1 out of 4 stars
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What is the key ingredient for a successful motivational text? Sincerity. Mark L. Wdowiak’s If Life Stinks Get Your Head Outta Your Buts is replete with abstract hypotheticals and brief anecdotes but lacks sincerity. Ethos is an essential element for a didactic text to be convincing, yet this book did not have it. If you want me to follow your advice in order to make significant changes in my behavior, you had better convince me that you know what you are talking about. After reading If Life Stinks Get Your Head Outta Your Buts, I was not convinced.
Although I have not read many self-help, motivational texts, I have read some of the more famous ones: Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, MD, What Color Is Your Parachute? by Dick Bolles, and several books by Zig Ziglar (whom he mentions in the Acknowledgments). After reading Wdowiak’s book, I gained a better understanding of what If Life Stinks Get Your Head Outta Your Buts lacks: sincerity. I rate this book 1 out of 4 simply because there was nothing relatable about it.
When it comes to nonfiction, the author’s voice must be convincing. Wdowiak’s was not. He makes several abstract claims about the power of positive thinking, taking responsibility for one’s actions, planning ahead, dealing with criticism, and identifying root causes, etc. However, he does not include specific anecdotes or sincere, believable examples of just how he came to his conclusions. Sure, he relates some of his experiences with family and finances, but they are too brief to make up for the long, iterations of the same rhetorical question: What are you going to do to solve your own problems?
This book is missing the voice of a storyteller. I wanted to be entertained or shocked or inspired by actual, believable episodes in his life, or the lives of others. That never happened. It seems that he only uses his age as a source of credibility. Well, as I am rapidly approaching middle age, even my children won’t accept my arguments without concrete, convincing evidence. “Because I’m old and know better” just won’t cut it.
I liked that the tone of If Life Stinks Get Your Head Outta Your Buts is informal and conversational, and I kept waiting for Wdowiak to engage me with a funny or poignant story, but it never happened. Perhaps this book would be more appealing to a younger demographic, because it just came across as a catalogue of common sense advice without a soul.
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If life stinks get your head outta your buts
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