Krishna
The first few pages of this book feels a little like the excellent book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. But very quickly it drops back to the average level and stays there until the end.
He starts with the story of Charles Bukowski who was a layabout and a failure in his passion to become a poet. After thirty years of this, at the age of fifty, a publisher let him publish a book and he became a successful author and a poet.
He was vile, drunk, exposed himself in public and still tried to sleep with every woman he could find after achieving fame!
Anyway, the book soon veers into advice for a happy life and turns out to be a very different book. Gone are the descriptions of astonishing people and their lives and in comes examples of specific people.
Yes, Mark Manson is candid about his many errors in life – his drug habit and getting expelled from school, his homeschooling, the divorce of his parents – who in his words were generally unruffled by calamities. If the house was on fire all around them, he thinks that their reaction would be ‘It’s not too bad; a tad warm maybe’.
He has some interesting points to make. How most self help books get it wrong by saying ‘You are wonderful; everyone is exceptional; you can be what you want to be if you want it enough’ and says that breeds delusions of grandeur and victimhood mentality. He quotes the extreme example of a man he knew, Jimmy (a pseudonym). But overall it is another dose of the same – don’t sweat the small stuff, packed in an attractive modern lingo, and with a ton of swearing thrown in to keep the young engaged. Not a bad book by any means but nothing to justify the hype around it.
Despite some surprising and counterintuitive revelations, most of the book reads just like any other motivational or self help book. This is another one of those pile of books that advise you on how to be happy in life. Don’t get me wrong : yes, what Mark Manson discussed is important and is useful to get a perspective on what you need to let go in order to avoid happiness.
But this is old wine in a new contemporary bottle : the telling is a wise friend who likes to swear a lot and is occasionally funny.
He has a lot of anecdotes to illustrate his point – how his friends blew their life on chasing superficial and temporary ‘wins’ and how that never was enough, how measuring your success through factors you cannot control (like other people’s adoration) is a mug’s game, and so on. Some of the examples are drawn from his own life and all are told in the young college student’s lingo.
He lists five major things you need to keep in mind (See? Back to lists of things you can do) in order to ensure that you care only about things that you need to care about.
But the advise is age old and if you are looking for more than a couple of pages of ‘Aha’ moment, all of which can be summarized in half a page, you will be disappointed.
5/10
— Krishna