My Book Review of ‘Great by Choice’

Hi! Today, I have another book related to the business side of writing. Great by Choice.

This book is geared toward organizations. However, there’s a lot in here that can really help you as an entrepreneur—an entrepreneurial writer, let us say. There’s one part in particular, the epilogue. I’m just going to read a little bit, because it’s so awesome. Allow me to change sunglasses glasses. I’ll just change glasses. I can cut that part out, right? You don’t have to see this part. No, I can just cut that part out. Right, so let’s see.

We sense a dangerous disease infecting our modern culture and eroding hope: an increasingly prevalent view that greatness owes more to circumstance, even luck than to action and discipline—that what happens to us matters more than what we do. In games of chance, like a lottery or roulette, this view seems plausible. But taken as an entire philosophy, applied more broadly to human endeavor, it’s a deeply debilitating life perspective, one that we can’t imagine wanting to teach young people.

Do we really believe that our actions count for little, that those who create something great are merely lucky, that our circumstances imprison us? Do we want to build a society and culture that encourage us to believe that we aren’t responsible for our choices and accountable for our performance?

That’s just one part, but he ends up in this wonderful paragraph.

We are not imprisoned by our circumstances. We are not imprisoned by the luck we get or the inherent unfairness of life. We are not imprisoned by crushing setbacks, self-inflicted mistakes or our past success. We are not imprisoned by the times in which we live, by the number of hours in a day, or even the number of hours we’re granted in our very short lives. In the end, we can control only a tiny sliver of what happens to us. But even so, we are free to choose, free to become great by choice.

I rather like that and he makes his case for that throughout here. So five stars.

Thank you. See you later! 🙂