How to use this Page

Guest blogger Danny Pettry is the author of Discover Hidden Secret Wisdom: A Recreational Therapist’s System on How You Can Become Great at Anything. In honor of the release of this book, Mr. Pettry has made a donation to First Book to provide new books to children in need.

“The book you don’t read won’t help you,” is a quote that was often said by the late legendary motivational speaker, Jim Rohn. Rohn’s quote is a key to personal growth and development. Great wisdom is hidden in books. However, a person must read books to discover their secrets.

Reading and writing are two of my favorite hobbies. Helping people is my life’s passion. Naturally, I felt the desire to write a book on how “reading books” can help a person to become self-fulfilled and successful in life.

Discover Hidden Secret Wisdom: A Recreational Therapist’s System on How You Can Become Great at Anything is a book that was designed for people who are seeking to find their way in life. Each of the 12 chapters is a prescription towards wellness, success, happiness and greatness. Readers can find this book to present a captivating approach to self-discovery. Many of the lessons in the book are based on my personal experiences as a recreational therapist for a children’s unit at a psychiatric hospital. I weaved together personal experiences and examples from a wide range of sources from self-help authors to scientific researchers. Bibliotherapy (the therapeutic use of books) is a technique that I use to help children with aggression problems to become more empathetic. We read children’s stories and have discussions about how each character felt during different parts of the story. We talk about safe and fair solutions that characters in the story could have taken. Learning to read promotes the child’s self-esteem and social skills, based on my personal experiences. I try to promote and encourage these children to become avid readers at a young age.

Discover Hidden Secret Wisdom is more than a book. It is mission to promote reading and literacy. There are a large number of people who’ll never read another book after high school. Many more will never read another book after college. An estimated 13 percent of adults in my home state of West Virginia didn’t have basic literacy skills in 2003, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics.

I decided to form a partnership and donate to First Book in honor of Discover Hidden Secret Wisdom because of their shared vision and mission to promote reading and literacy. I am always glad to hear about the wonderful things that First Book is doing to help provide books for children in need. I believe that avid reading should start during childhood.

Dr. Seuss said it best: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

Have you read any good self-improvement books lately?

For more information about Discover Hidden Secret Wisdom, please click here.

T. Scott discusses the work of Jim Collins and how what makes a business great and what makes a social sector enterprise great are two very different things.

[I]n the social sectors it is a mistake to think that we need to “act like a business” (the subtitle to the monograph is why business thinking is not the answer) and he acknowledges that the measurements that we use to assess ourselves are not going to be as neatly quantitative as those that measure the performance of a for-profit company. But we still have to have clear goals, and strong discipline, and a way to tell whether or not we are moving toward those goals.