Review: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

Title: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get it

Author: Barbara Sher with Barbara Smith

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Cisnormativity, heteronormativity, parent death (mentions), spouse death (mentions), child abuse (mentions), emotional abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

If you suspect there could be more to life than what you’re getting, if you always knew you could do anything—if you only knew what it was—this extraordinary book is about to prove you right. No matter what your age, no matter how “unattainable” your dreams, you can create and live a life you love.

I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was reveals how you can recapture “long lost” goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams forever. You will learn:

• What to do if you never chose to be what you are.
• How to get off the fast track—and on to the right track.
• First aid techniques for paralyzing chronic negativity.
• How to regroup when you’ve lost your big dream.
• To stop waiting for luck—and start creating it.

A life without direction is a life without passion. I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was guides you not to another unsatisfying job but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart’s desire.

Review:

I had some reservations about this book, as I read Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose! several years ago and found it occasionally insightful but overall unimpressive. But the title of this book called me so dramatically that it might have well have been called Jay Needs to Read This Book. I have often said that my biggest problem in getting anything done is that I genuinely could get good at almost anything, I just don’t know what I want to do. So I decided to give this book a try.

I’m not sure what Barbara Smith contributed to this book, because the writing style is most definitely Barbara Sher’s. Like Refuse to Choose!, it spent the first part of the book establishing the idea and laying general ground rules, and then the rest of the book examining detailed ideas for different people depending on what specific issue they were dealing with. And I think it did it significantly better. Refuse to Choose! felt like it was introducing a concept, but this one felt more like it was providing advice and solutions, so the whole book worked better. The book uses a ton of specific examples of people Barbara has helped work through the processes she recommends, which solves my biggest issue with the other book: I still don’t know where Barbara gets her ideas, but at least the examples provided some authority. Whatever other kind of expertise and experience she has, at least the examples show her methods do work in some cases. It’s also packed to the gills with practical exercises no matter what is really holding you back, which I deeply appreciate.

And now I’m done with the comparison part of the review, and we can actually talk about what’s in this book. Because there’s a lot.

Barbara identifies ten different reasons why you might be struggling to pursue or even identify what you want:

• Fear of leaving less-successful loved ones behind
• Too many interests to make progress on any of them
• Busy making a lot of progress, but not on something you want
• What you really want is something you don’t think you “should” want
• Recent graduate intimidated by choosing the course of the rest of your life
• Radical life change (good or bad) and you aren’t sure what to do in general
• Already achieved your dream, then lost it forever due to circumstances out of your control
• Never find anything interesting
• Doing anything other than your dream (even the work to get to your dream) is too frustrating
• Trying really hard to want something even though it’s not really what you want

Personally, I relate most to the second one – way too many diverse interests to really focus on any of them. (If I spend all my time writing, I’ll never sew; if I sew all the time, I won’t have the energy to grow my business; if I focus on growing my business, I won’t have time to study for a Master’s degree; if I’m studying for a Master’s degree, I won’t feel like studying IT … you get the picture.) But I read every section, and all of them have great advice.

I really appreciate how Barbara focuses on the underlying emotions. You can’t force yourself to feel (or not feel) something, and you don’t get a whole lot of say in what your heart desires. Some of the reasons you’re struggling to find what you want and pursue it she ties back to childhood trauma (which, as a person who’s done a lot of reading on trauma and its effects, made a lot of sense to me.) Others she tied to family dynamics, emotional states, or thinking patterns you didn’t realize you learned. And she provides so many exercises to do, some by themselves and some sequentially, to help you feel and process your emotions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a self-help book about hobbies and careers be this emotionally aware, and I am impressed.

I even paused reading for a bit to actually do one of the exercises in the “too many interests” chapter. As much as I appreciate exercises, I very rarely do them while reading – generally I read the whole book and then go back. But this one I did stop reading to do, and it was enlightening.

