3 out of 4 stars
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Achieve Your Dreams: Why You Don’t and How You Can, by Scott Hughes, is a motivational self-help book for aspiring authors and other dreamers. In this book Scott sets out the reasons why achieving our dreams can seem impossible and gives practical advice on how we can “embrace the exceptional” and succeed.
Written in an easy to read, conversational style this books explains how fear of dreams and fear of failure can crush our dreams so effectively that most people don’t even try to achieve. A clever integration of quotes and statistics links unfulfilled dreams and low self-esteem, and reasons that dream chasing is a fundamental part of living a happy life.
The fear of failure is countered with a series of failure before success stories about celebrities. This section lets down the book a little, since these are old stories heard before and used in other motivational writing. But this section also contains plenty of good reasoning and my favourite quote of the book “Even pigs fly these days. Literally. In airplanes.”
While aimed at all of us with dreams, the book includes a challenge to aspiring authors in the form of an admitted plug for Scott’s other book 10 Steps to Promote Your Book. He discusses this title and promises that every author who follows his 10 steps will sell 100 copies of their book, or get their money back. At this point I could question the intent of the book: is it about achieving dreams or selling 10 Steps? I could question it. But I find myself wondering if I could be an author too…
The book ends with the main calls to action summarised in commandment style. It also has something unique that I wasn’t expecting; an offer of social media friendship from Scott himself, who wants to hear about the readers’ progress on achieving their dreams.
I liked this book because of the friendly tone and well-reasoned rebuttals to the reasons why we don’t achieve our dreams. I feel good reasoning is essential to a self-help book such as this, as without it the calls to action wouldn’t be as strong and meaningful. I didn’t like the old and well-used celebrity failure stories because I was expecting to continue reading original content. This decreases my rating by one star.
Overall I found this book to be friendly and well-reasoned, like having a motivational chat with a good friend or favourite teacher. I rate this book 3 out of 4 stars.
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Achieve Your Dreams
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-- 17 Jan 2017, 12:12 --
Thanks for publishing my review Scott. Since reviewing this book I was super excited to get the 10 Steps book as BOTD and have actually started a writing project (a blog).