Life's Missing Instruction Manual : The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth [Hardcover]

Joe Vitale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2006

Bestselling author and marketing guru Joe Vitale offers insights and life lessons for achieving success

In the simple, straightforward tone of an instructional manual, this little book offers big wisdom and little-known secrets for living a better life. Packed with life lessons most people will wish they'd learned earlier, Life's Missing Instruction Manual uses humor and anecdote to present practical steps readers can use to take control of their lives, overcome any obstacle, and find fulfillment. Each simple lesson is explained and brought into focus with real-life examples and includes practical steps on putting those lessons to work every day. Full of uncommon wisdom and lighthearted humor, this book will help readers develop confidence, create a plan for success, get ahead at work, build rapport with others, develop time-management skills, and find wealth and happiness.

Readers will learn how to live life to the fullest when they discover how to:
* Take chances that lead to success
* Get through the tough times
* Be themselves and like it
* Find their purpose
* Work as a team
* Create their own blueprint for success
* Believe in themselves
* Lead a good and moral life
* Accept their mistakes and move on
* Define success for themselves

Joe Vitale (Wimberley, TX) is President of Hypnotic Marketing, Inc., and author of The Attractor Factor (0-471-70604-3) and The E-Code (0-471-71855-6). He has been called "the Buddha of the Internet" for his combination of spirituality and marketing acumen. His professional clients include the Red Cross, PBS, Hermann Children's Hospital, and many other small and large international businesses.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vitale, "the Buddha of the Internet," compiles a trove of life lessons from "internet celebrities," motivational speakers, writers and entertainment industry folks in this little book that offers a mishmash of oft-heard self-help homilies. Bits of wisdom and anecdotes are bundled into chapters with titles like, "Your Feelings Are Your Hidden Thoughts" or "How to Know What You Want." Each chapter is punctuated by subheads that address the finer points, including "Naps Are Good," which advises: "When the world seems bleak, when you feel out of sorts, when your body feels tired and you mind seems wild, sometimes all you need is a good nap." Vitale frequently mentions his previous books (The Attractor Factor; The E-Code), and includes short essays from other enterprising authors or "internet marketers" that are virtually indistinguishable from each other's (and Vitale's) in style, content and form. Worth noting is the journey the book takes from the simple advice at the beginning to the hints on manipulating people-"People Will Tend To Say Yes If You Start Them Saying Yes" and "People Will Pay Any Amount of Money to Have Their Inner States Changed"-that creep into the end of the book. Searchers intent on finding instructions on living a fulfilling life should seek a less scattershot book, but readers looking for the odd pick-me-up will find them in large supply here.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Dr. Joe Vitale, president of Hypnotic Marketing, Inc., located outside of Austin, Texas, is the author of way too many books to list here. Here are just a few of them:

He wrote the number-one bestseller, The Attractor Factor: 5 Easy Steps for Creating Wealth (or anything else) from the inside Out, the number-three bestseller The Greatest Money-Making Secret in History, and the number-one best-selling E-book Hypnotic Writing. His latest book, written with Jo Han Mok, is the E-Code: 33 Internet Superstars Reveal 43 Ways to Make Money Online Almost Instantly-with just e-mail. His next book will be There's a Customer Born Every Minute.

Besides all of his books, Dr. Vitale also recorded the number-one best-selling Nightingale-Conant audio program, the Power of Outrageous Marketing in addition, he has a complete home-study course in marketing at www.HypnoticMarketingStrategy.com. Sign up for his complementary newsletter News You Can Use! at his main web site at www.mrfire.com.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471768499
• ISBN-13: 978-0471768494
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #237,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joe Vitale is President of Hypnotic Marketing, Inc., a marketing consulting firm. He has been called the "The Buddha of the Internet" for his combination of spirituality and marketing acumen. His professional clients include the Red Cross, PBS, Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital, and many other small and large businesses. His other books include The Attractor Factor, There's a Customer Born Every Minute, and Life's Missing Instruction Manual, all from Wiley. He is also one of the stars of the hit movie The Secret.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars 10% Gold and 90% Infomercials, March 27, 2007

By 

A. Bengzon "goldenarm" (Jersey City, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Life's Missing Instruction Manual : The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth (Hardcover)

If you can skip past the hundreds of advertisements for the self-help products being peddled by Joe's friends and colleagues, there is actually some very useful stuff in here. But the presentation of the material is very disjointed. This is really just a collection of infomercials. Not bad but there are many better books out there that are actually written by one person and flow coherently.

