2 out of 4 stars
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One of the main things self-help books teach us is that we're responsible for our own lives, and our success and happiness depend entirely on our own actions and attitude. Unfortunately, the world is totally, completely packed with all sorts of distractions and negative influences. This is the focus of A Life Undisturbed by Thadrick Holmes: to help teach people how to "live your life unbothered by things that are external to you".
A Life Undisturbed teaches the reader lessons such as not competing with others, focusing on the present, and the importance of guarding our thoughts and staying positive. Quotes like "you have to strive every day to become better than you were the day before" are solid, fantastic motivational lines to live one's life by, and looking back through my highlights I'm finding all sorts of positive takeaways.
Based on my highlights alone, I could easily see this being a 3- or 4-star book. But then I remember back to the dozens of errors I found (48 to be exact) and the issues with organization the book had. For the first half of the book, chapters were frequently unfocused on their topics. The funniest example of all is chapter 2: "Stay Focused, Success Requires It". The entire chapter is supposed to be about focus but then meanders over to not comparing oneself to others (still mostly about focus), the power of the creative process, and linking to the infinite intelligence before coming back to its topic. The same is true in many of these early chapters, and the topics the author ends up bringing up are the same ones mentioned in practically every chapter, which gave the book a very repetitive feeling. This happened so often that my notes are all I really have to remember what the book actually said at all; everything just ran together so much that it was all a bit forgettable. On the other hand, there was one point where I had to laugh a bit: the author made a frequent point of saying that we need to live in the past and not worry about the future or the past, but then there's one single instance where Thadrick says not to worry so much about the present because the future will be better. This one statement went against so much of the book that I was shocked!
In addition to the power of magnetism, the book also discusses the "infinite intelligence" or "infinite wisdom". I've heard similar concepts before: that there's a force that connects us all together, and that giving oneself over to it allows us to perform our part in the world. Participating in this flow also makes us more successful as we're living out our purpose, and failure becomes far less common. For those who aren't spiritual at all, this heavy reliance on the topic throughout the book may be something that will keep them away.
A Life Undisturbed is far from a bad book, but it was missing quite a bit. There were no detailed instructions on how to improve one's life, no lists, and no worksheets. I did like the author's inclusion of poems at the end of each chapter (except the first for some reason) which were quite successful at eloquently covering the concept of each chapter overall. I definitely got that "okay, I'm ready to make my life better!" feeling, but I never got the ultimate "okay, I'm ready to make my life better and I know how to do it!" energy that a great self-help/motivational book inspires. My rating of the book is 2 out of 4 stars, although I do hope that Thadrick continues writing in the future. With some professional editing, some effort keeping chapters more fully separated from one another, and more thorough information on how exactly to carry out the plans in the book, this easily could've been a book I'd recommend.
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A Life Undisturbed
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