Live Large

Live Large, An Achiever's Guide to What's Next by Elizabeth B. Crook, Greenleaf, 2017

Bold move writing a book about living large, especially coming from a senior woman, but it works.  As a consulting advisor for management, Crook has helped CEO's and entrepreneurs to realize, or at least color their dreams.  Women know that throughout their lives they are challenging to invent and reinvent and invent again their careers and even their lifestyles and spending habits.  But taking the five miles up perspective requires guts, or maybe a reckless desire to just see what's possible, what could happen.  

Many of us are blessed with an ordinary, boring, daily work grind that seems to glue our shoes to the ground and make us want to take long 4 pm naps.  And that routine might work well peridically, but Crook says we have a responsibility to stretch, to reach our life aspirations.  She has a process for identifying limiting beliefs, but also discovering unique talents and developing a concrete plan to reach our aspirations.  "I have led hundreds of people from all walks of life through this process, " she says.  "I have never seen it fail."

Wow.  Pretty scary.  Could you finally take on Roger Federer and send him into early retirement?  Do you think you could push Placido Domingo off the stage at the Met?  Or how about running up a corporate behemoth bigger than Bezos?  Wow.  How much could it hurt to imagine the unimaginable, to understand the unfulfilled potential, or to simply become more than an ordinary over-achiever?

Crook believes in the possibilities - "The wide horizon you are imagining is right in front of you.   You only have to discover the path that leads you there."  and she provides practice and discovery exercises to move the process.  For example, there is a one to five scale called the Yippee index that is a shorthand way of saying:  Will this situation make me smile more than frown? Next, she introduces he concept of the Triple J (Judge, jury and jailer), the inner voices that hear evidence against our dreams, judges those dreams, and then jails us, limiting our ability to act. Finally, Crook offers antidotes to prevent the Triple J from sabotaging our dreams and aspirations.

Readers will appreciate the hints that help us remember very important discoveries and understanding and surviving adversity, fear and sadness. Overall an surprisingly useful book that pushes us to make bold dreams and moves.