Creating Your Own Destiny: How to Get Exactly What You Want Out of Life by Patrick Snow

Creating Your Own Destiny:  How to Get Exactly What You Want Out of Life, written by Patrick Snow, is my favorite self-improvement book this year.  Such praise proffered is saying a great deal because my blog, “Helpful Books,” reflects my very choosy appetite.  

As a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and Religion, I think I’m able to separate the bogus self-schleppy, New Age fluff from the wisdom of the ages. I can tell when a person is pushing candy and when they’re sharing real life experiences that offer authentic encouragement to the reader. Creating Your Own Destiny is of the latter ilk. 

All 16 chapters of his book are chock-full of wisdom (both ancient and “kitchen-table”)—most of it drawn from Snow’s direct experience as an employee, husband, father, son, and entrepreneur.  He also mines his favorite inspiring quotes from those admirable people he’s tried to emulate (including his own parents).

Snow is a formidable optimist and a transparent truth-teller; he shares what works and the exact techniques he’s used (and still uses) to thrive as an author, speaker, book coach and business consultant.

Like those other “Honest Abe’s” in business—Stephen Covey, Martha Beck, Brian Tracey, Warren Bennis, Oprah and Laurence G. Boldt—Snow isn’t “selling” this idea of “creating your own destiny” as if it’s easy. He testifies to how hard won it is to be diligent in your aim to “follow your heart’s desires.” He humbly describes his own sense of failure and the lessons that came all along the way.

At one point Snow had a paper-route (as a second job!) to make ends meet and he often encourages readers to keep their current job while building up their own business and getting out of any debt. In no way does Snow promote a “wish-based” or “day-dreamer’s” reality. He invites people to dream big and to take action on their dreams or they will be living in a nightmare. 

It is clear to this reader that Snow is a person of integrity, fairness, service and faith. One cannot help but feel his passion for giving away his secrets of success—specific methods from his own past achievements and current dreams.

All of what Snow makes plain throughout this book reiterates these four winning elements:  Let yourself have a vision (dream); Put it down on paper within a realizable time frame (plan); Step up to the plate and live into the dream, (execute); and reap the benefits of your hard work and tenacity (soar)! 

Snow believes in his principled technology because he has been experiencing its benefits ever since he was a young man. His father encouraged him to write down what he wanted to see happen in his life (check back in on them and be grateful for the miracles that follow). This method has been working for Snow ever since.  

Snow clearly believes that his most profound learning has come from clarifying his aspirations, taking bigger risks, overcoming his greatest challenges–including what the naysayers may say–and getting clear on who it’s all for. His ultimate motivator is adding to the wealth of love embodied in all his relationships—especially his immediate family).

Many people gripped by financial fear and psychological insecurity do not think, “family first!” when it comes to creating wealth or insuring happiness. In fact, the pursuit of “abundance” can sometimes be a red herring for the rotting fish in one’s personal life and relationships. In fact, when one looks to Wall Street, popular culture, or even the outgoing administration (in 2008), we can see that principled solutions to most of our current crises are perceived to be a thing of the past. But, there is hope.

My favorite tenets of this book that are like no other, include the following:

1.  Unique questions about your inner-direction, priorities and past practices and plenty of room to fill in your own answers.

2.  A plethora of wonderful quotes to inspire the reader—I’m talking more than 321 of them.

3.  Humor and humility in equal measure.

4.  Honesty about the marketplace and the greed and ignorance that can rule when profit comes before people.

5.  Placing one’s priority on happiness within relationships, not just as a “successful” individual. So many “self-help” books begin and end with the “self” thus fueling the unhappy illusion that we are rocks, Islands, and legitimate narcissists.

6.  Though Snow is a “born again” Christian, he doesn’t push what guides him, in a religious sense. His advice seems to come from an open mind, one committed to leaving readers to find their own understanding to “destiny” and purposeful living.

