Tag Archives: self-help

Discipline Equals Freedom

Book Review of Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual, by Jocko Willink

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I won a copy of Jocko Willink‘s Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual through Goodreads.

Description:
FIND YOUR WILL, FIND YOUR DISCIPLINE – AND YOU WILL FIND YOUR FREEDOM

Jocko Willink’s methods for success were born in the SEAL Teams, where he spent most of his adult life, enlisting after high school and rising through the ranks to become the commander of the most highly decorated special operations unit of the war in Iraq. In Discipline Equals Freedom, the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Extreme Ownership describes how he lives that mantra: the mental and physical disciplines he imposes on himself in order to achieve freedom in all aspects of life. Many books offer advice on how to overcome obstacles and reach your goals—but that advice often misses the most critical ingredient: discipline. Without discipline, there will be no real progress. Discipline Equals Freedom covers it all, including strategies and tactics for conquering weakness, procrastination, and fear, and specific physical training presented in workouts for beginner, intermediate, and advanced athletes, and even the best sleep habits and food intake recommended to optimize performance.

Within these pages discover the keys to becoming stronger, smarter, faster, and healthier. There is only one way to achieve true freedom: The Way of Discipline. Read this book and find The Way.

Review:

It’s not that I think Willink doesn’t have any good points in this book, it’s just that I really, REALLY can’t relate to how he presents any of them. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is a book written for men. And I don’t just mean because of its yanged out, gung-ho tone (there are women who go for this sort of thing), but because it talks about the benefit of exercise and such as building muscle mass and increasing testosterone, among other things (not generally things women aim for). I’ll go farther and say it’s written for Willink’s fellow soldiers. There’s a section on guns and another on choosing a martial art. Neither of which seem relevant to a standard get fit self-help book, but are right up the alley of aggressive male types.

The thing that I found so very alienating about this book though was the framing of everything as a battle. After 20 years as a navy seal, I can understand how Willink came to be this way, but I just find the very idea pointlessly exhausting, wrong, and unnecessary. Many of his points could as easily have been said in less adversarial terms and be just as true. But that’s not the sort of book this is. It’s designed for war-minded men who like the idea of crushing their enemy, even if that enemy is self-doubt, or laziness, or lack of motivation. I’m just really not one of those people.

Further evidence (to me) that the book is intended for those who might qualify as meatheads is the way it’s formatted with white text on a black background, with indents and right justifications, and lots and lots of empty space per page. The whole thing reads more like mini-motivational speeches than anything else. As if it’s intended to sit on the coffee table and be opened to a random page for the quick inspirational pick-me-up. I read the whole thing in less than an hour, despite being almost 200 pages long.

All in all, I can’t say if this is good or bad, only that it really isn’t for me. I found the whole thing ridiculous, even if Willink’s point that anything you want to do you just have to do is a good one. Too bad he didn’t actually write a book about how to actually accomplish that.

Review of The Gifted Storyteller: The Power Is in the Story You Tell, by Gregg Korrol

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I won a copy of Gregg Korrol‘s The Gifted Storyteller through Goodreads:

Description:
What if a Genie popped out of a bottle and gave you the power to create your life as it happened?

Michael followed “the plan” and did everything he was supposed to for life to be successful; great job, money, dates, yet despite it all, everything wasn’t the dream he expected. One night after work, he meets a beautiful and mysterious woman named Jeannie, who introduces him to the Gifted Storyteller, and changes his life forever.

Review:
This isn’t so much a review as documenting I’ve read this book, because I just don’t like this sort of book. I knew that I didn’t like a certain sort of book, but didn’t know this would be a book of the sort I don’t like. By this sort of book, I mean the sort where someone meets a stranger who opts to impart sacred knowledge to some random sap and this is presented to the reader as ultimately enlightening. There’s a quote on page 91 that states, “What she is saying is mind blowing.” and that’s how the reader is meant to feel about the book and it’s lessons. Here’s the thing, I almost never feel that they are. I didn’t here either.

I could take that fact to mean this is a pointless self-help book, but maybe it’s just imparting lessons I don’t need—to be mindful of the reality you build yourself and be careful of the fictions you build in your head (very Deepak Chopra).

