In her novel, \Secrets of the Young and Successful-How to Get Everything You Want Without Waiting a Lifetime,"" Jennifer Kushell generates ideas geared at helping 20-somethings achieve their dreams.
Different chapters in the book evaluate different aspects of a reader's life, but the basic premise of the book is that anyone can pull themselves out of a rut and become wildly successful and wealthy regardless of their chosen career path.
While it offers a lot of moral support and does a fair job of reassuring readers that they are not losers, this book is far from a winner itself.
First and foremost, Kushell seems to use the book primarily as a way to brag about herself. In one section, she suggests that everyone set aside their resum?? and instead create a ""bio,"" which she believes will offer a more personal snapshot.
She uses her own biography as an example, and recites the names of just about every media outlet which has ever used her work. While she is understandably proud of her accomplishments, this makes for some long-winded reading.
Interspersed throughout the book are many stories from her life, and it gets tiring. Kushell does an immense amount of bragging, and writes under the impression that everybody wants to be like her. In truth, many of the achievements she brags about fall short of deserving the amount of boasting she delivers.
This book is also flawed as it falls back on the same cheesy methods used by so many other self-help books on the market.
Kushell trots out bad acronyms such as TAPPS, which she calls ""a strategic planning process that takes us through five simple steps to uncover what we would do if a major life decision were to hit by identifying the best possible approach."" The letters stand for Truth, Awareness, Preparation, Prevention and Survival. This does not seem like the type of thing most people would spend their free time trying to decipher.
Perhaps because the material is so dry, Kushell goes overboard in trying to engage her readers by coming up with very random hypothetical situations as she tries to get them to think about what they really want to do with life.
In one situation, Kushell has the readers imagine that a dead uncle has left them millions of dollars, and they can only inherit if they work 50 hours a week for the rest of their lives. But then there are so many other little rules in her hypothetical situation that the reader may become lost, such as they get a certain amount of money each year, but then that amount is reduced by certain things.
In another exercise, Kushell walks her readers through what she calls a ""personal fire drill."" Here she urges people to imagine their house was on fire, and to think about how they would react. Her logic is that disasters happen, and that people should have their priorities in order before it is too late.
In spite of the obvious clich??s and bad acronyms, there are a few redeeming qualities to this book.
Spaced throughout the book are several stories of real people who were able to succeed at various ventures, and some of these stories were truly uplifting.
However, others were more generic, such as the story of Marsha, who achieved her dream of becoming a celebrity manicurist by taking a beauty school course and then-hold on, this is so amazing-following her dreams and asking people for jobs.
Kushell also falls back on the tried-and-not-so-true method of having the reader stop reading periodically to write out lists and maps and charts for the future. These exercises get old in a hurry, and are vaguely reminiscent of the quizzes found in teenage fashion magazines.
Some of the trivia Kushell shares does make this book interesting, such as the fact that Fred DeLuca started Subway, the second largest restaurant chain in the world, when he was only 17 years old. Or that Edgar Allen Poe wrote his first book of poetry at 18.
Unfortunately, these few bits of trivia and the occasional success story that do make interesting reading fail to save this novel from it's final destination-up on the shelf with all the other self-help books people read once but then forget.
-Secrets of the Young and Successful is published by Simon & Schuster
