This self-help book opens with the author offering his 10 best pieces of inspirational advice on how to obtain success and happiness. These include exhortations to be generous, inclusive and tolerant, spend 10,000 hours to become excellent at something, run risks from time to time, find your life’s ambition and reinvent yourself.
The book’s 10 chapters invite the reader to answer deep questions about their lives and tries to find out what energises a person. It suggests finding out what differentiates you and what you are better at than others and how you should leverage this. You don’t need to compete with others. Make them irrelevant by only competing with yourself is the message here.
The book invites readers to write a scenario of the new life they wish to have on the basis that documenting a process involves a degree of commitment. The story of Flemming Borreskov, the CEO of Realdania, one of the largest philantrophic organisations in Denmark, is intersperced throughout the book. He has carried through all of the exercises and, we are told, is now on version 7.0 of himself!
Langer exhorts readers to big dreams. ‘What would I attempt to do if I thought I could not fail is a very good motto to live by’, he says, also advising to frontload initiatives and not procrastinate.