentor,” and “The Giver”—each of which has its own restrictions, priorities, and joys. But Danon stresses that the positives of his system hold true at every stage. “One of the key benefits of allowing yourself to explore your options for 18 years is that it will minimize your regrets—and the fewer regrets, the better, since you never know what life may throw at you,” he writes. “If you wait around for something important to happen to you, you may never get to do it.” In keeping with Danon’s long experience as a coach and motivator, his prose is bright and compulsively readable. And the main strength of his approach is that it far more closely conforms to everyday lived experience than most of the more hustle-oriented volumes of this kind. He reiterates that learning takes time, and opportunities flow as much from chance and experience as from blue ocean strategy (creating new demand rather than battling for market share). Danon is at his most interesting when he’s leaning into this individualistic bent, declaring business-world heresies like: “There is no need to try to make serious money before you turn 36.” This is a skillful rearrangement of the paradigm.

Genuinely thought-provoking strategies for the various stages of life.