BRAVE Learning

(This is a review for Richard Wiseman’s “Rip It Up.” I first published it on HugDug – go and buy this book there so we can help their charity of the month!)

You need this book to make sense of all the other books that tried to help you.

Psychology, life coaching and therapy carries a heavy burden of the white male gaze. It is sometimes hard to shake off the feeling that white men decide what’s normal and what isn’t – they decide who to cure, who to coach, who to showcase as the “healthy” specimen.

Here’s another white man reviewing a white man’s book about psychology. But this time, it might be a bit different.

Richard Wiseman methodically goes from one area of psychology and therapy to another. He takes you with him, and you follow willingly (the style of the book is chatty and quite engaging and it helps). Along the way, you meet the big questions in psychology and coaching: the problems that the world’s greatest minds have long tried to answer.

Richard Wiseman tells you: it’s not the mind you should be worried about. Or rather, not just the mind. The whole book is a powerful account of how your body influences the way you think: how your smile makes you happy instead of the other way around, how a determined posture increases your willpower rather than resulting from it.

I saw people read this book on trains, and fidget in their seats, sit upright and smile all of a sudden. Page after page and chapter by chapter, Richard Wiseman helps you figure out these questions:

• How does your body influence the way you think, feel and perceive?
• What can you start doing now to feel, walk, think and act “outside” these confining postures?
• Have you been spending too much time in your head recently? What if you didn’t?

There is a lot to say about this book – but it’s best experienced. Go and read it: it’s entertaining, clever and will change a few things about your every day.

The question from the title is not merely rhetorical. I was fortunate to attend a debate today which discussed this question in quite some detail. This post is a summary of this debate, and a voice from another perspective. I would like to invite you in as well: are performance drugs the future of foreign language learning?

(This review was first published on Hugdug. If you want to buy the book, do it there so we can do something good for charity!)

I’m reviewing this book 7 years after its first edition hit the shelves and changed everything to the point of being mock-referenced in The Office.

I’m also reviewing it eight hours after hearing someone say “we should set up a meeting” in a cheerful, expectant and self-congratulatory tone.

Between the first event and the second event, I have had jobs, positions, stints, gigs, contracts and projects. And this book was one of the very few that stayed with me and remained relevant, no matter what I was doing.

It’s not about the amazing visions of fulfilled life that Tim Ferriss depicts so vividly. It’s not about the success stories and the relentless math that shows you how easy it is to feel rich without being rich. These things appeal to different people in different contexts, and I’m sure you’ll find your dream and your tools in this book if you look hard enough.

What makes the book important for me, though – and what keeps it on my shelf, and on my work-related list – is these three questions:

What would excite me?  – This is my ultimate criterion for work, leisure and everything in between. “4-Hour Workweek” puts this question to work, and the results are impressive.

What is the worst that could happen?  – The slightly more philosophical part of the book deals with the fear of change – the resistance you get when trying to chase the answers to the first question. It’s effective, and written with integrity.

What is going to bring the most results for me? – The 80/20 principle has, since 2007, been quoted and mis-quoted countless times. But on a personal level, this will still ring true: one little thing you do may change several big things in time. The book doesn’t tell you which thing it is, but it gives you lots of hints on how to trim the ones that aren’t it!

Tim Ferriss is an acquired taste – this book is the one which started it all. If you haven’t got it yet, consider how much you still need to learn in relation to the three questions above – then buy it before you find yourself cheerfully setting up another meeting with a smile on your face.