The Power to Persist
8 Simple Habits to Build Lifelong Resilience
Mixing personal anecdotes with outside examples to show resilience at work, The Power to Persist is an inspiring self-help guide.
Featuring a forward by Reverend Al Sharpton, Lamell J. McMorris’s clear-eyed self-help book The Power to Persist is about building resilience by developing strong habits.
Advocating that people cultivate resilience, the book explores eight resilience-building habits, including attitude, vulnerability, and faith. After defining resilience and establishing its worth, it devotes a chapter apiece to each of the eight core habits, naming strategies and exercises for achieving each. All of its advice can be applied in both personal and professional contexts and to a variety of circumstances.
The book mixes personal anecdotes with outside examples to show resilience at work. For example, McMorris, once left unemployed after a high-ranking position in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, took a risk and opened his own lobbying firm in Washington, DC. Later, when his partner pulled out of the venture, McMorris and his team started a new firm overnight in order to retain clients and maintain momentum.
Everyday individuals whom McMorris met through charity work and elsewhere, including a once homeless woman who became a first-time homeowner and a single father working fifty-five hours a week to support his children, are also held up as examples of resilience. More general, but still illustrative, are examples like Malala Yousafzai, who became an advocate for the education of girls, and Simone Biles, who made an Olympic comeback after backing out of the 2020 games.
The prose is encouraging, featuring assertions like “I’m certain this will work for you, too.” McMorris’s religious viewpoint shapes much of the book, but it also includes quotes from a chaplain, a rabbi, and a reverend. However, the consistent but formulaic chapter structure becomes less effective as the book progresses, moving through examples, the specific habits they illustrate, and seven strategies for implementing the habit in daily life without variation.
Further, much of the book’s advice is quite worn, as with exhortations to practice gratitude, reframe one’s negative thoughts, and celebrate one’s milestones. And the afterword expands on the book’s lessons with recommendations for businesses and communities to build resilience and employ resilient habits as well, taking it further afield of its personal development roots.
A straightforward self-help guide that draws on personal examples for inspiration, The Power to Persist is about fostering resilience by forming intentional habits.
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.
