cover image Success Trap: Rethink Your Ambitions to Achieve Greater Personal and Professional Fulfillment

Success Trap: Rethink Your Ambitions to Achieve Greater Personal and Professional Fulfillment

Stan J. Katz. Ticknor & Fields, $18.95 (250pp) ISBN 978-0-89919-855-2

The authors of False Love set out to help readers ``thrive as well as strive'' by finding internal milestones of fulfillment. Using case studies of patients with misguided values, along with sociological research, they trace assumptions that lead us to substitute money for human worth, proposing multiple goals over narrow focus. Thought-provoking questionnaires complete most chapters, measuring such things as readers' competition quotient and obsessions. Unfortunately, the text is less psychologically involving and becomes repetitious. Beyond learning how we came to be so greedy and fixated, we get mostly platitudes and little guidance for implementing change--e.g., ``Use that energy anger and frustration to develop new opportunities.'' And a chapter about women is occasionally offensive, with comments like ``Many women make a mistake in interpreting every negative remark as a personal assault.'' (Feb.)