you owe you book reviews

Select your cookie preferences

We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie notice . We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements.

If you agree, we'll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie notice . Your choice applies to using first-party and third-party advertising cookies on this service. Cookies store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. The 96 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Click "Decline" to reject, or "Customise" to make more detailed advertising choices, or learn more. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences , as described in the Cookie notice. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy notice .

Business, Finance & Law
Management Skills

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why Hardcover – 13 Sept. 2022

Thomas's secrets of success have already helped hundreds of thousands on their journey, but this is his first guide to show you how to start today, right now. These critical first steps include deeply understanding yourself and the world around you, finding your why, accepting that you may have to give up something good for something great, and constantly stretching toward your potential. No matter where you are on your journey toward greatness, you owe it to yourself to become fully, authentically you. And Eric Thomas's You Owe You can help get you there.

Print length 288 pages
Language English
Publisher Rodale Books
Publication date 13 Sept. 2022
Dimensions 16.28 x 2.51 x 23.95 cm
ISBN-10 0593234987
ISBN-13 978-0593234983
See all details

From the Publisher

Product description

"Eric Thomas doesn't mess around--he pushes you to your breaking point to help you find the inner strength you never knew you had. Every page of You Owe You contains nuggets of wisdom, inspiration, and good old-fashioned Truth that will help you work harder, discover your real motivation, and crack the code of enduring success." --Ed Mylett

About the Author

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rodale Books (13 Sept. 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593234987
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593234983
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.28 x 2.51 x 23.95 cm
675 in Psychologist Biographies
875 in Business Biographies & Memoirs (Books)
5,959 in Practical & Motivational Self Help

About the authors

Eric thomas phd.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Eric Thomas

Eric Thomas is a loving father to his two children Jalin and Jada, and devout husband to wife DeDe of 24 years. A critically acclaimed author, world-renowned speaker, educator, pastor, and Audie Awards Finalist, ET as he is better known, has taken the world by storm with his creative style and high-energy messages. His words have already impacted millions of people in several hundred countries across the planet! His recent tours in Australia, London, and Africa have truly transformed him into a global phenomenon!

Drawing from his own personal experiences dealing with homelessness, not knowing his biological father, scholastic struggles, and various other obstacles, ET allows his life to be an "open book" from which radiates dynamic and inspiring messages that many people across all barriers relate to.

Not letting his scholastic struggles stop his growth, after 12 years, ET received his Bachelor's degree and in 2005, a Master's Degree from Michigan State University. Having already blazed a trail of community service initiatives such as his award nominated GED program, his critically acclaimed non-profit, Break the Cycle I Dare You, and a multitude of other educational and ministerial endeavors, Michigan State University is where he continued to pursue his passion to remedy the effects of adverse societal influences by developing the Advantage Program, an undergraduate retention program targeting high-risk college students. It is from

this platform that he initiated International Urban Education Consultants, a non-

profit committed to finding solutions to close the achievement gap in urban schools through goal framing and helping students to reform their perception of learning.

ET is currently a dissertation away from receiving his PhD in Education Administration. As a consultant of Michigan State University, ET is the epitome of hustle, drive, determination, and success and when coupled with a vision, millions of others have been able to unlock the secrets revealed in his award nominated autobiography, The Secret to Success, which has scaled the social media charts with over 50 million hits. Trailing closely behind his hit premiere release is his sophomore project, Greatness Is Upon You. Both titles can be found on the label of his publishing company, Eric Thomas and Associates Publications.

As CEO of his Consulting Firm, ETA LLC., Eric has led his team through the doors of dozens of Fortune 500 companies and other reputable organizations such as General Electric, Quicken Loans, AT&T, Nike, Under Armour, New Balance and UPS. He has also consulted for major Universities, sports teams, and affiliates such as the MLB, NBA, NFL, the University of Michigan, Duke, North Carolina, and dozens With Eric's persistence of higher education, along with the knowledge of life's pains, he truly is a living testament that "When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful."

Customer reviews

5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 88% 7% 3% 1% 1% 88%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 88% 7% 3% 1% 1% 7%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 88% 7% 3% 1% 1% 3%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 88% 7% 3% 1% 1% 1%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 88% 7% 3% 1% 1% 1%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

UK Modern Slavery Statement
Amazon Science
Sell on Amazon
Sell on Amazon Business
Sell on Amazon Handmade
Associates Programme
Fulfilment by Amazon
Seller Fulfilled Prime
Advertise Your Products
Independently Publish with Us
Host an Amazon Hub
› See More Make Money with Us
The Amazon Barclaycard
Credit Card
Amazon Money Store
Amazon Currency Converter
Payment Methods Help
Shop with Points
Top Up Your Account
Top Up Your Account in Store
COVID-19 and Amazon
Track Packages or View Orders
Delivery Rates & Policies
Returns & Replacements
Manage Your Content and Devices
Amazon Mobile App
Customer Service
Accessibility

Conditions of Use & Sale
Privacy Notice
Cookies Notice
Interest-Based Ads Notice

You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why

About this ebook, ratings and reviews.

Flag inappropriate

About the author

Rate this ebook, reading information, similar ebooks.

Server Busy

Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown in the image below.

Type the characters you see in this image:

Publications

You owe you.

You Owe You : Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose , and Your Why urges you to stop waiting for inspiration to strike, and take control of your life. In this book , one of the world’s best known motivational speakers Eric Thomas shows you how to rewrite your life’s script . You Owe You contains the critical first steps including deeply understanding yourself and the world around you, accepting that you may have to give up something good for something great, and constantly stretching toward your potential. Thomas's secrets of success have already helped hundreds of thousands on their journey, but this is his first guide to show you how to start today, right now.

Topics Discussed

Associated people, eric thomas, child publications.

BOOK REVIEWS

"He shows up 100 percent every time without asking for anything in return . And it’s not just for me. It’s for everybody. I’ve seen him give his phone number out to kids because he could tell they needed someone to talk to. He does it because it’s his calling. It’s his calling to coach us all in whatever way we need it. It’s his calling to be on our team."

—Chris Paul , from the Foreword

"Eric’s vision will transform perception about your mind and your heart. His words are a gift to people on a path of purpose . You Owe You is full of insight and guidance for those seeking their inner selves."

—Michael B. Jordan

"Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential. You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain’t lied yet! We’ve got to look in the mirror and identify WHO and WHAT we see, and take full ownership regarding the WHY. Let’s make a commitment today because You Owe You ."

—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime

"Eric Thomas doesn’t mess around—he pushes you to your breaking point to help you find the inner strength you never knew you had. Every page of You Owe You contains nuggets of wisdom, inspiration, and good old-fashioned Truth that will help you work harder, discover your real motivation , and crack the code of enduring success."

— Ed Mylett

The information contained herein is obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. It is not designed to meet your personal financial situation - we are not investment advisors nor do we give personalized investment advice. The opinions expressed herein are those of the publisher and are subject to change without notice. It may become outdated an there is no obligation to update any such information.

Find a Library
Browse Collections
You Owe You

ebook ∣ Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why

By eric thomas, phd.

Add Book To Favorites

Is this your library?

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

9780593234983

Eric Thomas, PhD

Harmony/Rodale

13 September 2022

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:.

A – G BOOK SUMMARIES
H – S BOOK SUMMARIES
T – Z BOOK SUMMARIES
Motivational Showers
Success in 50 Steps
Brian Tracy
Dale Carnegie
Earl Nightingale
Eckhart Tolle
Evan Carmichael
Gary Vaynerchuk
Grant Cardone
Lewis Howes
Napoleon Hill
Richard Branson
Robert Greene
Robert Kiyosaki
Russell Brunson
Ryan Holiday
Simon Sinek
Tim Ferriss
Tom Butler-Bowdon
Tony Robbins
Biographies
Business & Marketing
Real Estate
Relationships
Personal Development
Spirituality
Time Management
Search Search for: Search Button

You Owe You | Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why | Eric Thomas | Book Summary

– Share on Twitter
– Share on Facebook
– Share on Google+
– Share on LinkedIn
– Share via Email

GET THE 500+ BOOK SUMMARY BOX SET IN PDF & MP3 here

You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why by Eric Thomas

No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will “help you work harder, discover your real motivation, and crack the code of enduring success” (Ed Mylett, #1 bestselling author of The Power of One More )

If you feel like success is for others, that only certain people get to have their dreams fulfilled, Eric Thomas’s You Owe You is your wake-up call. His urgent message to stop waiting for inspiration to strike and take control of your life is one he wishes someone had given him when he was a teenager—lost, homeless, failing in school, and dealing with the challenges of being a young Black man in America.

Once he was able to break free from thinking of himself as a victim and truly understand his strengths, he switched the script. And now, with this book, Thomas reveals how you, too, can rewrite your life’s script. With support, he recognized that his unique gift is being able to capture the attention of all kinds of people in all kinds of settings—boardrooms, locker rooms, churches, classrooms, even the streets—thanks to his wealth of experiences and command of language. Today, Thomas considers himself blessed to speak to an audience that is as large as it is diverse, from the rich and famous to kids struggling in school to young men in prison hoping for a new start.

