Take on the World! And See How Much You Learn!

Seth Taft

Take on the World is an odd combination of memoir and inspirational business book. Taft obviously wants to share both and illustrate the relation between the two. For an amateur writer, he didn't do a horrible job. Which could well be why the book is self-published.

The core of the book is the self-help stuff. It's a bit wordy, even in a seventy-nine page book, but good, solid common-sense stuff. Some of it will only apply in certain situations, however (e.g., setting up a nonprofit corporation), and there are probably some places where he could have gone into greater detail. Surrounding the self-help stuff is the memoir stuff. Which isn't quite as interesting as the self-help stuff, because the old truism is actually true (no one finds another person's life as interesting as they do their own), but it does, in fact, server to illustrate the self-help stuff in a "here's how I lived, and here's the result" kind of way. The main problem is that there's a good deal of overlap between the two, and repetition that comes with it (some stories are told three times, others two).

Still, not horrible. I've read a lot of self-published books far worse than this. However, were this a manuscript being submitted to a major publisher, it would still be rejected out of hand.