Fired Up!: How the Best of the Best Survived and Thrived After Getting the Boot

Inspirational books of this variety do me well. MacKay’s style is very lively. He chose a good cross section of people. Some of the people have excelled (after being fired) in fields I pursue, and others have excelled in fields, I may never pursue. Thus surely some of these tales contain lessons more suitable to me personally, but pretty much all of them have valuable lessons. The person’s lessons which hit home the most with me was our former governor, Jesse Ventura. I was already acquainted with his story, so hearing it wasn’t new, though MacKay’s exploration of Ventura’s life revealed some additional insights. I believe Ventura is a positive person and his interview demonstrated that quality in spades. At the end of each story, MacKay summed up the lessons and phrased them as witty pithy maxims, such as “Don’t tell the Ayatollah to shave his beard” for his son’s story. In between, the stories, MacKay reported facts and tales to buffer the points of these stories. MacKay seems like an open minded person who values people. There is only one criticism of any significance: my friend Tim once accused all motivational writers/speakers as being “charlatans” since he believes “they fill people up with vacuous nonsense”. I don’t believe motivational people deliberately mislead, though I do believe they are sometimes naïve and make blanket statements that may sound good but in reality don’t pan out. So many motivational speakers and writers try to convince us “If you are a good person, you will succeed”. Such is definitely not the case. For example, MacKay said “Frauds NEVER [emphasis added] make it to the finish line”. Sure, it would be great if that was true, but I can’t believe it is.