Kudos to first time author Kingston S. Lim. The recent college grad got a real wake-up call when he tried doing laundry on his own for the first time. No one had told him that mixing a red garment with the whites would produce a washing machine filled with damp pink clothes. It occurred to him that our current system of education does a poor job of preparing students for the quotidian challenges of life beyond the classroom.
Lim's solution was to assemble notes he had taken from years of reading a variety of authors, group them thematically, and offer them as basic Cliff Notes for Life to steer other Millennials in the direction of practical wisdom. The authors that Lim has read and summarized span many centuries, beginning with Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Seneca in the first century, to Thoreau, Emerson, Ben Franklin in the early days of the Republic, and finally some of today's self-help gurus like Tony Robbins, Ray Dalio, and Stephen Covey.
The book is structured in short chapters that offer pithy quotations from the source material addressing topics such as Emotions, Fear, Loyalty, Gratitude, Priorities, Aging, Death, Finding Purpose, Handling Money. For the reader who is motivated to dig more deeply into a topic, there are footnotes that will lead him or her to the source. Among the chapters that grabbed me was the one on Remembering and Knowing, offering practical mnemonic advice for memorization.
Mr. Lim's guide for navigating life experiences would make a great gift for someone who could profit from the author's work of distilling wisdom from the ages into bite-sized portions that fit the attention span of those coming into adulthood in the 21st century.
Enjoy.
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