Wise, inspired reading.
A former professional lacrosse player offers insight into the perennial human quest for excellence.
For Rabil, whom the New York Times called “the LeBron James of Lacrosse,” choosing challenge is the way not just of the champion, but of anyone who seeks what champions have in common: greatness. He begins by considering the amateur stages of a champion’s journey, which are necessarily characterized by exploration and experimentation. For the person who walks this part of the path, “the goal is to find the thing that…will eventually inspire” full commitment. After that, the individual must leave behind fear to move beyond what Arnold Schwarzenegger has called the “daydreaming” phase to goal setting and methods that include daily workouts/practice, as well as confronting setbacks with realistic optimism. The next stage is that of the professional. The freedom to play now becomes imbued with seriousness: “You have to invest more of your time, more of your resources,” and be more aware of the competition than ever before. The discipline of the amateur now becomes insanity “about the craft.” Being a professional also means learning how to work with others on a team because greatness means asking for help and letting others help make you better. “You should be able to do anything, but you can’t do everything,” writes the author. The final stage of the champion’s journey involves letting go “of attachments and expectations” and, like soccer great Abby Wambach, seek to be forgotten so that the greatness of others can emerge (“I want to leave a legacy where the ball keeps rolling forward”). Accessible and practical, Rabil’s book will appeal to anyone seeking not only to understand what it takes to succeed, but also to understand the courage, discipline, and grace it takes to become a champion. Bill Belichick provides the foreword.
Wise, inspired reading.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593545492
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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