Big Takeaway:
Success isn’t the endpoint, but a portal to our potential, so let’s enjoy the ride!
Overview
This book is a great mix of snappy writing and a fun sense of humor as the author describes different success types and our reaction to them. Her fun approach brings some levity to the deeper topics she discusses as well. Gassner Otting also provides thoughtful questions for us to consider as we ponder our own reactions to success.
Laura Gassner Otting frames our success journey as a day at the amusement park: we look forward to it for a long time and when we get there it seems great at first. But as the day wears on we get hot, tired, full of junk food and we start feeling gross.
She then follows this theme as she assigns an amusement park ride to various types of success and then offers tips of how to deal with them. These tips are based on stories and studies she’s explored, then are present in three questions for us to explore at the end of each chapter.
These questions are excellent journal prompts to get to know our own reactions to success, goal-setting, imposter syndrome and other aspects of personal development.
To get a closer look at how she applies the amusement park theme, let’s take a look at a chapter, one called “The Carousel”. In this chapter, the author discusses how to say no to hustleporn, the pressure from society to always be doing more. She likens this to a carousel as those who are hooked by this need to hustle might feel like they’ree just spinning in circles and never really getting anywhere.
At the end of that chapter the reader is presented with these three questions:
1- Are you pursuing the next big thing because you want it or simply because it is there to be achieved?
2- What are you sacrificing to achieve the next success and is it worth it at this age and life stage?
3- How can you use your success to impact other people in ways that will stave off burnout for you?
These questions and others are fantastic journal prompts in themselves. Add in Gassner Otting’s witty writing style and you’ve got a book that’ll bring a smile or two along with some deeper insights whenever you’re ready to explore your own Wonderhell.