Thomas’s secrets of success have already helped hundreds of thousands on their journey, but this is his first guide to show you how to start today, right now. These critical first steps include deeply understanding yourself and the world around you, finding your why, accepting that you may have to give up something good for something great, and constantly stretching toward your potential. No matter where you are on your journey toward greatness, you owe it to yourself to become fully, authentically you. And Eric Thomas’s You Owe You can help get you there.

It’s You versus You

Victimhood is a mind-set. It’s an attitude you hold that pushes you to make certain decisions or act a certain way. Victimhood is when the world happens to you. It’s when you depend on the world to dictate your life. Victimhood is when you wait for the world to provide you with the tools to move forward. It’s when you cede control to someone or something.

Here’s the thing: When you let the world have the power, you’re playing Russian roulette with your life. You don’t know where you’re going to land because you are not steering the car. But when you begin to take control, you’ll find that you have the power to change your outlook and become a victor in your journey.

There are going to be plenty of times in your life when things go sideways. There are going to be times when you feel hurt. And you’re allowed to be hurt. You can be upset and angry. But feelings are not facts. They are feelings. Facts are how you can move through your feelings.

You can be angry, but be angry in your house. Be in angry in your bedroom. You can be upset, but be upset with air conditioning and a roof over your head. You can be sad, but be sad with meals on the table and clean clothes on your back. You don’t need to sabotage your whole life to have your feelings. You can have your feelings, but you don’t need to be a victim.

You Are Never in It by Yourself

Aloneness is part of the victim mentality. This is the mind-set of someone to whom things are happening. When you act like a victim, you close yourself off to communication and relationships. You pit yourself against the world. You dig yourself into a dark hole where no one else can see you or touch you. You close yourself off to potential solutions. But, in reality, you are never in it by yourself. The perception that it’s you against the world is a construct. The world does not conspire against you. You conspire against you. It’s you versus you. Nobody can tell you that you’re alone but you.

Seeing the people around you clearly is necessary to combat the victim mentality. When you tell yourself you’re alone, it can be easy to slip into relationships that are false or that fulfill a surface desire for praise or company or pleasure. In constantly evaluating your own behaviors and patterns and seeking evidence over emotion, not only will you be able to see yourself better, but you’ll also gain a clearer view of the people who surround you.

Discover Your Superpower

Even when other people don’t recognize your gift, or the outside world doesn’t validate it, you have to know with every fiber of your being that you are doing what is right for you. Trends come and go. Sometimes light skin is in. Sometimes dark skin is in. Sometimes it’s short hair and sometimes it’s long. You can’t worry about what the world thinks is cool right now. You can only worry about you.

It should feel like a romantic relationship. You can’t be number one in the world if you aren’t obsessed with your gift. You can’t be the best at what you do if you don’t honor your gift. If you’re going to contribute to your field or advance the game or get mentioned with the greats before you, you have to be dedicated to getting up every morning and taking care of it. Like any relationship that’s worthwhile, your relationship with your gift requires work. If you get complacent and don’t work at it, your gift will go fallow. Even if you are naturally good at what you do, that is not enough. You have to work at it and you have to want more.

There are plenty of people who, with very little instruction, can hear a song, pick up a guitar, and play. But unless they get into their gift and practice, they’re never going to play like Jimi Hendrix. Plenty of people can open their mouths and sing beautifully. But if they don’t get obsessed with the gift of it, they’re never going to get to Beyoncé-level. Steph Curry was born with the ability to throw and sprint, but if he hadn’t worked at it and gotten consumed by it, he wouldn’t be the NBA legend he’s become. Serena Williams was always going to be able to smash a tennis ball, but had she not put in the grueling hours of somebody who wants to win, she wouldn’t have the accuracy or grace she shows up with on the court today.

Sacrifice Good for Great

Good is good, but good doesn’t get you the championship. Good is good, but good doesn’t get you into the job of president or CEO. Good is good, but it doesn’t qualify you for the Olympics. Good is good, but it isn’t great. Almost anyone can get something good, but if you want to keep moving forward and level up, you’re going to have to come to grips with abandoning good for great.

Now watch this: Kobe Bryant said that if you want to be great, you have to be obsessed with it. To go from good to great, you must be obsessed with whatever it is you want to be great at. If you want it, you will never settle for good. You will instantly recognize the measure of goodness against greatness and you will intuitively move beyond mere goodness to the level you are reaching for. You have to be willing to let go of predictability and stability. You have to be okay with the feeling of discomfort. You must be like an athlete in the throes of training. You push your mind and your body to their limits to get to the next level of competition. You must have the courage to take yourself beyond average. You owe it to yourself to gather this courage and move toward greatness.

The thing you have to keep sight of in sacrificing good for great is the present moment. Always be where your feet are. The best version of you is actually where your feet are. But if you aren’t always developing and growing and changing, you will still be standing in the same place for eternity. Where your feet are will eventually expire.

You Are a Business

When you think about corporations or brands, you see a product or a service first. A car. A purse. A shampoo. But if you look behind those products and services, there were people first: Henry Ford, Louis Vuitton, Johnson & Johnson. A business is the physical manifestation of a mind and a vision. You can look at a company and see its parking lot and its building and its desks and its elevators, but all of this is somebody’s thoughts and dreams actualized. Shifting your mind into business mode means thinking about yourself as a business.

For those of us who grew up working class, you aren’t raised with the idea of seeing yourself as a business. You see yourself as a worker. You see your value in terms of working for somebody else. When you’re working class, you decide to give your youth—your twenties and thirties and then some—to somebody else’s company. You decide to give your energy and your strength to somebody else’s vision. You decide to give your natural gifts to promote somebody else’s bottom line. There’s nothing wrong with helping somebody else achieve their vision or their goal, as long as it doesn’t keep you from achieving your own vision and goal. If you give of yourself without boundaries, you are doing so without clarity about what you want for yourself.

Once you’ve shifted to see yourself as a business, you need to think practically. Where do you see yourself in business? Which industry? Specifically, what are your gifts and who can benefit from them? What is your product? In which market does your product belong?

You Owe You

Nobody owes you time but you. You are the only person who will make time for yourself. What does this look like within the reality of life? Start your day by getting centered. Imagine a piece of paper with a dot at the very center. You are the dot. There will be many things that try to move you away from the center, pull you to the edges. Your job every day is to stay as centered and focused as possible. You can’t wake up and think, I need to make this money. The treasury prints money every day, but they don’t print peace or joy or happiness. You can go to Walmart and buy a watch or to Louis Vuitton and buy a purse. But you can’t go out and buy your own fulfillment. When you’re centered, you can see yourself, you can see where you’re supposed to go, you can see your future unfold before you.

Think about what your day looks like. Visualize what fulfillment will mean for you today. Paint a picture of the ideal day. And if you’re not there yet, if you can’t have your ideal day yet, think about what today needs to look like to get to that ideal day next week, next month, next year. Think about what your week looks like. What do you need to do to get to the next level? What does your month look like? Your year? Make a plan to get yourself on track. Nobody is going to make your plans but you. And you owe it to yourself to be the center of your own plan.

When you have a blueprint—your values, your beliefs, your focus, your self-knowledge—then you must set a standard. You owe it to yourself to constantly evaluate your own performance and the way you spend your time. Goals are good, but standards will get you to the next level.

Now is the time to do the work. Now is the time to dream of what greatness lies ahead. But not only to dream—to become your dream. To become great. The time has come to take hold of your life. The time has come to step into yourself. To begin living life the way that only you can live it. The time has come to become you.

Kick Ass | Mel Robbins | Summary

5 Gears | Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram | Book Summary

Becoming Supernatural Book Summary | Author Joe Dispenza

You Owe You

Ignite your power, your purpose, and your why.

4.7 • 129 Ratings

Publisher Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential. You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain’t lied yet!”—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will “help you work harder, discover your real motivation, and crack the code of enduring success” (Ed Mylett, #1 bestselling author of The Power of One More ) If you feel like success is for others, that only certain people get to have their dreams fulfilled, Eric Thomas’s You Owe You is your wake-up call. His urgent message to stop waiting for inspiration to strike and take control of your life is one he wishes someone had given him when he was a teenager—lost, homeless, failing in school, and dealing with the challenges of being a young Black man in America. Once he was able to break free from thinking of himself as a victim and truly understand his strengths, he switched the script. And now, with this book, Thomas reveals how you, too, can rewrite your life's script. With support, he recognized that his unique gift is being able to capture the attention of all kinds of people in all kinds of settings—boardrooms, locker rooms, churches, classrooms, even the streets—thanks to his wealth of experiences and command of language. Today, Thomas considers himself blessed to speak to an audience that is as large as it is diverse, from the rich and famous to kids struggling in school to young men in prison hoping for a new start. Thomas’s secrets of success have already helped hundreds of thousands on their journey, but this is his first guide to show you how to start today, right now. These critical first steps include deeply understanding yourself and the world around you, finding your why, accepting that you may have to give up something good for something great, and constantly stretching toward your potential. No matter where you are on your journey toward greatness, you owe it to yourself to become fully, authentically you. And Eric Thomas’s You Owe You can help get you there.

