True Success

With insight, humor, and down-to-earth parables, a dynamic Notre Dame professor distills the wisdom of the ages into seven core requirements for sustainable personal success.

Slick sloganeering about the meaning of life, laced with quotable quotes from philosophical heavyweights. A professor of philosophy at Notre Dame who takes considerable pride in his success teaching football players, Morris is a master of catchy mnemonics, especially alliteration. Here, he explains how the key to success lies in the seven C's of conception, confidence, concentration, consistency, commitment of emotional energy, character, and capacity to enjoy. Each C is spelled out in its own chapter, and all are full of appropriate examples from Morris' own life and stories gleaned from other sources and studded with sayings from the likes of Socrates, Thoreau, Bacon, Confucius, and Carlyle. His advice is determinedly simplistic: e.g., make a list of your goals on a 3x5 card and tape it up where you'll see it frequently. He cannot resist rhetoric such as ``you have to plan your work and then work your plan,'' but alliteration appears to be his favorite teaching device. Besides the seven C's of success, there's the 2- U Principle (involving uniqueness and union), the Human Happiness 4-U Thesis (involving the above plus usefulness and understanding), and the great I AM acrostic defining the basic dimensions of human life as the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral. His message is simple: don't confuse success with power, wealth, status, or fame, for it lies instead in personal excellence and fulfillment. There's little that is new or controversial in Morris' philosophy; the package he has put together demonstrates his facility as a teacher rather than any originality as a thinker. (First printing of 75,000) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This eclectic author, philosopher (Univ. of Notre Dame), composer, and rock guitarist joins a long list of others who write in a genre that appeals to New Age thinkers with substantial questions about life, work, and the topic of Morris's 13th book: success. Morris describes his seven Cs of success, which he relates to real-life situations, his personal remembrances, and exemplary anecdotes. The Cs are conception, confidence, concentration, consistency, commitment, character, and a capacity to enjoy the process along the way. Stephen Covey has sparked many imitators, and this is one of them; Morris's ideas are nothing but a rehash of Covey's solid The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ( LJ 3/15/90). Recommended for general collections that do not own Covey's trendsetting tomes. See the preceeding review of Stephen Covey & others' First Things First for an assessment of his latest work.--Ed.
- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.