Finished: May 10, 2024
Why I read this
I’ve never been someon who has felt I needed a “self-help” book. I think the title make it sound like the reader is floundering in their life and cannot take care of themselves, so they need a magic book to keep them on track. Instead I prefer to think of them as self-improvement books, where the reader simply wants to improve their flaws and work on being a more well rounded person. Despite this idea I did feel that in this moment a bit of self-help could be useful. Having recently changed job functions, I’ve found myself a bit lost in a part of my life that has traditionally been very clear to me. Due to some uncontrollable changes in the launch of a project I’ve been left with very little to work on in my first few weeks and having so little direction has been a new and uncomfortable feeling. I wanted to read this book to see if I can profit a little more from this downtime and work on my personal resilience and softskills for the day where I know the job will speed up. Ultimately, I found this break from sci-fi to be refreshing and motivating. That mixed with the first tastes of summer in Paris and I’m ready to tackle my next challenges!
What I learned
In this section I wanted to do the review a bit differently. I don’t feel that a normal reflection of the books strengths and weaknesses fits the same for a sel-help/motivational book as it would a science fiction novel, or a classic literature piece. Instead, here I will list the key concepts that I found engaging that I want to remember to implement in my future life, and to simply support them a bit with why. I’ll make a note of this review, and I’ll do my best to come back regularly and assess if I’ve implemented any of these things, and if so, what I think about how they work in my life.
Being comfortable with being uncomfortable: This is an absolute classic from self-help books prevalent in books such as Mindset, Atomic Habits, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, so much so that it’s a point almost impossible to dispute. My experience learning French confirms this, and I believe it is the only way you can tackle a new language, as Adam Grant’s version states. I think the periods of growth in my life have been heavily aligned with when I’ve been a bit uncomfortable. Transitioning from highschool to college, from college to the working world, moving from the US to France. I think each time I’ve been thrust into a new and uncomfortable environment it has come with enormous gains in my satisfaction with who I am and what I have accomplished. The challenge here will then be how to continue to put myself into situations where I am not comfortable. Abstractly that means doing new things, going to new places, pushing a bit past your limits. Concretely, for me it will mean things like, being assertive past my comfort zone in my new work environment, posting on social media and promoting this blog, or taking dance lessons to prepare for our wedding next spring (I think the later will be the hardest one for me!).
Knowing when good enough is ok: This has been something that has normally come very easy to me. In high-school I was not a straight-A student, because I knew I didn’t need to be. I could put in enormous effort to be perfect, or I could put in very little effort and have an acceptable result (normally a mix of High-B’s and Low-A’s). There were of course times where I regretted this choice, like when a door was shut on a top tier university because I was not accepted (whether it was my grades or not, I’ll never know, but it certainly would not have hurt), but looking back so far I think the principle has served me well. Another example might be this blog. Mostly it serves as a way for me to collect my thoughts and share my ideas with a couple of close friends and family, so I don’t heavily proof-read it. There are often typos and small errors in the text, and that’s ok! For this purpose that is acceptable and spending the extra time and energy to make it spotless adds no value to any other success factors. It’s a principle I want to apply more to work to be more effective. For example when preparing a presentation it should of course look good, but preparing the content should take 95% of the effort, and putting it on a nice Power Point slide should be minimally important, while of course adapting this methodology for the audience (not a good idea to present to a bunch of executives plain text Power Point slides because it was not a “value-add”). The point being we have limited time and energy, so concentrate on tasks that produce value, and not just trying to be perfect. A clear action to put here is to set challenging, but specific goals and being ok if you get close.
You can teach even if you don’t know it: Teaching a subject had such a strong correlation with retaining the information that it is astonishing that it is not absolutely mandatory in most subjects. This is an area where I could easily voluteer to teach subjects and force myself to learn more about the subject to explain it to others. A bit basic, but still something that stuck with me as effect and good enough to make note of. An interesting fact on the subject was also that the better you get at something, the worse you get at teaching it, so having people who are just a bit above your skill level to teach you, could be much more effective at teaching than having people who are way beyond your level. It could be a good way to optimize teaching and learning in almost any environment.
Character is much more important than technical ability: With all my effort on self-improvement, I was very glad to see this bit of information, but there are definitely some specific methods to helping to improve this or apply the idea in my daily life. For example when creating teams, the smartest teams are not normally composed with the smartest individuals, they are instead composed with the people with the best teamworking capabilities. So when focusing on interviewing candidates, especially for roles that are not highly technical, maybe there should be a much higher focus on the character flaws and developing methods to quantitatively judge those skills, like making different interview questions, might result in much better hiring decisions than hiring on technical proficiency.
Judge people on their trajectories, not on the absolute values: This was a specific one that I found very interesting. Someone who starts college with straight A’s and finishes with A’s and B’s is likely someone with lots of natural ability, and is very intelligent, but they could end with a higher GPA than someone who started college with straight C’s and ended with straight A’s. The ability to continously improve shows character, and if you can measure it, it places much less emphasis on starting condition, and much more on the person’s work ethic.
At the end of the day, books like this are nice to hit here and there. They continue to push motivation towards self-improvement, and even though you won’t be able to capture 100% of the value from all of it, I think it helps you with the Growth Mindset, and you always get one or two key ideas that you can immediately apply. I think I heavily agree with the author when he says that “there’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today.”
What I didn’t like
For an author who seems to have been so insightful and made some good points about human nature and potential I found one of his ending points to be incredible weak and hurt the book overall. He describes how he was struggling with imposter syndrome in his acceptance to Harvard and when he asked his first Harvard interviewer what he had done that was exceptional, what had made him stand out as a candidate, the answer was a bit ridiculous. Normally, you would expect that this Harvard interviewer had seized on some specific word, or answer that revealed some golden nugget of information about Grant that would make him a shoe-in for Harvard acceptance. Instead he told the story of how Grant had brought with him a deck of cards and performed a detailed magic trick with the interviewer, then they went on a tour of the offices searching for another set of cards to see if he could perform the trick with someone else’s cards. It must have taken at least an hour to do all of this, and the author of a book about hidden potential couldn’t understand why his application was put forward? Come on.
Questions I asked
What is the right level of uncomfortable? When is it a growth opportunity, and when can it be a problem?
What minor changes in my normal routines can I make to improve my abilities to learn and improve?
How to work on self-improvement, slowly and constantly, without being unsatisfied with yourself?
My Favorite Quote
“What looked like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity”
Adam Grant
Books I liked like this one
Atomic Habits : James Clear (for applicable methods of self-improovement)
Mindset : Carol S. Dweck (for a psychological approach to what makes people improve)
Book Reviews for Mom 