TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

Overachievement
by John Eliot
259 pages; hardcover; $24.95
The Penguin Group, New York, 2004

Stop thinking. Find your inner squirrel.

According to Dr. John Eliot, professor, consultant and author, those instructions are key to transforming yourself into an overachiever.

Ignore this advice by rooting yourself in conventional wisdom instead and Dr. Eliot believes you may become – or remain - an overmotivated underachiever. You’ll set goals and work hard to attain them, but will never race to the top of the tree, despite talent and intelligence.

Why? Overachievement explains the reason this way: When you follow standard self-help programs, you’re so focused on performance you forget to perform. That’s where finding your inner squirrel comes in.

Say a squirrel needs to dash across an electrical wire to reach the next pole. Goal setting and concentration won’t get him there. Acting will. The same theory applies to your performance. As the Nike ad says, just do it.

Full of suggestions that contradict traditional techniques for realizing your dreams, Overachievement may be the beginning of a much-needed shift in the self-improvement field. Yet, like many of the cliched approaches it seeks to supplant, the book appears to overlook the fact that no one method is right for all.

Even so, there’s food for your inner squirrel here. Self improvement is a process, like gathering nuts for lean times. Overachievement can add one more nugget to your stash.

 

Review originally published April 2005.