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Surviving Your Serengeti: A Review

Surviving Your Serengeti

Surviving Your Serengeti

The new book, Surviving Your Serengeti, teaches 7 essential skills for success in life and business through the metaphor of African animals on the Serengeti. Written by businessman and real estate expert Stefan Swanepoel, the book draws from the author’s experience growing up in Africa and applies the lessons he learned from the animals to our everyday lives.

The book is written as a novel in a style reminiscent of The Goal, where the protagonist is at a crossroads with his business and is mentored by a old friend that has reentered his life. The book follows Sean & Ashley, a couple on a trip to the Serengeti who are mentored by Zachariah, an old college friend of Sean’s. Zachariah takes them to see the animals in their natural habitats and he explains the main survival skill that makes each one of them successful. He draws parallels between the skills of the animals and the skills necessary to thrive in life and business.

This is an easy to read book that can be completed in a few hours. Although there is nothing really new here and this material has been covered in different forms in many different books over the years, this book is worth reading. The book makes an excellent point by saying:

“Often, our comfortable existence lets us become complacent-and we fail to identify or grow our skills.”

For this reason, it is worth reading this book if only to get a refresher of the skills that are important to success and a reminder that we need to continually work on them to become better at what we do. The storytelling and the picturesque African setting make this process a pleasant experience. Each chapter contains a helpful summary of the lesson learned, which is useful for quickly going back to reconfirm one’s understanding of each concept.

The publisher has put up a site called What Animal Am I? It has an online quiz that allow you to identify which African animal you are most closely identified with by comparing your dominant survival skills. It’s a fun quiz that will take less than 10 minutes and it will get you thinking about how you can work to improve your less dominant survival skills.

If this book been 400 pages of ponderous repetition, I couldn’t recommend it but as the author gets to the point quickly and covers universally important concepts, the book is well worth reading.

In the interest of full disclosure, we received an advance copy of the book, free of charge. We were asked to give it an honest review, which we have.

 

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  • Stefan Swanepoel April 1, 2011, 12:03 am

    Scott, just saw your review and wanted to quickly say thank you for taking the time to read Surviving Your Serengeti, and to write the post. Much appreciated!nnStefan SwanepoelnAuthor: Surviving Your Serengeti