Not a Life Coach: Are You Ready to Change Your Life? From the Sunday Times No.1 Bestselling Author

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I know his ethos, banter and growth stories because of Instagram, I’ve been in the JSA, I’ve listened to his podcasts (pre the most recent lads in Aus podcast series) and I’ve seen the value James can bring to people and I’ve personally drawn a lot of value from him. Meditation and mental health were great chapters but the ones that hit home was mindset and motivation. Likes: Simple language, split into interesting categories, good reminder of some topics such as Carol Dweck’s mindset concept. Every reference book he cites would be far better to read than this book (I haven't read them all but I have read a good proportion).

e. double spacing between lines, far too many blank pages and lots of repetition throughout, all of which give a misleading impression of the quantity of content contained in the book. He’s not totally the same as all the other self made wizards who’ve cracked the trick to life, but he’s not really worth the hype I’m sorry to say. I'm not disputing that he has earned his success and has done the hard graft to get where he is today but he talks as if he lived in the trenches of slugging it out in the corporate world for 20 years, a poor pt for 20 years until he finally made it.It’s rich telling people that being a millionaire isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when you are a millionaire. Time to stop sleep-walking through your life; to challenge the status quo; and to truly ask yourself if you’re on the right path to success, happiness and fulfilment. hours of listening to him that they are just regurgitated information or memes that he has seen and posted. To give a James Smith like analogy, this book is like me reading his 'not a diet' book then writing a diet book myself as though I know what I'm on about. The only possible reason why he abruptly kept quoting Einstein about the law of thermodynamics in a self improvement book is the effort to seem smarter even though “he didn’t do school”.

It felt a bit self-centered a lot of the time, but I understand his point, just not something that I found particularly useful. This book is full of contradictions, one minute he’s saying he believes people should leave their careers if they don’t align with their utopian vision of their future, the next he’s idolising people working in checkouts of supermarkets, admiring the nobility of it.It is also reminiscent of times I would just open a web page and copy verbatim what was in front of me in an attempt to pass it off as my own work. I had a look of some of them after reading it and I really felt that it wasn't properly read or interpreted. Personally I’ve read a lot of self development books and I know James’s story so I don’t feel I gained as much value from this book as someone who is reading self development for the first time. This book is useful as an accessible version of the material it references for those who can’t be bothered to read the underlying sources.