I have a confession – brace yourself. As a former librarian, I’ll probably lose so many cool points for admitting this, but I hate writing book reviews. I love talking to people about what I read, but when it comes to reviewing something, I struggle, and generally fail. It’s always hard for me to articulate exactly how a book makes me feel – because that’s just it, if it’s worth reviewing, it’s because the book made me feel something and probably hit a personal cord. Also, sharing my feelings is not always easy for me. So, I’m more inclined to rate it on Goodreads, maybe snap a quick Instagram picture of the cover, and write a short sentence about how you should read it too. But, yesterday I finished a book that I feel like I need to say some things about.
So, it’s called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***. I know what you’re thinking – that sounds awfully cynical, negative even. Before I started reading it, I felt the same way. But what I found were awesome anecdotes, not on how to not care about anything, but on being very intentional about what we chose to care about and invest our time and energy in.
So here are a few of my favorite takeaways, in no particular order:
“We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”
Instead of focusing on the wrongs done to me, I have to train myself to view dissatisfaction, insecurity, let down as an opportunity to redesign my circumstances. This view makes it easy to understand the principle of the sphere of influence. Some things are just out of our control; however, our reactions to these things aren’t. We might not be able to change what someone does to us, but we can always change how we let it affect us.
“Emotions are part of the equation of our lives, but not the entire equation.”
I’d scream this from the rooftops if I could! As someone who struggles with sharing emotions and sometimes even admitting and understanding my own emotions, I value the idea that rational, realistic thought means just as much as listening to your heart. And when we think about where we invest our love, time, and energy, rationality becomes paramount.
“If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.”
I am too hard on myself. I, like many other people, tend to set my measurements for both success and failure on those of others – and comparison is a dangerous thing. Oftentimes I set very unrealistic measurements for success, which are almost always impossible to attain. I operate under the assumption that I could be doing more, doing something better, because look at her, she’s doing so much. This leads to unrealistic measures of failure – instead of celebrating myself and even the smallest victories, I’m constantly feeling as if I have not done enough. What I’d like to see, for myself, is a more realistic gauge of both my success and my failure, focusing on viewing the failure as a stepping stone to accomplishing my goals.
“Growth is an endlessly iterative process…personal growth can actually be quite scientific. Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and important; that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data.”
As someone who tends to see things very literally (my husband often calls me Drax), this was a #micdrop statement. I love the idea of seeing growth as a scientific process. To me, this makes me feel so much more at ease with allowing myself space and vulnerability to accept areas where I need to be honest about choices and change.
“How will the world be different and better when you’re gone? What mark will you have made? What influence will you have caused?”
This is the ultimate self-reflective question. As I wrote last month, I want to leave no disaster in my wake. I’ve spent most of my life trying to make a positive impact on the people around me. I’m a fixer and a helper by nature, so leaving behind a legacy that I’m proud of and that has helped as many people as it can is so, so important to me. As I continue to grow, I realize I want to be more than nice and caring, I want to be inspiring. I want to make people feel confident in their own abilities and intelligence. I want to cause influence that leads to positive change.