RSS
Home
Excerpt #1 from new book
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
So this column has moved quite a bit away from what it was originally supposed to be (50 Things You Don't Know About Every Guy). It will get back to that at some point but there are more important items to discuss ahead of such things. I just finished the manuscript for my next book, which is currently being considered by agents and publishers, going through the rigorous publishing routine. The book is based on the motivational presentation I posted at www.bestpossiblechoice.com. The book flushes out the concepts in greater detail. It's entitled Choice - The Meaning of Life: How to Have More and Better Choices in Business, Relationships, Government and Life. I am going to post clips from the dating and relationships chapter here as my next several entries and give other examiners the opportunity to read the entire manuscript.
Here is the first part of the intro to the book, so you understand why I wrote it (I post the rest of it early next week):
Growing up, I learned what everybody learned—math, science, grammar . . . At seventeen, when it came time to make a decision about my life, I quickly realized that I had never been taught what I needed most: A process for making good choices. For some reason, I had been left out of that loop. I assumed that because I got good grades, everybody thought I knew how to make good choices and I didn’t need to learn the system they were bestowing upon my classmates. I searched around me for said system, checking with friends, peers, co-workers, teachers, my dean, parents, grandparents, and bosses. At times, I even sought wisdom from strangers. It became apparent that I hadn’t been left out of the loop; I wasn’t taught a good decision-making method because there wasn’t one.
At nineteen, I developed a system. I naively thought such discovery was a coming-of-age passage; that everyone made a similar discovery as part of their growth into adulthood. By thirty, after years of implementing my process with repeated success, I realized few people, companies, and certainly governments, ever develop a method for making good choices. They are often unaware they practice poor decision-making processes in the first place. In fact, many of them tenaciously seek the means to a better life and more profitable business via some secret or trick, when all they really need is a method for making good decisions.
The self-help market booms with books, companies, seminars, and motivational speakers who promise the recipe of success to the life you desire. Most focus on advice that is only effective in a specific area of expertise, such as relationships or marketing. Some offer philosophies that can be applied to life and specific topics, but these philosophies are generalizations that do not provide a tangible process for application. Others provide information for making a good choice only within the confines of certain scenarios. Many are inundated with opinion rather than rationale.
It had never occurred to me to apply my decision-making process to dating and relationships; but, once I did, it proved remarkably effective and my dating life became one others envied. It was then that I realized my process could be applied to anything, no matter how small or large. It could be applied to life. It could be applied to planning a camping trip. It could be applied to fighting terrorism. It could be applied to creating laws or disciplining your kids. It’s such a simple process it could even be used by children.
After continual prodding from friends, I shared my dating advice in my book God is a Woman: Dating Disasters, while simultaneously providing entertaining stories of my various dating flops, occurring prior to the application of my decision-making process. After the book’s release, I finally had time to go further and share my process for making good choices in presentations. Such presentations, though, are limited by time constraints. The ideal medium for sharing the process, where I can explore it in full detail and provide ample examples of its application in diverse categories, is a book.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
