A course in personal development.

• Author: Holtzman, Henry
• Position: Required Reading

"The Secrets of Power Politicking"

Howard Jackson

Universal Publishers/uPUBLISH.com

Parkland, Fla.

2000, 118 pages, $19.95

Brevity has its advantages. Many of humanity's greatest innovative advances can be expressed simply, plainly and briefly. Too bad this doesn't include the process behind innovative thinking, which is often lengthy, complex and hard to understand.

Of course, you don't have to be innovative when writing a book. Any author is free to pick and choose among long-established ideas defined, developed and refined by others and put them forward as a sort of primer on any subject. No one thinks less of the author for doing this, except bored readers who read the thoughts years ago as developed by the original innovators. After you've read the same advice dozens of times before, you begin to wish for a longer book breaking fresh ground instead of an extensive monograph that re-plows long familiar acreage.

The motivational ground that author Howard Jackson plows has been tilled so often that most of us have forgotten it was originally farmed by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Israelites and Egyptians. The grandfather of all modern personal development advocates, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, never failed to credit these early original thinkers. On the other hand modem personal development coaches (including Jackson) inevitably give much of the credit to 20th Century gurus such as Earl Nightingale, Zig Ziglar, Harvey Mackay and Denis Waitley.

Strangely enough, Nightingale and Ziglar freely admit there's nothing new about their advice, but claim only that they are modern advocates of personal achievement.

Some of the good things about Jackson's book include fairly concise statements of fundamental personal development techniques.

Here's one example:

"You will be known as a frog or a prince/princess the moment you open your mouth and speak the first word. The first words you speak can create a lasting impression. Do whatever it takes to develop the quality of your voice and the words that come out of your mouth. Sometimes the less said can be better than more said."

Three ideas in four sentences aren't bad.

On the other side of the coin are sentences and entire paragraphs set within italics and quotation marks that aren't attributed to anyone. These certainly sound familiar, but the entire book frequently sounds familiar. Here's an example of the...