Life's Golden Ticket

Life's Golden Ticket by Brendon Burchard is a motivational novel about the power of finding meaning in life and being willing to change to improve your circumstances. The main character, an unnamed narrator, has a spiritual experience when he is sent on a mission to an enchanted amusement park. At the park, the groundskeeper Henry becomes his guide. While visiting the attractions, the narrator becomes aware of how his past influences his future and the ways he can change his behavior to improve his outlook on life.

Life's Golden Ticket, Burchard's debut novel, is considered a thinly-veiled self-help book – though it is technically a work of fiction, the story has a consistent message throughout and is meant to guide readers on a journey toward an enlightenment similar to the one the author experienced after a serious car accident at age nineteen. Burchard is the author of a number of books, two of which have become New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The Millionaire Messenger (2011) and The Motivation Manifesto (2014). His most recent book, High Performance Habits, was listed as a “best business and leadership book of 2017” on Amazon. Burchard is the founder of two academies focused on self-help, leadership, and business, and has developed a number of popular online courses for the Oprah Winfrey Network.

As Life's Golden Ticket begins, the unnamed narrator is sitting by his fiancée Mary's bedside. After an argument, Mary had disappeared for forty days; when the narrator found her, she had been admitted to the hospital and is now comatose. Mary wakes briefly in the opening scene and tells the narrator to travel to a theme park that she visited once with her younger brother, who fell to his death at the park. Following Mary's instructions, he visits the park, where he finds that it has not re-opened since the accident. Instead of a typical theme park experience, the narrator meets Henry, a groundskeeper who offers to lead him on a tour of the park that he claims will open his eyes and offer him a second chance to change his life. This second chance is the golden ticket that gives the novel its name.



After the narrator signs Henry's contract, claiming that he will not become defensive and will face the truth about his own life without turning away, Henry begins his tour. They journey to a number of attractions, where the narrator learns various life lessons and is forced to revisit his own past – and Mary's – with a new set of eyes. The narrator meets his own mother in the Truth Booth, who gives him sage advice. Later, a wizard teaches the narrator that he has long been under “Society's Spell,” and that he has believed himself to be weak, inadequate, and useless for much of his young life. He comes to realize that these faulty beliefs are the reason he struggles to find happiness and achieve his dreams.

The book continues through a series of rides and attractions – the narrator and Henry visit the Tunnel of Love, a Hall of Mirrors, bumper boats, a lion tamer named Larry, and a hypnotist named Harsh. Along the way, each carnival employee imparts their own wisdom, building on a central message that what the narrator believed about his own life – that it was dangerous, that other people are unfair and cruel, and that he is not deserving of love and success – is not true after all.

As the narrator comes to terms with his own beliefs and his own past, he also learns more about Mary. It turns out that his fiancée was on a journey of her own the forty days that she was missing. From Henry the groundskeeper and guide, the narrator learns that Mary's parents blamed her for the untimely death of her younger brother. The narrator is forced to face his own anger, whose roots lie in an abusive family home and a father who abandoned him when he was young. When he returns to the world outside the park, the narrator discovers that he is more empathetic, confident, positive, and willing to work harder to improve his relationships with Mary and with his family.



The narrator leaves the park having learned messages often found in self-help and motivational books: that it is worth changing despite the risks involved; that you must always look at a situation through another's eyes; to take responsibility for yourself; to be bold; contribute to the world; forgive others for their mistakes. Mary's health improves after the narrator's visit to the amusement park, and at the end of the novel, Burchard makes it clear that the narrator has embraced his second chance at life and will continue to improve himself and his outlook on the world.