Book Review - Ticket to the Limit!!!!!! by Randy Cohen

Oh my gosh! What a great book! This guy is so inspiring! And he doesn’t overuse his exclamation points at all!!!!!

Fortunately, Ticket to the Limit: How Passion and Performance Can Transform Your Life and Your Business into an Amazing Adventure knows what it is. Randy Cohen says on page 11, “Woowoo! As you can probably tell, I’m an energetic guy, and I love life. . . . Be passionate about everything you do. . . . Go big or go home! . . . I may have friends or colleagues who think I’m a little over the top, but isn’t that more fun than trudging through life?”

As a result, the book is anything but a tedious read—a good thing, too, since it’s supposed to be motivational. And Cohen has a lot of great anecdotes—which is also a good thing, since they’re really the meat in this random collection of thoughts splattered through a thin framework like a six-year-old’s first attempt at a “real” painting.

And he is making his first attempt. Ticket to the Limit is TicketCity CEO Randy Cohen’s first book, and judging by his frequent mentions of the fact that writing it was one of the things on his “100 Things to Do in Life” list, it will likely be his last. After this, I imagine he’ll return to gouging wealthy sports fans for as much money as he can, under the guise of “making dreams come true,” all the while racking up enough cash to cross more amazing life experiences off his list.

(I recognize that the above sentence is a rather cynical view of the secondary ticket market, and I feel I should make it clear that as a die-hard supporter of capitalism, I have no problem with people making a business out of buying and re-selling tickets for market value. I just think it’s a little disingenuous to make as many references as he does to “making a difference” and “making dreams come true”, when really what he’s doing is taking a very hefty convenience fee in exchange for letting rich people avoid the tedium of standing in line the second the tickets go on sale.)

The guy has led an amazing life, and the anecdotes really do make the book—for 150 pages, we get to read stories about the author sneaking into a party at the age of 43, or running into Yao Ming at a restaurant in China during the 2008 Olympics. We get to relive the Longhorns’ BCS National Championship, and we read profiles of other amazing individuals’ unlikely paths to success.

Outside of those anecdotes, the book is tolerable only because Cohen knows he’s a goon and doesn’t care. He also knows he’s a ham, not making any attempt to hide—and even, in one place, drawing attention to—the fact that this book is, as much as anything, a commercial for his Austin-based business, TicketCity.

So the upshot is: Ticket to the Limit is an enjoyable, entertaining read, with some great stories. As a “motivational book”, I don’t know that it really does the job, because I didn’t come out of it much more motivated than I came in. Although I did start my “100 Things to Do in Life” list, so at least there’s that.  Woowoo!

Ticket to the Limit: How Passion and Performance can Transform Your Life and Your Business into an Amazing Adventure
by Randy Cohen
Emerald Book Co.
$19.95