Give Me a Year
12 New Things to Embrace Change and Live Your Best Life
An aspirational memoir–cum-self-help guide, Give Me a Year is about fostering one’s sense of adventure across a year of intentional new experiences.
Entrepreneur Shonda Scott’s self-help guide Give Me a Year is about seeking joy and embracing courage for sustainable change.
Drawing on Scott’s own response to a personal slump, in the midst of which she issued herself a challenge to do one new activity each month for a year, the book introduces the 12 New Things Lifestyle. It is built on the principle of “doing new and different things to move you out of your comfort zone.” Illustrated by personal anecdotes and interactive because of journal prompts, the book describes its ethos with encouragement.
A combination of self-reflection, calendar-keeping, and vision boarding is recommended for planning and tracking one’s intention-based year of new activities. Indeed, each chapter ends with exercises for personal growth, like making a list of hobbies that one once enjoyed, inviting twelve people to dine at one’s home, and committing oneself to a random act of kindness. Much of the advice is faith-based and inspiration-minded; to complement this perspective, there are scriptural citations. The book’s rooting in popular culture is also broad: quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, and Sex and the City are included for wide appeal.
Scott’s stories of her own year of change are engaging. She recalls skiing on artificial snow in Dubai, cave diving in Mexico, dining with the Obama Foundation, and opening the first Black woman–owned coffeehouse and cybercafé in Las Vegas. She also recalls soaring via sea plane to the Maldives and staying at the Ritz-Carlton alongside family-oriented memories of holidays. As examples, many of her tales are too aspirational, but the book suggests that its recommended goals can be tailored to be accessible to all. Indeed, recommendations such as to write someone a note of gratitude or to take a local road trip can be pursued at low or no cost.
While the introduction and conclusion include general guidance for others to begin their own years of experimentation, the book ends up reading more like an inspirational memoir about Scott’s adventures than a work of widely applicable advice. Indeed, it is heavy on personal examples, which are interspersed with life lessons and journal prompts. Its language is quite casual as well, undermining its persuasiveness. Further, the twelve chapters are organized by theme, such as finding one’s happy place, gift giving, and prioritizing family; they do not follow Scott’s own year of change in a strict manner.
Give Me a Year is an inspiring self-help guide to seeking new adventures and venturing beyond one’s comfort zone.
Reviewed by
Hannah Pearson
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
