The Power – Book Review

The Power is Ronda Byrne’s follow up book to The Secret, the hugely successful self-help book on the Law of Attraction released in 2006. In The Power, Byrne reframes the Law of Attraction as the Law of Love. By giving love you are fulfilling your deepest purpose in the world, according to Byrne. By giving love you will get everything you want. The universe will submit to your every whim. Flowers will fly out your ass. Cherubs will sing. You get the picture. The universe revolves around you.

Now, to be fair, I like the idea that giving love is our reason for being. I am totally on board with it, in fact. I guess I just don’t like the way this book presents it. It’s incredibly long, drawn out, and repetitive. At 250 pages, I kind of expected a bit more. I kept thinking that it could have been 1/3 the size. Take As a Man Thinketh, by James Allan as an example of the brevity I am talking about. 100 pages. It’s all you need for a simple idea.

Another major complaint that I have about this book, and new thought material in general, is the propagation of the belief that, “if we can all just get along, everything will be fine”. I wish it were true. But the simple fact is that there are people out there who don’t give a crap about everyone getting along. The world could burn, and as long as these monsters are safe from it, they wouldn’t care. There are terrorists and serial killers, people with almost zero morality. We will never ever “just get along”. But that isn’t reason to give up. In fact, the realization of that fact can inspire one to action for positive change. It will never be perfect here, but the pursuit of a better world is an ideal worth acting on. “If only everyone could get along”, however is a perspective detached from action. It’s delusional, and The Power is rife with this kind of delusion. Anyway…

So, let’s dig into the big idea of the book. What is the Law of Love? Here’s what Byrne says on the subject. “Love is the positive force of life! Love is the cause of everything positive and good. There are not a hundred different positive forces in life; there is only one”. Skip to the end. Byrne is stating that our greatest gift is our capacity for giving love. A quote in the book from Mother Teresa sums it up quite nicely. “It’s not how much we give, but how much love we put into giving”.

Okay, so what does that mean? Why is our greatest gift our ability to give love? Well, according to Byrne, love is the thing us humans most want. Every single one of us wants to be loved…more than anything. But most people have a fear of giving love without first receiving it. This means that everyone is walking around really wanting to be loved but scared of giving it first. Those rare individuals, who are brave enough to step out and give love before they get it, end up being rewarded for their courage. They tend to attract everything they want in return. Byrne says, “The beauty of life is that when you put love first, all the money you need to live a full life comes to you”. There you have it.

Bottom Line

If the book is lying around and you have nothing better to do, give it a read. However, I suggest just skipping to the end of each chapter where the “points of power” sum up the preceding section. You can pretty much get the “point” of “the power” from there, and it will take you a fraction of the time to get through. Put simply; rich idea, poor presentation.