Customer Reviews

Secrets of the SuperOptimist

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The walls push the air against your eyes. Even a quiet destiny seems swallowed by the very earth. Every friend is a memory of casual betrayal. And yet there is Amazon. The debris of cardboard boxes around me are a childish fort of novelty and hope. From one of them, I pull out...
SECRETS OF THE SUPEROPTMIST
Gee. I didn't even remember ordering that one.
The falling flaming man on the cover reminded me of everything. It is Truth and any certain truth, just by itself, is vaguely comforting.
Really this book is about escape. Every hint/suggestion/trope/ideal/goal/aphorism in here is a key to escaping from the cage every man has built for himself.
"Focus on the Previous Small Thing."
"Set no Goals, then marvel as you exceed them."
"Take Advantage of Free Electrical Outlets."
They are all truth and all put the lie to the canned phrases and quips that fuel Dr. Phil/et. al.
The graphics are elegant and clever. The font highly readable. I have only one thumb left(an advantage, I now see) but it is so far up for this book I can't pull it out.

This book will inevitably be categorized as "humor," and humorous it certainly is, with its spot-on and very funny parodic takes on idiotic self-help tomes. The amazing part is that it actually has more to say about life choices than most "serious" books in the same area. Morton and Whitten have clearly done their homework by slogging through the usual bromides, cliches, and platitudes. They have been there, read this, been nauseated by that, and had it up to here, but luckily haven't lost their sense of comedic absurdity in the process. And we are the beneficiaries. Their disillusion is our gain. All we need to do now is listen a little, learn a little more, and laugh a whole lot.

Very smart book about how to turn absolutely any negative into a positive. Great tongue-in-cheek writing that reminded me of the Colbert Report.

Especially love the exercises at the end, like the tips for dealing with the death of a loved one that include chanting "I am not a wizard", and the memory exercises that help you remember your sexual experiences by having you write a very complimentary and detailed letter from your lover to yourself.

Clever and funny, but with an air of real intelligence and truth, and damned if it won't actually make you think about things a little differently.

Confession: opening this book I felt like I was getting mixed signals. I couldn't decide if it was supposed to be funny or serious. But fortunately I wised up soon enough.

One of the main things this book is making fun of is the idea that a book like this has to be either funny or serious, that a philosophy or self-help or whatever book can't be funny and irreverent and at times dumb in the service of making a serious point.

That legitimate point is that any, absolutely any negative can be turned 180 degrees around if your head's in the right place. "Love your worst problem best," the authors suggest, and while you're at it, "refer to pain as 'sensation.'"

"Secrets of the SuperOptimist" is funny, but isn't comedy. It's help.

First time I picked up this little book I thought it was a joke. I thought that because of the cover - a human fireball falling through the air. I read it, because I thought it would be a funny parody of all the stupidity you find in self-help books.

Turns out I was right! And wrong. It's a very funny parody, but it also happens to have a fully fleshed-out philosophy that has elements of Buddhism, Existentialism and plain old Daily Show irreverence. Smart stuff.

The book's structured as a series of "Secrets" handed down to the author from a divine being. They have names like "#14 Own and Wear a Sarong" and "#108 Never Be Photographed While Eating".

It's sort of like Tony Robbins meets Jon Stewart - and if you're at all intrigued to see what that would look like, open this book.

What kinds of minds could possibly have created this book? Brilliant minds, I should say. The book is clever, informative, sensible, witty, and downright laugh-out-loud funny. Whitten and Morton should go to the head of the class and take a well-deserved bow. And Jon Stewart would be doing himself a big favor by buying the book, and immediately hiring Morton and Whitten as writers for his TV show. David Letterman would be well-served to follow suit. Kudos to the authors for looking at the positive side of life and writing about it so well, and in such an entertaining manner. Why isn't this book on The New York Times best-seller list, and why haven't Oprah and her best friend Gayle included "The SuperOptimist" as a "book club" selection? Readers: Boggle your mind and get this book!

I'm not a total cynic. I'm open to reading about new philosophies, new ideas and original ways of thinking about the world. But most of the tripe that gets published under the banner of "self-help" treats you like a child and talks down to you.

This book makes fun of that whole phenomenon and the entire idea that self-help books have a secret that they're generous enough to bestow on you. The "Secrets" in the book include "Set No Goals", "Boredom is Power" and "Respect the Pineapple".

Not that the authors don't have something to say. Ultimately the book has a compelling message at its core, a pseudo-hybrid philosophy made up of Objectivism and Buddhism and...some other stuff. It's funny, but the stuff rings true. And they trust you to get it, instead of spoon-feeding it to you.

All in all a totally unique book. Well done.

This book has given me much needed giggles - I have found myself folding down pages as I am reading, because the ideas are so absurd and strangely right...
I am looking forward to my new found optimism based on these haphazardly placed 116 secrets. I am sure it will let me "sleep with the pineapples", as secret 44.4 suggests.

After the giggling subsides, the wonder seems to settle in. Maybe this isn't just silly. It is in fact a profoundly simple, but deeply meaningful way of looking at things. Made for the smarty, but with no cynicism. The degree of difficulty in that feat alone makes it worth reading. I don't want to take anything away from the laughter it provides or the self help gurus it deflates, but again, there is something deeper here. It really is a useful roadmap for navigating the apocalypse with a smile on your face. Good stuff.

I found this book extremely satisfying. I thought it would be just a fun gift book for my sister, but I find myself returning to its wisdom long after having finished it - and now I don't want to part with it.

It's really hard to categorize - the majority of the book is the list of secrets (listed out of order, of course) which are designed to help you reframe any negative into a positive - and they are hilarious.

My favorite part, though, is the series of SuperOptimist "exercises" at the end. This includes a memory exercise to help you remember your great sexual experiences by writing yourself a letter FROM your lover to yourself (full of detailed compliments).

Each of the 116 little secrets is great, and taken on their own seem almost like little magic tricks that distract you from the wisdom long enough to laugh, but then reveal the wisdom again with a flourish. But taken together they end up illuminating a fully-fleshed out world view that actually has resonance.

And the authors do all this with their own brand of over the top confidence... sort of like a Zen Master version of Stephen Colbert. Very fun, very smart.