Editor’s comment: Another “non-fiction that reads more like fiction”. Jho Low, between graduating from Wharton in 2005 and exposes that began in 2015 appears to have pulled off Madoff-style fraud. The difference? It was primarily perpetrated on his home country (Malaysia) and allegedly with the aid of their former Prime Minister, Razak Najib. Perhaps as much as $5 billion was looted from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund (1MDB) over a six year period, much of which was used for Gatsby-like lifestyle which included many names you know such as DeNiro, DiCaprio, Hilton and more. I felt a little seedy reading it but my goodness, what a story! With many charges still pending against both Low and the former Prime Minister, we are likely to be reading more about this story in the future (if they can find Jho Low who is in hiding).
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. It turns problems into gifts, failures into successes, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. It can turn an existence into a real life, and disconnected situations into important and beneficial lessons. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
Editor’s Comment: As you may guess, the book is profane and Manson seems to be the classic millennial male. But not even that could distract me from gaining momentum as I went from chapter to chapter through his entire book. I’ve long despised the positivity bend of most self-help advice. By the mid-90s I had given up such trash in favor of insight meditation to learn “seeing things as they are”. Manson takes it another step by saying such things as “embrace death” and that everything worthwhile in life comes from surmounting negative experience. He’s a good story teller and uproariously funny at times.
Editor’s Comment: The news seems no longer the news, it’s seems more like mud-slinging. I’m weary of it. So when this old song came up on my ITunes, I played it over five times.
