For those who are into reading overtly cliché positive-mentality advice that’s loaded with a bunch of superfluous self-help jargon, Robin Sharma’s new ‘manifesto’ is like crack cocaine. You wouldn’t think it requires nearly 400 pages to convey the same essential points over and over again about success advice, but Sharma’s book really epitomises what majority of the self-help genre has become: repetitive and superficial.
There is range to his advice, including how to succeed, why you don’t succeed, what to do once you’ve succeeded, how to avoid losing your success, why success is so not what you think it is etc. But the book’s massive flaw is not it’s obviously vast breadth of insight, but it’s plain lack of depth. Every point he makes is at max a page and a half, with several of his 100 chapters, which are somewhat long, being compiled of dot-point format paragraphs to convey each sub-insight.
As for the manifesto side of it, the details of his personal stories and experiences feel entirely redundant. Maybe if Sharma was straightforward and said on the front page ‘THIS IS ACTUALLY A SELF-HELP BOOK, I JUST PUT MYSELF IN IT THIS TIME’, it wouldn’t have taken me a couple chapters to start skipping to the end of each dry personal anecdote and find the ‘lesson learnt’ from each one. I would have much preferred if it was only the lesson at the end, but then it would literally turn into an amalgamation of all his previous books - which it is.
Looking at it plain sighted, the wise one-liners are probably the best part of it, however most of the time he’s literally telling you he’s quoting someone else (usually a Roman philosopher, a 19th century psychologist, or wiz-tech tycoon). So by instinct, you would think to simply put this jargon-loaded book down and read the original source - which you should.
For those looking for a book about positivity, productivity, and lifestyle, there’s more nourishing stuff out there. I’ve read his first book (and most successful one) called the Monk who sold his Ferrari, which (a) I loved and (b) could be part of the reason why I struggled with this one.
I think if you haven’t read his previous works, or if it is your first positive-mentality maximise-productivity self-help book, or even if you only read one chapter per day, you may have a better response than I did to it. Regardless, any book that depends on such a narrow criteria for a good reader experience, from my perspective, is not a good book.
P.S. Not to get too personal, but my irritation with this book could be a sign that I’ve out-grown this industry. I hope others who are just starting out with the self-help genre don’t experience an instant turn off because of this book. So for that minor epiphany, I give it an extra star :)