The funniest thing about this reading experience is that even though this book is astonishingly insightful, emotionally-aware, and almost therapy-like, very little of this is actually revolutionary. Barbara’s main skill here is helping you get in touch with your own feelings about things or pointing out the obvious that an impartial observer can see much better than someone close to the issue. I’ll use the most dramatic one for me, from chapter six (“I Want Too Many Things; I’m All Over the Map”). The problem here is the person who likes too many things to stick with one. Barbara outlines the issue, and then says, “Hm. What if you did everything you want to do, just not all at once?”

When you think about it, that’s extremely logical and fairly obvious advice. None of the things I want to do are mutually exclusive, and there’s no rule that says I have to focus on only one of them. But somehow that idea had never occurred to me before. So much of self-help content is about doing everything, and we tend to assume that if we’re not actively doing something we don’t like it. So it felt revolutionary for someone to say, “Yeah, you can not write a word for several months while you focus on sewing a bunch of stuff, that’s fine.” The exercise I did had me make a list of all the different “lives” I would like to live (I came up with 12) and then analyze what I could do in a year, two years, twenty minutes a day, and other timeframes. And you know, it turns out I can do everything I want to do – just not all at the same time.

For as great as this book is, there are some parts of it that I don’t love. One is that it’s very career-focused – it pays lip service to the idea of finding a low-effort job and using your free time to do things you love, but the vast majority of it equates “finding what you love” with “finding your dream job.” As someone who doesn’t really have a “dream job” (I simply do not dream of labor), I found that irritating, but as the content was generally good it wasn’t a dealbreaker.

Also, this book was published in 1994, and sometimes it shows its age. There’s a whole section about how getting on this newfangled Internet thing is actually pretty cool and how to find someone to help you out if you don’t think you can get on the internet by yourself. It also includes stories of people with jobs like “word processor,” which apparently in 1994 was a business job held by a person and not a type of software. I would love a 2023 update of this, but since Barbara Sher died in 2020 that seems unlikely.

My final criticism is a general lack of acknowledgement of mental illness. I’m sure it had something to do with the time it was written, but for a book that is as astonishingly emotionally aware and cognizant of issues of grief and childhood trauma, there’s a whole chapter that’s basically “I don’t know what I want because I have chronic/severe depression that includes an inability to experience pleasure in anything” and never once considers depression as a potential issue. Barbara assumes that some sort of childhood problem stymied your ability to be enthusiastic about your career and that is the issue. For some people, it may be. But the way she describes it – “chronic negativity,” “everything looks pointless,” “genuine despair” – sounds a whole lot like a person with clinical depression. She does at least mention that it might be worth seeing a doctor, but the rest of her prescription – exercise, introspection, and “just do something” – may not be incredibly helpful if your issue is mental illness.

All told, this book does have its issues (most of them likely stemming from the fact that it is nearly thirty years old). But it’s also astonishingly useful. This book is everything Refuse to Choose! tried to be – at least a little authoritative, packed with examples, filled with actually useful and compelling exercises, and explaining not only a new idea but what to do with it. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s great for a very particular type of person. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: If you feel like you could do anything if only someone would tell you what you want to do, this book is for you.

Review: The Power of Ritual

Title: The Power of Ritual: How to Create Meaning and Connection in Everything You Do

Author: Casper ter Kuile

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: No major trigger warnings

Back Cover:

What do Soul Cycle, gratitude journals, and tech breaks have in common? For ter Kuile they offer rituals that create the foundation for our modern spiritual lives. 

We are in crisis today. Our modern technological society has left too many of us—no matter our ages—feeling isolated and bereft of purpose. Previous frameworks for building community and finding meaning no longer support us. Yet ter Kuile reveals a hopeful new message: we might not be religious, but that doesn’t mean we are any less spiritual.  

Instead, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in which we seek belonging and meaning in secular practices. Today, we find connection in:

• CrossFit and SoulCycle, which offer a sense of belonging rooted in accountability and support much like church groups
• Harry Potter and other beloved books that offer universal lessons 
• Gratitude journals, which have replaced traditional prayer 
• Tech breaks, which provide mindful moments of calm 

In The Power of Ritual, ter Kuile invites us to deepen these ordinary practices as intentional rituals that nurture connection and  wellbeing. With wisdom and endearing wit, ter Kuile’s call for ritual is ultimately a call to heal our loss of connection to ourselves, to others, and to our spiritual identities.

