Dare to Author!
Take Charge of the Narrative of Your Life
With guidance for questioning one’s preexisting thoughts, beliefs, and values in order to gain insights from past experiences, Dare to Author! is an innovative self-help text.
Encouraging its audience to make meaning of their lives by becoming the authors of their own stories, Lior Arussy’s powerful self-help book Dare to Author! draws on examples from the business world.
While acknowledging that it can be difficult to rewrite long-held beliefs or to pivot and grow from errors and personal trials, this book emphasizes the importance of actively authoring one’s own story in a fast-paced, ever-changing world. “Authoring our life story,” it says, “is more than just making sense of the life we did not plan. It is mobilizing what seemingly are passive or even helpless events in life into chapters of power, strength, resilience, and motivation to do better in the future.” In support of this vision, the book shares examples of companies and employees failing to adapt and becoming outmaneuvered by competitors, blending business acumen into its self-help paradigm. Questions and prompts pepper the chapters, inviting reflection, the reevaluation of one’s core memories, revisions of one’s roles in life, and heroism in the face of adversity.
The brief, detailed chapters are flush with examples of the importance of authoring one’s own story juxtaposed to examples of the pitfalls of relying on stories about oneself that are authored by others. Audiences are encouraged to question their preexisting thoughts, beliefs, and values, to gain insights from their past experiences, and to absorb and share wisdom. Contemporary challenges like imposter syndrome, confirmation bias, and the minimization and dismissal of values like gratitude are handled in turn, as with an example of an employee who, during a glowing evaluation, was unable to accept or absorb the praise she was given and awaited negatives that never arrived.
The examples are pulled from diverse fields, including the realms of psychology and religion. The message that making meaning is a lifelong process of acting with purposefulness, moving with direction, and being open to course-correcting is best illustrated with the assertion that “a person cannot name their values; they need to live them.” The questions posed throughout presume a high level of dedication to altering the course of one’s life, including via concerted efforts to shift one’s mindset and center the self as the seat of agency—sometimes daunting work. Still, from this ambitious beginning emerges a nexus of possibilities to revisit, reframe, and rewrite the story of one’s self.
A future-orientated self-help guide that’s designed to pull wisdom from the trials and triumphs of the past by reexamining, recontextualizing, and rewriting them in one’s mind, Dare to Author! is an exceptional self-help book that blends wisdom gleaned from decades in the business world with an innovative approach toward self-improvement.
Reviewed by
Caitlin Cacciatore
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
