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E-book Review: “Reclaim Your Dreams: A Uncommon Guide To Living On Your Own Terms” by Jonathan Mead

As a new blogger, it was with great excitement I received in one day two seperate opportunities to review e-books for the first time.  The first one that came in via email was Jonathan Mead’s Reclaim Your Dreams, so I spent the last hour absorbing all 85 pages of it.

Most self-help books/e-books start the same way, they hype themselves up to what you can expect to change in your life, tell you how the outcome should be, then give you overrated and, for the most part, unrealistic ways to solve them.  That is not to say the way described is not possible and doesn’t work, quite contrary it probably does, *if* you followed it.  However most of us seeking help or looking for a change have already tried several methods and usually the most obvious ones at that and are really at a point in our lives where the usual just isn’t enough for us.  Blame it on willpower, confidence, or whatever, we just typically don’t follow through.  I have been one of those types for longer than I care to admit to anyone, including myself.

Jonathan’s book however is a welcome change to that and actually provides me hope on that what I am out trying to accomplish in my life right now is actually obtainable.

Divided into two parts totally eight chapters, it contains enough material and quotes that even a bullet list of key sentences would be enough to inspire you.

To me a key part that differentiates his book from others is he is not providing you a check-list of things you must do to obtain your goals.  Instead, he gets you to understand yourself better, to bring to light how you function and how you operate so that you can inevitably fulfill your goals in a way satisfactory to your preferred lifestyle, or way of being.  I say that just before I tell you that there are exercises for you to follow, but I think they are just that, exercises, they help you accomplish but aren’t what actually does the accomplishing, that is reserved to the change of attitude and mentality you hopefully adopt during the course of the book.

For me, there are definite ideas and exercises in the book that I have never fully brought to light in my own self, such as just what exactly are my dreams, what do I want to accomplish in my lifetime, and the dreaded line I’ve heard before but never gave the time of day until now, how do you want to be remembered when you die.  Just the idea of the “To Stop” list instead of a “To Do” list is completely new to me yet makes so much sense, why didn’t I think of it before?  The ‘Points To Meditate On’ make good endings to each chapter, giving you a time to reflect over what you have just read, rather than moving forward and possibly downplaying the importance of the previous chapter in itself.

A book like this has to be lengthy to some degree, I’ll give him that, so if your engulfing everything like I did, chapter one becomes a blur by the time you read chapter eight as so many ideas are brought to light, so this weekend I’ll definitely be spot-reading over chapters again as I try to implement the ideas in my own routine.  Every chapter had key phrases that clicked in my head that I look forward to reading again to solidify them in my mind.

For those needing a kick in the pants, this is definitely worth reading.  If nothing changes in your life afterwards, I can promise you it won’t be the books fault.

“Ditch the mainstream and embrace the unstream.”

Filed by jclements at 4:18 pm under Review, blog
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