The Power of Ritual reminds us that what we already do every day matters—and has the potential to become a powerful experience of reflection, sanctuary, and meaning.

Review:

This is the book I needed when I first left Christianity. I stumbled through several religions and practices, knowing Christianity wasn’t what I needed but unable to put in words what I was searching for. Turns out, what I needed was this – ritual, community, ways to mark the passing of time, a “spirituality” not necessarily based in anything spiritual but in moments of intentional connection and reflection.

I listened to this as an audiobook while working, and I almost wished I hadn’t because there were many places I wanted to take notes. Casper himself is not religious, but he takes religious rituals I’m familiar with from Christianity and turned them on their head. I was introduced to Lectio Divina as a way of reading the Bible, but Casper hosts a whole podcast using Lectio Divina to read the Harry Potter books, and apparently listeners can get a lot out of it. I’m considering trying it with some of my most-reread books (probably Blackbringer and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I’ve read four times and three times, respectively).

This book isn’t long, but it feels like one you need to take notes on. It’s packed full of ideas and information, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to read this again. Possibly several times. Obviously I won’t be sure until I read it again, but it gives the impression of one of those evergreen books that will give you something new every time you read it. Plus, what’s there spoke to me – it feels like there’s things in this book that are what I’ve been searching for.

Final verdict: Read the book. Especially if you identify as any sort of spirtual seeker.

Review: Adventures in Opting Out

Title: Adventures in Opting Out: A Field Guide to Leading an Intentional Life

Author: Cait Flanders

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food, alcoholism mention

Back Cover:

We all follow our own path in life. At least, that’s what we’re told. In reality, many of us either do what is expected of us, or follow the invisible but well-worn paths that lead to what is culturally acceptable. For some, those paths are fine — even great. But they leave some of us feeling disconnected from ourselves and what we really want to do. When that discomfort finally outweighs the fear of trying something new, we’re ready to opt out.

After going through this process many times, Cait Flanders found there is an incredible parallel between taking a different path in life and the psychological work it takes to summit a mountain — especially when you decide to go solo. In Adventures in Opting Out, she offers a trail map to help you with both. As you’ll see, reaching the first viewpoint can be easy — and it offers a glimpse of what you’re walking toward. Climbing to the summit for the full view is worth it. But in the space between those two peaks you will enter a world completely unknown to you, and that is the most difficult part of the path to navigate.

With Flanders’s guidance and advice, drawn from her own journey and stories of others, you’ll have all the encouragement and insight you’ll need to take the path less traveled and create the life you want. Just step up to the trailhead and expect it to be an adventure.

Review:

I didn’t realize when I picked this up that it was written by the same author as The Year of Less, so there will inevitably be some comparisons in this review. Reading this had nothing to do with the author, though. I picked it up purely for the title, because lately I’ve been feeling a strong desire to opt out, usually in the fantasy of selling everything, getting in the car, and driving away.

This book is not exactly about that, though. It’s about smaller “opt-outs,” or choosing to do something different than what your parents or society or whoever tells you that you should. Cait illustrates her field guide mainly with the example of her choice to travel full-time starting in 2019. She also talks about her other opt-outs of quitting drinking, not buying things, not following her parents’ guideline of working a government job and retiring with a pension, and rejecting the societal script of getting married, having kids, and buying a house.

This book is a lot more practical and a lot less memoir than The Year of Less, although it definitely has some memoir in it, too. It’s not about helping you decide what you should opt out of, and in fact operates under the assumption that you instinctively know what you need to opt out of, and instead operates as a guidebook for what your general opting-out journey might look like. Cait uses her love of hiking to turn the journey into a metaphor, with stages of your opting out journey likened to different stages on a mountain hike. (I can’t judge the accuracy of the metaphor as I have never been on a mountain hike.)

