The Midas Power is a book published by Irish business development guru Padraic O Maille.  The book is written in the form of a story centered on a fictional character called Rory Murray.  Rory’s life is falling apart in post Celtic Tiger Ireland as he struggles up to his eyeballs in debt and he escapes to an Island off the west cost of Ireland to get away from it all.  By good fortune he meets a stranger who connects him with a very wise mentor who teaches him how to turn his life of failure into a life of success and prosperity.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the book – the story is good and there is an interesting twist at the end!  The story is also rooted in the West of Ireland with local places, characters and sayings plus the reader can pick up a few words of the beautiful Irish language as well.

To find out more about this book or SMACHT (an Irish word which means discipline) please visit www.smacht.com  SMACHT is a business therapy programme  for people who want to improve the results their achieve, both in their professional and personal lives.

You can buy a copy of the book from Amazon by clicking on the link below:

The author of this book is Morgan Scott Peck (May 22, 1936 – September 25, 2005).

Peck was a Psychiatrist, born in New York City and best-selling author, best known for this book, The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978.

Wow – what a book!  In this article I have summarised what I think are some of the key points of the book.  There is a lot of wisdom packed into this book and the whole book must be read to be appreciated.  The book itself is a classic in personal development.  The book spent 13 years on the New York Times bestseller list to create a paperback record, sold 10 million copies worldwide and was translated into more than 20 languages.  I have read this book before and as I re-read it again I realise how good it is and why it has remained so popular over the years.  It is the type of book from which you can gain new insights every time you read it.

I have highlighted some of the Key points from the book below.

Problems

Life is difficult.  This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.  Once a person understands this they can transcend this.

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?  Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing.

Problems, depending upon their nature, evoke in us frustration or grief or sadness or loneliness or guilt or regret or anger or fear or anxiety or anguish or despair. These are uncomfortable feelings, often very uncomfortable, often as painful as any kind of physical pain, sometimes equaling the very worst kind of physical pain. Indeed, it is because of the pain that events or conflicts engender in us all that we call them problems. And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist.  Avoiding problems leads to neurosis which eventually is more painful than the problems we are trying to avoid.

We need to learn the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the pain involved.

How do we solve life’s problems?  Answer – Discipline.

“We teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural”

Discipline

Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems.  There are 4 tools in Discipline:

Continue reading The Road Less Travelled (Published 1978) →