I like motivational stuff and I like fast talking, in your face dialog that seems like it could of come out of an strange cosmic cross of Gilmore Girls and Reservoir Dogs. It was weird, but good.

52 Weeks of Book Reviews. Week #20 – You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life – by Jen Sincero

I recommended this book for my wife, that doesn’t happen very often. My wife and I don’t typically read the same type of book, she seems to read a ton of either period drama, steampunk, or urban fantasy stuff that blows my mind. I’m not sure what the last book was that we both read, possibly Harry Potter. The Venn Diagram of our overlapping tastes in books has got to be pretty slim, but this is a book we could both dig into.

I found some of Jen’s examples and daily experiences to be just slightly distracting because whatever experience she was sharing seemed gender biased and didn’t pertain to me. I assume that this happens all the time to female readers of male authors. We write so often based on our own experiences and about what we know that we must not even recognize what we don’t know, because we don’t know it. Despite the fact that I noticed the author was a woman didn’t change the message of the book, and maybe Jen is going for a predominantly female base, or maybe she’s a woman and doesn’t give a rip if a guy doesn’t get some particular reference, deal with it. I dealt with it and it was fine.

She writes very spontaneously, at least it sounds that way. I hope she wrote most of this in a fit of creativity and then only had minor revisions. I’d be mildly irked if she was in a room on the 188th version with her editor crafting her message sentence by sentence to sound like it was passionate, off the cuff and real. It’s not a bad plan if that’s what she did, but I’d like to think of her as throwing back a couple of Corona’s and then thinking she’d better get this ish done and fired up the creative juices.

It’s not like Jen reinvented the wheel or anything, she just tries her hardest to persuade you to take action. She’s really trying to sell you on yourself the entire book, she uses the classic “Feel, Felt, Found” type layout to try to convince you to get up off of your duff and to take action. She realized that a lot of people feel the same way she did before she took this massive action and changed her life. A ton of other people have felt the exact same way that the reader does now, like they can’t make a difference, like they can’t afford to take bid risks, like they can’t do what they want to, because it’s not going to work out and it takes too much work anyway. However, what Jen and other readers of her books, clients and colleagues have found out is that if you really apply yourself and give yourself a quick kick in the ass, you’ll be fine. Things actually work out better with the occasional swift kick, whether or not it’s self inflicted or not.

Everything is Sales and everyday I wake up I know I have to sell myself first. I am a BADASS.