An often thoughtful and straightforward conception of the costs and benefits of change.
Klijn presents a model for determining and achieving one’s true career aspirations in this self-help book.
The author—a professional speaker and coach, and a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam—aims her book at the many people in the workforce who feel dissatisfied with their current job, either because they feel like they aren’t realizing their full potential or simply due to curiosity about other possible paths. “Considering that work constitutes a substantial part of our lives,” Klijn writes, “it’s wise to assess the type of work that resonates most with your desires.” In these pages, translated from the Dutch by the author and Molegraaf, Klijn drew on her own 17 years of experience in sales, marketing, and human resources,plus her establishment of a management training company, Klijn Creative Teaching,to create the Personal Energy at Work (or “PE@W”) model. The model encompasses physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual elements, and she examines the interplay of each using charts, graphs, and insets that relate relevant stories from her and others’ employment lives. Through the lens of PE@W, Klijn effectively examines a variety of personal factors that can generate conflict in the workplace. For instance, if someone values a sense of harmony in their life, they may seek to avoid confrontations at work; however, the author points out, it isn’t always beneficial to one’s career to avoid uncomfortable situations. While Klijn’s prose can be awkward at times (“In times of uncertainty, our decisions often gravitate towards the fear of negative outcomes”), the bulk of her thoughts on the working world are clear and thought provoking, particularly in her emphasis on the physical element of work. For instance, she points out that making decisions to ignore bodily cues, such as fatigue or stress, can have serious, wide-ranging effects. Workers contemplating something new may find much of value in these pages.
An often thoughtful and straightforward conception of the costs and benefits of change.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9789083368320
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Santasado
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
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