This book is not exactly what I wanted. I wanted something that would give me some ideas for turning my general “I want to opt out of society” feelings into concrete things to opt out of. But this is more for people who already know what they want to opt out of and just need some guidance and encouragement for the journey. It seemed a little bit longer than it needed to be, but overall it seemed like a good guide for the adventure and I may come back to it once I’ve figured out what I actually want to opt out of.

Review: Radical Acceptance (DNF)

Title: Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

Author: Tara Brach, PhD

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, sexual assault, miscarriage, moralizing about food

Read to: 50% (beginning of chapter 7)

Back Cover:

“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork–all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s twenty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.

Writing with great warmth and clarity, Tara Brach brings her teachings alive through personal stories and case histories, fresh interpretations of Buddhist tales, and guided meditations. Step by step, she leads us to trust our innate goodness, showing how we can develop the balance of clear-sightedness and compassion that is the essence of Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance does not mean self-indulgence or passivity. Instead it empowers genuine change: healing fear and shame and helping to build loving, authentic relationships. When we stop being at war with ourselves, we are free to live fully every precious moment of our lives.

Review:

This isn’t a bad book. Not at all, actually. It’s just very repetitive.

I was really engaged through the first few chapters. Tara talks about her own personal spiritual journey and how she came to Buddhism, and the basic principles of radical acceptance. (The main idea is that emotions or desires you don’t like don’t mean you’re a bad person, and instead of resisting them, sit with them and accept that you are feeling them. It sounds silly when I say it like that but she does a much better job of explaining it.) She also has examples of using radical acceptance herself and helping her therapy clients use it to deal with difficult things.

But it never really goes beyond that. I felt like I got a pretty good understanding of it sometime around chapter four or five, and after that it started to feel repetitive. The issues that her clients were working through were different, but the principle was the same. Pause, breathe, accept that the feeling or desire is there, remember that having it doesn’t make you a bad person, and whatever you decide to do from there do it mindfully. At some point I was like, “Okay, I get it and I’m definitely going to use this myself, but can we get on with it?”

I’m not saying this book is bad. On the contrary, the first few chapters are excellent and I am definitely going to work on using this in my own life. But it started to get boring after a while with example after example that didn’t teach me anything new. A good book, but I think it should be at least 30% shorter.

Review: Stand Firm

Title: Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze

Author: Svend Brinkmann

Genre: Self-Help/Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: Mentioning death

Back Cover:

The pace of modern life is accelerating. To keep up, we must keep on moving and adapting – constantly striving for greater happiness and success. Or so we are told. But the demands of life in the fast lane come at a price: stress, fatigue and depression are at an all-time high while our social interactions have become increasingly self-serving and opportunistic.

How can we resist today’s obsession with introspection and self-improvement? In this witty and bestselling book, Danish philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann argues that we must not be afraid to reject the self-help mantra and ‘stand firm’. The secret to a happier life lies not in finding your inner-self but in coming to terms with yourself in order to co-exist peacefully with others. By encouraging us to stand firm and get a foothold in life, this insightful anti-self-help guide offers a sobering and realistic alternative to life-coaching, positive thinking and the need always to say ‘yes!’

Review:

This is not really what I thought it would be. I liked the concept so much because I like self-help stuff and I thought it would be really interesting to see a critique of that. That’s not really what this is, though. Stand Firm is just a self-help book that claims Stoicism is the way to go.

This book is really short, which I was glad of, because I forced myself to finish it even though I lost interest pretty quickly. I wanted the anti-self-help book this promised to be, not the modern-self-help-is-bad-let’s-do-Stoicism-instead that I got. A lot of the thesis of this book came down to, “constant self-improvement is too fast-paced. Stoicism is more steady and reliable.”

