How to Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places [Hardcover]

Michael Gates Gill (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 29, 2009

Michael Gill's lemons-to-lemonade memoir chronicled his transformative years working at Starbucks after losing his high-powered job, his marriage, and his health (he developed a brain tumor). In response to overwhelming requests from readers who wanted to know how they, too, could weather downturns, he has distilled his lessons into fifteen meaningful lessons, including:

·Leap...With Faith: Sometimes it pays to leap without looking and say yes without thinking (Gill accepted the Starbucks job immediately, on a whim).

·Let Yourself...Be Helped: Pride is even more paralyzing than fear.

·Look...with Respect at Every Individual You See: Gill was raised to avoid eye contact with those who were different, cloistered in a privileged world. Now he realizes the potential in all who cross his daily path.

·Lose...Your Watch (and Cell Phone and PDA!): Our obsession with productivity produces madness, not gladness.

Offering living proof that extraordinary happiness is found in ordinary moments, How to Save Your Own Life provides empowering words and hope for anyone facing a reversal of fortune. True fortune, Gill discovered, lies not in fate but in discovering the innate capacity we all possess to rescue ourselves.

Watch a Video

Editorial Reviews

Review

"We are all lucky that Starbucks saved Michael Gates Gill's life. It enabled him to return with this beautifully written book filled with wisdom, passion, humor and love."
-Jeffrey Zaslow, author of The Girls From Ames, coauthor The Last Lecture

About the Author

The son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, Michael Gates Gill was a creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising, where he was employed for over twenty-five years. He lives in New York within walking distance of the Starbucks store where he works, and has no plans to retire from what he calls the best job he’s ever had.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Gotham (December 29, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592405215
• ISBN-13: 978-1592405213
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,041,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Gates Gill was born with all the material advantages that America can offer, with an acclaimed New Yorker staff writer for a father, and spent his childhood surrounded by famous intellectuals and socially connected people. After graduating from Yale he was given a job with the help of a classmate as a Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson, the most successful and largest advertising agency in the world. Then after 25 years of devoting his life to work, he was suddenly fired and his life at the top of the American establishment became derailed. He found himself broke, his marriage dissolving, learned he needed a brain operation, and was desperately looking for work to help support his five children. Then he found a job at Starbucks where he still works as a barista.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Pearls of Wisdom December 7, 2009

By Holly K TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This book is a follow-up to Gill's "How Starbucks Saved My Life" which was published in September 2008. Anyone who read and enjoyed that book will probably like this one as well.

Michael Gates Gill was born into privilege and had an abundance of material things as well as doors of opportunity opened for him because of who he was and his family connections. He went to Yale because he was a legacy and his first job was handed to him by a friend from Skull and Bones. He never had to go through a job interview or get things the way "average" folks do. His life was filled with mover and shakers both in New York and Washington D.C. He worked hard at his job and sacrificed his family to get ahead and it all fell apart when he was in his late 50's. He lost his job, lost his family and ended up working at Starbucks since there were no other job opportunities. His story of is fall from "high" places and yet managing to land on his feet and finding out he was much happier after losing everything comprises the story told in "How Starbucks Saved My Life."

This new book takes all the lessons he learned through his life experiences and boils them down to 15 life lessons that he shares with the reader. Some chapters will resonate with some people more than others, based upon where the reader is in his/her life journey. What an opportunity for us to look at someone else's experiences and learn from them without necessarily having to go through the same thing (which is what he talks about in chapter 1). He bares himself and talks about where he made mistakes and where he did things well with an honesty that is refreshing. There is a lot of wisdom in these pages and I enjoyed the book from beginning to end.

Here are the chapter/lesson titles:

Listen - To Others Who Have Suffered and Survived
Listen - To Your Own Heart to Find True Happiness
Leap - With Faith
Let - Yourself be Helped
Look - With Respect at Every Individual You see
Learn - From Your Children
Learn - From your Father
Learn - From your Mother
Lose - Your Watch (and Cell Phone and PDA!)
Let Go - And Let God
Laugh - with New Insight
Live - Each Day with Gratitude Like It Might be Your Last
Late Bloomers - The last of Life Can Be the Best
Less is More - Lose All Your "Stuff" and Find Freedom
Love - The Ride and Let Your Light Shine

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Rags-to-Riches Story with Hopeful, Helpful Lessons January 13, 2010

By Holly Jahangiri

Format:Hardcover

How to Save Your Own Life...provocative title, isn't it? Michael Gates Gill isn't indulging in hyperbole - in his latest book, the author of How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else shares insights and valuable life lessons that will help others survive, even thrive, in what might appear to be the worst times of their lives. Gill lost just about everything: his job, his wife, and his health - yet he discovered real happiness within himself. In How to Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places, Michael Gates Gill shares the lessons he learned and shows how to apply them.

