Rating: 4/5, good
This is a butt-kicker of a book. It contains some deep motivation, real talk, and psychological counseling that could help you get out of a rut. It also has some woo-woo aspirational-vibrational stuff, but the writing in this book is so witty and involving it didn’t bother me. I loved all the funny little anecdotes about things like walking out on a mattress salesman who wanted her to give him a high-five. Her voice and the stories are what kept me reading all the way through.
Sincero deconstructs all of the things that we think that hold us back from going after what we really need, from low self-esteem to parental/societal expectations to adverse experiences. This book asks the reader to think about a lot of deep questions regarding what they want out of life.
The first section, titled “How You Got This Way” asks the reader to confront their unconscious beliefs about the common areas people want to be successful in, like love, money, and friendship. Often we consciously think we want something but our subconscious is holding us back with negative beliefs we absorbed from our parents (it can also be from peers or experiences).
I really loved Sincero’s concept of The Big Snooze (or BS) for short. The Big Snooze (BS) is living your life on autopilot instead of taking control. It’s the thing that says doing what you really want to do is too hard, too embarrassing, too unconventional, or too risky. It’s the force that tends toward equilibrium, which if you want to make a change in your life for the better, is something you want to disturb, not enable.
Sincero writes:
“The Big Snooze is like an overprotective Italian mother who not only doesn’t want you to ever go outside, but who wants you to live with her forever. Her intentions are good, but fully fear-based. As long as you stay inside the familiar, risk-free zone of your present reality, the Big Snooze is content, but should you try and sneak past her to attend the rockin’ party outside, your overprotective, controlling mother is going to claw, scratch, scream, bite, hurl her body in front of your rapidly approaching new life—basically she’s going to do whatever she can to stop you.”
I think this is an extremely useful concept for artists to keep in their back pocket. We’re taught all our lives to be safe and obey what our parents and teachers tell us and grow up to be productive members of society, but sometimes the more interesting and fulfilling life exists outside the safe zone.
“Part 2, How to Embrace Your Inner Badass” has a lot of useful pep talks and mantras to help you change negative self-talk and start learning how to be kind to yourself. “Chapter 8, What are you doing here?” contains a number of approaches to figuring out what you really want to do.
“Part 3, How to Tap into the Motherlode”, is about getting into the right headspace for success. Sincero goes into depth about what it really means to believe in yourself.
Sincero writes: “You have to change your thinking first, and then the evidence appears. Our big mistake is that we do it the other way around. We demand to see the evidence before we believe it to be true.”
A lot of the ideas in this book are not new, but Sincero gives these old concepts new life by explaining them in a new way.
I find that I learn more from self-help books that tell you what not to do than what to do. In that way this book is similar to Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness, which has multiple chapters at the beginning talking about the causes of unhappiness before it gets to talking about how to be happy. If you’re starting at unhappy (which you probably are if you’re picking up a self-help book), I think it’s more helpful to try to climb out to an even baseline, and then try to go up from there.
Sincero does a great job as well at illustrating what a successful attitude looks like as opposed to an unsuccessful one:
“It’s the ones with the proper mindsets who will succeed. The ones who kick ass are the ones who can see themselves kicking ass, who truly believe in themselves and what they’re selling, who remind themselves how much they want to better people’s lives with their coaching, who are excited to get compensated for selling it and have no limiting, subconscious beliefs holding them back. The ones who feel weird or who worry that they’re being pushy and annoying or who subconsciously believe that they don’t deserve to or can’t succeed—they’re not gonna do so good.”
Sincero’s chapter on forgiveness is also pretty great. I like how You Are a Badass has a lot of short practical suggestions for thought experiments and different approaches to problems, so if something doesn’t work for you, no worries, it’s only given like a page or a page and a half and then it jumps to the next idea or solution.
Probably one of the most important chapters for me was Part 4 Chapter 17 where she talks about becoming more aware of the stories you tell yourself about yourself. She also asks the reader to ask themselves how their stories are serving them. Sometimes when we think we can’t do something, it’s because it’s just comfortable and easy to say you can’t instead of growing to meet the challenge.
She suggests you recognize your negative stories about yourself, thank them for protecting you, dismiss them, and replace them with positive affirmations.
Another great tactic Sincero covers is “flipping the fear” – you’re not dancing to avoid feeling embarrassed, but how embarrassed will you feel if you never dance even though you love to?
The last concept that I want to highlight is the Life Manifesto. Sincero writes:
“Write down your goals and your vision of your ideal life in the present tense and be as specific as possible. Where do you live, who do you live with, what do you do for fun, who are you surrounded by, how much money do you make, how do you make it, how do you give back to the world, what are you wearing, etc.”
She says to read this every morning and every night and get really worked up about it. I don’t know if you need to read it every day, but just figuring out what kind of life you want to live down to the specifics seems like a good defense against floating aimlessly through life.
So there’s a lot of really important stuff, some bleh stuff, and some downright dangerous stuff (buy a new car to feel like an executive so you can manifest being an executive? Hm.), but the good outweighs the bad. The reader just needs to have common sense and only use the parts that apply to their life situation. If you really hate the rah-rah modern positive-thinking stuff, I’d suggest reading The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. It’s actually pretty similar, but the writing style is a bit more subdued.
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