cover image The Breakthrough Factor: Creating a Life of Value for Success and Happiness

The Breakthrough Factor: Creating a Life of Value for Success and Happiness

Henry Marsh. Simon & Schuster, $23 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-684-81425-4

A world-class distance runner for 13 years and now a program director with Franklin Quest, where he conducts motivational seminars, Marsh has come up with a self-help guide that is anything but world class. His facile system of principle-driven behavior is based on what he sees as four basic human needs--for life, love, variety and self-worth. Through 15 chapters with unrevealing titles (e.g., ""It works!"" ""Why ask why?""), he ranges across nutrition, finances, relationships, TV watching--broad topics on which he delivers banal pronouncements as ""Anything can be an addiction"" and ""We cannot underestimate the need for relationships."" He is unclear about his use of the word principle, on which his argument is structured but which ends up as enormously elastic. At one point he equates it with belief, but at others it seems to be closer to rule or guide or value-system. One is likely to encounter Marsh's advice in many other self-help tomes: do not lose sight of long-term goals by grasping at short-term distractions, keep cultivating a positive self-image. (Nov.)