43 pages • 1 hour read
Good Vibes, Good Life: How Self-Love Is the Key to Unlocking Your Greatness
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Key Figures
Vex King (the Author)
Vex King, a bestselling author, mind coach, and spiritual teacher, has become a leading voice in the personal development world. Born in 1987 in the UK, King faced numerous challenges throughout his early life, including financial hardship and the death of his father. He is open about these early struggles as a way of connecting with readers, thus laying the foundation for his teachings on positivity.
In King’s telling, coming across Rhonda Byrne’s self-help book The Secret and its claims about the Law of Attraction became central to his teachings. In 2015, King launched an Instagram page dedicated to sharing motivational quotes, life lessons, and insights on mindfulness and self-love. The platform quickly gained popularity, leading to a successful life coaching practice, public speaking engagements, and ultimately the publication of his first book, Good Vibes, Good Life (2018). The book promotes pseudoscientific ideas like manifestation, energy vibrations, purporting to prove that cultivating a high-vibrational mindset attracts success and happiness. In 2021, King published Healing is the New High, about emotional healing and trauma recovery.
Celebrities
King draws on the experiences of various celebrities to illustrate key principles of success, confidence, and mindset, offering readers examples of how these public figures embody his teachings. King does not address the logical fallacy that their success does not retrospectively prove the efficacy of wishful thinking: Many people desperately hope for greatness, which means that greatness is not the result of positive thinking.
King argues that rapper J. Cole and football quarterback Colin Kaepernick exemplify the power of focused vision and maintaining faith. He also argues that bodybuilder, actor, and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger’s use of visualization techniques played a crucial role in his success, discounting his extremely rare genetics. Athletes Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Roger Federer, and David Beckham are used to highlight consistent, intentional mental conditioning, with no attention paid to the many equally dedicated boxers and basketball, tennis, and soccer players who do not rise to the top of their professions and to the innate talents that all three were born with. King instead wants each celebrity’s story to act as evidence of his motivational philosophies, reinforcing the book’s core themes of The Power of Positive Thinking.
Experts and Pseudo-Experts
King refers to experts and pseudo-experts to attempt to give his message authoritative support. Some of King’s allusions are to renowned figures from history. He quotes ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to emphasize the importance of consistent, positive actions in shaping one’s life: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” King mischaracterizes scientist Hans Jenny’s cymatic experiments, which examined the effects of sound vibrations on matter, as proof of vibration as a force shaping both our physical and emotional states.
King draws on the writing of other self-help authors who promote Energy and the Law of Attraction, such as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006). He also references Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, best known for the novel The Alchemist (1988) as someone who portrays the universe’s support for those pursuing their personal destiny.
Finally, King uses unproven, debunked, and otherwise fringe pseudoscience for support, including figures like André Simoneton, who purported to categorize foods based on their vibrational energy, Bruce Lipton and Gregg Braden, who dubiously claimed to connect spirituality with epigenetics and quantum physics, and Masaru Emoto, who claimed that positive and negative thoughts could affect water and ice formations. None of their pseudoscientific work is replicatable; however, King relies on their ideas about the impact of consciousness on the body and the world around us because they align with King’s message of using positive energy to create a fulfilled life.
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