Upside: A Guide To Achieving Your Unique Potential In Life

Written by retired Navy Command Master Chief, submarines, John Gregory Vincent this book just received a strong, positive review from Kirkus Review. Read it below:Vincent’s self-help debut challenges readers to find peace in a focused, “one-life approach to living.”The author had a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and personal battles with divorce, debt and alcoholism before he became a keynote speaker, productivity expert and inspirational author. He’s a firm believer that “almost every influence in our lives encourages us to be anything but unique,” and in this book, he offers a series of questions and life lessons to help the reader find his or her purpose. “One-size-fits-all fits no one,” he asserts. Early on, he suggests that readers build lists of their skills (“combination[s] of experience and knowledge”) and their talents (“the innate abilities that allow you do things well the first time you do them”) and use these lists to help figure out their “unique potential.” In other chapters, he explores the importance of accountability and communication in interpersonal situations, preaches prioritization over “balance,” provides “the critical fundamental basics of nutrition” and introduces the idea of “moving with purpose” to keep one’s body as fit as one’s life. He points out that he isn’t attempting to provide “a guide to Nirvana”; instead, he aims to highlight “common threads in people who seemed to have found happiness, success, and a peace of mind.” The author prefaces most chapters with quotations from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the biggest influences in his own life, but the philosophical reach of his book is vast, using ideas previously proposed by psychologist Carl Jung, author Stephen R. Covey and the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book. Indeed, the author borrows so liberally from other self-help tomes that when he offers the equation “event + reaction = outcome,” he can’t say for certain where he came across it—although he thinks he saw it in Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen’s Chicken Soup for the Soul (1993). “I write like I think, a bit all over the place at times,” he admits, but his conversational tone and easygoing sense of humor make such moments come off as endearing rather than distracting.A breezy, appealing self-help guide. -Kirkus Review