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

In Eric Thomas’ motivational guide You Owe You , everyone’s greatest sin is unrealized potential. The renowned “Hip-Hop Preacher” wants you to become the CEO of your life by refining, marketing, and selling your talents. In other words: Find your passion, and cultivate it relentlessly. He reinforces all his teachings with personal anecdotes that illustrate that he’s not just talking—he lives what he preaches. When he writes about “miracle territory,” he’s referring not to heavenly intervention, but continuously being in a position to take advantage of opportunities. Thomas might be the king of networking, extolling the need to keep turning new connections into new opportunities. (After he made an unscheduled appearance at one event after another engagement was canceled, a chance meeting led to his current business partnership.) You Owe You is a powerful reminder that we all have gifts—but what we do with them is up to us.

Customer Reviews

Biggest tool i’m harnessing for me.

I put this book off for some time of finishing , I wrote some better words but it got deleted when I was trying to submit so let’s give this a second try, and simplify my enthusiasm on how this drawn me not by ET not by the title of the book maybe a little bit of the title but by the instinct my mother always told me to trust my gut always listen to ya mind. I’m happy I did I’m happy I was able to meet ET through these pages. I’m happy I grabbed the this tool he placed in these pages to forward my legacy so I can grasp my dreams . Things and the stories I harness it pulled me in sometimes to relive the moments through these pages on how strong I’ve come in the life . Like how there is no copyright on music, there is no copyright on my life. And what I make of it is my responsibility my Google search when you ready to hit the bottom and the name Franklin Rodriguez pulls up. Not for the fame of social media that alone is a shared tool . Just not who I’m gonna become and how exciting it’s gonna be to celebrate me of being me actualizing myself. God blessed me with this tool as he blessed me to be a first time dad at the age of 30. Being the only son and first example for my two sisters for my mother how a man is taking care of business. Still high obstacles I will over come. Yes being financially stable has been my biggest hutch back then Notre Dame lol but ET also expressed staying Centered through what shall be in person possession and spending time on themselves financially it’s going to come. Develop and pursue it knowing the pain is coming with it. Being Great and being comfortable being great is my testimony thus it gets hard doing it alone and at times feel whole heartedly I am God pulls me back into reality with the gifts . Especially when I’m honest with myself and who and what I’m poring into for Franklin Rodriguez legacy. THANK YOU FOR THIS TOOL ET.

Dooooooope!

Dr. Abraham

I read this book in four days and each day I grew hungry for wisdom and became blessed by the blueprint and honesty presented by Dr. Eric Thomas and Mrs. Thomas.

More Books Like This

This Massive New Guidebook Will Forever Change the Way You Look at Trees

Written by Smithsonian botanist W. John Kress, the book details more than 300 North American tree species in words, maps and photographs—and why we shouldn’t take them for granted

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz

Senior Editor

When W. John Kress was in college and pondering what life was all about, he used to climb up into a treetop and stay there for hours at a time. “I wanted to be away from everything else and be with nature in some way,” he says now, speaking to me from his home office in leafy Vermont.

Kress is the author of a new book, an 800-page tome called Smithsonian Trees of North America . It’s an incredibly thorough guide to just about every leaf, needle, flower, seedpod and pinecone you’re likely to come across as you walk around the United States or Canada. Kress—a research botanist emeritus at the National Museum of Natural History and former interim Under Secretary for Science at the Smithsonian Institution—wrote the text and took most of the photographs.

He notes that the book doesn’t cover all the tree species in North America—a global tree assessment published in 2021 estimated that there are 1,432 of them. But the 326 species the book does include account for 98 percent of the trees on this continent, north of Mexico. (The U.S. and Canada share many more species of trees with each other than they do with Mexico, so it’s common for botanists to consider the lands south of the border as a separate region.)

“We take trees for granted a lot,” Kress says, as I glance out the window at a flowering crepe myrtle in my own backyard. “And that was the point of the book. Not every tree is the same. Another point of the book is that we’re losing that diversity. We need to start paying attention.”

When it comes to the animal kingdom, you’ll hear people talk about “charismatic species”—the elephants, pandas, lions and dolphins that never fail to attract zoogoers or sell plush toys. Conservationists hope these alluring creatures will serve as ambassadors, making people care about entire habitats and all the other forms of life within them.

With the notable exception of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy , you don’t usually see tree toys or arboreal characters in children’s cartoons. (Let’s not talk about the dismembered heroine of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree .) And yet trees are all around us if we’re lucky, an underappreciated backdrop of shade and greenery. Kress wants people to care about the individual trees in their neighborhoods, form relationships with them and, through that, build a deeper connection with nature.

Ahead of his book release this Tuesday, September 3, we spoke about the botany, beauty and companionship of trees.

Did this book grow out of any particular event or research project of yours?

Most of my work as a researcher at the Smithsonian has been focused on tropical plants—herbs, bananas, gingers, these sorts of things. But I wanted to re-engage people with nature, because I think we’re losing that. When I’d walk down the streets of Washington, D.C., I’d see everybody looking at their phones, particularly children or young adults. And I said, “I’ve got to do something to get people back into nature, or we’re doomed.”

You helped create a plant-identifying smartphone app a few years ago.

Yes, Leafsnap . The idea was that people would want to use their phones to identify a tree, and then they’d become engaged in the tree and not just their phones. That’s when I started gathering images of all those parts of trees. Then Yale University Press said, “Why don’t you take those photos and write about the trees of North America, and we’ll make it into a book?”

One thing you encourage people to do in the book is to form real relationships with specific trees. It makes me think about how people get attached to their own dogs and cats—their golden retriever isn’t interchangeable with their neighbor’s golden retriever. But we don’t always stop to notice how every tree on a street has a different character.

Every maple is different from an oak, but also, every oak is different from another oak. Their barks are different, their leaves are different, their acorns are little bit different. Trees are shaped by their environments, and there are also genetic differences between individuals in the same species, just like there are between us—dark hair, blond hair, blue eyes, brown eyes. If you study trees carefully, you’ll see that there’s quite a bit of variation.

When you were saying that just now, I found myself thinking about a tree on a hill in Iowa, where I grew up. It was a cottonwood tree, and I always used to notice it because when a breeze blew, it looked like it was flickering, or shimmering. I found out later that it had to do with the flat shape of its stems.

Do you know the Latin name of the quaking aspen? It’s Populus tremuloides . Because the leaves are always doing that same thing, trembling with the slightest breeze. Good for you that you noticed!

Your book is full of pictures of every little part of a tree. Most of us don’t really notice those parts unless we step on a pinecone, or an acorn falls on our heads.

The flowers and fruits are really what define the species of a tree. It’s not really the leaves, because there’s a lot more variation in the leaves than there is in the flowers and fruits. Back in 1753 , botanists decided that we would classify plants based on their flowers, fruits and bark. As I explained in the book, it’s not just petals. There’s anthers and stamens and carpals, and you have to open the ovary and see how many different little seeds will develop in there.

Until I looked through your book, I never really thought about the fact that an oak tree, for instance, has flowers.

Yeah, people will notice a magnolia tree flower, but nobody looks at oak flowers except when they sweep up those little things that fall from oaks in the spring. Those are the male flowers. I wanted to show all these parts of the tree, as beautifully as I could. Most field guides are sketches, and not very good sketches at that. So taking the time to make those photographs was not trivial.

Tell us a little bit about that process.

When I started working on this book, I set up a portable photography lab, and then I started going to arboretums and botanic gardens, and to my backyard, to find all the species I needed. Then the damn pandemic hit, and I couldn’t go anywhere. So I just tapped all my friends and asked them, “Can you send me fruits and flowers of X?” I spent almost two years of the pandemic in my photo lab here in my house, getting a FedEx package every day. I was just astounded at how well some of those plant parts survived a trip from Oregon or a trip from Washington state.

One thing a book can’t capture is the unique smells of different trees. How do you think smell plays into our relationships with them?

I was trying to figure out how to capture that, if there was some way I could put perfume samples in there or something. But I do try to describe the fragrances of different trees. There are also the auditory elements—the whisper you’ll hear when a breeze blows through those aspens we were just talking about. Or that sound when you’re walking down the street and the acorns are falling. And there are some fruits you don’t want to bite into, but a lot that you do. Maybe at some point we’ll have a tasting field guide. That would be fun.

How many of our trees in North America come from Europe or from other places?

Of the 326 species in the book, only about 50 of them are exotic—though that number is growing.