7.  He urges those who want to make money to look at their spending, saving and investing habits and asks readers what they believe “more money” will do for them. I love the idea that people who make more money often spend more money and feel just as fearful about money-lack as the rest of the middle class. Money smarts doesn’t necessarily come along with a better income.

8.  Though Snow is an optimist, in no way is he naïve. He has clearly suffered many losses:  his childhood home was nearly burnt to the ground, his agility after a back injury at 18, his dream of becoming an NCAA football player for Michigan, his first few jobs after college,  a custom-designed dream home (in order to get out debt); and hearing initial reviewers of his CYOD manuscript tell him, “Don’t quit your day job, you’ll never make it as an author!” I’m sure he’s laughing all the way to the bank after selling more than 125,000 copies of his book (now in its 9th Edition).

9.  His nature as a person comes straight through his inspirational writing. He is clearly a person of great character –  true blue – not just red, white and blue (though he is that, too).

10.  He values loved ones and knows that he would not be here without those special mentors, teachers, leaders who’ve paved the way. Snow is clearly driven to make the world a better place by having more “enlivened-by-their-work” human beings truly living in it.

As you might have guessed, I strongly recommend this book and so do his readers–some from Nairobi, Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico, Pakistan, India and Iraq. This book has been translated into many languages and appreciated by people of all ages.

It seems the perfect time to get inner direction, regardless of your context.

The sweeping changes in North American society would give any conscious person pause when considering positively affecting their future. Yet, the notion of counting on a secure marketplace or reliable employment is even more fanciful. 

Asking ourselves Snow’s important questions could not be more relevant for the 21^st century. That his writing speaks to so many people outside the U.S. tells us that these principles are universal, timeless and enduring.

Snow did not invent his recommended methods nor does he take credit for them. He has simply identified, experimented, and organized them into a framework that nine to 109-year olds can test for themselves.

To order his book, go directly to his website.

If you like this book, you’ll like mine too: Check it out for yourself:  Manlowe’s Books!

 

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Steering by Starlight: Find Your Right Life No Matter What by Martha Beck

You may have heard of best-selling author Martha Beck through her advice column in Oprah Magazine or through her many books: Expecting Adam, The Joy Diet, Leaving the Saints, Finding Your North Star, or Four Day Win–all available at my favorite independent bookstore Powell’s Books. Psychology Today, NPR and USA Today consider Martha “the best known Life Coach in America.” Beck is a very straightforward writer who believes each person has an “inner-compass” and has available to them “limitless possibilities” to help them locate their “just right” lives.   

I have envied Martha Beck for a long time and was motivated to choose the profession of “Life Design Coach” because of her own courage to do so. At present, she now calls herself a “personal trainer” saying, “I work with healthy people to help them achieve maximum fitness–that is, well-being and quality of life.” After being professors, both Martha and I chose to forego the prestige of upper-crust academia as well as to abandon our restrictive and misogynous religions’-of-origin.

Both of us have conducted research in China and–in our advice giving–we tend to use the three great Chinese philosophies of Daoism, Buddhism and, Confucianism (with a feminist slant). Just like Beck, I received my graduate degree from an Ivy League School in the early 1990s and published research that was focused on women, social-psychology and religion.

It seems that we were “separated at birth” because of our pasts, because we both like to write helpful books, and because we each regularly publish essays offering personal and practical advice. But enough about our common threads in the great garment of life. It is more important to convey the unique messages of her latest book, Steering by Starlight.

Steering by Starlight, according to its introduction, is about “finding and following the life you were meant to live: your highest and happiest possible destiny.” The theory that Beck uses is much like the multitude of helpful books on business and self-help shelves. She assumes, along with much Ancient Greek and Indian Philosophy, that there exists a fundamental purpose to everyone’s life and believes that we all have a  particular dharma (in an Indian-philosophical sense). If we ignore this elemental calling (or dharma) we will be thwarted.