This book is broken down into seven “steps” to take to switch from constant self-improvement to Stoicism, and each step takes up one chapter. Each chapter has several sections of Svend trying to make his point and then prescribing what you should do. I don’t know if it’s because the English version is just a translation or because the book itself is actually unfocused, but it really felt like the book danced around the point a lot. None of the arguments were very compelling and they’re all based on a lot of assumptions (such as “being yourself intrinsically has value”), not all of which I agreed with.

This book is really just represented as something it’s not. It’s not an anti-self-help book, it’s just a self-help book that has a different philosophy than most of modern self-help books. I am extremely disappointed.

Review: Refuse to Choose!

Title: Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

Author: Barbara Sher

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: None noted

Back Cover:

Don’t know what to do with your life? Drawn to so many things that you can’t choose just one? New York Times best-selling author Barbara Sher has the answer–do EVERYTHING!

With her popular career counseling sessions, motivational speeches, workshops, and television specials, Barbara Sher has become famous for her extraordinary ability to help people define and achieve their goals. What Sher has discovered is that some individuals simply cannot, and should not, decide on a single path; they are genetically wired to pursue many areas. Sher calls them “Scanners”–people whose unique type of mind does not zero in on a single interest but rather scans the horizon, eager to explore everything they see.

In this groundbreaking book, readers will learn:

• what’s behind their “hit and run” obsessions
• when (and how) to finish what they start
• how to do everything they love
• what type of Scanner they are (and which tools they need to do their very best work)

Review:

As someone with a lot of disparate interests, I was really excited to read this book. However, my final opinion of it ended up being fairly low, as the book started off good and then went steadily downhill.

Barbara spends the first bit of the book talking about how it’s not bad to be a Scanner (her name for people with a wide variety of interests and/or who bounce between interests, so named because they’re always “scanning the horizon” for new opportunities – personally, I think her way of naming things is absolutely terrible, but that’s neither here nor there). Her whole idea in this section is that not everything you’re interested in has to turn into a business or a career. It doesn’t have to be marketable or make money. It’s totally okay to do something purely because you enjoy it. Which, great. I can absolutely get behind that, and resisting the pressure to monetize everything I like is something I struggle with.

Part One is good, too – she goes over the details of a Scanner, what they tend to have in common (feeling unfulfilled, unable to find the “perfect career” or stick with things, more than one passion, and more) and where they struggle. I actually enjoyed going through this part and picking out where I related to the concept. I thought her take on Scanners never finishing things was great – the idea being Scanners stop something when they get what they wanted out of it, but what they actually want might be something like “a feeling of understanding how X works” rather than completing the project they started.

Part Two is where it got rough. This is entirely descriptions of different types of Scanners, listing 10 different subtypes of Scanners, how they operate, what they struggle with, letters and comments from real people who are those type of Scanner, tools and methods they can use, and different “life design models” that will help them make money while still doing everything they want. It honestly starts to drag, and I think it could have been better done with a summary of the different types at the beginning, maybe with some kind of quiz or test to help you determine which one you are, and then you could just flip to that section and read only about the type of Scanner you are. Reading about all of them was … a lot, and not really very helpful because some of them were so different it was obvious the strategies wouldn’t work for multiple types.

After Part Two is the epilogue. I expected there to be more, and there wasn’t, so it felt like it ended really abruptly – which, again, could have been fixed by changing it to an “only read about your type” structure.

So now let’s talk about the main problem with the book: Authority. Or rather, lack thereof.

Barbara gives the reader absolutely no reason why they should listen to her, other than the fact that the Scanners she wrote about talking to seemed excited about her ideas. She puts in a lot of letters, comments, and interviews with other Scanners, but not a single one has any suggestions or tips for how they dealt with it. They all follow the same formula: “Here’s my problem, showing I’m obviously a Scanner.” *Barbara makes a wise suggestion perfectly fitted to the type of scanner they are.* “I can’t believe I never thought of that before, that’s perfect for me, Barbara you’re amazing.” Barbara is always the Wise and Knowing One who has the perfect tool/advice/life design model for every scanner, but there’s no indication of where she got those ideas or that they would even work. I think there’s only two or three Scanners in the whole book who actually get a follow-up where Barbara includes what they told her about how her ideas worked in their lives.

