A pat motivational book with a slick gloss.
Qandeel applies street knowledge to business and dating in this debut self-help guide.
To be street smart means to possess a certain blend of worldliness, common sense, and people skills, but the author argues that there’s more to it than that: “It is about being always ready to learn new skills and ideas in order to be the winner rather than accepting defeat,” writes Qandeel in his introduction. “It is also about not taking no for an answer and using your problem-solving skills to make things work.” With this book, Qandeel helps the reader adopt the “street smart mindset” in order to better succeed in business, investing, romance, and more. He breaks down the necessary components to reshape one’s mindset, from finding the proper motivation and expanding one’s tool kit to abandoning the security of a 9-to-5 job, launching side hustles, and navigating interpersonal relationships. The author distinguishes being “book smart” from being street smart, claiming that street smart people are better equipped to take advantage of book smart people. (Nikola Tesla? Book smart. Thomas Edison? Street smart.) In addition to business, Qandeel advises the reader on dating and romance, detailing seven types of men and women and the issues that can doom a relationship. In keeping with his street-smart persona, the author dispenses some cynical advice—he discourages men from being “nice guys,” favors prenups, and encourages readers to embrace manipulation. “Some people want to act morally superior and refuse to admit to using manipulation at any point in their lives,” he writes. “Well, let me tell you that if you ever tried to get a job, you most likely used manipulation.” Qandeel does not offer much evidence of his expertise besides mentioning a few of his business ventures (snow removal, a collision center), and much of his advice is fairly rote. Even so, his direct manner will no doubt appeal to some readers.
A pat motivational book with a slick gloss.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781038324276
Page Count: 126
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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