Customer Reviews

Crunch Time: 8 Steps to Making the Right Life Decisions at the Right Times

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Lindner manages to mix together various of his life's lessons learned, his career as a media/entertainer rep, his tennis experience, his battle with weight and his parents' wisdom and lack-thereof into a somewhat difficult-to-read to the end self-help book. There is nothing new here in the self-help genre (not that there ever is) just a lot of repackaging and sprucing up with italicized terminology (Heart-of-Hearts) and self-help advice.

The advice is generally good (delay gratification, go with your heart, etc) and Lindner is a good story-teller. The book is most captivating when he is recounting epsiodes from his life that have affected him to this day (his mom's advocacy for his college recommendation in high school; his dad's challenging his mom on her extreme lateness habit). As somenone who is knee-deep in media entertainment representation, Lindner probably has a good novel in him about media personalities and behind the scenes shenanigans.

There are some glaring weakenesses. Roger Maris' difficulty handling the attention during his quest to break Babe Ruth's home run record is oversimplified as a matter of "not seeing the big picture". Also, on the one hand Linder appropriately gives us Kobe Bryant as an example of someone who made a bad decision during his so-called "Crunch Time", then at the end of the book give us Madonna as a role model of ends-over-means decision-making.

Lindner could have used better advice from his editorial support. He introduces key terminology at the beginning, the so-called Heart-of-hearts, for example, without defining it and giving examples (this comes near the end), and he provides other how-to's at the very end of the book as well.

Unless you're really clueless in the area of social skills, or maybe if you're just really young and haven't lived long enough to learn skills us older folk take for granted, this book would be a waste of your time. I'm amazed intelligent people like Matt Lauer actually have a need for a strategist. For the rest of us, its unlikely you're going to read much of anything that you dont already know.

First Lindner book I have read. How does a self-aggrandizing daddy's boy manage to get the puffy endorsements from celebs? Amazing, and this book should be an emabarassment to a smart guy like Matt Lauer, who is the star of the author's claim to fame. Boring, trite material which could be summarized if the whole book said only "carpe diem." Maybe he is smart -- he got my money and evidently from others who were taken in by "reviews".

I have to admit that I'm naturally cynical of self-help books, and it was just a coincidence that I was at a book store clearance sale and happened to be thinking about life decisions on the same day. The cover of this book is catchy (don't say it) and it became a seven dollar impulse buy. I was actually sort of excited to start reading it, but it didn't take long to become designated "toilet reading," and it probably wouldnt even get that if I wasn't so cheap to try to get my seven dollars worth. The book seems so silly at times, I'm even embarressed to be reading it on the toilet. The author keeps repeating stupid terms like "heart-of-hearts," and "strata-gem" that have no meaning as far as I'm concerned. Here's an example of advice that you'll get from this book (paraphrased rather heavily): [Use "Out-Of-The-Box decision making" sometimes, making an unconventional rather than conventional choice. I did, and now I'm extremely successful in everything I do. My clint so-and-so also did, and he is successful as well, for example this one time he chose to ...]. It just doesn't do anything for me.

Ken has put together a clear and easy-to-understand guide to making decisions for your career and your life. His method is simple and it WORKS. I also enjoyed his stories about his clients and how certain decisions immensely influenced their careers in a positive direction. Very practical and a must read!