I read the book this week, actually it was not the first time I had it. I read it already last year. The first time I saw the book in booksale, I thought of how this is part of the marketing ploy of the coffee company but since it was sold for a mere 15 pesos and me being kuripot, I immediately grabbed it. As I read it, I realized that the book is more on motivating others than a book that sells more coffee.
I saw it again in my disorganized bookshelf and decided to read it for the second time to see if I it would shed a different light. I personally like reading books twice, it's like visiting an old friend.
The feelings are still the same. I still like it. It was a light and feel-good read. It is a true riches-to-rags story. The writer, in his sixties, was once a great executive in a prestigious company earning a huge amount of money, got fired, lost everything including his family, was diagnosed with brain tumor, then he met a person who offered him a job in Starbucks, mopping the floor and cleaning the toilets. He had his humble pie. While working, he made a lot of realizations and learned things which are important in life. Here's my favorite part of the book:
"Looking across my latte at this confident, smiling Starbucks employee, I felt sorry for myself. Later, I would learn that she had seen more hardship in her life than I could conceive of having seen in three lifetimes. Her mother, who died when she was just twelve, was a dope addict. She had never known a father. When her mother overdosed, she had been sent to live with an aunt, another single mother, who already had several of her own fatherless children to care for... But at that moment I was still at the center of my own universe, and my own problems were all-consuming.
It shows how a person can have so much material and worldly success and in just a snap of a finger, everything else is taken away from him. And because he was so engrossed with his own life, not minding others' circumstances, he automatically thinks how miserable his life is. But eventually realized that it was when he felt miserable and had hhit rock-bottom that he had learned something so much more in life.
And sometimes, as crazy as it sounds, there is actually a huge power in hitting rock-bottom. The beauty with it is that a person has nothing to lose and with it, a person can always take big leaps and goals beyond what he can mentally comprehend.
