A breezy guide to dealing with rejection and transforming it into a learning experience.
A book written from personal experience about rejection—how to live with it and learn from it.
Jia attempted to subject himself to rejection for 100 days, thus toughening himself to what he most feared. As a boy in China, he dreamed of becoming the next Bill Gates, an entrepreneur whose ideas and accomplishments would change the world. Instead, he was trapped in a corporate environment, very successful but deeply unsatisfied after having “sold out my dream.” He’d done so out of fear of rejection—not of failure, which would at least require him to put his efforts and ideas on the line, but of the fear that those ideas would meet rejection that he couldn’t handle. So, with his wife’s blessing, the author quit his corporate job in Austin, Texas, and gave himself six months to succeed as an entrepreneur. Along the way, he steeled himself by committing to “100 Days of Rejection,” in which he would make requests of strangers that they would likely decline, and thus thicken his skin. He asked Costco and Southwest Airlines to let him make announcements over their public address systems, asked a stranger to let him play soccer in his backyard, asked Starbucks to let him serve as a greeter and asked people for money. As he posted blog videos of his failures, some went viral, leading to a sidelight as a motivational speaker (and to this book). He soon found that he was receiving a greater percentage of acceptances instead of the rejections he’d anticipated. It probably helped that he launched this project in Austin, a freethinking city that prides itself on its quirkiness, but the lessons he learned have wide applicability. He sees what he did as “a journey of transformation. I conquered my fear, gained knowledge and wisdom and found a new kind of freedom and power.”
A breezy guide to dealing with rejection and transforming it into a learning experience.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4138-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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