Japanese Best-seller Comes to America

"This is Your Life, Not a Dress Rehearsal" is a best-seller in Japan, endorsed by Toyota's CEO, Fujio Cho, who hailed it as a "magnificent success manual, and embraced by the Japanese people.

No big deal on the surface but the book's author, Jim Donovan, lives in the United States. While the book is a huge success in Japan, it has yet to be "discovered" in the US, although it was first published here.

It's interesting that the Japanese people flock to self-help books by American authors, using the principles they contain to make their lives better, while native born Americans seem to forgo personal development in favor of the immediate pleasure provided by television and video games. More than a third of the US population has not read a book since completing school and 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years, according to industry expert, Dan Poynter.

The book's author sees this as a dangerous trend, one which, if it continues, will result in the US becoming less of a world power than it is today. "With young people, particularly in Asia, studying success principles that have been taught here for centuries, they are rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with, while their American counterparts devote their time to the pursuit of instant gratification. It's time the US started paying attention to the fact that we are in a highly competitive global marketplace and that if we "rest on our laurels," we are destined to become a second place economy."

"Instead of waiting for the government to step in and fix things, we need to begin taking personal responsibility for our lives. We must become willing to stretch ourselves, setting goals that are out of our comfort zone and take bold action toward their achievement. This is what America's founders did to become a world power and what we need to do now to reamain one."