A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Paperback, 224 pages
English language
Published Sept. 13, 2016 by Harper.
Lord almighty. Hard pass on the macho Buddhism.
Can't understand the hype - this book does nothing for me.
Sometimes I wasn't quite sure where it was going or if it was ever going to get there at all, but I liked his tone and way of thinking, and in the end I think it's cohesive and very intriguing. Would recommend.
I pretty much learned nothing from this book, sadly.
The first 2 chapters were promising, but then it just went down hill. It was very repititive and I can not hear the word “entitled” again.
I can’t help but feel that this entire book could have been on one sheet of paper.
Incredibly insightful with lessons, thoughts and ideas across every page. Though the title is crass, it really speaks to about living life to your values and things you truly care about and how you go about doing it. It isn't trying to say don't care about things and tell people to screw off, but to find ways to live your life, while still owning up to your own failures and mistakes.
This is not a book in which to find any deep thought. There are some fine common-sense bits, but that common sense is packaged in much the same way L. Ron Hubbard packages his wisdom-isms in his own irony-quote, self-help books, irony-unquote. (The best news, I guess, is that Mark Manson never started a cult.)
There are a few items in this book I would have cherry-picked for myself as a confused twenty-year-old young man, but would that advice back then actually have helped? Doubtful. There are much better books than this I should have read. This just feels like something written by a recovering, secret, pick-up-artist/men's-rights-activist.
The author really wants you to know he's had sex with a lot of very beautiful women, all while telling you that really powerful people rarely brag.
If F*cks were stars, I would give this book none.
To the point.
This is an amazing book.
I watched a random video YouTube recommended about the "Do Something" principle, which led me to this book. It turned out I had already read Mark Manson's other book - Models. Thinking this would be a lame, feel-good, increase self-esteem piece of fluff, I still picked it up. To my utter surprise, this was a great book, it asked some really good questions and had some great ideas, which I won't spoil but summarizing here for you.
Overall, entertaining and useful, what more can a guy ask of a book?
As someone who often claims not to give a fuck, you mught think I don't have anything more to learn on the subject, but this book raises a lot of good points and gave me a lot to think about.
An okay read but a little too wishy washy for my liking. It's basically some Buddhism shredded up against a young person's life experience. I didn't gain much from it.
Reading the title makes you grin and someone might think its about being ignorant, arrogant and selfish. But this book is clearly the opposite of that expectation. On one hand its sort of amusing just by the high frequency of the usage of the F-word, but at the end this book is deep.
It forces you to reflect on your life and your values. And the most important takeaway is, that sometings things are as they are and you cannot change them, so why bother or getting emotional involved in things that you cannot control? Learn to let go and focus on what matters in your life.
It also tells you the importance of failure. Without failure there is no meaning in life and no chance to improve. The other important lesson is that you need to say "no" to some things in your life, otherwise you have no values …
Reading the title makes you grin and someone might think its about being ignorant, arrogant and selfish. But this book is clearly the opposite of that expectation. On one hand its sort of amusing just by the high frequency of the usage of the F-word, but at the end this book is deep.
It forces you to reflect on your life and your values. And the most important takeaway is, that sometings things are as they are and you cannot change them, so why bother or getting emotional involved in things that you cannot control? Learn to let go and focus on what matters in your life.
It also tells you the importance of failure. Without failure there is no meaning in life and no chance to improve. The other important lesson is that you need to say "no" to some things in your life, otherwise you have no values that you live on.
And at the end there will be the inevitable death. Nothing to be afraid of once you learned to live and not just be existent.
This book is definitely one of the best books I've read in my life. Highly recommended reading, and recently I found out there is also a Twitter account @SubtleOf that tweets quotes from this book as a good reminder on what to give a fuck. ;-)
This book was really interesting and humorous, until I spotted this line:
As she describes in her autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the 1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later.
Although false reports of rape turn up about as often as lightning strikes humans, that line turned me right off this book. Right off. It's just like finding out there's feces in your food. The author should read
Still, I finished this book.
There are quite a few interesting bits in the book for the first fifth of it, but then it veers into quasi-science, with no references to claims made. "Research has been done on," et cetera.
This book was really interesting and humorous, until I spotted this line:
As she describes in her autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the 1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later.
This book was really interesting and humorous, until I spotted this line:
As she describes in her autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the 1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later.
Although false reports of rape turn up about as often as lightning strikes humans, that line turned me right off this book. Right off. It's just like finding out there's feces in your food. The author should read
Still, I finished this book.
There are quite a few interesting bits in the book for the first fifth of it, but then it veers into quasi-science, with no references to claims made. "Research has been done on," et cetera.
This book was really interesting and humorous, until I spotted this line:
As she describes in her autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the 1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later.
This book was really interesting and humorous, until I spotted this line:
As she describes in her autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the 1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later.
Although false reports of rape turn up about as often as lightning strikes humans, that line turned me right off this book. Right off. It's just like finding out there's feces in your food. The author should read
Still, I finished this book.
There are quite a few interesting bits in the book for the first fifth of it, but then it veers into quasi-science, with no references to claims made. "Research has been done on," et cetera.
This book was really interesting and humorous, until I spotted this line:
As she describes in her autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the 1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later.
He has this really annoying thread of "millennials are subject to entitlement culture," but the stoicism and targeted effort concepts are refreshing to hear from a person who speaks more of a younger person's language.
