My 10 Secrets to Success
My 10 Secrets to Success is a motivational and practical self-help book that encourages persistence in working toward personal goals.
Perminder Chohan’s self-help book My 10 Secrets to Success uses storytelling to spell out strategies for self-improvement.
Drawing from his own story and from the examples of other successful people, Chohan relates how he overcame his humble beginnings to advise others on how to attain their dreams, too. The practical guidance in this slim volume comes in ten chapters, each devoted to a secret to success, among them attitude, gratitude, and positive thinking.
The work is brief but dense, packed with quotations, inspirational tales, and personal stories. Its chapters often end with exercises that ask the audience to consider their lessons against the big picture.
The book’s insightful advice hinges on the notion that changing habits changes lives. It asserts that people should not be discouraged if they do not meet their objectives right away, and encourages being sure that a person’s goals are their own and not someone else’s. There’s intelligence in the way that it deconstructs myths about overnight success, and its insistence that people be curious and read more books is healthy and perennial.
As a means of providing additional motivation and inspiration, the book includes examples of famous people, including Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and J. K. Rowling, but whose stories may prove too lofty to be relatable. They all follow the same template, tracing now well-known figures from their hard beginnings, showing how they put in long hours of hard work, and ending with realized dreams.
Coming after one another, these stories are repetitive and have diminishing returns, though quotes from personalities ranging from Alice Walker to Mark Twain add intellectual heft. Connected anecdotes—such as that Jim Carrey kept a motivational but not real $10 million check in his wallet in hopes of such a future payday—are not transferable to everyday lives or to humbler goals like promotions or securing financial well-being.
Serious challenges are covered in a too breezy manner, as when Malala Yousafzai’s struggle with the Taliban is distilled into a lesson on living without fear. All such challenges are made to fit into the overarching goal of attaining success, sometimes at the cost of warmth and depth. The book works toward an ending that emphasizes listening, developing self-awareness, and believing in oneself—an encouraging primer for achieving success.
My 10 Secrets to Success is a motivational and practical self-help book that encourages persistence in working toward personal goals.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
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.
