An energetic and immensely helpful overview of working life and its challenges.
Calhoun-Senghor presents a comprehensive guide to joining a new workplace and happily staying there.
The author draws on his 40 years of experience in legal and government work, including a stint in the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration, in order to distill the basics of finding a job, as well as starting it, liking it, and keeping it. These basics are organized around 24 “Calhoun-Senghor Rules,” such as “Never Criticize a Colleague or Co-Worker,” “Sometimes People Just Won’t Like You (Or You Won’t Like Them),” and “All Big Problems Start Small.” These chapters, playfully illustrated by Liv Senghor, begin with observations about organizations in general, then move on to explanations of the various rules, including the all-important “Never Send Anything When You Are Angry or Upset”: “If after sleeping on it, you still believe the email should be sent,” he writes, “review it again, drain it of all emotions, and stick to the facts without commentary or embellishment.” Many of these dicta are fleshed out with fictional examples. The book then moves on to other generalities, including the seemingly counterintuitive “How To Get Fired,” which features a tone of dogged optimism that runs through the whole book: “Getting knocked down by life is not a bad thing, as long as you learn from it and keep getting back up.” The book also has some helpful extras, such as a sample cover letter that one might use as a model when applying for a position.
Calhoun-Senghor proves to be an invaluable mentor in these pages. His prose style is clear and personable, with an understated sense of humor and an unfailingly optimistic view of how his readers might improve their situations. This is an essential study of the dynamics of workplaces (including the author’s segment on entering government work), but it’s also a low-key guide to self-improvement. For example, Calhoun-Senghor urges unskilled public speakers to work harder at it; he reminds timid jobseekers that one person can change the dynamic of an entire conversation; and above all, he stresses honest self-evaluation: “Don’t believe your own press releases,” he writes. “Live in a reality-based world.” He also goes through many basics that newcomers to the workforce might not have considered, and always with a refreshing clarity: Never gossip, be generous with praise, try to plan for the unexpected, and perform one’s duties in a way that will impress a supervisor. “The key to success is to make your immediate boss absolutely thrilled with your performance,” he writes. “If you are good, your boss will typically sing your praises, or word will get out anyway.” His tips about negotiating techniques and entering government service clearly come from hard-won professional experience, and they include choice reflections from his time in the West Wing. As Calhoun-Senghor points out, the principles he’s outlining are millennia old, but this is a good thing—time has proven that mastering them can lead to success.
An energetic and immensely helpful overview of working life and its challenges.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798987423707
Page Count: 304
Publisher: John & Courtney Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2024
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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