This is another book I finished lately. At the end of last year I was seeing an occupational therapist for some mental health issues I was struggling with, and she reccomended I give this a read. I was pretty skeptical when I googled it, it seemed very TED-talk-core. It turns out that Brown’s (apparently meteoric) rise to fame occurred because of a TED talk she gave, so that gives an idea as to what sort of book this is.
Anyway, the book itself. It’s alright. A few parts grated on me; all the people used for reference seemed fictional and not particularly well written, unlike Emily Nagoski’s “case studies” which we were told were fictional and were also incredible well-written. It was also a bit Instagram-management-consultant-core with lots of capitalised Words and list summaries. idk. it wasn’t for me.
So that’s the way it was written, what about what it had to say? The tl;dr is being vulnerable, emotionally, intelectually, whatevery, is important and hard. When you stop trying, good things stop happening, and the lack of trying slowly erodes everything important to you. She spends a lot of words analysing the different things people feel vulnerable about, and how they cope, and so on. I think this is basically correct.
The book is informed in her research and teaching (lectures in social work, as well as miscellaneous management stuff), which sort of explains why it feels kinda… ungrounded? (which is ironic). it has the vibe of “subjects reported” throughout, although Brown does bring in her own psychology and tries to make it relevant and personal, for the “storytelling”, it didn’t quite stick it.
The final chapter on parenting was pretty great, actually. It did follow my least favourite chapter about management/leadership, though. There’s no best way to parent; you just have to be an adult you want your child to grow up to be like. I like that phrasing.
The content was correct and like, yeah, I should think about it and Dare Greatly more often – it’s hard and scary ;-; The delivery didn’t do it for me, hence why this took me like 6 months to read…