Living the Good Life by David Patchell-Evans

This book. Oh god, this book. It's very far off the beaten track for what I would normally read, but I've generally said that if someone puts a book into my hands, it jumps onto my immediate to-read list. This one was given to me by a friend who was in the process of quitting GoodLife home office, which is of course in the city where I live. They requested that I tear it apart on my blog.

It's hard to resist the challenge. However, even though I already know I don't like GoodLife as a workplace, having heard terrible stories from the three or four people I know who have worked there, I tried to at least start the book with an open mind.

I mean, it's a self-published, self-congratulatory treatise on living by a millionaire. What could, uh, go wrong?

The person who gave me this owes me a beer. They're aware of this. This book is very bad, for a number of reasons. Let's narrow it down to three.

First of all, the chapters on creating or working in a good workplace had me sputtering and developing a severe eye twitch. Everything I've heard about the workplace that his company has created sounds as bad as the worst place I've worked. It may even surpass it. They aren't my stories, so I'm not going to relate them here, but the pay is not great, the top of the pay scale absurdly low, overtime expected, and it sounds like one of those environments where high pressure meets huge workloads, and all the resultant stress from that.

Not to mention turnover, except that it's apparently company policy that they won't give references. 

Let's go back to the book. The bits on the workplace made me angry, because I know he doesn't practice what he preaches - or maybe he means to, but it's not what his company does, and that buck has to stop right about on his doorstop

However, even if you put that aside, there are two other problems that are solely with the book: Positive thinking bullshit and a complete lack of context.

So much of this book reads like it comes from having read a not-very-good magazine article on something to do with positive thinking and writing about it with about that level of understanding. Nothing is cited, things are simply asserted, and there's no deeper consideration of causation or external factors or really anything that would make any of these assumptions worthwhile. Instead, we end up with a positive thinking mishmash that insists, like so much other positive thinking bullshit, that everything is under your control.

I mean, there is lip service to the idea that you're not going for physical perfection, just being healthier, but then we get absolutely baloney things about how half of what happens to you is genetic, 40% is voluntary and 10% comes from external circumstances - but that you can change your external circumstances, so it's really 50/50. Aargh. I hate this so much, and did even before I'd read Barbara Ehrenreich's devastating takedown of this culture, Bright-Sided.  Thank you, for yet again telling people that if they have no money, a shitty job and few resources, it's all their own damn fault.

And beyond that, a problem of writing first and foremost is how entirely weightless this book is. There's no context for anything. It can't quite decide what it is - part memoir, part positive thinking encouragement to start exercising in such a way that will make the author money, part testimonial. For every time he talks about it not being about losing weight, there's a testimonial about how much weight they lost. For every positive thinking anecdote or piece of information, there's no context.

His life sort of floats around the story, but isn't anchored to anything. There are vague references, but no storytelling. There is no mention of a spouse. No mention of the other three children listed in the dedication, just a reference to the one who is autistic. You don't come away from this knowing anything concrete about him, other than that he's great at business and overcame physical disability through exercise.

Make no mistake, this book is a sales pitch. But it's one that does so through ignoring externalities and context, at virtually every step.

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

 

This is rather far afield from the books I usually read. I have a healthy skepticism about self-help books born of years working in a bookstore, seeing the vast mass of them and how few looked like they offered anything at all but platitudes. However, this was a pick for my real-life book club this month, and so I sat down and read it. It didn't hurt that a youtube video of Brene Brown (not her ubiquitous TED talk) had helped me figure out a few things during a stressful time.

So, when I sat down and read this, what did I find? I liked a lot of her message, and felt that the book was strongest when she was drawing directly on her research. However, there were a few sections in the middle where it got a little mushy, and one particularly irritating moment when I had a moment of recognition, and then very little help. 

Her main thesis (looks liked explored more thoroughly in a previous book) is that when she studied people who lived wholeheartedly, she found that they were the very people who accepted and even embraced vulnerability despite how much it gets you hurt.  And that shame was the greatest barrier to embracing vulnerability, because we think other people will see our openness as weakness.

In general, I'm on board. Her main ideas feel right, and she has a few practical ideas for staying mindful and opening yourself up. (On the other hand, most of the kinds of vulnerability she's talking about I already feel like I'm fairly good at embracing, so I would wonder how this would read to someone who is entirely vulnerability-averse.)

I am particularly wary of self-help books when they advise being more vigilant every second to make sure that you're doing this right. It's a twisted way of creating more stress - when your happiness is all your own responsibility, are you doing enough? Being enough? If you're not happy, is it really your own fault?

At least this book is striving to help people achieve a sense of innate worthiness no matter what happens in their lives, of knowing that bad things happen and you can fuck up and that does not mean you are a horrible fucked-up person. I feel like in the the last ten years, I arrived at a place of believing that I was an alright person, no matter what happened, and deserved my spot here as much as anyone does. (And furthermore, that it's not a matter of deserving, so just let that the fuck go and be here.)

(Thanks, Mom and Dad, for well equipping me to arrive at that place.)

So, in other words, I'm already on board with her general ideas. But there was this one section that annoyed me and got a little mushy. In the section on armour, she goes through what she says are the three distancing/coping techniques for vulnerability that everyone uses at some time or another, and ways to combat them. Then she goes through some less frequent ones. And one of those made me stop and go "yes. That's what I do. That's the one I use." Then I was eager to see what she'd say was a good coping technique with that particular armour.

But she really didn't. It felt like her research hadn't covered that one yet, so she could identify it, and all she said for addressing it was "when I'm doing this, I think of this one movie that contains the line I'm referencing in naming this armour, and it makes me stop."

That is...not that helpful if you've never seen the movie and are unclear on how knowing the movie would help you stop. I get that it's a deeply personal reminder that works for her but this is one place I really wanted some simultaneously broader and more specific advice like she was dispensing earlier in the book.

I don't think this book changed my life. I mean, really, it was more or less validating for several strongly held beliefs I had, so it was a welcome reminder, and gave some good advice on how I can keep working on something I'm already working on. Ways to think about it.