I was just out in Northern California, and I always notice all the eucalyptus trees there. Are the eucalyptus trees in California the same as the eucalyptus trees in Australia?

The eucalyptus in California are all imported from Australia. They’re not native. The three most common types of eucalyptus were brought there because people wanted them for either ornamentals or for timber trees. They don’t take as long as an oak tree to grow. Though unfortunately, those plantations don’t sequester as much carbon out of the atmosphere. They don’t do the same things to offset climate change that natural forests do.

What about redwoods? What is it about the West Coast that’s conducive to such enormous trees?

That’s the part of the world where they evolved, and they had this abundance of moisture—some rain, but primarily fog—that allowed them to just keep growing. You also get really big trees in the tropics where there’s no winter, there’s no season when things stop growing. In Miami, you see these giant fig trees and so on. So again, the environment and the climate have a lot to do with what you’re going to see.

Hollyleaf cherry branch with infructescence

Are you involved with the BiodiversiTREE program at SERC [the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the Chesapeake Bay]?

Oh, yes. When I was Under Secretary of the Smithsonian, I actually funded that project. John Parker, who runs it, is a great fellow. They’re doing wonderful stuff. They’ve probably explained to you that they’ve planted 18,000 trees, in plots with different types of species—some with eight species and some with 16 species—and then they can compare how those plots develop over time. It’s a big experiment. There’s also ForestGEO [the Smithsonian’s Forest Global Earth Observatory, a worldwide network of researchers and forest sites].

Visitors who come to Smithsonian museums might not know about that whole other part of what we do, those huge experiments that cover enormous areas of land.

The other thing is that unlike a lot of other institutions, we can do projects that are long-term. The BiodiversiTREE experiment is going to outlive John Parker. It’s designed to last not just a year or two years or ten years, but 50 years or longer, if they can keep it going. And trees change over time, to say the least. Whole forests change as they mature. So they’ll see what they can do.

Trees obviously have a dramatic effect on our quality of life. Even little kids know that they absorb carbon dioxide and give us oxygen. And in a city like D.C., the neighborhoods with shade are like 10 degrees cooler than the neighborhoods—usually less affluent ones—where trees are scarcer.

You bet. Trees also give character to neighborhoods. There’s a photo in the book from Tallahassee, with the live oaks and the Spanish moss hanging onto them. It sets the ambiance for a city or a countryside. When I was an undergraduate working in the tropics, I had a professor who classified trees according to their architecture—whether they went straight up, whether their branches went out horizontally. He wasn’t an artist. He was a scientist just trying to understand how these trees were shaped and how they grew. But the beauty of it influenced me, and it still does 50 years later.

It works the other way around, too. When you’re sketching or painting a picture of a tree, you notice the mathematics and geometry of it.

In the book, you probably saw that I have two drawings by my grandchildren. I wanted to see what they thought a tree was at 6 years old, 8 years old. And, I mean, they’re glorious. People start appreciating early on what a tree is. Some people maintain that, and other people don’t.

What about the recent science that says trees communicate with each other underground and send each other nutrients?

You know what, I have a hard time with all that. It’s too much anthropomorphizing for me. I do think trees can communicate in various ways, but they don’t talk to each other. They don’t mother their saplings. That’s all fantasy. In some ways, I can see why you’d want to make people feel connected with trees by anthropomorphizing them. But I think it sends the wrong signal. All life out there is not based upon what we see as humans, or the way we act, by any means. So I try to stay away from that as much as possible.

I have to admit that I enjoy hugging trees. There’s a tree in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden that my kids and I used to hug every morning before I dropped them off at Smithsonian Summer Camp.

That doesn’t mean you’re anthropomorphizing the tree. I think you’re just appreciating it.

Get the latest on what's happening At the Smithsonian in your inbox.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz | READ MORE

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine. She was previously a senior editor at the Atlantic .

Review of ‘Do I Know You?’

“Do I Know You?” by Sadie Dingfelder,is an eye-opening autobiography about a self-described “quirky” forty-year-old woman who recently discovered her inability to recognize faces, known as prosopagnosia. Throughout her life, Sadie felt her experiences were different from those around her. She always wondered why she had a hard time making friends, why she was never asked out on a date, and why she felt so lonely. Although recognizing the face of a loved one, a friend, or a stranger seems simple for most people, for Sadie it is like solving a new riddle with every new face. To her, interactions that normally would be defaulted on by intuitive memory, are moments for strategic planning and insight that take a massive amount of effort. For instance, to remember a woman named Sandy, Sadie would memorize her hair as being a sandy color, thereby remembering her name. Throughout her experiences, Sadie feels like sometimes all she does is talk to strangers.

Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder in which one has an inability to recognize known faces, deriving from the Greek words prosopon , meaning face, and agnosia , meaning lack of knowledge (Rocha Cabrero & De Jesus, 2024). This condition can be acquired following an injury to the brain or inherited. Damage in the right or bilateral fusiform-lingual gyrus, where facial recognition and memory are processed, is thought to be the primary reason for acquired prosopagnosia. Whereas development of prosopagnosia seems to be caused by either a disconnection between anterior and posterior face networks, or reduced activation in regions of the brain responsible for facial recognition (Rocha Cabrero & De Jesus, 2024). Sadie, along with being diagnosed with prosopagnosia, has stereoblindness (inability to perceive in 3D), aphantasia (inability to visualize), and SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory).

Sadie first discovers her unknown condition after reading an article on prosopagnosia in The New Yorker, written by neurologist, Oliver Sacks. Quick to realize the similarities between this condition and her own, Sadie questioned, “Is that me?” Initially, Sadie tries to reject the notion that she has severe face blindness; being cast as an outsider from an ocean of neurotypical people is a hard reality to face. Sadie, however, puts her best foot forward while advocating for neurodiversity.

Sadie reinterprets her memories, and she begins to see the offbeat and out of kilter thread running through each storyline. After her uncomfortable epiphany in the grocery store while shopping with her husband Steve, Sadie describes her unfortunate mishap, noting that, “All at once, I see that this man is not my husband. He’s a Steve-shaped stranger who’s wearing almost the exact same coat. What a nasty trick!” (Dingfelder, 2024, p. 14). She later returned to her husband in the checkout line, embarrassed and shocked at the realization that this is not the kind of mistake other people make. Sadie begins researching her unknown condition, searching for answers to identify it. Sadie began communicating with Joe DeGutis, a Harvard neuroscientist who is conducting experiments on the topic of face blindness, and Sadie decides to take part in his research experiments. After flying to Boston to undergo those experiments and complete a training program and countless facial recognition tests, Sadie receives a formal diagnosis of severe prosopagnosia and begins to accept her new reality.

Sadie examines the vastly diverse ways in which people think and see the world. Her struggles of understanding and coping with her newly diagnosed neurological disorder led her to a refreshing realization about neurodiversity. With everything we know and do not know about the brain and its cognitive processes, many atypical ways of thinking are yet to be discovered. After reading this book, the question stands: Does a neurotypical person exist? Despite the challenges posed by her condition, Sadie adeptly interweaves humor into her narrative, creating entertaining anecdotes of her awkward interactions that captivate and amuse her audience. This book illustrates an engaging and insightful story into Sadie’s life as she deals with the obstacles that prosopagnosia poses. Sadie offers an optimistic lens, leaving you to question the existence of the “typical” mind, while exploring new avenues of thinking. This refreshing story will captivate and entertain readers, shedding light on several less-known disorders and reconceptualizing the concept of neurodiversity.

Dingfelder, S. (2024). Do I Know You? United States: Little, Brown and Company

Rocha Cabrero, F., De Jesus, O. (2023). Prosopagnosia. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559324/

About the reviewer

Ariana Jording is an intern in the Precollege and Undergraduate Education office, at APA. She graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Arizona State University in the Spring of 2024. Ariana plans on applying to doctoral programs next fall to pursue her interest in psychological research in cognition and behavior. During her free time, she likes to read, play piano, and paint.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player

Keeping a poker face had never struck me as much of a feat—until I had to keep one. My pulse quickened, my cheeks felt flushed, and my eyes were desperate to dart and size up the pot. What had been a mediocre hand was transformed, after the flop came down, into something spectacular: every card from seven to jack—a straight. All that remained was to play it cool and build up my cash prize. The bets started small, and then grew. The next two cards looked innocuous enough. My beautiful straight was intact, and the pot had expanded rather nicely.

Truthfully, I’ve never been much of a gambling man. My previous experience was limited to a few college poker nights during which my friends would hastily explain the difference between a straight and a full house and then rake in my charitable contributions to their respective beer funds. You could safely call me risk-averse. In fact, the only really reckless financial bet I can recall making was deciding to become a professional journalist.

