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59 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Parent's Perspective, September 30, 2004
This review is from: The Student Success Manifesto (Paperback)
The Student Success Manifesto is an exceptionally mature and well-thought-out look at life from the perspective of a college-attending 18 to 20-something-year-old. I have read widely in the success literature and was impressed that Mr. Simmons seems to also be. He makes excellent use of key ideas from many sources and puts them into a young person's framework.
Mr. Simmons was born with what we called an "old head" when I was young. Many people I know who are about to retire never get it together like Mr. Simmons has. That's a shame . . . because their lives could have been so much better for them and those they love.
Several qualities of this book really stood out to me. Mr. Simmons points out how you should seek to gain many different kinds of advantages (such as learning, networking, visibility, access and reputation) from every activity you seek out. Most young people don't realize that point and misdirect their efforts as a result.
Mr. Simmons also uses graphs and charts to make brilliant points much more explicit than I have seen them done by other authors in the same subject areas. Bravo! You're ahead of the older generations here.
Finally, Mr. Simmons is able to relate to a number of different kinds of life goals and explores them thoughtfully. I was very pleased to see that he emphasizes goal setting in many different ways. That's the most important thing that college students should be doing.
What are the book's weaknesses? First, the book appears to have originally been an e-book. The text refers to my soft cover copy as an e-book and mentions red lines that appear nowhere in the book. So a little copy editing was missed here. Ignore that. Second, Mr. Simmons is at his best on starting businesses. Many college students have no interest in that possibility and won't find the book to be compelling for them unless they get to near the end of the book where the paths he describes branch out quite a lot. Third, he doesn't really follow through on some of his best ideas. For example, he points out that Kinko's got started by a student. Now, I have been watching students start local copy services for years, and most of them never built a lasting business or a decent career (after having harmed both their business and their education). Why was Kinko's such a big success while tens of thousands of others wallowed in a blind alley? There would be important lessons there.
Three of my children are well along in their careers now and seem to like what they are doing. But my daughter is a college freshman. She dislikes business so this book isn't one that she would ever read. But she would surely benefit if she did.
Perhaps Mr. Simmons will write another version of this book that my daughter would like to read. I would be delighted to send her a copy. But it would be better if a friend suggested it to her.
I wish this book had been available when I was 18 and someone had given it to me.
Pick out your goals and start achieving them, no matter what age you are.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's About Time!, September 22, 2003
This review is from: The Student Success Manifesto (Paperback)
It is an unfortunate reality that authors often feel the need to talk down to students. The typical college "advice" guide is defined by condescending tips, corny humor, and a fear of offering anything more substantive then simple survival advice. Michael Simmons's Student Success Manifesto is the remedy to this sad state of affairs. Mr. Simmons offers unabashed advice, culled from years of personal experience as a phenomenal young man, on how to take control of your life. The Success Manifesto is not about how to survive as a student, but how to succeed as a young human. Reading this book gave me a jolt of inspiration, and exponentially increased my dedication to creating, in the words of Mr. Simmons, a life of passion, purpose, and prosperity. If you are still a student, this book is a must read. It won't help you get better grades. It will change your life.
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27 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exactly what I needed right now!, October 16, 2004
This review is from: The Student Success Manifesto (Paperback)
Michael Simmons' THE STUDENT SUCCESS MANIFESTO is exactly what I needed right now. It reveals that success later in life does not depend on your performance in school, that many of the wealthiest and most successful businessmen and women did not do well in school. Further, there are different standards of success. Maybe your idea of success is different from that of the next person. What I appreciated the most, however, is Mr. Simmons' revelation that we are our own teachers - each individual is his own best teacher. That puts a hole in the notion that success in later life is gauged by how well you performed on your SAT test.
I also appreciated the multi-cultural aspect to Mr. Simmons' work: within the first few pages of the book he references a tribal ritual in Africa. This is not typical in books about success. Only a few pages later he references the scholastic performance of inner city African American students, noting that according to statistics African American students do not perform well in school - but that doesn't mean they aren't smart! This point resonated deeply with me because I graduated from Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, which is the high school with the highest percentage of African American students in the entire state - something like 70-80%. I can honestly say that in many ways I received more education from the African American student body than I did from the teachers at Jefferson High School. School, in my opinion, and I believe in the opinion Mr. Simmons expresses, tends to teach you how to follow rules, and then you graduate and realize that life itself does not follow any rules. And, by the way, school didn't teach you anything about life! On the other hand, many students at Jefferson who were African American did teach me a lot about life, and one of the few teachers at my high school who actually taught me about life was the teacher of the class on African American History, a class I was not required to take, but elected to take on my own. (And it was actually one of the only classes where I felt the teacher actually cared about his students.)
THE STUDENT SUCCESS MANIFESTO is exactly what I needed right now because lately I have been battling with regret. In a little less than a year I will turn 30, and I often regret that I did not do well in school, that I didn't study harder and didn't take the whole process more seriously. But as Mr. Simmons points out, your school performance does not really guarantee anything after school. And there are different meanings for the word "success." One type of success is happiness, and I'm relatively happy with my life.
The reader may also be interested in John Taylor Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN and Noam Chomsky's UNDERSTANDING POWER.
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