Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within promises to give you "immediate control of your mental, emotional, physical, and financial destiny." Immediate. Control. Of your destiny. This is an extraordinary claim for a book that costs $18 and could be summarized as "make decisions and then follow through on them."
Robbins is a force of nature. He's six-foot-seven. He has the energy of someone who discovered caffeine yesterday. He walks on hot coals at seminars, which is impressive until you learn that walking on hot coals is actually not that dangerous due to the physics of heat transfer, which makes it less a demonstration of willpower and more a demonstration of thermal conductivity. But it looks great on stage.
Decide what you want. Take action. Notice what's working. Change your approach until you succeed. This is, fundamentally, the scientific method applied to personal development, and it works. The book wraps this simple framework in 544 pages of stories, exercises, and motivational language that could be edited down to about 40 pages without losing any content. The other 504 pages are enthusiasm, which Tony has in abundance and which cannot be transferred through text, no matter how many exclamation points are used.
The giant within is supposed to wake up, take control, and transform your life. In practice, the giant hits snooze. You read the book, feel energized for a weekend, and then return to your regular life because your regular life has inertia and inertia beats enthusiasm every time. Awakening the giant requires changing your entire environment, your habits, your social circle, and your daily structure. The book tells you to do this. It does not do it for you. The gap between inspiration and implementation is where most self-help books go to die, and this one is no exception.