A valuable manual with tips and tricks on how to achieve complete contentment.
A guide urges readers to learn how to enable their own long-lasting happiness using the principles of inner knowledge.
Kaalmly recalls that he was a “generalist.” He specialized in looking at challenges from broad perspectives to pinpoint practical solutions both professionally and personally. He uses this approach in his book, the first installment of a trilogy. The series aims to guide readers through topics of inner knowledge, outer knowledge, and “the advanced application of inner and outer knowledge such that happiness becomes effortless.” This installment focuses on the pursuit of inner knowledge by looking at happiness from a holistic perspective. The guide uses a healthy blend of science and spirituality, featuring ancient wisdom, like Tao and yoga, and modern sciences, such as biology and psychology. The first part, titled “Inner Knowledge,” is all about getting in touch with the inner self and soul by asking questions: Who am I? What do I want? How do I walk in the outer world? What happens when things go wrong? The second part also utilizes such questions, but it expands beyond basic inner knowledge into what Kaalmly calls “Prime Inner Knowledge”: Why don’t I listen? How do I take charge of my life? The author uses poignant anecdotes from his own life throughout to show the power of change and a long-term commitment to happiness. He argues that total inner understanding—of self, happiness, and emotions—is entirely possible through awareness, self-realization, and a calm, unshakeable foundation. Using an easy-to-follow structure, he expertly distills scientific concepts that readers will understand and connect with in this manual. Despite offering occasionally complex content, he maintains a warm writing style that invites readers into their own processes of developing happiness by encouraging the necessary inner work that many prefer to avoid. As a result, this is the ideal book for readers who feel disconnected or burned out from their everyday lives and who want an introductory guide to inner and outer change.
A valuable manual with tips and tricks on how to achieve complete contentment.Pub Date: March 6, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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