Nate Silver, America’s most famous elections prognosticator, got me to cut loose. His new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” (Penguin), uses poker as a model for responding to uncertainty. Having drawn the lot of reviewing it, I realized that I couldn’t do it justice without learning more about poker—specifically Texas hold ’em. “On the Edge,” like his previous book, “The Signal and the Noise,” is a hefty set of meditations on probabilistic thinking, only this time the author is taking in broader horizons. Silver left FiveThirtyEight, the statistics-based news site that he founded and sold to Disney, but is still in the business of predicting election results. Yet his first love is poker—he once played it professionally—and “On the Edge” sees him return to that passion.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

“I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention,” Silver writes in the new book, a treatise that extends the lessons of poker and modern gambling to arenas like artificial intelligence and ethics. He has spent time interviewing such notables as William MacAskill, the philosopher-evangelist of effective altruism; Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced cryptocurrency billionaire; and Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI. The people changing the world are doing it by thinking like poker players, Silver contends. If we want to keep up, we’ll have to learn the mind-set of the successful gambler.

My chronic risk aversion aside, I figured I had the right foundations to do so. Chess had always been my game of choice; I squandered many afternoons of my adolescence playing, move by move, through Alexander Alekhine’s best games and “Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual.” My college years contained less chess, but lots of problem sets in math, economics, and statistics—many of them involving probability theory. I graduated knowing my martingales from my Markov chains. Among my first assignments as a journalist was to build forecast models for British and French elections. If I applied myself to poker, I thought, I’d probably be decent: I could multiply fractions fast enough in my head to calculate the probability of, say, drawing a flush on the river. (I was also picking up the lingo.)

After giving myself a crash course, I decided that I was ready for some real action. I set up a family game, recruiting my wife and my teen-age brother. That may have been my first mistake. Somehow, I’d forgotten that my wife had once been a foreign-exchange trader, and I later learned that my brother, fresh from a summer camp for academically talented students (a.k.a. nerd camp), had spent the season card-sharking his camp mates. I’d also forgotten to get poker chips; we played with pie weights for puny stakes. Things started badly. Baby brother, barely old enough to hold a driver’s license, bluffed me out of a decent hand, and then he smugly called my audacious revenge bluff. (Brat summer, indeed.) Finally, my straight arrived, a chance at redemption. In a spousal showdown, I confidently displayed my hand—only to find that my wife had a straight of her own, and that hers ranked higher. My once proud pile of pie weights was reduced to a pittance.

Probability and gambling have always been intimately intertwined. The mathematics of probability can be traced to a well-known stumper about how best to divide a pot, which a seventeenth-century gambling enthusiast posed to two leading mathematical luminaries of the time, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. Their inquiry would spawn the powerful idea of “expected value”—the average outcome of an uncertain event, calculated by multiplying the outcome in every possible state of the world by the chance of it happening. How powerful? The once alien notion that humans could be precise about uncertainty gave rise to the discipline of statistics. A model in which people were treated as rational actors trying to maximize the expected value of their utility became the cornerstone of modern economics. And systems based on feeding statistical prediction models with gargantuan helpings of data and computing power have already started to roil this century.

Silver’s book falls into a long tradition of using games to model real-world decisions. John von Neumann, whom some consider the greatest genius of the twentieth century, was working at the Manhattan Project when he published, together with his frequent collaborator Oskar Morgenstern, a book titled “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” (1944). The work, which included a detailed chapter on “Poker and Bluffing,” essentially gave birth to game theory, a field that, neatly enough, would provide the basis for contemporary doctrines of nuclear deterrence. Decades before artificial neural networks could generate personalized poems and wacky images, computer scientists were using them to build backgammon programs.

What Silver offers is a tour of what he calls “The River”—the community of people (often based in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Las Vegas) who think about the world in terms of expected value and comfortably use words like “Bayesian prior”—and its face-off with “The Village,” basically the political and media establishments. The River’s name is an homage to the river card, the fifth and final card revealed in a game of Texas hold ’em. Where the Village gets its name is left unexplained, though it’s presumably meant to convey a sense of conformity. The dichotomy is not a particularly illuminating one, but this detracts little from the stimulation of each individual subject. Silver’s meandering itinerary through the River and all its oxbows makes for an enjoyable ride.

He begins with the world of gambling, where being “degen,” or degenerate, is something of a badge of honor. My homemade humbling helped me grasp the grand scale of Silver’s own poker achievements. At one point, he was in the top three hundred of the Global Poker Index rankings; he has also won eight hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars in high-profile tournaments (and presumably further significant sums in private games). It’s understandable that he sees poker as a model for the game of life. Poker calls for properly calibrating risk in the face of very imperfect information—and recalibrating it as you gain more information about your companions. In that respect, it is a decidedly human undertaking.

Even so, the computer—having already established its dominance in other classic games (chess, Go, StarCraft II)—has come to surpass the best human players in poker. Just as chess grand masters rehearse their opening lines with superstrong programs, the best poker players, Silver reports, now spend hundreds of hours honing their skills with computer-based “solvers.” Unlike chess—in which the solution is deterministic and there’s always a best move—the solution to poker is stochastic and requires you to play identical hands differently, because once you’re predictable you’re beatable.

In recent years, the game has been swept up by what’s known as the “game-theory optimal,” or G.T.O., approach. It has been accepted that the best way to play—to maximize expected value—is to randomize between calling, folding, and raising according to a computer-calculated list of probabilities, which serious players memorize. As for randomizing? “The player wasn’t just staring out into space—she was probably looking at the tournament clock,” Silver writes about one G.T.O. adept. “She could randomize by taking an aggressive action if the last digit was an odd number or a passive action if it was even.”

When you read about the lengths to which poker sharks, shrewd sports bettors, and savvy slot-machine players (they do exist) must go in order to scrape together a narrow edge—to get “positive expected value,” or “+EV,” against the house or their fellow-gamblers—you realize what a slog big-time gambling actually is. Even if you’re exceptionally talented, you will find it hard to make serious money, and you may have to spend seventy or eighty hours a week to achieve it. There are reasons that the house always wins: identifying a real edge is hard to do, that edge tends to be thin (as in less than one per cent thin), and the house is constantly trying to shove you off the precipice. Casinos will politely but firmly ask you to leave if they notice you counting cards. The major sports-betting sites will sharply curtail your wagering privileges once they figure out that you are playing to win. Big edges are fleeting, and usually exist only for gigantic events like the Super Bowl, or Presidential elections, in which the sheer volume of dumb money resists correction by the sharks.

Link copied

So Silver is justifiably proud that, in 2016, his statistical model gave Donald Trump a twenty-nine-per-cent chance of winning, when the betting markets put his odds at seventeen per cent. His results made it rational to bet on a Trump victory: assuming that Silver’s model was accurate, the expected value of the bet was high. Because the markets were giving odds of roughly five to one, if you risked a hundred dollars betting that Trump would win, and he did, you’d earn five hundred dollars of profit. The value of a twenty-nine-per-cent chance of getting five hundred dollars outweighed the seventy-one-per-cent chance of losing a hundred. The expected value of your bet was a seventy-four-dollar gain on what you’d wagered. How often would you find such a sizable edge? By Silver’s calculations, even an outstanding poker player, one in the top two hundred in the tournament play, has even odds of finishing in the red in any given year.

As an experiment for the book, Silver, a basketball fanatic who developed his highly regarded statistical model for player performance, took up betting on N.B.A. games. Despite being limited by many major sports books, he managed to place $1.8 million in bets a year. His profit: $5,242, a return of about one-third of a percentage point. That wasn’t for lack of trying. “Sports betting took more mental bandwidth than I expected, even when I wasn’t on the clock,” Silver writes. “Checking betting lines was often the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did before going to bed.”

The effort to improve one’s rationality as a gambler easily approaches the irrational. Even my own study of poker became moderately obsessive. I watched hours of poker-strategy videos and long montages of televised poker tournaments with commentary; I went through the lecture notes of a class taught at M.I.T. called Poker Theory and Analytics. Learning about pot odds—it turns out that you can confidently meet an opponent’s call with positive expected value (that is, money-making on average) if your chance of winning is greater than the share of the pot you’d be contributing—made me understand where I’d erred. The concept of “fold equity” could help me decide how big my bluff ought to be. The concept of “blockers,” or cards one possesses that limit the winning combinations available to one’s opponent, further refined the rudimentary calculations I had been trying to make. I spent a few hours playing against a G.T.O. poker program and analyzing my play with a solver. All this because of losing forty ceramic balls and some of my dignity.

