ME POWER

A debut guide offers a motivational call for people to stop being victims of circumstance.

Adams opens her work with the promise that it’s “a book that teaches you how to tap into the limitless power that resides within, even when circumstances or other people present barriers outside of your control.” In response to the question “Who are you?” the author maintains that “choosing to be the answer is more important than finding it.” Nobody else in the world is you, she writes, and that is the source of your power. She points out that this can often be obscured by the daily realities her readers face. When the “locus of control” is external to ourselves, she asserts, it fosters the belief that both good and bad things are in the power of others and that we have no way to do anything about it. Citing a wide array of studies and experts, Adams lays out an elaborate refutation of this idea. She draws on figures as dissimilar as primatologist Michael Tomasello, engineer Destin Sandlin, and neuroanatomist (and author of 2009’s My Stroke of Insight) Jill Taylor to paint a far more complex and nuanced picture of how individuals form and reinforce their self-images. Throughout, the author is firmly, realistically encouraging, always aware of human fallibilities even while she’s championing inner strength. “The information we use from our past provides a snapshot in ways that aren’t necessarily knowing,” she writes, “and that’s okay.” All our lives, she points out, we go through the process of discovering and rediscovering ourselves and display a tendency to overestimate our knowledge. But she winningly, convincingly insists that rediscovering ourselves can go hand in hand with reinventing ourselves independent of the naysayers we may have around us. It’s a simple and salutary message, something that will doubtless be very galvanizing for many of her readers.

A wide-ranging and powerfully optimistic look at how individuals can change their lives.