How many business books have you read that told you to plan your life - and how many actually gave you the template to do it?
I was reorganizing my home office at 10 PM on a Tuesday (Jenny calls this "productive procrastination," and she's not wrong) when I decided to throw this on. At 4 hours and 20 minutes, it's practically a pamphlet by business book standards. I appreciated that before I even hit play.
The Funeral Exercise That Earns Its Keep
Let's get the big thing out of the way: the central hook of Living Forward is writing your own eulogy. Not original. Stephen Covey did this in The 7 Habits decades ago. But here's where Hyatt and Harkavy earn some credit - they don't just tell you to imagine your funeral and feel feelings about it. They walk you through constructing what they call a "Life Plan" document, broken into specific life accounts (health, marriage, career, finances, spiritual life, etc.), each with an envisioned future, current reality assessment, and specific commitments.
This is what my parents did instinctively. Now it has a TED talk. My dad didn't need a chapter on "life accounts" to know he was investing everything into the family business account and running a deficit on health. He just didn't have the vocabulary or the margin to articulate it. The framework here isn't revolutionary, but it's structured in a way that forces clarity. I'll give them that. That search for clarity around life's bigger purpose is something New Earth: Awakening Your Life's Purpose chases too, though Tolle takes a far more spiritual route to get there - less spreadsheet, more surrender.
Where The Audio Format Actively Fights You
Here's my biggest gripe, and it's a serious one: this book is essentially a workbook. The whole point is to sit down and write your life plan. Listening to someone describe fill-in-the-blank exercises while you're driving or organizing your office is like watching someone else do push-ups and expecting to get stronger.
Multiple listeners flagged this exact problem, and they're right. The book literally asks you to write out priorities, rank your life accounts, draft purpose statements for each area. On audio, you're just... nodding along. By the time I got to the action steps in the back half, I realized I'd retained maybe 40% of the framework and would need to buy the physical copy anyway. That's not a great ROI on an Audible credit.
Daniel Harkavy narrates, and he's fine. Practical, clear, no vocal fireworks. He sounds like the executive coach he is - steady, measured, the kind of voice that works in a boardroom but doesn't exactly command attention through earbuds. I didn't find myself drifting because of his delivery, but I also didn't find myself leaning in.
The Inspiration Gap
The stories peppered throughout - meant to illustrate the cost of drifting and the power of intentional planning - land flat. I've seen this fail at three different companies: you can't motivate action with generic anecdotes about unnamed executives who "turned their lives around." The book needed more of Hyatt's specific journey (he briefly mentions his time running Thomas Nelson Publishers) and less motivational padding. When Hyatt gets concrete about his own life plan and how it shaped real decisions, the book clicks. When it retreats to coaching-speak platitudes, my 2.0x speed couldn't save it.
The faith-based undertone is worth mentioning. Both authors come from a Christian perspective, and while it's not heavy-handed, it's woven into the framework - spiritual life is one of the default life accounts, and there's an assumption that faith plays a role in your planning. For some listeners, this adds depth. For others, it'll feel like an uninvited guest at a strategy meeting. Know going in what you're getting.
The 45 Minutes That Matter
Bottom line: the actual life plan creation process - the template, the structure, the review cadence they recommend (quarterly reviews, annual deep dives) - is genuinely useful. It's the most practical goal-setting framework I've encountered in audio form, and I've burned through dozens. The key takeaway is worth the listen. The other 3 hours? Not so much.
But - and this is the killer - you almost certainly need the print version to actually do the work. The audio is a preview, a pitch for the methodology. The real value lives in sitting down with pen and paper. That makes this a hard audiobook to recommend as a standalone purchase.
Who Gets Value Here (And Who Doesn't)
If you've never done any kind of structured life planning and you want a clear, no-nonsense starting framework: grab the paperback. Listen to this on a commute first if you want to preview the approach. If you're already deep into goal-setting systems - OKRs, Covey, even a solid bullet journal practice - there's nothing here you haven't seen. Skip to chapter 5 if you want the actual template mechanics and thank me later.
Jenny would say I'm being harsh. Jenny is right. But also: a book whose primary value is a written exercise shouldn't cost a full audio credit when the format actively undermines the content.