One of the points that really struck me came in Lesson 3: Leap...with Faith. Gill is talking with a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who tells him that one of the biggest problems she sees, counseling young people, is that they have no problems. Gill asks her to explain. She tells him that their parents had to struggle to the top, themselves. But, having survived the "mean streets" and having achieved success, they want to protect their children and shelter them and make sure they never experience such "tough times" themselves. But what they are doing is making their kids afraid of the outside world. Gill realizes that this has been the case for him, all his life - and that had he been thinking, had he not simply taken a leap of faith and accepted a "low status" job offer with Starbucks when the chips were down, he would still be passively unable to cope with his unfamiliar new world.

Michael Gates Gill was a creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising. At age 53, he was "invited out to breakfast and fired." Like many professional men and women, he had defined himself largely through his job; he writes, "I was devastated to have my reason for being - my sense of self - taken away." Later, his wife left him. At 63, Gill was diagnosed with a benign, but potentially life-threatening, brain tumor. He had no health insurance. And just when things looked truly bleak, he was offered a job - at Starbucks.

"With a desperate kind of courage, I said yes," writes Gill. The next year of his life brought a transformation: Gill learned how important it is to listen, to share experiences, to stop being a slave to his watch or his PDA, to treat everyone - no matter what their station in life - with respect and kindness. He writes of the importance of learning, not only from our parents, but also from children. And he writes of the importance of trusting in God, knowing when to "let go...and let God." Gill discovered the value of laughter, which he calls "a gift of mental health we can grant ourselves at any time in our lives. . . . It is crucial not to let serious concerns keep you from experiencing the miracle of every unfolding moment."

Gill's happiness is like a ray of hope - or a friendly hand extended to anyone who is experiencing the hardships of a tough economy. How to Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places seems to say that maybe we don't need all that we thought we needed - the prestigious job, the fashionable clothes, the cool sportscar, and the trappings of social privilege; maybe what we need most is to have ourselves back, and to rekindle the sense of joy in ordinary experiences.

Gill currently lives in New York within walking distance of the Starbucks store where he works, and has no plans to retire from what he calls the best job he's ever had.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Learning to Live August 3, 2010

By Tracy Rowan TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Everywhere you go these days you see people chasing down what they consider to be 'the good life' with long working hours, omnipresent technology, ethical lapses and perhaps, underneath it all, a sense that maybe it's not all good. Michael Gill, son of writer Brendan Gill, was born to privilege and became a workaholic. Success is what he understood. He was golden until the day he was fired from his high-powered job, saw his marriage disintegrate and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. With his life in shambles, he took a job at Starbuck's on impulse and a year later recognized that he was finally a happy man.

He documented the process in his first book, "How Starbuck's Saved My Life" which apparently struck some responsive chord in his readers, many of whom asked him to give them the benefit of his experiences. How could they weather personal and professional disasters? How could they turn their frantic and often empty lives into something rich and meaningful? So Gill followed up with "How to Save Your Own Life," fifteen lessons on how to find what's really important in your life and go with it.

I have to admit that much of this book seems like common sense, but as I often say, common sense is fairly uncommon these days. Treat everyone with respect, Gill tells us. I say, well of course; you get back from people what you put into them. But other lessons are not so obvious: Get rid of the stuff that weighs you down. Life isn't about what you own. And make leaps of faith. Instinctive acts are sometimes the greatest indicators of who you really are and what you should be doing with your life.

I can't help but feel that this is one of those books that everyone can benefit from. Gill doesn't really do more than remind us of what's truly important about life, but it's remarkable how often we need to be reminded of those very things. As such, I really do recommend it, particularly for those who are feeling that there's a whole lot less to life than they once believed. It's all still out there; we just have to know where to look for it.