Sure, some of the ideas sound really good. But I’m not inclined to trust that Barbara is just the Scanner Whisperer who automatically knows how each Scanner should structure their lives, and she gives no sources, interviews where she learned anything, or any indication of how or where she learned how each type of Scanner should live. It can’t even be from personal experience, since there’s no way she is all 10 types of scanner. In some ways it just comes across as a “life coach” (which Barbara is) trying to be life-coachy and sell you a way to live your life that sounds good but may or may not work.

That said, was the book bad? Not really. There’s a lot of good things in it. I appreciate knowing that I’m not the only person who doesn’t have a singular passion, and there are some good ideas and I do actually plan to try out a few of the exercises mentioned. That said, though, there isn’t enough authorial authority in this book for me to fully trust everything Barbara says, and I don’t plan to drop everything and restructure my life according to Barbara’s method any time soon.

Update: If you’re the kind of person who feels like this book could be helpful but it isn’t really giving you what you want, try I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was instead.

Review: Better Than Before

Image from Gretchen Rubin

Title: Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of our Everyday Lives

Author: Gretchen Rubin

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food, weight loss, exercise, dieting

Back Cover:

The author of the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers, The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, tackles the critical question: How do we change?

Gretchen Rubin’s answer: through habits. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life. It takes work to make a habit, but once that habit is set, we can harness the energy of habits to build happier, stronger, more productive lives.

So if habits are a key to change, then what we really need to know is: How do we change our habits?

Better than Before answers that question. It presents a practical, concrete framework to allow readers to understand their habits—and to change them for good. Infused with Rubin’s compelling voice, rigorous research, and easy humor, and packed with vivid stories of lives transformed, Better than Before explains the (sometimes counter-intuitive) core principles of habit formation.

Along the way, Rubin uses herself as guinea pig, tests her theories on family and friends, and answers readers’ most pressing questions—oddly, questions that other writers and researchers tend to ignore:

• Why do I find it tough to create a habit for something I love to do?
• Sometimes I can change a habit overnight, and sometimes I can’t change a habit, no matter how hard I try. Why?
• How quickly can I change a habit?
• What can I do to make sure I stick to a new habit?
• How can I help someone else change a habit?
• Why can I keep habits that benefit others, but can’t make habits that are just for me?

Whether readers want to get more sleep, stop checking their devices, lose weight, or finish an important project, habits make change possible. Reading just a few chapters of Better Than Before will make readers eager to start work on their own habits—even before they’ve finished the book.

Review:

Before I get started on this review, I want to point out a MAJOR trigger warning for anyone with a history of eating disorders or disordered eating. This book talks about dieting, exercise, and weight loss almost constantly as an example of “good habits” to start. There’s so much of it that it will overwhelm your coping skills, and I highly recommend that if you struggle at all with disordered eating, you should avoid this book.

Beyond that, this is not a super scientific book. It’s mostly based on Gretchen using herself as a guinea pig and drawing out principles from her successes and failures. She admits at the end of the book she finds individual examples (a “data point of one”) more convincing than research, but she also admits towards the beginning that she is not a typical person. So take her suggestions with several grains of salt. She does test her ideas on family and friends, but doesn’t really draw out advice from them so much as use them of examples of “see, my strategy works!”

A lot of this book is based on her previous work on the “four tendencies,” which is a personality framework she developed in a previous book she wrote, The Four Tendencies, that deals with how people respond to expectations. You don’t have to read that book to follow this one, though, as she explains the tendencies well enough that you can understand the point she’s trying to make. (And in fact, I feel like I understand the tendencies well enough now that I have no desire to read an entire book about them.)

Some of the points she makes using the four tendencies framework actually make a lot of sense. So does some of her other advice, like making a habit convenient making it easier to start and how identity affects habit formation. But even after paying lip service to the concept that everyone is different and should work towards forming different habits, a lot of the book followed Gretchen’s attempt to push people in her life (and by extension, the reader) to adopt habits that she thinks are best. Advice on habits in general is included along the way, but a good portion of it is Gretchen trying to convince everybody to form the same habits she does.