Some will likely call this a sexist generalization, but I think men are especially in danger of this. After all, how many women have died because they didn’t live up to the fantasy of some strange man? (Certainly Korrol uses his character’s relationship to the opposite sex to make this point.) So, maybe these are lessons some people actually need, while some of us had to learn them growing up or risk never making it to adulthood.

Book Review of The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen, by Taylor Marsh

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The Sexual Education of a Beauty QueenI won a copy of Taylor Marsh‘s The Sexual Education of Beauty Queen through Goodreads.

Description from Goodreads:
“The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen” is at once memoir, commentary, enlightenment, and a little dose of self-help. Taylor Marsh was Miss Missouri and performed on Broadway, hosted a radio show, and starred in a one-woman show. She was also a relationship consultant for the nation’s largest newsweekly, edited the web’s first megasuccessful women-owned and -operated soft-core pornography site, worked as a phone-sex actress, and studied sexuality and relationships for years. She’s been single, a girlfriend, a mistress, and a wife. She has the inside track to what men want, what women need, and how we all tend to muck it up. As a political commentator and popular writer, Taylor is intelligent and inspiring. She blends personal experience, pop culture, and the politics of sex in an entertaining, engaging, and inspiring read.

Review:
This was not a big winner for me, for several reasons. This despite the fact that I actually agreed with a lot of her final conclusions, appreciated her take on feminism and thought some of what she had to say, especially about the church, was very brave. The problem for me was that I think she should have stuck with an academic argument and left out the autobiography. Because often the biographical sections just came across as braggy and cluttered up the message she was trying to convey. But let me break down a few of my more specific complaints.

Marsh tried to simultaneously hold onto her “I’m so innocent,” Midwestern beauty queen person and tell the reader about all the sexually liberated, kinky things she was doing. And it just didn’t work. They really are kind of mutually exclusive.

Further, despite presenting herself as ultra liberal and accepting—she talked to prostitutes like people, after all—the book is full of micro-aggressions against the same people and demographics she’s claiming to liberate. For example, stating that managing circus talent was the perfect previous experience for corralling the misfit strippers, models and XXX-raters who worked at a porn startup and denigrating the men who called the phone sex line for some of the more deviant fantasies. She seems to want to simultaneously be believed to be open and accepting of all fantasy, while also making it clear she maintains the moral and societal high ground. Again, it just doesn’t work.

Also, several events in the book feel very re-remembered. For example, she claims to have started working in a sex phone bank explicitly for the opportunity to talk to men about why they call for phone sex. I seriously doubt she was being that introspective at the time. Some of these re-remembrances go all the way back to childhood. This goes along with how grandiose she seems to feel her contributions to feminism have been, though the scale doesn’t seem to have been borne out in reality.

I get that this is an autobiography of sorts, but it’s also presented as a bit of a self-help, behind the curtain look at various aspects of the sex industry. But very little of that materializes. The author says over and over again, “I was…” or “I did” or some variation there of. She was the first editor of a soft porn internet site. She was the first person to introduce an alternative personals page to a syndicated newspaper. She interviewed dominatrixes and prostitutes. She worked for a sex phone bank. But she says very very little about these things other than that she did them and even less that I would consider particularly enlightening on the subject. The whole thing just comes across as a self-centered brag book. We learn about her boyfriends and her relationships and she dropped several references to her own previous publications, but I finished disappointed. I mean a whole chapter in the beginning is dedicated to what she watched on television growing up. And while some of the feminist critique of early Hollywood was interesting, I just didn’t care.

Worst of all, after telling the reader how bad rules on how to get a man are, even taking a website to task for swearing they wouldn’t and then doing it, she ended the book on a list of rules for how to get your man. She didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. Sure, it starts with know what you want, which is great and more female centric than a lot of lists, but it’s still a ‘what to do’ list!

Put simply, a whole lot of this is about Taylor Marsh, not sexual education or sexuality or sex. And while that might work for some, it wasn’t enough to keep me interested. I mean, where are all those “Relationship Secrets from the Trenches” we’re promised. We never take our gaze off the narrator long enough to even realize we’re in a trench, let alone learn anything from it.

Addendum: It’s not really relevant in the content review of the book, but for those looking to read the paperback, it’s worth noting that the font can’t be any bigger that 10pt (it’s notably  smaller than standard) and it’s single spaced. I found it hard to read and I don’t yet have age related eye constraints.

What I’m reading: Coffee with cream