A Glass Half Empty? ...or Half Full?

A surprisingly good book, with a great way of conveying some simple life lessons, that should be able to get even the most mis-maligned thinking on the straight and narrow. What goes around comes around, patch up your troubles (yet don't worry about them either too much or too little), fill your life with what makes you happy but leave a chance for climbing the next rung up the ladder – yes, the author could have used a bounty of cliches, metaphors and similes for his text, but by sticking with the glass allusion he really gets things down pat. A pleasant visual style, a gamut of fonts – the description of this as 'a children's book for grown ups' is very accurate.

I thought this was a great book. I loved the illustrations and the layout. It’s quick and easy to read as well as understand the concepts.
It’s a good book to pick up again, as I did, when you’re having a bad day to remind yourself of your glass being half full.

Extremely simplified but surprisingly deep for such a simple book. A fun way to show that half full and half empty are not the only two alternatives in your glass or in your life. We can all learn something from reading this, even if it's just a few new words for that empty space at the top of the glass. Room for opportunities anyone?
Really enjoyed reading this book and will definitely be getting myself a copy, maybe even some for friends and family too!

A Glass Half Empty? Is such an insightful read for only being a short picture book! It takes one of the most common concepts and somehow both simplifies it and makes it deeper at the same time!

I feel that A Glass Half Empty could help readers understand that there is much more to life than simply being half empty or half full and sometimes there are things you can control and other times you can''t control things.

It relays how important it is to be nice to other people and help them as it can effect your glass, being negative to people will also have negative effects for you meanwhile if you are nice someone else can benefit from it as well as yourself.

The cute pictures definitely helped, I feel this has conveyed more of a message to me than 200 pages block text ever could!

I would recommend this book to anyone who only thinks of their glass as being half empty or half full and hope it changes their minds!

*ARC received from publisher via netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

I’ve never read a self-help book before, but if there is ever a stage in my life where I need to, it would be now. I decided to start this self-help series after seeing the category on Netgallery and deciding that I want to explore this genre and see if anything I read in these books can really help me. I am going through a hard time at the moment, I’m leaving education for good after school, high school, college, university and postgraduate study without taking a single year away. And now I face finding a job with limited options due to having a disability. My life is going through a complete overhaul at the moment and adulthood is slamming me in the face with a spade.
I’m starting this review series off with an easy introduction into the world of self-help; a children’s book for adults on the topic of optimism and pessimism. In reality I am a bit of a pessimist, so I thought it would be interesting to start with a book that tackles that. I was taken by surprise. Considering it’s a simplified book with illustrations and fancy fonts, this book is deep. Really, really deep. There is a lot packed into it’s 48 pages.
I don’t really think that I came away from reading this with a new lease on life, and I don’t think it really gave me a way to tackle the problems I am facing at the moment. But it still made me smile, and it made me think.
A Glass Half-Empty? is full of clever metaphors to help you make sense of life and I like that the main message behind this is that having a good balance is a solid place to start. One of the metaphors that I really enjoyed was the metaphor of the crack in the glass. Sometimes risk means we loose what’s in our glass, and ignoring this risk will make things worse, but keeping our glass empty to save us from risk can be just as bad as it means we might miss out on things in life. See what I mean? this book is full of detailed pieces of wisdom that I really didn’t expect from a book that’s only 48 pages long and full of pictures.
Another message that resonated with me was the idea that no two glasses are alike; everyone has different problems, and everyone has different ways of dealing with their problems. I think some people need to realise this more and society would be a better and more understanding place for everyone then.
“Remember, whether you put it there, or someone else puts it there…your Glass is always being refilled. ” No matter what happens, what cracks you get, or if your glass gets empty. Someone or something will also be refilling it. I like that idea.
However most importantly, this book teaches that we have to be grateful for what we have in our glass, and that the empty space above the waterline should be thought of as opportunity. This is a message that I really should start living by, and maybe then I can become more of an optimist. “If you feel seasick, try keeping your eyes on the horizon” if life becomes all too complicated and too much. but if “you stay focused on the balance in your glass, you’ll be just fine”.
To answer the question at the end of the book; is my glass half-empty or half-full, at the moment I think my glass is half empty. It’s ready to be filled with opportunity though, but a little empty at the moment as I transition to leaving education and trying to work out what I want from my future. I need to start finding more balance and this book did actually give me some hope for that. It helped me to understand where I am at the moment, but also that our glasses are always changing so thinks might start to look up soon. I need to start trying to be more optimistic, grateful for what’s already in my glass and look forward to whatever is going to be added to it next.
If you are also feeling a little low at the moment, or are a self-proclaimed pessimist like myself, I’d urge you to give this book a go. There is still so much that can be unpacked from this book, and I believe it could help anyone find positivity in a whole range of different situations, and provide wisdom for a whole range of problems. And even more importantly, a donation of the proceeds from the sale of this book is being given to the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation! Which is really cool!