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THE WEALTH SPARK

IGNITING YOUR PATH TO ABUNDANCE AND SUCCESS

An energetic but conventional primer on the personal habits that yield success.

Parker presents a multistep guide to reaching financial and personal objectives.

In his nonfiction debut, the author assures his readers that he’s providing them with more than just a simple guide to prosperity; this book, per Parker, is “a crusade, a journey, an exploration through the wilderness of human potential, relationships, and unwavering tenacity.” At the heart of the guide is the author’s distinction between what he calls the “wealth mindset” and the “scarcity mindset”; the deepest elements of each are instilled in us from childhood experiences and social conditioning. In order to overcome such conditioning, Parker proposes many strategies, including “cultivation techniques” for the abundance-oriented perspective—habits such as practicing gratitude, visualizing desired outcomes, stressing present-in-the-moment mindfulness, and surrounding oneself with supportive people. He details nine habits of successful people, including managing time efficiently, learning from constructive criticism, and maintaining persistence in pursuit of goals. The author draws on a wide variety of examples, from business leaders to motivational authors to famous actors, and the various sections of his book are broken down into bulleted and numbered sections for quick reference. Readers of self-help or business motivation books (the obvious target audience here) will find much of what Parker has to say very familiar, whether he’s suggesting the use of “vision boards” or a Prosperity Gospel–like approach to manifesting wealth. And although his prose is clear and straightforward, some of the author’s examples are tone-deaf, as when he writes, “Elon Musk, the innovative entrepreneur and founder of companies like SpaceX and Tesla, exemplifies the principles of adopting success habits” (in 2023 alone, Musk, an increasingly unpopular figure, lost $25 billion on Twitter). But readers looking for accessible reminders of the basics will find them well presented here.

An energetic but conventional primer on the personal habits that yield success.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9798989180820

Page Count: 146

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2024

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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

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