Ed

personally, I got nothing out of it. I would not recommend it to anyone unless they would want to listen to short stories about dedication, faith, persistence, desire....blah blah blah.

I almost didn't buy this book because of the obnoxious comments by the person from VA, who appears so defensive that it now seems as though Mark may have run over their cat, I've had bad experiences with car-sales people and neither the tone used by the author or the narrator justifies the comparison made.

All criticism for the unfortunate soul aside, I have read books about leadership, neuroscience, social science and management (before anyone points this out....you don't have to be a manager to be a leader :P) and have to say that this has been the easiest and most pleasant to read. I have given the Kindle version to my son who has just entered high school and is having his first encounter with bullies. I believe there is something in this book for everyone.

Will be looking into more of Mark's books, he may not given birth to the ideas captured in the book but he certainly has articulated them very well.

I have never had so many duh moments listening to an audiobook before. This book would be better narrated by a couple of readers and dramatised to make it a Winnie the Pooh adventure. I stopped listening and restarted a few days later and the book was no less irritating than when I had stopped. This is now the 4th time and I'm giving up. Very basic, nothing innovative about anything mentioned in the book, an absolute waste of time.

If it is so obvious to reach a weight loss objective through a carbohydrate deficiency then why are there so many obese people that go to the gym, this to me clearly states that there is an obvious nutritional knowledge defecit that even personal trainers don't seem to understand or are reluctant to share with their clients. Day after day though these commited individuals will try to lose weight by burning calories and then try to restrict caloric intake through the use of will power.

Gary goes over many cases in which different societies have become obese and aludes to their adherence to more 'civilised' feeding habits as the cause for their poor health. I think that it is necessary to go into the detail of where we as human beings became more and more reliant on such a simple and non-essential nutrients and how this reliance has affected us as humans.

The book gets to the point very slowly, however, changing habitual behaviour for some does require research based evidence and this is about as close as you're going to get in an audio book format. I strongly recommend this audiobook to anyone that has been trying to lose weight through dieting or is struggling to stay on their strict caloric restricted regime.

Will power will only get you so far!

The author spends a lot of time talking of his achievements and how companies before they engaged him they were failing and how his methods have even turned countries around.

The author has been teaching people how to think for some time and he's obviously very good at it, with all the books he's written on the subject you would think that he might leave all the talk of his achievements for his CV and not for a book that I had to pay for.

As for the non-self edifying parts of the book; repetative and not a lot of substance.

Yes the advise is very basic if you already have personal finance acumen, the book is aimed at the younger crowd and provides some good foundational advise and background on asset classes and the diffence between diversification and asset allocation. Ramit is a vibrant reader and keeps you interested right the way through.

Peter Schiff is able to clearly articulate the cause and effects of inflation in the US the ongoing devaluation of the dollar and how everyone can put a plan to mitigate exposure to these risks to reduce impact to them. I found his 2009 updates somewhat amusing, almost like an adults version of "I told you so". In any case, the audio book was informative and educational and would recommend it.

I'm not sure what the previous reviewers were looking for in this book, as an IS & Audit specialist I found this book thought provoking and entertaining. It really opened my eyes to the power of social engineering and made me see that I was not only prone to being a victim, but a perpertrator of such activity.

Recommended reading for anyone in an IS role or looking to gain insight into how the other half use their social skills to get around hardened security measures, highly engineered processes and even armed guards.

It took me a couple of runs through this audio book to really understand the framework that Nassim was putting together. First, by dividing the everyday from the extreme, understanding how scalable vs non-scalable events might allow us to increase our encounter with the black swan event. Second, understanding how our own minds will distort or prevent us from being able to see black swans. The author provides guidance on how we might shift our internal belief paradigm so that we might become more conducive to black swan events and to stop trusting the common as it might be the one thing holding us back from making it to extremistan.

The way in which we go about our business might look like random set of events, little do we know that there are machines out there that are watching our moves, poking and prodding to see which way we turn, what we buy, why we don't etc....

The author uses examples to make recommendations on how we might put some structure into our chaotic lives to ensure that we think before we do. There are several examples that are used in books such as the Black Swan & Freakonomics which one might take to mean that the book is simply repeating points already made by others.