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Book Summary and Reviews of How to Save Your Own Life by Michael Gates Gill

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How to Save Your Own Life by Michael Gates Gill

How to Save Your Own Life

15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places

by Michael Gates Gill

  • Published:
  • Dec 2009, 160 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Michael Gill's lemons-to-lemonade memoir chronicled his transformative years working at Starbucks after losing his high-powered job, his marriage, and his health (he developed a brain tumor). In response to overwhelming requests from readers who wanted to know how they, too, could weather downturns, he has distilled his lessons into fifteen meaningful lessons, including:

  • Leap...With Faith: Sometimes it pays to leap without looking and say yes without thinking (Gill accepted the Starbucks job immediately, on a whim).
  • Let Yourself...Be Helped: Pride is even more paralyzing than fear.
  • Look...with Respect at Every Individual You See: Gill was raised to avoid eye contact with those who were different, cloistered in a privileged world. Now he realizes the potential in all who cross his daily path.
  • Lose...Your Watch (and Cell Phone and PDA!): Our obsession with productivity produces madness, not gladness.

Offering living proof that extraordinary happiness is found in ordinary moments, How to Save Your Own Life provides empowering words and hope for anyone facing a reversal of fortune. True fortune, Gill discovered, lies not in fate but in discovering the innate capacity we all possess to rescue ourselves.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"We are all lucky that Starbucks saved Michael Gates Gill's life. It enabled him to return with this beautifully written book filled with wisdom, passion, humor and love." - Jeffrey Zaslow, author of The Girls From Ames, coauthor The Last Lecture

This information about How to Save Your Own Life was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Michael Gates Gill

Michael Gates Gill is the author of How Starbucks Saved My Life and the son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill. A former creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising, he now works at Starbucks and has no plans to retire.

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