Demanding manual

Achieving Unlimited Success by Dennis E. Kelley; Indra Publishing House; Price: Rs.195; 224 pp

You can get everything you want from life once you make up your mind to do it. So says Dennis Kelley, author, speaker, and founder president of The D. Kelley Group, an American consulting and training company. In this typical self-help manual, which reportedly sell as fast as they are printed in the US, Kelley vows to “help you overcome the obstacles in your life so you can live the life of your dreams”. Whether you are a business owner, a work-at-home entrepreneur or a corporate professional, and job satisfaction haunts you, Achieving Unlimited Success could help you discover and achieve your highest potential.

A former bank president turned personality development consultant and author, Kelley seems to be a success story in his own right and quite obviously wants to share the secrets of his success. According to the book’s introduction, Kelley also runs a large Ohio-based consulting business intended to help people achieve their unrealised potential. “Using proven strategies and methods, our consulting services have helped numerous people achieve greater success than they imagined,” says the company website. “A key element of our program is to help people understand the steps needed to achieve balance between their work and personal life. Helping business owners, executives and individuals achieve the success they dream of is the mission of The D. Kelley Group.”

Unlimited Success is divided into 12 strongly titled chapters, such as ‘Defining Success on Your Own Terms’, ‘Go Big or Go Home’, and ‘Breaking through the Barriers to Change.’ The author’s style is direct and forceful and his message is clear: Once you resolve to do something, you must overcome all obstacles and odds to succeed. Simple advice, but the devil as always, is in the details.

To begin, the reader is asked to define success on her own terms. Readers must also recognise their “self-limiting beliefs”, which define how they feel about relationships, communities, and values. The book includes work sheets for the reader to fill — for example, defining success by what she has already achieved in her career, relationships, and wealth creation. Other work sheets require readers to create lists of self-defined preconditions for attaining personal aspirations, pen a “personal vision statement” and write down goals (“written goals are a critically powerful tool if you are on a specific path toward a very clear mission and vision”).

The downside of this genre of simple-minded, folksy self-help books which Americans — and Indian sub-continentals judging by the number of personality and self-development manuals crowding the shelves of indigenous bookstores — seem to love, is that they demand too much of the reader. Although it’s a precondition — and probably useful — to complete the numerous worksheets, written statements etc, it is difficult to visualise anyone except the most eager-to-succeed, actually following the author’s success formula to the letter. For the very dedicated and truly ambitious, the path to success is well charted and illustrated with narratives, anecdotes and the author’s own experiences.

Unlimited Success is a book of unlimited optimism. It motivates the reader to think big, overcome adversity and muster the courage to follow dreams. Kelley has produced an up-beat and thoughtful guide, a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in western entrepreneurial thought.

Nevertheless while within its genre this is a useful, perhaps even helpful personality development manual, one can’t help entertaining some misgivings that the $10 billion (Rs.487,114 crore) self-help books publishing industry is seriously over-crowded, dominated by a handful of millionaire celebrities like Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra, who have built empires of multi-media websites, books, tapes, DVDs, public or corporate seminars and workshops, infomercials, TV or radio shows and consulting firms.

The advice they offer is broadly similar — overly simplistic solutions to serious personal and social problems. There is consid-erable truth in the wryly cynical comment of Christopher Buckley, author of God is My Broker (1998): “The only way to get rich from a self-help book is to write one.”

David Wightman