Customer Reviews

The Superman Syndrome--The Magic of Myth in The Pursuit of Power: The Positive Mental Moxie of Myth for Personal Growth

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If you are already a fan of Dr. Landrum's work, stop reading this review and just click the "Buy Now" button. It's that good. If you're not familiar with his work, you soon will be. Landrum is, hands-down, *the* authority on what truly sets powerful people apart from the mediocre masses.

Do you think extremely successful people lead more balanced lives than the rest of us? Think they're better educated? Think they're more "realistic" thinkers? Do you think they're better long-term strategists? Think "luck" is on their side?

If so, think again. Dr. Landrum pulls back the curtain on some of the most powerful people in history and puts his finger on the very heart of what allows them to succeed. And along the way, he shows how this very power can be tapped by each and every person with the guts enough to claim it.

If there's a drawback to the book it's that it's a little rough around the edges. It has some typos and a few paragraphs that could have been tightened up a bit, but so what? That's like complaining that your million-dollar, winning lottery ticket has a little smudge on it. These minor blemishes are buried beneath a mountain of ideas so powerful that I literally found myself pacing the floor as I read. No kidding. If there is such a thing as literary amphetamines, this book is laced with them.

I never write book reviews, but this one is so poor I can't keep from doing so:

(1) If the book has any virtue at all, it is that it serves as a perfect illustration and cautionary example of the pitfalls of self-publishing. Quite literally, I have never encountered a book with such poor editing and formatting. I sincerely doubt the author has ever read through it cover-to-cover, much less honed a second draft. It is indisputably an amateur's incomplete effort, which is ironic because the author is so condescending toward the world's mediocrities.

(2) His content consists almost entirely of oft-repeated anecdotal incidents from the lives of notably-creative and influential people. Although the list of people is diverse and the anecdotes interesting, they tend to distract from his redundant and sometimes weak points rather than exemplify them. Moreover, if his anecdotes are as spurious as are some of those he cites for Walt Disney, you'll have to treat all of his stories as apocryphal at best.

(3) His thesis is essentially that you must create and believe superior delusions about yourself in order to achieve superior results. Fine. But to support this, he illustrates the self-delusions of a long list of diverse and extraordinary people. Here's the key failing in that assertion (and the book's undoing): while it might be the case that 90% of the world's extraordinary people held superior self-delusions, it is certainly not the case that 90% of those with superior self-delusions become extraordinary. Asserting that if you wish to achieve greatness you should hold superior self-delusions the way the world's great did is faulty logic at best, if not hazardous.

(4) I'm dismayed at how cavalierly the author disregards what a shambles the personal lives of his notables mostly are. Somehow to him all the destroyed people left in the wake of self-delusional luminaries are inconsequential compared to the influence and prominence they achieved. "It's okay to use and abuse individuals as long as you achieve worldly success in the end" seems to be the book's undercurrent sentiment.

I'm sure he's a fine professor, a decent businessman, an honest gentleman and a reasonable, thinking human being, but very little of that is evidenced by his book.

I was really disappointed in this work after reading the positive reviews and making a decision to purchase this based upon the reviews. While I appreciate his premise and real life examples, there is nothing substantive in this book that could not have been encapsulated in two words; "dream big!" About half way through the book, I put it down.