The book is pretty inspiring, but I don’t really know how actually useful it is, especially for me. I’ve always been strange about habits – if I try to form a habit, no matter what method I use (and I’ve used several that Gretchen recommends), it doesn’t work. But sometimes a switch randomly flips and I pick up a new habit effortlessly. I used to only brush my teeth at night, and didn’t even have the intention of trying to brush twice a day. Then one day last year a switch flipped and ever since, I’ve brushed my teeth morning and night, no exceptions. I wonder what Gretchen would have to say about that.

Review: The Happiness Project

Image from Gretchen Rubin

Title: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Author: Gretchen Rubin

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food, discussion of serious illness

Back Cover:

Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. “The days are long, but the years are short,” she realized. “Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.” In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.

In this lively and compelling account, Rubin chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. Among other things, she found that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that money can help buy happiness, when spent wisely; that outer order contributes to inner calm; and that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest difference.

Review:

I’m back to “reading” audiobooks since my morning commute is now 35 minutes. And I was super excited to find this as an audiobook, because I’ve been wanting to read it ever since I’ve heard about it. I’m all about making myself happier.

Gretchen Rubin planned for her happiness project by reading all the research she could get her hands on about happiness, both from scientists who study it and from less scientific works (like Aristotle, as she mentions in the title). Then she listed out a bunch of little things they said would make people happier, grouped them into categories, and set out to tackle one category each month. These “little things” included concrete things, like writing a novel, cleaning closets, and starting a collection, and intangible things like “be a treasure house of happy memories” and “be Gretchen.” Along the way, she discovered four “splendid truths” and one general maxim of happiness.

Overall, I liked this book. Gretchen is very open and honest about both times when things went well and times when she messed up (being human, she messed up a lot). She writes in a very engaging and relatable way, and (except for a few moments where I felt awkward for her as she described herself screwing up) I thoroughly enjoyed listening.

I also think some of her principles are good, too, especially her general happiness maxim – “To think about happiness, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right in an atmosphere of growth.” Basically, to increase happiness, you have to consider what makes you feel good, what makes you feel bad, what makes you feel right (in a moral sense), and ways for you to grow. Which sounds both completely doable and like great things to consider when you’re trying to be happier.

And then we come to the problems with this book. Namely, Gretchen isn’t facing anything unchangeable that would cause her to be unhappy. She’s white and rich enough to live comfortably in New York City. She has a good marriage to a good man. She’s college-educated, working at her dream job (full-time writer), has many friends, and has no mental or physical illnesses whatsoever. She’s not facing poverty, discrimination, illness, or anything else that might make a “happiness project” less effective. She focuses purely on individual actions and completely ignores societal and systemic problems that cause most unhappy people to be unhappy.

There’s a whole essay I could write here on the problems of the Western individualist approach to health and happiness, but this is a review and not the place for it. I enjoyed reading this book, but I have doubts about its general applicability. I’d be much more interested to see a happiness project from someone poor, marginalized, and/or ill to see if individual actions really make that much of a difference when society is stacked against you.

Also, Gretchen’s happiness project sounded exhausting. She had to constantly put in so much mental energy to change the way she acted, reacted, and thought. I might incorporate some of her principles, but I doubt I’ll be doing one of my own anytime soon.

Review: The Lunatic Gene

Image from Adam Shaw

Title: The Lunatic Gene: How to Make Sense of Your Life (alternatively subtitled The Reason Your Life will Never Make Sense)

Author: Adam Shaw

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: Mentions of death, mentions of injuries

Back Cover:

Are you fed up with reading self-help books and not getting results? If so, this book is a hard-hitting, yet light-hearted voyage of discovery as to why your life will never make sense, because you live in a lunatic asylum. If you are feeling stuck, trapped, sleepless, anxious, depressed, or at a cross-roads in life, this book will help explain why, and what you can do to reduce the effects. It will also explain that all of these symptoms are messages from your body to enable you to change your life in very positive ways. This book is your guide to the trait which leads 99% of people into chaos and illness, and 1% to incredible, purposeful lives. If you are fed up with being part of the 99%, this book is for you.