Silver acknowledges the paradox here. Although poker is an arena that prizes decision-making, most pros would, he writes, be better served financially doing something else for a living. Clearly, its rewards aren’t fully reflected in the +EV models. The dopamine rush that follows a successful bet will trump the slow-burning satisfaction of contributing to your Roth I.R.A. The first time Silver played a poker game with two-hundred-dollar stakes, he recalls, “I literally felt like I was on the sort of narcotics that I used to do a lot of in my twenties.” Our understanding of the mathematics of gambling has never been greater, but no one captured the psychology of gambling quite like the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. Alexander Pushkin’s short story “The Queen of Spades” tells of a Russian officer who is obsessed with gambling but able to contain himself until he hears about an unbeatable card trick. He scares an old woman to death in order to learn it, but she has the last laugh: the officer ends his career in an asylum. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was himself a roulette addict. (“I pawned both my ring and my winter coat and I lost everything,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, begging her for fifty francs to settle his hotel bill.) His novella “The Gambler,” one of the finest studies of the compulsion to gamble, was written in less than thirty days to pay off his own debts. He had wagered a prominent publisher to whom he owed money that he would complete a novel and an edition of writings by a specific date, or else he would surrender the rights to all his works—past and future. He finished the manuscript with only hours to spare.

What about the games of chance that Silicon Valley venture capitalists play when they stake millions of dollars on tech startups that have a roughly one-in-ten chance of making it? Success comes when the returns on a breakthrough firm more than make up for their losses elsewhere, so venture capitalists have to be thoughtful about their bet sizes. Being good at this game is different from being good at founding a company, Silver argues. He sees it as the difference between the fox, who, proverbially, knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one big thing. The venture capitalist is a fox: risk-tolerant, probabilistic, adaptable, and comfortable with complexity. The founder in whom the V.C. invests is a hedgehog: risk-ignorant, stubborn, drawn to order. V.C.s, spreading their bets, will acquaint themselves with multiple markets and try to adjust their exposure on the basis of the latest information. Founders, committed to their company, will persevere through setbacks and fight for their singular vision. The genius of Silicon Valley, Silver maintains, is in creating a symbiotic relationship between the two: the founders get to take their shots, and the venture capitalists get their positive expected value in returns.

In Silver’s account, large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude are like poker players, too. The job of a large language model is to maximize the chance that the next word it outputs makes sense given its previous output and the user’s query. (For the latest version of ChatGPT, this has involved training on a vast Internet corpus and fine-tuning a trillion or so parameters.) The linguist Noam Chomsky described these models as “a kind of super-autocomplete,” and, though he meant it dismissively, it’s a fair description of the mechanics. Super-autocomplete can do more than just solve high-school homework problems. It has already revolutionized computer programming, in which co-piloting with A.I. is now routine, and you can imagine lots of white-collar tasks getting more efficient with its use—up to the point where they are automated away.

Silver finds a cautionary tech-industry parable in Sam Bankman-Fried, who granted him several interviews after FTX, his cryptocurrency exchange, went bust but before he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Although Silver thinks the stodgy Village types are too risk-averse, Bankman-Fried shows what happens when you’re a compulsive gambler without limits. He had “hacked the VC algorithm and catered to some of its worst biases,” Silver writes. Because Bankman-Fried looked the part, had the right pedigree, and had placed himself in the right networks, nobody cared to examine the financial details of FTX too closely. Silver’s take on his rise amounts to a mini-book within the book, and an enlightening one.

Still, Silver might have spent more time exploring domains where expected-value thinking may be even more consequential. One involves the government’s role in funding and fostering scientific innovation, which requires balancing the reality of repeated failure with the huge potential of success. It could do with a serious reboot. That probably means taking more chances rather than rewarding scientists for their ability to fill out labyrinthine grant applications and channelling money toward the gerontocrat who coasts on a discovery made decades ago while the next generation languishes unfunded.

Another domain that Silver scants is Wall Street. Hedge funds are named for their ability to mitigate risk; quantitative-trading firms hired hundreds of math and physics Ph.D.s to craft ultrasophisticated probability models. The late Jim Simons, a mathematician who got his start breaking codes for the N.S.A., founded a “quant” hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies that was essentially a money-printing machine for decades—a forty-per-cent return per year on average. And what gambler alive could hold a candle to George Soros, who so heavily shorted the British pound, in 1992, that he “broke the Bank of England,” forcing a devaluation while he netted at least a billion pounds?

If the concept of expected value can be applied to the task of earning billions, or of rivalling the cognitive function of a human being, can it also be fashioned into a system of ethics and social planning? Utilitarianism—which was formulated around two centuries ago, and holds that what is morally right can be determined by whatever maximizes the greatest good (or utility)—is a natural fit. It’s little surprise that many of the people Silver terms Riverians—Will MacAskill chief among them—embrace a kind of ultra-utilitarianism that seeks to apply rigorous cost-benefit analysis on the scale of all of human society, not just today but centuries into the future. These “longtermist” expected-value calculations can lead you to unexpected places: reducing the probability of human extinction, whether by nuclear war, unchecked climate change, or rogue A.I., becomes all-important. When you consider the sum total of possible human life in the future, this existential peril—cutely called x-risk, and sometimes p(doom)—swamps the other, happier states of the world, implying that you should do everything you can to avoid it. Surveying the field, Silver finds that “the domain experts give a trimmed mean forecast of an 8.8 percent chance of p(doom) from AI—defined in this case as all but five thousand humans ceasing to exist by 2100.” But this isn’t something he’s taking bets on. “I think AI x-risk is a question on which we ought to have a lot of epistemic humility. It’s not as simple as a poker hand.”

I have my doubts, too. It’s absurd to think that you can realistically model the sum total of human flourishing in all the possible states of the world a century hence. Our statistical tools can be powerful predictors when it comes to the here and now—the next best action to take in a poker match, the likeliest next word in a line of code, the next best trade to make, the likeliest location of the next amino acid in a protein sequence. But the magnitude of uncertainty when we’re projecting far into the past or far into the future is, well, incalculable. There is a reason that religion specializes in matters of cosmogony and eschatology. The Abrahamic faiths conceive of God as an omniscient creator and generally abjure gambling as a result; one of the first laws passed by the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony banned the possession of cards, dice, or gaming tables. Hinduism is more accommodating: the events of the Mahabharata are set off when the eldest Pandava brother loses his kingdom to his cousin in a rigged gambling match, eventually triggering a colossal civil war. Each of the four ages in Hindu cosmology, in fact, is thought to be named for a throw of the dice.

The metaphysical debates will rage on, but the immediate material benefits of the study of chance remain inarguable. After concluding my laptop-based training, I reconvened the family match—this time with real chips. I called a bluff of my brother’s, having diagnosed him as playing too loosely, and confiscated his chips with some satisfaction. My wife and I found ourselves battling for a big pot yet again. My bets were just large enough to keep the action going; my chance of winning didn’t just feel vaguely right—it felt like positive expected value. It all came down to the river. Against her respectable two pairs, I had made both a flush and a straight. I took down the pot and took back my dignity. It was a fitting moment, I decided, to retire from my gambling career. For all that I’d learned about pot odds and fold equity, I recognized the wisdom in the old adage: quit while you’re ahead. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

An Oscar-winning filmmaker takes on the Church of Scientology .

Wendy Wasserstein on the baby who arrived too soon .

The young stowaways thrown overboard at sea .

As he rose in politics, Robert Moses discovered that decisions about New York City’s future would not be based on democracy .

The Muslim tamale king of the Old West .

Fiction by Jamaica Kincaid: “ Girl .”

High-Pressure Hope at the Paris Olympics

Can You Find the 12 Thrillers Hidden Within This Text?

By J. D. Biersdorfer Sept. 3, 2024

Share full article

An illustration of a person reading a book while riding on a large bomb.

The 20th-century Cold War era of geopolitical tension between the United States, the Soviet Union and their allies also produced some gripping thrillers. This week’s Title Search puzzle is focused on novels set during that period, which ran from 1947 to 1991, and your challenge is to uncover the names of a dozen such books hidden below within an unrelated text passage. As you read along, tap or click the words when you think you’ve found a title. Correct answers stay highlighted. When you uncover each title, the answer section at the bottom of the screen grows to create a reading list with more information and links to the books.

A new literary quiz lands on the Books page each week and you can match wits with previous puzzles in the Book Review Quiz Bowl archive .

“When we left Cuba after that disastrous operation on the beach, our team should have left more than one agent in place,” said White. “Our man in Havana lost the Soviet agent.”

“Thankfully, our woman in Moscow is keeping us on our game,” replied Black. “One of her people got intel from an American spy when they met up today at the Higgins funeral in Berlin. Saw the Russki coming out of one of their safe houses near The Last Frontier nightclub and followed along.”

“That Soviet agent, a most clever girl, is on a train to Moscow right now and will be collected at the Minsk stop.”

Newsletters
Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

Trump Isn’t the Only One H.R. McMaster Takes to Task in His New Book

H.R. McMaster’s At War With Ourselves , a memoir of his 13 months as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, has aroused much attention for its stinging criticism of the former (and, God help us, possibly future) president. But the publicity and TV interviews have been too narrowly focused. McMaster also takes dead aim at a vast cast of others who got in his way or disagreed with his views: Secretaries of Defense and State Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson; Trump’s mischief-makers Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus; his successor, John Bolton; White House chief of staff John Kelly; and, not least, Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

The hero of this well-written and entertaining tale is H.R. McMaster himself, and its grand theme is what a great shame it was that the president didn’t take his advice more often. It is an oddly presumptuous theme for a three-star general—a hero of both Iraq wars—who was, and is, more intellectual than most of his Army brethren but who had never worked in Washington or engaged in any policy issues outside the Middle East.