When I say “thwarted” I mean we will feel “ill at ease” until we honor our “true selves” or our “innate destiny”–something that will forever follow us, haunt us, and hunt us down until we honor its mandates.

I can see why Beck left behind her position as a sociology instructor at Harvard University because her hope-filled theories would be critically eviscerated at any academic conference.

Why? Because Beck’s fundamental beliefs would be considered totalizing, essentialist, simplistic and a typical example of the naively Western grand narrative in a Postmodern (“pomo”) sense.

The great 20th-century French sociologist/philosopher–Michel Foucault–would shame Beck for mimicking the homogenizing, colonizing and mono-mythic paradigms of the uniquely-American project called the “Human Potential Movement” (HPM).

To wit:  HPM was a superbly optimistic movement that arose out of the social and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and was formed around the concept that humans could cultivate their “extraordinary potential.”  Its advocates believed that this buried treasure lay largely untapped in most people. The movement took as its premise that in discovering, developing and releasing one’s inner potential she/he could experience an exceptional quality of life filled with simplicity, happiness, creativity and abundant fulfillment. 

Why would Foucault reject such an optimistic theory? In brief, (and if he were alive), he would accuse Beck for proffering “a reductionistic fantasy” that assumes humans could be hygienic individuals who live unaffected by their surroundings. He would mock the romantic idea that people, by muscular will alone, would be able to “throw off” the multiple cultural influences operating within and all around them. If readers are interested in learning more about Foucauldian frameworks, I’ll offer these in another book review (I promise)!

But, if you must read an alternative to this common (reductionistic) mistake in career-advice literature, read my very favorite business book this year called Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by a very plain-speaking French sociologist and philosopher named Herminia Ibarra. 

Like Foucault, Ibarra does not subscribe to the fashionable belief in pop-psychology, i.e., that there is a singular treasure (or self) within all of us that will point us to the work we were meant to do. Rather, she urges readers to experiment and even play with their identities–which she says, are always multiple and naturally morphing according to whatever social-context or in which ever job they find themselves.  

For Ibarra, such multiplicity need not be “read” pathologically nor must it cause a baffling crisis of identity. Rather, if accepted, this fluidity of “self” can be freeing, relationally-responsive, dynamic, intimate and spontaneously-inventive.

Even though Martha has abandoned her “pomo” philosophies, I find her work unique and quite forward-thinking when she turns to the latest research in psychiatry, neurology and related fields for the ruts we can return to and the ways we might change these phenomena.

Too, Beck writes in a way that will speak to anyone with a ninth-grade education–the target audience, in terms of literacy, of the average person who buys self-help books. For instance, she keeps her writing teacherly and repetitive; she identifies and reiterates three simple stages along the vocational path to recapturing a satisfying life that include:

* “the stargazer” a metaphor that helps readers understand why it’s so easy to lose themselves in an endless quest for self-knowledge; she offers strategies for sighting their “North Star” (a trope of her earliest career book and career workbook called, Finding Your North Star);

* “the mapmaker” simile used to evaluate one’s unbearable situation in order to plot a different course for the future;

* “the pathfinder” which explores the “adventures” or trials that may be encountered as one travels along their ever-challenging, new life course.

Whether one is seeking better relationships, more focused career direction, physical fitness or to create a more harmonious lifestyle, Steering by Starlight’s stories, experiential references and up-to-date, neuro-scientific evidence will guide HPM believers to “actualize their human potential,” uncover their own “inner compass,” and perhaps, find their way in the world.

Note: Even though I may sound a little sarcastic in this review, I appreciate the courage, humor, and Beck’s approachable framework; I use her framework often as a creative career consultant, in my own Life Design Publishing business as well as in my writing.

What do you think about your own potential? Are you cynical about change or are you hopeful about releasing possibilities for vocational transformation? P.S. You might want to order another helpful book for those seeking wisdom for those “in transition” called:  Polishing the Mirror: 90 Days to Vocational Clarity  Order Now.