Tom Oliver

I received this book free in return for a review.

I was attracted to the book by its encouraging title, though I am not familiar with the author. When reading this book I felt like I or the author, or both of us, had both ADHD and bipolar disease in the manic phase.

It is filled with inspiring quotes and innumerable exercises to do to start you on the path of fulfilling your dreams. We are reminded about visualization, instructed about finding our true passion and “ideal in all areas of our life”, setting goals that really work, and how to accomplish everything we’ve ever dreamed of.

The author did not have an easy start in life, and in fact had a bad stutter and severe nervous tics. However, when he began to devote himself to sport, which he loved, things began to improve until he completely recovered from these afflictions, and also became fluent in five languages. Now he is enormously successful in many fields.

Tom’s secretary needs to schedule in a certain amount of time every day for him to do sports and other physical activities in order for him to achieve well-being. This really helped me to understand my little grand-daughter, who like Tom is hyperactive. She needs a couple of hours of physical activity too, but I hadn’t really understood it that way until I read this book.

Tom explains the importance of laziness, which he equates with invention and innovation. Periods of laziness put our minds into a state of free flow, and relaxation is “the key to creativity and to finding the solutions you are looking for.”

He has lots of famous, high-profile friends, and there’s a lot of name-dropping in the book. We hear a lot about Richard Branson, whom I’d never heard of, but I’m sure all the other readers will know him.

We’re told about finding our “happy place”, whichever place we can go to to recharge and replenish our energies.

The Dalai Lama told Tom about dealing with problems: if we can change the problem, we can focus on doing so, but if we can’t we should concentrate our energy elsewhere.

We should count our blessings, exude self-confidence, get rid of perfectionism, and “let the invisible hands take over”.

We learn that there is no word for self-doubt in the Tibetan language, thus the Dalai Lama was unable to answer a question about it: In his mind it doesn’t exist.

We should turn every failure into victory – in fact the author tells us that “failures set us up for our biggest successes”. We need to remove fear from our vocabulary and live life unconditionally.

There is infinitely more inspiring material in the book than I have mentioned here.

However, I would like to point out that the reason I’ve given this book 4 stars and not 5 is as follows:

The chapters are large and sprawling, and what with all the information heaped on us, some of us, as I did, may feel overwhelmed and find it hard to digest everything. It would have suited me better, and I would have found the book more readable, had it contained shorter chapters focused on more specific themes.

Still, I found this well-written book to be inspiring – it will undoubtedly inspire/push you to follow your dream, and achieve success in your chosen fields,… (mehr)