Review of how to ruin you life by 40

How to Ruin Your Life by 40
• Genre: Personal Growth and Motivation
• Author: Steve Farrar
• Overall rating: 6 of 10
• How I heard about it: Colleen McBride
• Suggested Audience : Relatively new Christians between the ages of 16 and 20

In this book Steve Farrar takes a sort of crash course in what not to do with your life to be successful by time you are 40. He brings up some really good points about actions having consequences and every decision that you make when you are 20 will have an exponential effect on your life when you are 40. The overall thesis of the book is along the lines of. No one wakes up when they’re 40 with a dead end job paying child support on multiple kids from multiple marriages by chance. There are very clear decisions that play into ones life ending up in such a manor.

Farrar brings this full circle with the Christian life talking about how on average one of ten people that start the Christian faith in a way to impact the kingdom are still going strong by time they are 40 and even brings up big name evangelist from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s that got involved with excessive drinking and extra-marital relationships, in turn dropping out of the race.

While all of the points he makes are good ones I personally felt as if the book as a whole was written to a less mature audience. Every major concept he had spoke of I had defiantly heard of before. Many of the points he made I read and thought “well yea DUAH!!!!!!!” For example when he was talking about dating and relationships he said “”girls sometimes guys might tell you “I need to know if we are sexually compatible” if any of you have taken a Biology class everyone is sexually compatible.”” To any of my female Christian friends out there if any of your boyfriends even elude to the above argument something has gone horribly wrong in your choice of boyfriends and judgement of character. Just the fact that the author even made that point told me he was clearly writing to a less spritually mature audience.

So overall I would suggest this as a book for relatively new Christians between the ages of 16 and 20 that have not had much worldview training or teaching on practical Christian lifestyle choices. As I said it was good just a little less mature than most of my audience expects in a personal growth book such as this. Most of his points almost seemed derived from Wild at Heart and How Now shall we live but watered down and written in more understandable English with less christianeese.