Read This or Die!: Persuading Yourself to a Better Life

Summary

Diagnosed with a terminal illness, a leading marketing consultant discovers that what he has learned about persuading others might help him save his own life.

Ray Edwards was one of the top marketers and copywriters in the business with A-list clients like Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield, and Michael Hyatt when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The diagnosis brought his life to a screeching halt and propelled Edwards to question everything he thought he knew about his Christian faith, his relationships, what kind of person he was, and how the world worked.

Out of options and deeply depressed, Edwards decided he needed to turn his life around or die a failure. He had to let go of false beliefs and find better ones. To his surprise, he found that the principles of persuasion he’d honed for over four decades to move others could work for him. In the vein of The Last Lecture and Tuesdays with Morrie, Read This or Die! Is the tale of one man’s transformation and how he achieved it.

Edwards outlines the powerful, time-tested PASTOR process he created that helped him identify and untangle the beliefs that were holding him back and provided a game plan for how to change his life:

Pain: start with what hurts

Amplify: determine how it will get worse before it gets better

Story: find the story of a better future

Transformation: choose the evidence worth believing

Opportunity: discern where change can happen

Response: set up a system that makes transformation stick

For anyone who wants to turn their life around but does not know how, the PASTOR method teaches how to harness marketing wisdom to get honest about what we really want from life and craft better beliefs and plans to help us start living life on our own terms.