How to Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places

Michael Gill's lemons-to-lemonade memoir chronicled his transformative years working at Starbucks after losing his high-powered job, his marriage, and his health (he developed a brain tumor). In response to overwhelming requests from readers who wanted to know how they, too, could weather downturns, he has distilled his lessons into fifteen meaningful lessons, including:

·Leap...With Faith: Sometimes it pays to leap without looking and say yes without thinking (Gill accepted the Starbucks job immediately, on a whim).

·Let Yourself...Be Helped: Pride is even more paralyzing than fear.

·Look...with Respect at Every Individual You See: Gill was raised to avoid eye contact with those who were different, cloistered in a privileged world. Now he realizes the potential in all who cross his daily path.

·Lose...Your Watch (and Cell Phone and PDA!): Our obsession with productivity produces madness, not gladness.

Offering living proof that extraordinary happiness is found in ordinary moments, How to Save Your Own Life provides empowering words and hope for anyone facing a reversal of fortune. True fortune, Gill discovered, lies not in fate but in discovering the innate capacity we all possess to rescue ourselves.



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The son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, Michael Gates Gill was a creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising, where he was employed for over twenty-five years. He lives in New York within walking distance of the Starbucks store where he works, and has no plans to retire from what he calls the best job he’s ever had.