Success Is a Journey: Make Your Life a Grand Adventure

Citation

Rich, M.K. (2000), "Success Is a Journey: Make Your Life a Grand Adventure", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 73-74. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2000.15.1.73.2

Overview

Many have become captive to their way of life, succumbing to the daily rigors required to maintain a comfortable level of security. As “success” finds us, we tend to reduce our tolerance for risk and become complacent with our environment that either we have created for ourselves or we have arrived at by chance over a number of years. We seldom change our environment unless the evidence for such change is overwhelming, based on some scientific evidence that such change is justified. Age also seems to have an effect on this process. The older we become, the less tolerant we are of change. What at one point in our lives appeared as an adventure ripe for pursuit now looms before us as a risk that only the foolhardy would entertain. Age somehow tempers our thinking and calls to mind all potential pitfalls that seem to overshadow the possible benefits of a new direction.

Brian Tracy has linked these two periods of our lives with his work entitled, Success Is a Journey: Make Your Life a Grand Adventure. He reviews some of the travelling adventures of his earlier years and links the consequences of his decisions to general observations based on his present maturity – observations that have universal value for all of us. Brian’s writing style holds your attention as you anxiously await the outcome of the event, much like a good novel. What makes this book invaluable is the timeless truths that he offers throughout each discourse. These truths cause you to reflect on your own life and to realize that you have often come to the same conclusion as you lived your own adventures, the difference being that you probably have not constructed statements that provide future direction as succinctly as what is offered in this work. This book offers personal validity to the notion that we all want to be successful in life and to make this place a little better as a result of our being here. We learn over time that success is a matter of making the very best of ourselves under all conditions life dishes up for us. We learn from our past supposedly to make the future more to our liking. As you read this book, you will discover many truths about yourself that have more importance than you previously considered.

Content

The book is actually a story about a trip that Brian and some friends undertook after they had pursued dead‐end jobs for a number of years following high school. The word “trip” would have to be classified as an understatement since they set their sights on working their way to and through Africa. As the author indicates, there are three ways to read this book. First, it can be consumed as a travel adventure, where the reader is held spellbound by the author’s excellent writing style. Second, it can be studied as an account of a search for truth, with the reader enjoying and absorbing the conclusive nuggets that the author sprinkles liberally throughout the work. Third, it can be reviewed as a biography of a person, going through a complete metamorphosis from a kid on an adventure to an adult much wiser from the experience. Personally, I found it a combination of the first two, with the adventure leading to logical truths. These are truths that we all know but possibly have not structured into concise statements that can be responsible for supplying new direction to us for future growth and development.

Conclusion

Typically, the books that are reviewed in a journal of this type are steeped with cognitive reality anchored in empirical evidence. We examine works geared to expanding our understanding of the marketing field and its many subsets that have evolved during its short tenure as a defined specialization. Occasionally, we need to examine ourselves and enjoy a few moments to absorb a work designed to give us a sense of being and provide us with direction for our personal effort in this sphere we call a career. The 194 pages divided over 26 chapters make this book easy to digest during short lulls in the action of our busy existence. As a result of availing ourselves to its content, this book just might make our observation of life a little more enjoyable and provide us with ample reasoning to accept ourselves and our direction with a little more conviction.