Review Excerpt:

Here’s a book you can fall in love with just by reading the table of contents. It’s entitled 101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep Forgetting by Ernie J. Zelinski.

The table of contents listing those 101 things, plus a bonus of five more, is masterful, but so is each of the chapters expanding on each table of contents entry. If you are like most of us and have forgotten these lessons, I suspect you’ll remember them after reading the book.

I flipped over the book because each lesson struck me as important and because reading the explanatory chapter convinced me in a persuasive and entertaining way that the lesson was important.

So first take a sample from the table of contents:

• One true friend is worth more than 10,000 superficial ones.
• Good deeds are seldom remembered; bad deeds are seldom forgotten.
• The surest way to failure is trying to please everyone.
• Your past is always going to be the way it was – so stop trying to change it.
• A walk or run in nature is the best medicine for many of your ailments.
• The shortcut to being truly fit and trim is long-term rigorous action.
• Compromising your integrity for money, power, or fame will come back to haunt you.
• If the grass on the other side of the fence is greener, try watering your side.
• No matter how successful you become, the size of your funeral will still depend on the weather.
• Be happy while you are alive because you are a long time dead.

I don’t know about you, but I think those lessons of life are not only central to a good life but are also well stated. This Zelinski guy knows how to write prose that has the potential to become those old proverbs everyone repeats.

One of the lessons is “Do the difficult and uncomfortable if you would like an easy and comfortable life.” That hit a homer for me, as during my years as a professor, I found the key mistake students make is believing that something is wrong if the educational process isn’t entertaining and titillating. I found exactly the same problem with the many dozens of student interns I supervised while on television. I would try to explain that work is often a grind, that all of us sometimes have to endure what might seem unpleasant, but that if we want to get the job done, accomplish something worth accomplishing, and achieve our goals we can’t always take the easy and comfortable path.

Zelinski says once you master the rule embodied in this lesson, “success will come relatively easy – much easier than it came before you mastered this rule.”

So I’m about to give you the master key to success in life, and you won’t even have to buy and read the book. Zelinski explains, “The Easy Rule of Life tells us that when we always do the easy and comfortable, life turns out to be difficult and uncomfortable. When we do the difficult and uncomfortable, however, life turns out to be easy and comfortable. Think about it carefully, and you will see how this rule applies to your life.”

Here is the concrete illustration that Zelinski uses: “Taking the easy and comfortable way – sitting at home and watching a lot of no-brainer programs on television – will put you on a dead-end street. Long-term satisfaction can only be attained by undertaking the challenging activities that are at times difficult and frustrating. We must pay the price with time, effort, and frustration in completing these activities.”

NOTE: You can download the Free E-Book with the Table of Contents, Preface, and 17 Chapters of 101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep Forgetting at:

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          The Retirement Gifts Cafe 

Purchase 101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep Forgetting at:

101 Really Important Things at Amazon.com

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101 Really Important Things at BarnesandNoble.com

For more excerpts from 101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep Forgetting see:

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