During the Iraq war, McMaster thoroughly studied the history and theory of counterinsurgency warfare, then applied his learnings as regiment commander in the province of Tal Afar with remarkable success. Entering Trump’s White House, he studied the handbooks and protocols on the division of responsibilities between the national security adviser and the various Cabinet secretaries—and thought his mastery would once again guide him to dominance.

He never grasped—and still doesn’t; not completely anyway—the vast divide between theory and reality in the minefields of Washington politics.

McMaster led teams of talented analysts in the NSC staff to write impressive documents on geopolitics, a new approach to China, and other weighty matters. Trump, of course, never read them (few presidents peruse such documents); his bureaucratic rivalries had their own priorities, which he was ill-equipped to reconcile. A deputy warns him early on in his tenure that Washington is “nothing like your experience in the military.” Here, she warns, “friends stab you in the chest.”

McMaster does emerge from his adventure with shrewd insights into the commander in chief’s failures, and it is these insights that have (rightly) boosted the book’s appeal. For instance: “Trump’s ego and insecurities” left him vulnerable to “flattery,” a fact easily exploited by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, the Saudi royal family, and his own lackeys, who viewed White House meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy,” in which common phrases included “Your instincts are always right” and “You are the only one who,” which encouraged Trump to “stray from the topic at hand or to say something outlandish—like ‘Why don’t we just bomb the drugs’ in Mexico or ‘Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean army during one of their parades.’ ”*

Trump’s “lack of historical knowledge” made him susceptible to Xi Jinping’s self-serving account of Beijing’s rights to the South China Sea. The “fragility of his ego and his deep sense of aggrievement” made it particularly easy for Putin to “play him like a fiddle.”

Still, McMaster saw his role as helping to execute the president’s policies—a role bolstered by his insistence on remaining an active-duty officer (who has a legal obligation to carry out the president’s legal orders). And in this sense, he misunderstood the hostility mounted against him and the president by Mattis and Tillerson.

Both men—Mattis a retired Marine four-star general, Tillerson a former Exxon CEO—were supremely self-confident. They each expected McMaster to roll over to their demands; McMaster resisted, thinking his job was to coordinate administration policy. Mattis was especially condescending toward McMaster, viewing the relationship as that of a four-star to a three-star—and, in military culture, the supremacy of a four-star over a three-star is enormous.

McMaster viewed their connivances as purely a competition for “control.” But much more was going on. As we now know, and knew to a large extent at the time, Mattis and Tillerson viewed Trump as a danger who needed to be contained. Mattis spent much time traveling abroad, downplaying Trump’s America-first ramblings, assuring allies that the United States would always have their back; some thought his title should have been “secretary of reassurance.”

McMaster complains in the book that Mattis “slow-rolled” Trump’s requests for “contingency planning on North Korea and Iran.” What he omits from his account is that Trump wanted contingency planning for a military strike on those two countries; they thought that he really wanted to initiate a strike and that slow-rolling the request would restrain his impulse toward war. When Kelly, another retired general, started joining the private meetings with Mattis and Tillerson, McMaster thought, “Tillerson and Mattis have gotten to him. ” But in fact, what Kelly got was the supreme danger of Trump. And the three men left McMaster out of their cabal because they knew—in part because he still wore the uniform—that he’d sworn to take Trump’s side. McMaster reveals that, at one point, Kelly told an aide to let him know whenever McMaster was meeting alone with Trump.

McMaster understands all this to some degree. “Tillerson and Mattis were not just confident in themselves,” he writes near the end of the book. “They often lacked confidence in a president they regarded as impulsive, erratic, and dangerous to the republic.”

In a particularly revealing passage, McMaster writes that Trump’s incitement of insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, “might be invoked as an ex post facto justification for their [Mattis’ and Tillerson’s] behavior. But in August 2017, I was just trying to help the elected president set his course.” In fact, Jan. 6 can be seen as evidence that the two Cabinet secretaries were right—and that by helping Trump set his course, McMaster was sharpening the danger.

But McMaster is correct that Mattis and Tillerson were incompetent plotters. “The more independent of the president and the White House they became,” he writes, “the less effective they would be.” And that is what happened. Tillerson was fired even before McMaster was. (He was a terrible secretary of state who, among other things, put the interests of ExxonMobil above those of the United States, perhaps in part because he saw them as identical.) Mattis was an insular defense secretary —he surrounded himself with fellow Marine officers, many of whom had served with him abroad—and had no idea how to deal either with the Pentagon’s civilians or with the people in the White House, whom he held in contempt, to his ultimate self-defeat.

It’s a shame: On the issues, Mattis and McMaster agreed on much. Had they worked together, they might have steered Trump in a more sustainably sensible direction. That they didn’t is more Mattis’ fault than McMaster’s. John Bolton had plenty of high-level bureaucratic experience; when he replaced McMaster at the White House, he shut Mattis out completely. (In a remarkable exchange in the book, which takes place when McMaster knew he was on the way out, he tells Mattis, “I hope you get John Bolton, because you deserve John Bolton.” A red-faced Mattis replies, “At ease, Lieutenant General”—“at ease” being a phrase that senior officers invoke to put subordinates in their place—“you can’t talk to me that way.”)

Still, in the book’s postscript, McMaster hopes “that young people who have persevered through these pages will conclude that, even under challenging circumstances, there are tremendous rewards associated with service under any administration.”

Alas, the case he presents for a rewarding experience, at least in the Trump administration, is flimsy. Earlier in the book, he notes, “Despite the frictions I was encountering,” he and his team “were helping Trump make sound decisions.” He cites as examples Trump’s “long-overdue correctives to unwise policies” toward China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran.

He makes something of a point on China, where the administration was fairly unified in dropping the long-standing hope—held, to some extent, by every president since Nixon—that engagement would lure Beijing into the Western-dominated global system. But Trump’s correctives, mainly levying tariffs and launching a trade war, had little effect other than to hurt American consumers.

On the other areas, McMaster’s boast rings hollow. On Russia, Trump caved to Putin at every opportunity. On North Korea, after McMaster’s departure, and to Bolton’s frustration, Trump commenced a bromance with Kim Jong-un, again to no effect. His reimposition of sanctions on Cuba—which Obama had started to lift—helped nothing. Scuttling the nuclear deal with Iran had no effect on Tehran’s mullahs, except to spur them to revive their uranium-enrichment program, which the deal had halted.

It is worth delving a bit into McMaster’s comments on Cuba and Iran because they reveal, despite his harsh critique of Trump, a deeply partisan analyst.

He states that Obama pursued a policy of “accommodating Iran,” which had the effect of strengthening Hezbollah. He avoids noting that Obama retained several sanctions having to do with Iran’s missile program and its ties to terrorist groups. Nor does he note that under the nuclear deal, Iran was well on its way to dismantling its nuclear program under tight international inspections—until Trump scuttled the deal. As a result , Iran is now closer to building an atom bomb than it has ever been. (McMaster, by the way, writes in agreement with Trump that the accord was “the worst deal ever.”)

He also asserts that Biden would “resurrect the Obama policy of accommodating Iran”—a claim that is simply puzzling. Biden did not revive the Iran nuclear deal (though I was among many who urged him to do so ), nor did he relax the sanctions against Iran that Trump reimposed. Biden has also helped Israel defend and retaliate against Iran’s attempted attacks. Where is the accommodation?

In another utterly mystifying (and uncharacteristically far-right) jeremiad, McMaster writes that Obama’s attempt to normalize relations with Cuba stemmed from a “New Left interpretation of history at America’s top universities, where students learned that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed and that geopolitics is a choice between socialist revolution and servitude under ‘capitalist imperialism.’ ” This is ridiculous. Obama’s policy was driven by a realization that America’s half-century-long isolation of Cuba had done nothing to change the regime and was only hurting the tiny island’s people. McMaster also writes, “Obama, like Trump, evinced an unseemly affinity for authoritarians”—a truly bizarre contention.

And so, while McMaster certainly won’t endorse Trump in the November elections or go work for him again (though there’s no chance, especially after this book, that he’d be asked), it’s also unlikely that he’ll endorse Kamala Harris. (He has said he’s not endorsing any candidate.)

One point of this book, I suspect, is rehabilitation. Back when he was an Army major, McMaster wrote a Ph.D. dissertation turned book, called Dereliction of Duty , about how senior officers in the 1960s deliberately misled President Lyndon B. Johnson on the war in Vietnam, telling him what he wanted to hear rather than giving him their honest military advice, thus betraying their constitutional obligations.

