Review by Gyongyver Farkas -- The Mindset by Ace Bowers

[Gyongyver Farkas]

[Following is a volunteer review of "The Mindset" by Ace Bowers.]

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4 out of 4 stars

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Ace Bower’s The Mindset: My Journey from Janitor to Silicon Valley Millionaire in Five Years is an inspirational and powerfully motivational memoir of the author, an autobiography written in a very straightforward, sincere way. It is a kind of self-help book, can be used as an inspiration and as an example by anyone who wishes a complete turnaround from a very low financial level to remarkable prosperity. It is also psychological, analyzing the influence of childhood happenings, family, people, on the mindset and development of a young adult, on his future perspectives in his career, on his financial and personal development.

The Mindset is also a story about the American Dream, a development story from rags to riches. It is a flashback in time when the author felt helpless, worthless and ashamed. The book describes his early life and journey into adulthood. His early memories resemble a nightmare; the remarkable turning-point in his life took place in five years. He had blue-collar beginnings, but from a second-hand start and dull adulthood he could find himself later between white-collar millionaires at the end. He could not afford to attend an Ivy League school, he didn’t invent and didn’t inherit anything.

How was then possible for him to make this huge, revolutionary turn? He had instead a desire for change, motivation and the mindset of an over-comer. He had a great deal of willpower, persistence, and fortitude. It also involved a lot of sacrifice and a focus on important things. And, last but not least, really hard work.

He grew up in a rather chaotic environment, as the third child, facing difficulties in his childhood, like poverty, alcoholism of the parents, frequent fightings between them, his brother was convicted and spent some time in jail, apart from their family, his mother suffered abuse in her childhood, which was kept as a family secret, and one time she even committed suicide. The young Ace as a child, tried to hide his family life from his wealthier and happier friends, being ashamed to invite his friends in his home, for fear of not be seen the fightings between his parents by his friends.

After graduating from high school, he could not afford to go to college, while most of his friends left for college. He was overweight, depressed, a rather heavy smoker, had bad credits at the bank, and unemployed. The bottom-rock of his situation was that he found a job as a janitor at a motel for the minimum wage of 6$ per hour. He had two choices: to follow the bad cycle of his parents or to change his situation.

He managed to do the revolutionary change and in five years' time, he became a Silicon Valley millionaire. He had a burning desire to come out from poverty, but his motivation reached a stepping-stone phase when he heard that his future wife is expecting their first child. The birth of his son Noah marked a new beginning in his life.

There is a typology in psychology. There are people who are able to achieve results in their life by evading the situations, circumstances and environments they do not wish in their life. In this way, the chaotic family situation served for the author as something to evade. His motivation to evade poverty and the other undesirable situations became the strongest when he heard that he would become a father. He did not wish his son to experience the nightmares he experienced. That was the stepping-stone, the start for a new life, a new beginning. From that point, he not only wanted a change but had a strong motivation for a change.

The most important thing for a change lies in the proper mindset, it is not just a mere coincidence that the main title of the book is “The Mindset”. Many people today agree that everything first begins in the mind. Before that point the author did not really make plans, he was just adrift in life.

Being raised in that particular family enriched Ace’s life with some life-skills that gave him an advantage in his later career. He became highly intuitive and emphatic, and his ability to interact and communicate with people on different levels are his most important life-skills.

With his new mindset, he was able to lose 85 pounds in four months. In his career, the next step was to work as a security guard. While working hard as a security guard, he was also studying for his insurance exam. He was successful at his exam, and he could sell insurance. He flipped cars, painted houses, repaired cars, was promoted to security guard supervisor at a Silicon Valley tech company. He was never complacent and made progress all the time. He became an entry-level manual software quality assurance (QA) tester at the same company. He took a class on coding for beginners. He read books about software at night, went to night school to become certified as a QA software tester. He was then hired at Yahoo as a contractor. Then an agency hired him to do QA at Google. For one year he worked for a cyber-security company in Cupertino, where he first had six figures income. Then he became Senior QA manager at Google again. At the age of 32, he was already a multi-millionaire.

In the book, I liked how the author wrote about the people and relationships that were the most important and those who shaped his life, and how he realized that everything in his life made him become the over-comer, the new and different person he is now, all his struggles, all his lessons and all the hardships and difficulties he faced. When he became accountable for his life and did not blame anybody, he did not blame the circumstances, he became a real winner.

I do not find anything which I disliked in the book. I really enjoyed reading it, as it was very interesting and entertaining, especially because made me curious to read a book about an achiever of the American Dream.

The book appeared to be professionally edited, I could not really find typos or grammatical mistakes, I rate this memoir 4 out of 4 stars, for its content and edition. The book is very entertaining, readable, and I recommend it to all types of readers, I think everybody can enjoy the book, young and old alike, and many types of readers can find something interesting in the book or something in common in the situations encountered in it.

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The Mindset
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[Laura Lee]

Wow. That is really incredible. Thanks for your review! This sounds really inspiring.

[xoxoAnushka]

Wow! You've summarized the plot in a very detailed manner. Great review!