62 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book delivers what it promises, April 5, 2006

By 

Philip Hamilton (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Life's Missing Instruction Manual : The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth (Hardcover)

This book features numerous vignettes grouped into several themes:

* You: Congratulations on Your Life
* Internal Capabilities: Understanding Your Life's Potential
* External Connections: Caring for Others in Your Life
* Troubleshooting: Taking Care of Yourself
* Optimum Performance: Getting the Best Out of Your Life
* Specifications: What You Need to Know About Others
* Proper Usage: Defining Your Life's Purpose
* Assembly Required: Creating Your Future

You Create Your Future with a Pen (pp. 23-24)
I love this concept, because it involves imaging yourself at some future point in time and establishing goals for yourself under that pretext. We must visualize the future success and remained dedicated, for dedication means keeping a promise to oneself.

Indian Wisdom: Two Wolves (p. 91)
This is a concise and vivid example of controlling one's internal struggles. It reminds us that we are the ones who control the outcome by "feeding" the metaphorical wolf that represents one of two opposing forces.

People Only Act for Self-Serving Reasons, No Matter What They Say or What You Think (p. 112)
This insight is spot-on, and as Joe says, everyone still disagrees with this truism...but it is true. And it's not as if this is inherently a bad thing, but rather just the way we humans act. The sooner we accept this concept, the sooner we'll be able to interact with people more effectively.

102 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars How to write a best-seller: the missing instruction manual, March 9, 2006

By 

Steve Salerno "author of SHAM: How the Self-H... (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Life's Missing Instruction Manual : The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth (Hardcover)

It's hard to resist the notion that Vitale conceived his latest best-seller by applying the following formula: Take the marketing hook of a book that already published to wild success (You: The Owner's Manual), add some of the pointed religiosity of two other recent bestsellers (Your Best Life Now and The Purpose-Driven Life), throw in some generic cosmic blather (inspired, perhaps, by Sylvia Browne or Marianne Williamson) and VOILA!--another perfect entry in the burgeoning self-help sub-category of "holistic/successful/spiritually enriched living."

This approach is nothing new for Vitale, a master of so-called "stealth" or "viral" marketing who unashamedly admits to being president of a company called Hypnotic Marketing, Inc. His previous best-seller, The Attraction Factor (which owns the distinction of once having knocked a Harry Potter book out of Amazon's No. 1 slot) echoed several other books and/or programs that involved such concepts as "laws of attraction" or "rules of attraction." Here, Vitale proposes to offer "big wisdom and little-known secrets for living a better life." I'll give him this: The book is clever in some spots and pretty funny in others--but its ability to help you "overcome any obstacle" and "find fulfillment...wealth and happiness," as his publicity material promises, is highly debatable. Like so many of the gurus in this self-help category, Vitale subscribes to the Promise Readers Everything--Even Things That Clash--And Hope They Don't Notice school of motivational enlightenment. Examples: He vows to teach readers, simultaneously, how to "create their own blueprint for success" and to "work as a team." Granted, those two goals are not, strictly speaking, incompatible. But the degree of finesse required to embrace and, especially, implement both goals is not something you could hope to find in a book like Vitale's. Similarly, he says, readers will learn to "be themselves and like it" as well as "lead a good and moral life"--but for that matter, and for good measure, let's throw in two other objectives: "take chances that lead to success" and "accept their mistakes and move on." I defy anyone short of Socrates or Kant to resolve ALL FOUR of those stated benefits into the same action plan without endlessly qualifying, parsing language, or backtracking on something you said earlier.

I've said it a hundred times and I say it again here: If you're just looking for a quick jolt of formless inspiration that fades as fast as the winter sun, then what the heck, order the book. But if you actually expect life-transforming wisdom--come on, now. You know better than that already, don't you? The person most likely to profit off this "guidebook" is Vitale himself.