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Writer Smith has seen America change significantly since graduating from high school in 1970. He interweaves important elements of those changes in this guidebook for young people starting out in life and beginning to make crucial decisions about the direction they want to go and the place (in relation to home, family, and profession) where they hope to end up someday.
An opening issue, protecting one’s health, is an attribute that needs honest evaluation since many young adults are drawn to experiment with “tobacco, alcohol, and gambling.” These three vices, often stimulated by peer pressure, not only endanger one’s physical well-being but also may cause legal troubles and affect one’s finances. Just stop, Smith suggests, and the extra money accrued will be a further incentive. Education is a major key as well. Smith warns young people not to drop out of high school before acquiring the credentials needed for better-paid employment and general respect. He also recommends a career that begins with military service since it can promise specialized skills training and funding for later education.
Choosing one’s career is difficult, but once that choice is made, there are procedures needed to procure a job, including interview techniques that Smith details here. Controlling one’s income through judicious budgeting is also a need for those who wish to live the American dream of home, career, and family, so Smith delineates some intelligent mathematical examples to increase the reader’s grasp of that process, setting forth formulae regarding such items as average wages, general housing, food and clothing costs, and taxation. He underscores the need for good credit scores. Family cohesion is the final element in creating the dream; Smith advises that “the family that eats together stays together.”
The author offers sound advice that is given additional credibility due to his personal experiences in life. For example, Smith has lived his own version of the American dream, having met his future wife while serving in the United States Navy, thus completing two needed steps—the companionship of a stable marriage and the experience, skills, and respect garnered by military service. Smith is also smart enough to recognize that times have altered, and young people’s visions of possible outcomes have altered as well. For example, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau statistics, marriages are shown to last only eight years. Wages have increased, but jobs are harder to find and keep. House prices continue to rise, so all budgeting must consider those factors.
Smith’s general remedy, as wisely stated throughout this manual, is the repeated re-examination of one’s priorities and how one is acting to achieve them. Goal setting is needed at each step forward, and Smith urges readers to constantly ask themselves what they are doing to secure their desired result. The author’s instruction is practical and also considers the mindset of his target audience. For example, he teaches that just as the smallest strategy, like cutting back on “daily sodas,” can offer leeway to relax at a concert, that same principle can be applied to much larger, longer plans and their accompanying challenges. Smith offers his sage advice precisely because there has been so much flux in American values and realities, with the hope that young people who read his work can begin now, and not some distant moment in the future, to strategize, prioritize and move toward a solid basis for success. This practical and inspirational book would make a great gift for any young person but especially one who is curious about how best to make that all-important transition into adulthood.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review