Review:

What is the Lunatic Gene? I don’t know! The book never explains it. It’s very clear that the Lunatic Gene is not scientific at all, and it states some of the effects of the gene (what are they? I don’t know! It’s not clear), but it doesn’t tell you what the gene is.

Adam Shaw spends the first half of the book sharing his experiences (how are they relevant? I don’t know! He tries to tie them in but doesn’t do it very well) and trying to convince you that the Lunatic Gene is a thing, despite stating that it’s not a scientific discovery or genealogical fact. Then he spends the other half talking about how your brain/logic and heart/emotions disagree and how that causes problems, saying next to nothing about this Lunatic Gene.

And then he tries to convince you that heart disease happens because you don’t love yourself enough. Yes, really.

Not all of the stuff in here is bad. There’s actually some good insight into how suppressing or “bottling up” emotions that were overruled but “logic” causes problems and outbursts. But his solution to that is to listen to your heart more. (How do you do that? I don’t know! He doesn’t say what to do about it more than “follow your heart.”)

Also, my copy had no margins, so the first letter of every line was cut off and it was a nightmare to read. It was also difficult to read because none of it made sense. It didn’t fit together, the examples didn’t clear anything up, and I think there might have been advice in there somewhere? It’s a mess.

This book is very much … not great. It’s poorly written, poorly organized, and poorly formatted, some of its assertions are just outlandish, and it gives exactly zero concrete solutions to the issues it brings up. I’d say something here about the main message being not unique, but there’s like six “main messages” here that the book tries to cover in 44 pages and doesn’t give any of them enough page time to call it the main message. I can tell it’s trying, and it thinks it has something new, mind-blowing, and revolutionary, but it doesn’t.

Review: Just Tell Me What I Want

Image from Sara Kravitz

Title: Just Tell Me What I Want: How to Find Your Purpose When You Have No Idea What It Is

Author: Sara Kravitz

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: Gendered language, Christianity

Back Cover:

This book is for anyone who has ever been told to “follow their bliss” and then immediately wanted to punch that person in the face. Maybe you feel like you should have things figured out by now. Maybe you think things should be better, but you don’t know how to get started. Maybe you would love to work really hard toward something, but aren’t totally sure what that something is.

What if there was actually a way to get you pointed in the right direction? And what if it didn’t involve someone telling you to “follow your bliss”?

This book will:

• give you concrete tools to figure out what you want
• help you take steps toward a life that you actually want to be yours
• help you understand that everyone feels this way at some point, but you don’t have to feel this way forever
• not tell you to follow your bliss

Change can be scary. Change can feel risky. But taking a chance is always worth it. This book will help you take the right steps for you to figure out what you want.

Review:

This is going to be a short review, because this is a pretty short book.

I found a free copy somewhere, picked it up because I was bored at work, and was honestly unimpressed with chapter one. It was boring and unspectacular, and I almost stopped reading.

But I’m glad I continued, because the rest of the book was pretty good.

Let’s be clear – it doesn’t exactly tell you how to figure out what you want. But it does give you some techniques for figuring out what you don’t want, which is a step in the right direction. It talks a lot about feeling out what’s not right for you and understanding that you have options, which is a great thing to talk about. And it’s also pretty inspiring.

There were a couple things that bothered me about it, though. One was that there was a surprising amount of swearing. Most of the time swearing doesn’t bother me, but in this case it didn’t fit with the tone at all and I think it would have read better if there wasn’t swearing. The other thing that bothered me was a few mentions of God in a Christian context. This may not bother everyone, but I wasn’t expecting it and I wasn’t a fan.

I want to say more about it, but there’s not much more to say. It was good. It had some good tips. There also wasn’t a lot that I hadn’t already heard before. It was a lot better than I expected, but still not fantastic.