BEST VERSION EVER

A down-to-earth guide to self-empowerment.

Painter opens his book with an affecting portrait of his own past. Instead of crafting the standard motivational backstory of someone destined from the cradle for glory, he describes a life of bottoming out and engaging in the kinds of personal and professional compromises that many of his readers will immediately recognize: “I rented apartments, bought a house, took on debt, and got credit cards because I thought that was what you were supposed to do,” he writes. “I was a young guy trying to support a family without a thought about doing something I’d really love.” In 2008, his house was foreclosed, he filed for bankruptcy, he got a divorce, and he was living in a two-bedroom apartment and sleeping on the couch so his two children could have bedrooms of their own. At 26, he realized he was not remotely where he wanted to be. He left his job as a corrections officer and went into mortgage loans, and in time, with a lot of hard work, he started becoming what he hopes his readers will also become: the “Best Version Ever” of themselves. He lays out five key features of that path: Mindset (“how to shift your thinking from negative to positive so you will be open to new possibilities”), Aim (identifying specific goals), Gameplan (“how to create a schedule that allows you to gain momentum toward short- and long-term goals”), Immersion (commitment and “continual learning”), and Consistency (“how to develop lifelong habits that will make your changes sustainable”). While elaborating on these key concepts, each of his chapters contains some “Take Action” suggestions for real-world implementation of those concepts and also “Affirmations” to carry them to the next concept.

Painter’s tactic of laying bare his own vulnerability is a wise one. It grounds the more theoretical bulk of his book within human realities and frailties. This is all the more important because of the immediately recognizable, which is to say clichéd, drift of many of his points and urgings. “Hope is not a strategy,” he writes in one of many such passages. “If you want to become your Best Version Ever, you have to make the time to brainstorm and narrow down your goals.” To put it mildly, readers of self-help or motivational literature will have encountered such content before, so it’s fortunate that Painter adds so many personal notes of authenticity to make these tips feel more genuine. He also very effectively and frequently reminds readers that to achieve clarity, one must maintain a sense of perspective. He recommends that people imagine themselves five years in the future (and by extension, remember where they were five years ago)—a familiar exercise in motivational circles. Another common motivational concept is his suggested use of an imagery of a video game controller or movie director: “Imagine your future unfolding before you, like watching an actor on a movie screen,” he writes. “Imagine you have a remote control in your hand to fast forward, rewind, or pause if you like.” He counteracts the pat nature of much of his advice by consistently coming across as somebody who’s lived his way to such insights.

An accessible, heartfelt, albeit not exactly groundbreaking, blueprint for meeting one’s own life goals.