23.12.10

Book Review: '10-10-10' -- Susy Welch



I was given this book as a gift from my aunt as a means to jump start my new life after college, especially in such terrible economic times as these. It is self-help, which I will probably always remain skeptical of (I like it that way) and for good reason. There are too many bad books masquerading as solutions.

This book actually started off as one of those bad self-help books for me, but I wanted to stick with it out of loyalty to my family, plus I had nothing to really lose. Well, as predicted, it steadily progressed downhill from there. But, it came back up, leveled off for a time and then went up a bit to a higher point, where it stopped once the book ended.

This book is almost the epitome of everything I hate about self-help books (and a reason why I am wary of them) it was its own advertisement and basically a book riddled with testimonials. But they were testimonials from the author, not even from others...we just had Suzy to listen to and believe, and from her "writing" I could tell she was one of those annoyingly peppy women that are in great shape because they run all the time in between picking up their perfect little kids from soccer. Ok, I digress... I found all of this very distracting from an overall GOOD idea and premise to write a book.

The idea was this: here's a tool to help you prioritize your life and make good decisions. The formula is a solid one but disguised by a layer of sentimental cure-all type hype. I don't buy those, nor do I think this idea is revolutionary, what's revolutionary about it is its simplicity. You take an issue and analyze the situation (and everything about potential scenarios) in three different time frames: immediate present, a little farther off and The Future (hence: 10-10-10 --10 minutes into the future, 10 months and 10 years).

The potential pitfalls: you might not be honest with yourself about the imagined scenarios; you don't know what you want from life enough to make those decisions; you might not realize a good situation to use it in, until someone points one out (which is WHY she wrote a 200 page book of testimonials, aye...). The AWESOME parts of this book came at the end when she gives you page after page after page of questions to analyze that help you figure out your values in life (in case you aren't immediately aware of them) AND this book is relatively woman-friendly, and talks pretty extensively on issues related to women, some of which other books don't really take the time to go into with such care.

All-in-all: a great idea in a poorly executed book.
It's worth skimming through, and reading mainly the back of the book (that's when I finally got into it and learned to ignore her terrible formula).

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