Achieve: Find out Who You Are, What You Really Want, and How to Make It Happen
The High Achievement Handbook, Book 1
By: Chris Friesen/ Narrated By: Chris Abell
Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
Mostly for those who passed The Marshmallow Test…
At the very beginning of Achieve, Friesen poo-poohs personality tests, saying that none of them can grasp the complexity of human existence.
Okay, I’ll buy that. But then he goes on to totally develop his own “test” which has neat little categories that all people, you and I, fall into. Are you open to change? Are you high on “negative emotions”? And so on and so on. Plus, and this is what really irked me: If you flunked the famed Marshmallow Test, which tests you’re ability to delay gratification, you have little hope of real achievement.
Sure, he goes on to tweak all the categories so you might be able to see ways to tweak parts of your personality, but as someone who flunked the Marshmallow Test most woefully (I gnawed, I nibbled, I downright scarfed those little forbidden treats when I was but knee-high to a grasshopper), I didn’t find much to use, much to really believe in Achieve. There was very little in the way of hope or optimism besides lines that are basically, “If you want it enough, you’ll do it.”
Add to that the fact that this is the first book in a series of dream achievement books, and you’re in for a lot of things that are quite tantalizing which are then unfortunately (and most aggravatingly) followed by, “But we’ll get to that in later books of the series”.
Chris Abell turns in an adequate performance, but there’s not a whole lot here within the text of the audiobook to get the listener excited and ready to do that next big and great thing. Not even enough to take that first smallest step.
I dunno, maybe I’m just hypersensitive since the audiobook was so definitely not drafted for the likes of me and people of my ilk, but I think there are far better, far more motivating audiobooks out there that’ll have you shooting for the stars, or even starting to think of lesser, more mundane steps one can take on the path to overcoming obstacles and finding real achievement.
This is not a long audiobook.
But it sure as heck felt like it was.
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