Bookworm Speaks!- Success on Your Own Terms by James Rosseau

Bookworm Speaks!

Success on Your Own Terms: 6 Promises to Fire Up Your Passion, Ignite Your Career, and Create an Amazing Life 

by James B. Rosseau, Sr.

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This was book was provided through Word Slinger Publicity in exchange for an honest review. 

Note: Bookworm’s experience with self-help books is limited so he may not have a complete understanding of how books like this one function. 

The Story: Passion comes from inside. Stoke it.

Setbacks happen. Find your way around, over, and through them.

Be willing to receive, then give back. Pay it forward.

Many young people--perhaps four out of five or more--are dissatisfied with their jobs. Why bother to pursue a dream?

It's up to you to create your custom-tailored career and define success your way. How? Combine your burning passion with drive, determination, strategy, and commitment to pay it forward; and find and nurture mentor support, stay steady on your path, and see the fireworks. Success on Your Own Terms will show you exactly how to do it.

Living parallel lives as a business executive, Christian hip-hop media owner, and author, James Rosseau has merged the streams of his three passions to make a difference in his own life and the lives of countless others.

Learning to make and keep six promises during his diverse career, Rosseau now shows young people how to develop a plan for themselves.

These stories, lessons, setbacks, and triumphs--from the neighborhoods of North Philadelphia to executive leadership--reveal new possibilities in an inspiring blend of smart strategy, hard work, and willingness to connect to help others.

The Good: Non-fiction books, especially the inherently vague genre of self-help can be very difficult to get a read on the quality as they mean different things to different people. Nonetheless, as a soul that has been struggling with passion lately, he can safely say that this book does its job very well. 

The most visible way it works is in the author’s tone. It is a concise, no-nonsense one with just the right amount of humor to make it accessible to people of all stripes. It never comes off as sophomoric or high-handed. The author, uses both his tone and the stories of his childhood to create a down-to-earth tone that feels very authentic. The stories the author tells about his life are very interesting and help flesh out the book’s narrative. The stories themselves can be hit and miss. Not boring or trite by any means, but perhaps not completely relevant to the overall structure of the book. The stories are told with due humility and make the whole experience much more personable, the author tells them about phases in his life where his experiences are relevant to the point he is trying make in the chapter. 

Without ever feeling preachy, the book sets out clear guidelines for working towards your goal and igniting your passion. It lays it all out in a clear manner without simply making a list that would appear as lazy on the part of the author. One of the most important lessons he teaches is that self-discipline is critical when attempting to achieve success. 

Even though the author states on multiple occasions that he is a Christian man and has a personal relationship with the Lord, which is great. It works in the book’s favor though that he does not mention Jesus all that much as the source of discovering his success. Christian self-help books can come off as extremely pretentious and disregard any personal strengths of the reader, which as this book states, is essential for achieving an amazing life. This is not a Christian self-help book and that helps the book reach a wider audience and become more accessible to non-Christian readers. 

For those who are struggling with success, this book also does a good job of reminding us, that success is not a straight line. It is a long hard road, filled with failure and setbacks, but it makes the ultimate reward all the more satisfying. 

The Flaws: The author must have done a great deal of research when this book was in development for it is a very good book, but no beauty is without fault and this book does have a few. 

The author did well to make this book accessible to a wide audience but at times it still feels skewed toward a certain sect of people. This book seems geared more to those who are trying to find success in the world of business, where connections are essential. For those among its readership are in other fields, such as writing (Like Bookworm), some of the points made could be missed or simply irrelevant to their chosen fields. 

Finally, there is a small problem with the structure of the book itself. At the very end there are several completely blank pages. It is very odd when this occurs in any book and frankly a little wasteful. Perhaps the intent was like the Red Book in The Return of the King, leave a few pages for the next owner of the book to fill in. Given that this book is about finding one’s inner passion, this makes some sense. Still…it may simply be because this a review copy. 

Final Verdict: Success on Your Own Terms is a book that Bookworm has needed for a long. His struggles are coming to a head and he needs to find his passion. This book may just do that. 

Five out of Five Stars. 

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