A few months into his term in Trump’s White House, McMaster was ordered to go talk to the press about reports that, at a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump had revealed classified information to top Russian officials. McMaster recited a carefully written, very deceptive script: a “non-denial denial.” One of his former colleagues told me at the time that the statement left him “heartbroken.” A fellow retired Army officer mused, “I wonder what title will be given to the book written about him .” I should add that, in the book, McMaster refers to the column I wrote at the time:

The journalist Fred Kaplan, who wrote an essay entitled “The Tarnishing of H.R. McMaster,” stated that I “had been all but incapable of guile” but was “now soaked in the swamp of deceit in the service of Trump.” I was more amused than offended at his hyperbolic criticism.

The book doesn’t come clean about what really happened; most readers, who won’t remember the incident, will be left confused.

Still, At War With Ourselves provides McMaster—now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University—a chance to cut all ties with Trump, to point out the many times that he openly disagreed with Trump and tried to push Trump in the right direction, occasionally successfully. It’s an attempt to set the record straight and to fix for himself an honorable legacy, very different from that of the generals and admirals who abetted Lyndon Johnson’s horrors in Vietnam. In that, he has for the most part succeeded.

Correction, Sept. 3, 2024: This piece originally misidentified Kim Jong-un as Kim Jong-il.

IMAGES

You Owe You by Eric Thomas
You Owe You by Eric Thomas PhD, Chris Paul
'YOU OWE YOU' By Eric Thomas BOOK
'YOU OWE YOU' Corporate Bulk Orders!
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why: Thomas PhD
You Owe You by Eric Thomas, PhD

VIDEO

S2S Podcast Episode 391 99 Problems & The Truth Ain't One!
Moved Past Potential
Touch My Body
You owe you book by Eric Thomas * my thoughts clip 1
S.O.L. S2S Podcast Episode 420
DON'T COMPROMISE YOUR VALUES

COMMENTS

You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
No matter where you are on your journey toward greatness, you owe it to yourself to become fully, authentically you. And Eric Thomas's You Owe You can help get you there. Genres Self Help Nonfiction Personal Development Audiobook Business Inspirational. 288 pages, Hardcover. Published September 13, 2022.
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential. You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain't lied yet!"—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will "help ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. ... 5.0 out of 5 stars The GOAT has spoken, and reading this book, you'll know why he is no.1 in the world. Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2024.
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
Jan 31. Introduction. In the motivational landscape dominated by powerful voices, Eric Thomas PhD stands tall, and his book, "You Owe You," serves as a potent manifesto for personal transformation. With a blend of raw authenticity and motivational wisdom, Thomas takes readers on a journey of self-discovery, empowerment, and the pursuit of purpose.
You Owe You : Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "You Owe You is full of insight and guidance for those seeking their inner selves."—MICHAEL B. JORDAN No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will "help you work harder, discover your real motivation, and crack the code of enduring ...
You Owe You : Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential. You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain't lied yet!"—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will "help ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
Buy You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why by PhD, Eric Thomas, Paul, Chris (ISBN: 9780593234983) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. ... God bless you all that read this review. ☺️💕🙏 Images in this review 2 people found this helpful. Report. See more reviews › Back ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential.You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain't lied yet!"—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will "help ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why. Hardcover - 25 October 2022. by PhD, Eric Thomas, (Author) 4.8 1,531 ratings. See all formats and editions. You owe it to yourself to recognize your gifts, your power, and your place in the world, no matter your story or your struggle, and Eric Thomas-celebrated motivational guru ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your ...
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW. In Eric Thomas' motivational guide You Owe You, everyone's greatest sin is unrealized potential. The renowned "Hip-Hop Preacher" wants you to become the CEO of your life by refining, marketing, and selling your talents. In other words: Find your passion, and cultivate it relentlessly. He reinforces all his teachings ...
You Owe You by Eric Thomas, PhD: 9780593235003
About You Owe You. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential.You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain't lied yet!"—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
Cost. Paid. Published. 2022. Full Name. You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why. You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why urges you to stop waiting for inspiration to strike, and take control of your life. In this book, one of the world's best known motivational speakers Eric Thomas shows you how to ...
You Owe You by Eric Thomas, PhD
You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain't lied yet!"—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime. No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will "help you work harder, discover your real motivation, and crack the code of ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential.You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain't lied yet!"—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will "help ...
You Owe You
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why by Eric Thomas. No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders—will "help you work harder, discover your real motivation, and crack the code of enduring success" (Ed Mylett, #1 bestselling author of The Power of One More)
'YOU OWE YOU' By Eric Thomas BOOK
STEP 3. RECEIVE YOUR BONUSES. You Owe You Workbook (Value: $47) Find Your Fire Virtual Workshop (Value $199) Full Terms: Enter the receipt number from your order receipt for YOU OWE YOU by Eric Thomas in the receipt number box to participate in this bonus offering, while supplies last. Must be 18 years of age or older at the time of entry.
You Owe You
Description. About the Book. If you feel like success is for others, that only certain people get to have their dreams fulfilled, Eric Thomas's You Owe You is your wake-up call. His urgent message to stop waiting for inspiration to strike and take control of your life is one he wishes someone had given him when he was a teenager -- lost ...
You Owe You by Eric Thomas (ebook)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential. You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain’t lied yet!”—Deion Sanders, Coach Prime   No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas—celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes ...
You Owe You
About the Book. If you feel like success is for others, that only certain people get to have their dreams fulfilled, Eric Thomas's You Owe You is your wake-up call. His urgent message to stop waiting for inspiration to strike and take control of your life is one he wishes someone had given him when he was a teenager -- lost, homeless, failing ...
You Owe You by Eric Thomas
If you feel like success is for others, that only certain people get to have their dreams fulfilled, Eric Thomas's You Owe You is your wake-up call. His urge...
‎You Owe You by Eric Thomas, PhD on Apple Books
And Eric Thomas's You Owe You can help get you there. In Eric Thomas' motivational guide You Owe You, everyone's greatest sin is unrealized potential. The renowned "Hip-Hop Preacher" wants you to become the CEO of your life by refining, marketing, and selling your talents. In other words: Find your passion, and cultivate it relentlessly.
You Owe You Summary of Key Ideas and Review
Brief summary. 'You Owe You' by Eric Thomas is a motivational book that emphasizes on taking 100% responsibility for our lives and achieving success by developing self-discipline and a strong work ethic. It inspires readers to focus on their goals and take action to make them a reality. Topics. Self-Help Success Personality Inspiration.
This Massive New Guidebook Will Forever Change the Way You Look at
At the Smithsonian | September 3, 2024 11:15 a.m. Written by Smithsonian botanist W. John Kress, the book details more than 300 North American tree species in words, maps and photographs—and why ...
You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ "Eric Thomas moves, inspires, encourages, and challenges people to reach their full potential.You Owe You is flat-out brilliant, and he ain't lied yet!"-Deion Sanders, Coach Prime No matter your story or your struggle, Eric Thomas-celebrated motivational guru, educator, and problem-solver to many of the top athletes and business leaders-will "help you work ...
Review of 'Do I Know You?'
This book illustrates an engaging and insightful story into Sadie's life as she deals with the obstacles that prosopagnosia poses. Sadie offers an optimistic lens, leaving you to question the existence of the "typical" mind, while exploring new avenues of thinking.
Nate Silver's New Book, "On the Edge," Reviewed
Nate Silver, America's most famous elections prognosticator, got me to cut loose. His new book, "On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything" (Penguin), uses poker as a model for responding ...
Can You Find the 12 Thrillers Hidden Within This Text?
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review ...
Trump Isn't the Only One H.R. McMaster Takes to Task in His New Book
H.R. McMaster's At War With Ourselves, a memoir of his 13 months as Donald Trump's national security adviser, has aroused much attention for its stinging criticism of the former (and, God help ...

Select your cookie preferences

Sorry, there was a problem.

Image Unavailable

Follow the authors

You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why Hardcover – 13 Sept. 2022

From the Publisher

Product description

About the Author

About the authors

Eric Thomas

Customer reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

Top reviews from other countries

You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why

About the author

Server Busy

Type the characters you see in this image:

Publications

Topics Discussed

ebook ∣ Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why

Is this your library?

Search for a digital library with this title

You Owe You | Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why | Eric Thomas | Book Summary

GET THE 500+ BOOK SUMMARY BOX SET IN PDF & MP3 here

You Might also like

Kick Ass | Mel Robbins | Summary

5 Gears | Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram | Book Summary

Becoming Supernatural Book Summary | Author Joe Dispenza

Recent Posts

You Owe You

Publisher Description

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Customer Reviews

Dr. Abraham

More Books Like This

This Massive New Guidebook Will Forever Change the Way You Look at Trees

Review of ‘Do I Know You?’

About the reviewer

The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player

New Yorker Favorites

Can You Find the 12 Thrillers Hidden Within This Text?

Trump Isn’t the Only One H.R. McMaster Takes to Task in His New Book

IMAGES

VIDEO

COMMENTS