Medford Sun

By AUBRIE GEORGE | The Medford Sun
Former Medford Lakes mayor and lawyer Gary Woodend has reached many of the goals he set out to achieve in his lifetime.  Now, the 55-year-old borough resident has set his sights on helping young adults do the same thing.
Woodend recently released a project that took him about five years to complete: “Rocket Fuel for Young Adults,” a self-written and illustrated self-help book geared toward helping ambitious young adults learn the principles and techniques that will lead them to success.
Woodend said writing the book was something he had been meaning to do for years.
“It was something that was brewing for many, many years,” Woodend said. “As a young adult professional, I read almost every how to succeed in business book I could get my hands on.”
With a B.A. in economics and finance from Lehigh University, an M.B.A from The University of Virginia as well as a law degree from Rutgers University School of Law, Woodend read extensively on subjects such as sales, memory, negotiating and goal-setting, and he also learned a lot through his own professional experience, he said.
“I had thought, more recently, to write a book and take all these concepts that are geared toward adults and direct them toward younger adults and the things they’re concerned about,” Woodend said.
It took him about four years to write the book, which he did mostly through dictation while on long drives or plane rides.  The illustrations took him an additional year and he used the help of his father, Jim, a professional artist, to do them.
Some of the illustrations featured in the book come from sketches that Woodend’s father started and that he finished.  Others, Woodend drew himself from scratch.
Growing up a poor reader with a short attention span, Woodend said he wanted to use illustrations in order to break up the text and to reinforce the message he was trying to send to readers.
“I wanted to make the chapters short and have a lot of drawings to break up the text,” Woodend said. “Also I use, and have always used, pictures to remember things. I wanted the drawings to reinforce to people what I was writing so that they would remember.”
Woodend’s book aims to teach young adults principles and techniques that pertain to a series of different concepts including negotiating, goal-setting, remembering names, tackling problems, habits, body language, respect and more.
He said if young adults take the time to learn simple techniques, then it is fairly easy to do well and be successful.
“It’s not enough to be smart in this world, it’s not enough to work hard,” Woodend said. “But you can be very successful without being particularly smart or working particularly hard if you learn certain principles and apply them to your every day life.”
Woodend said he focused on one concept at a time while writing each of the chapters in the book.  He said some of the chapters took him months to write.
One topic he finds particularly important for young people to learn about is goal-setting, he said.
“There are hundreds of books on goal-setting, and I’ve read lots of them.” Woodend said. “But they seem to be incomplete and unrealistic to me.”
To address the topic in his book he took traditional concepts and approaches and twisted them around to write what he thought people should do when setting goals, which he said, is slightly different than what most books say.
“Essentially, my opinion is that you can do all the planning and goal-setting you want, but unless you take action, you’re not going to succeed,” he said.
To bring home one of his points about goal-setting, Woodend points to an illustration of a boy sitting at a desk doing homework while he watches as his friends play outside. 
“Most people don’t achieve goals or stay with a plan because they didn’t take into consideration the cost or the sacrifice they have to make from the beginning,” Woodend said. “If you want to do great in school, you’re going to miss out on some things. Unless you take that into consideration from the beginning, you’re going to get discouraged and not achieve your goal.”
Woodend said he wishes he had known some of the tools that he now teaches while he was growing up.
“If I had only know this stuff when I was younger, I would be light years ahead of my peers and better off today,” he said.
Woodend, who aside from working as a lawyer also works as an adjunct professor at Burlington County College teaching wills, trusts and estates, said his goal in writing this book was simply to teach young adults.
Woodend is the only source that is selling “Rocket Fuel for Young Adults.”
The book is on sale for $12.95 per copy.  Anyone interested in purchasing a copy of Woodend’s book can e-mail him at gfwoodend@aol.com.

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