Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Book Review - In Pursuit of Excellence

I'm pretty excited since I just recently received, In Pursuit of Excellence: How to Win in Sport and Life Through Mental Training, Third Edition. As I normally do, I thought I would break down the book and do a book review ala grade 4.

Pictured Above: Back at coed tryouts a photo of Toronto's Riverdale East hill run (photo courtesy of Jason Moy)

This book is divided into four parts:
  • Visions of excellence
  • Committing to excellence
  • Mental Preparation for excellence
  • Living excellence
Based on those four sections titles I'm a little skeptical on the value of the book, but we'll see if there are any gems to help our Ultimate games get to the next level. I'll review each section over some of the next posts. I'll mix it in with other topics, so don't expect to see the book review in a contiguous set of posts.

Like I said, I'm a little nervous about the quality of this book since it my basic preview gives me the sense that the book is fluffy and will say things such as, "you need to visualize what you are doing" without any concrete steps on how to do visualization.

PJ

2 comments:

Norm said...

maybe they mean "keep your eye on the prize"- see? it all makes sense now.

Janer said...

I would agree with your assessment. I own the book as well and at first thought it was interesting. However, on reflection, I don't find that he gives much (i) evidence or (ii) guidelines for the things that he says.

Also, last year I heard him talk at a conference and that sealed the deal - it was one of the worst talks I've heard. He basically talked for an hour and a half on the topic of "focus rules" without either having focus or rules.