Soaring with Eagles by Bill Newman: Book Notes

TL;DR

• A 1990s Australian motivational title on goals, persistence, attitude, and the company you keep. Warm, quotable, and almost entirely evidence-free.
• Two of its instincts hold up: written goals move behavior, and the people around you shape you more than raw willpower does.
• Two age badly: «attitude beats circumstance» overclaims, and the «fly with eagles, not turkeys» frame flatters more than it explains.
• This is a niche, self-published book. We built these notes from its documented themes, not from a fabricated chapter list.
• Verdict: read our notes instead.

Verdict

Bill Newman is an Australian professional speaker, and «Soaring with Eagles» reads exactly like a speaker’s book: short chapters, big imagery, a story every few pages. The published edition we could verify is «Soaring with Eagles: Principles of Success» (Bill Newman International, 1994), a self-published title that is hard to find outside second-hand shelves and library catalogues. That scarcity matters for a review, so we will be honest about it below.

The advice is not wrong. It is just untested inside the book and older than its evidence. The good news is that the durable parts have since been studied properly, and the weak parts have been named by researchers. You do not need the hardcover to use what works. Rating: «Read our notes instead».

The big idea

Newman’s thesis is that ordinary people underperform their potential because of attitude, hesitation, and bad company, not lack of talent. Set a vivid goal, refuse to quit, keep your attitude up, and surround yourself with ambitious people rather than complainers. The eagle is the mascot: it climbs, it is rare, and it does not flock with «turkeys».

It is a coherent message. The catch is that a coherent message and a tested one are different things, and the whole genre it belongs to rarely notices the gap.

Key ideas

• Do it now. The book’s most repeated line is a bias toward action over endless planning: observe, absorb, then move, rather than research a decision to death. As a corrective to analysis paralysis it is fair.
• Difficulty is the tuition. Newman treats obstacles as necessary, not as signs you chose wrong. Quitting, he argues, almost always happens too early. This is the persistence theme the genre loves.
• Fear of failure and ridicule is the real ceiling. He locates the block not in ability but in the dread of looking foolish. Expanding past that discomfort is framed as the price of any goal worth having.
• Vision and imagination shape destiny. Leaders, in his telling, cultivate a large picture of the future through deliberate reflection, and that picture pulls them forward.
• Association decides your average. The «eagles, not turkeys» rule: spend time with people who lift the ceiling, not with those who normalize giving up.
• Guard your sense of humor. One of the more human notes: the real tragedy is «dying while still alive», and losing your humor is an early warning sign. It is a softer, more likable idea than most of the book.
• Talk about ideas, not people. Newman ranks conversation by depth, from gossip, to events, to ideas, and uses it as a rough gauge of character. A blunt heuristic, but a usable one.

Because the book is scarce, we have described these as documented themes rather than reconstructing exact chapter contents. We are not going to invent quotations the title cannot back up.

What holds up

Goals, done specifically. The instinct to set a vivid, concrete target is the book’s strongest. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent 35 years showing that specific, difficult goals beat «do your best» across hundreds of studies, provided the person is committed and gets feedback (Locke & Latham, 2002, American Psychologist). Their model also folds in self-belief: self-efficacy is a real moderator, so «believe you can» is not empty, within limits.

The company you keep. «Association» is the idea with the best modern support. In the Framingham data, obesity spread through social ties across 32 years (Christakis & Fowler, 2007, New England Journal of Medicine), and happiness clustered and spread through the same network (Fowler & Christakis, 2008, BMJ). Behavior and mood are partly contagious, so who you stand next to is not a trivial variable. Newman’s eagles-and-turkeys line is a cartoon, but the mechanism under it is real.

Persistence, with an asterisk. Sticking with hard things does predict outcomes. We keep the asterisk for the next section.

What doesn’t

Attitude over circumstance. The book’s engine is that mindset can override conditions. That overclaims. Positive fantasizing about the outcome you want can actually drain the energy to pursue it: in controlled studies, people who indulged idealized futures showed lower systolic blood pressure and less follow-through than those who did not (Kappes & Oettingen, 2011, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). Visualizing the summit is not the same as climbing, and sometimes substitutes for it.

Grit as a super-trait. «Never quit» is the genre’s favorite command, and persistence does matter, but its unique power is oversold. A meta-analysis of the grit literature found grit correlates strongly with plain conscientiousness and adds little independent prediction of performance (Credé, Tynan & Harms, 2017, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). A follow-up review is blunter still about the weakness of the evidence and the marketing that outran it (Credé, 2018, Educational Researcher). So «refuse to quit» needs a partner rule: know when the goal is wrong.

Survivorship, dressed as principle. The genre proves its points with people who already made it, which quietly hides everyone who followed the same advice and did not. The 1994 edition carried a foreword by Dexter Yager, a multi-level-marketing figure, which places the book firmly in that motivational lineage rather than the research one. None of the book’s claims are tested inside it, and the reader is left to assume the anecdotes generalize. They often do not.

Why the tools outlive the theory

Strip the eagle imagery and three usable tools remain, each working for a reason the book never states. A written, specific goal works because it directs attention and lets you get feedback, not because it is «vivid». Choosing your circle works through social contagion and default-setting, not because winners repel «turkeys». A bias toward action works because it converts vague intention into a datable first step, which is where habits actually form. Keep the tools, drop the mysticism.

Who should actually read it

If you like a speaker’s cadence and want a warm push before a hard week, the book delivers that, and there is no shame in it. If you already know the goals-and-association playbook, you will find nothing new, and the scarcity makes tracking down a copy more effort than it repays. Anyone who reacts badly to unqualified «anyone can do anything» messaging should skip it: the overclaiming is the point, not a flaw the edition edits out. Readers who want the same energy with a sharper edge will do better with a more structured treatment of goal systems, like The Power of Focus, or with Robbins in Notes from a Friend, which is at least honest about being a starter pamphlet.

One thing to try

The shift: stop treating motivation as a mood to summon and start treating it as an environment to design. Attitude follows structure more reliably than structure follows attitude, which is the opposite of the book’s order.

First move: today, write one goal in a single specific sentence with a number and a date, then name the one person whose company will make it more likely and put 20 minutes with them on the calendar this week. That is the whole method: a target you can check, and a circle that pulls the right way. If you want to go deeper on why environment beats willpower, our notes on thinking and decision defaults pick up there.

Get the book

Find «Soaring with Eagles» on Amazon — as an Amazon Associate, The Boring Work earns from qualifying purchases (disclosure).

The boring bottom line

«Soaring with Eagles» is a likable relic: right instincts, no evidence, and a bird metaphor doing the work a study should. The parts that survive, specific goals and a chosen circle, now have real research behind them, and you can apply both without owning the book. The parts that do not, attitude-over-everything and never-quit-as-identity, are exactly where the genre reliably fails. Take the two tools, leave the feathers.

Sources

• Newman, B. (1994). Soaring with Eagles: Principles of Success. Bill Newman International. Internet Archive record.
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. PubMed.
• Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2007). The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. New England Journal of Medicine, 357(4), 370–379. PubMed.
• Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2008). Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network. BMJ, 337, a2338. PubMed.
• Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719–729. LSE Research Online.
• Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511. PubMed.
• Credé, M. (2018). What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know. Educational Researcher, 47(9), 606–611. SAGE Journals.
• More verdicts in our Book Notes hub.

The Russian-language predecessor of this article (2007) is preserved in the archive.