A brightly crafted, overlong diversion.
How to make yourself lucky.
Seneca said it best: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” In this genial, upbeat overview, former Parade editor-in-chief Kaplan (The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life, 2015, etc.) and risk-taking expert Marsh offer stories of those lucky moments in the lives of countless people. “To get lucky, you have to be in a place where opportunities are going to be around you,” said Marsh in one of the authors’ regular weekly conversations, which drive the narrative. Kaplan, a veteran journalist, is often out conducting interviews with famous and successful (and lucky) people, and she compares notes with Marsh, who provides insights from his own risk-related work (as a visiting researcher at Princeton and Harvard), as well as other findings in psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Time and again, their stories find luck occurring at the intersection of “chance, talent, and hard work,” whether in the case of the young carpenter Harrison Ford, installing cabinets for movie director George Lucas and winding up in the movie American Graffiti; or of aspiring actress Charlize Theron, discovered by an agent during a screaming fit in a Los Angeles bank. “You make luck through other people”—witness Mother Teresa, who found that flying first class put her next to wealthy donors. Not to mention social media maven Sree Sreenivasan, the former chief digital officer at the Met Museum, who, when he lost that job, got word out to his followers and soon landed a better-paying position. In a long succession of feel-good stories, not always about the famous but often so—from Thomas Edison to Lee Child and Deepak Chopra—the authors illustrate how individuals managed successfully to place the constellations of good fortune in alignment. They are quick to note that you won’t get lucky sitting home watching TV.
A brightly crafted, overlong diversion.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98639-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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