Publisher copy on this audiobook describes a completed presidential campaign, and the recording itself came out in October 2007. That gap explains most of what is odd about the listing. The book Donald Trump wrote with Bill Zanker is a business motivation manual assembled around momentum, revenge, contracts and the merits of thinking on a large scale. The blurb now introduces him as president-elect and reality-television star and folds in a campaign slogan, which means somebody rewrote the sales copy years after the audio was finished and left the recording exactly where it stood.
Where This One Lands
Momentum, revenge and contracts are the three items the publisher puts forward as teachable content, and the middle one is what separates this from everything else on the business shelf. Most success writing treats grievance as a distraction to be managed. This one treats it as fuel, promises to explain how and when to take revenge, and adds that it is sweet. Whatever you make of that as advice, it is an honest account of a worldview, and the book never pretends to a decorum it has no interest in maintaining.
Real-life stories from people who applied the formula make up a substantial share of the material, according to the copy, which tells you the shape of it: assertion, illustration, assertion. Zanker is described as an entrepreneur who learned the tactics firsthand from Trump, and his presence is presumably what turns a set of positions into a book with chapters in it. The byline names only one of the two. That is ordinary practice for a celebrity business title, and it still matters, because the structuring is the part a listener consumes hour by hour.
What Makes Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life Worth Hearing
Bluntness is the product, and on its own terms the book delivers it. Business writing is mostly euphemism: stakeholders, alignment, difficult conversations. This one names the transaction, states what it wants, and specifies what will happen if somebody crosses it. For a listener who finds the genre's politeness exhausting, eight hours of a writer refusing to soften anything has real appeal, and that appeal survives whatever you think of the man. Rhetoric this direct also travels better in audio than the hedged variety, since nothing depends on catching a qualifying clause.
Sugar-coated is the word an April 2011 five-star uses for every other business book it had read, before crediting this one with giving it to you straight. That entry singles out the running theme, refusing to be taken advantage of and hitting back considerably harder when somebody tries, and notes that warnings about the book's grittiness appear in its own front matter. A book that flags its register before it starts is doing something honest, whatever that register turns out to be once you are inside it.
Alan Sklar speaks a first person belonging to somebody else, and on this book the choice has consequences. The prose is voice-driven boasting, and the whole effect depends on delivery: read too flat it becomes a list of assertions, read too broadly it turns into impersonation. A professional narrator taking the middle route produces something closer to a business audiobook than to a performance, which is probably correct across eight hours. Pick a passage of direct self-promotion and set it beside one of the third-party success stories, since those two registers need different handling from one voice.
What Gives Us Pause
Halves are the only fractions two votes can produce. With a rating count of two, the available averages are whole numbers and halves, so 4.7 sits between rungs that do not exist on this ladder at all. The figure cannot have come from the population the counter reports, and this is not a rounding argument or a close call. Meanwhile five posted verdicts sit underneath it, spread across roughly fifteen years. Read those and disregard the average, which is measuring something the page declines to disclose.
Politics is what a good part of this column is actually grading. A December 2016 five-star opens by identifying itself as the verdict of a young voter who had followed the campaign closely, describes becoming a supporter after watching speeches, and recommends the book as a corrective to media portrayal. Nothing in that entry evaluates the writing, the argument or the recording. It is a statement of allegiance filed in a review slot, legitimate as expression and useless as purchase guidance, and a buyer should sort the column on that basis before weighting any of it.
Quotation marks arrive doubled on this page, wrapped around the campaign slogan in a way no editor produced, which is the visible fingerprint of copy pasted in from somewhere else. The series field carries the same carelessness: it repeats the book's own title and leaves the number blank, so the listing claims membership in a series consisting of itself. Neither problem changes a word of the recording. Both tell you how much attention this page received, and the honest answer is close to none.
Should You Listen to Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life?
Entrepreneurs who want permission to negotiate aggressively are the natural audience, and they will have what they came for inside the first hour. So will anybody studying how a particular public figure explains himself, since eight hours of unfiltered self-presentation recorded before the political career began is a primary source of a kind that later material cannot be. Taken that way, the book is a more interesting listen now than it was when the recording was originally made.
Anybody after operational business advice should look elsewhere, because the practical content is thin beside the attitude and the anecdotes carry the weight that frameworks would carry in another book. Listeners who find the revenge material distasteful will get no relief across eight hours, since the copy advertises it as a selling point rather than burying it. Everyone else is buying a period document inside a rewritten wrapper, and the wrapper is the only part of this listing anybody bothered to update.
Before You Press Play
- Voice: A professional voice speaking a heavily first-person book, holding a middle route between flatness and impersonation for eight hours.
- Big ideas: Momentum, retaliation, negotiation and contracts, self-promotion as method
- Atmosphere: Loud, unapologetic and entirely uninterested in nuance
- Worth it?: A period document worth hearing for its directness, sold beneath a description written long after the recording existed.
Common Questions
Does this audiobook offer practical tactics or mainly attitude?
Both, weighted toward attitude. The publisher's summary promises concrete material on building and rebuilding momentum, on why contracts matter in business and private life, and on when retaliation is justified, illustrated by stories from people who applied the approach. What it does not offer is process: no frameworks, no exercises, no measurable steps to follow.
What does Bill Zanker contribute to the book?
The description credits him as co-author and as an entrepreneur who learned these tactics firsthand from Trump, which suggests he supplied the reporting and the structure while the positions stayed Trump's. He does not appear in the byline on this listing, so the collaboration is visible only if you read the final paragraph of the copy.
Does the author narrate this audiobook himself?
No. Alan Sklar performs it, so eight hours of first-person material written in an unmistakable voice reaches you through somebody else's. That choice keeps the tone even and avoids impersonation, at the cost of the swagger a listener might expect from the title. Anyone hoping to hear the author speak should know as much in advance.
