After
completing this bloody awesome book, I had a strong urge to write its review in
slangs. Then I thought, wait Ravi! You ought to behave like a gentleman. So I
sacrificed my darling desire on the altar of sophistication. Well, you all must
be agreed that the irony of the age is that we are taught to be sophisticated
but all admired arts are often found beyond sophistication. I guess the writer
has found this irony and applied in his book. So far this is the fourth
self-help book that I ever read and got this hitting to the core.
The word
‘Fu*k’ that has many-many meanings in English is written almost thousands of
times in the book. You can guess “this is the importance of giving a F*ck”. The
book is divided in nine well-built chapters and in every chapter Mark gives the
audience a chance to peep in his own life. So this book is part autobiography,
part reading, part travelling, part about the girls he slept with and part his
sermons. For these nine chapters I would like to give nine points in brief-
1- You mustn’t give a f*ck about
everything. You ought to give your f*ck only about one or two things, like
family, friends and your aim in life. Something true, immediate and important.
2- Happiness is a problem. Happiness
comes from solving problems, not from avoiding or putting its responsibility on
the others. Well, happiness is an illusion also, because we have evolved to
always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity. We are
wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and whatever we don’t.
Happiness is a constant work in progress.
3- You are not special. This reminds me
dialogues of the movie Fight Club (1999), one of my favorite movies. Well, the
first rule of the Fight Club is you mustn’t talk about it, but I will, it seems
obvious, “You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” We are all,
for the most part, pretty average people. But it is the extremes that get all
the publicity. Second thing, your problems and excuses can’t make you special,
because at the corner of your vicinity you can see someone is suffering from
greater pains.
4- Humans often choose to dedicate large
portion of their lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes. Mark gives
example of two persons in Japan. Reading about them will be like unfolding the
layers of your conscience. You’re defined by what you choose to struggle for.
You’ve to adopt the way of self-questioning for your choosing.
5- When we feel that we are choosing our
problems, we feel empowered, but when we feel our problem are being forced upon
us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable. Story of William James-
father of American Psychology is quite inspiring. We don’t always control what
happens to us,, but we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as
well as how we respond.
6- You are wrong about everything, (but
so am I). When we learn something new, we don’t go from, “wrong” to “right”,
rather we go from “wrong” to “slightly less wrong”. You never get an absolute
truth except death. Certainty is the enemy of the growth. Nothing is for
certain until it has already happened- and even then, it’s still debatable.
That’s why accepting the inevitable imperfection of our values is necessary for
any growth to take place.
7- Our proudest moments come in the face
of the greatest adversity. Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient,
more grounded. We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective
look at how we have been deriving meaning in our life.
8- You should always learn the
importance of saying NO. Rejection makes your life better. We need to reject
something, otherwise we stand for nothing. If nothing is better or more
desirable than anything else, then we are empty and our life is meaningless.
Sometimes we are defined by what we choose to reject.
9- If you’re always conscious about the
inevitability of Death, this would influence your behavior and work highly, for
a betterment. Writer mentions here Earnest Becker who died in 1974 of cancer
but before his death he wrote the book Denial of Death as his “immortality
project”. In this way, everything that is good in this world it is because of
many people’s immortality project
In brief, it
is a marvellous book. At one or two places, he starts preaching like other self-help books, then again continues his logical pace.
Rating- 4/5
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