This review was completely wrong and has been rewritten from scratch. The previous version was titled “Transform Your Health with The Greatest Salesman in the World,” filed the book under Fitness, and described it as a guide to workout routines and physical discipline, including invented stories about team members starting morning workouts.
None of that is in this book. There is nothing about health, exercise, or the body in it. The old review appears to have been generated from the wrong category and then filled in with material that does not exist.
What the book actually is
Og Mandino published The Greatest Salesman in the World in 1968. He was a New Hampshire insurance man before he was a writer. Bantam reissued it in 1983 and it has never really gone out of print.
It is a parable. Hafid is a poor camel boy who is sent to sell a red cloak, and instead wraps it around a shivering infant in Bethlehem. His master, impressed, gives him ten ancient scrolls containing principles for success. The rest of the book is Hafid’s life and the contents of those scrolls.
It is a book about sales, persistence, and personal success. It is closer to Dale Carnegie with a robe on than to anything in the Christian living section.
The method, and why it needs a caveat
The scrolls are not meant to be read once. Mandino instructs the reader to read each scroll aloud three times a day for thirty days before moving to the next, so that the words work their way into the subconscious.
That is autosuggestion. It is a technique from the positive-thinking tradition, and it is worth naming plainly rather than letting it pass as devotional practice. Repeating declarations to yourself until you believe them is not the same thing as prayer, and it is not what Scripture means by renewing your mind. A Christian reader should know which one he is doing.
The nativity framing is the other thing to hold loosely. The infant in the parable is Jesus, and that is where the book’s Christian atmosphere comes from. But the atmosphere is sentimental rather than theological. Christ is the occasion for the gift of the scrolls, not the content of them. There is no gospel here.
Is it worth reading anyway
Honestly, yes, if you take it for what it is. The scroll on persistence is genuinely good, and the discipline of returning to a short text daily is a habit worth having even when the text is not Scripture. Millions of salespeople have found it useful and they are not all wrong.
Just do not read it as a Christian book, because it is not one, and do not read it as a fitness book, because that was our mistake and not Mandino’s.
A note for the site
This post is still categorized under Fitness. That is wrong and it should move. It belongs under personal development or work, if anywhere.
Who should read it
A man in sales or running his own business who wants a short, motivating classic. Someone who likes the discipline of a daily reading.
Skip it if you want biblical teaching, if positive-thinking material puts you off, or if you came here looking for anything to do with health.