The Courage to be Disliked - Book Summary, Notes & Highlights

Adlerian psychology about how to change your mindset to follow a simpler and happier life.

Table of contents

1. 🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

2. 🎨 Impressions

   1. 🔍 How I Discovered It

   2. 👤 Who Should Read It?

3. ☘️ How the Book Changed Me

4. ✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

5. 📒 Summary + Notes

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. The world is simple and life is simple, too.

2. We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences.

3. Most of what we think of as competition is just made up and hurting our happiness.

🎨 Impressions

What an empowering, rational, thoughtfully crafted book. The Courage To Be Disliked comes in the calm, cool-headed style you would expect from Eastern philosophers. By shining a light on Adler’s work, it fills a gap in our current pop psychology conversation. It provides a useful, level-headed approach to living a happy and fulfilled life.

🔍 How I Discovered It

Tim Feriss's Podcast.

👤 Who Should Read It?

The Courage to Be Disliked will guide you through the concepts of self-forgiveness, self-care, and mind decluttering. It is a deeply liberating way of thinking, allowing you to develop the courage to change and ignore the limitations that you might be placing on yourself.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

The book led me into a deeper state of introspection, where I reflected on the moments in life when I was beating myself up over the past, the future and never really allowing myself to be happy with my present state. It made me realise all the unhappy situations which I needlessly put myself through and need to be more aware of.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

“once one is released from the schema of competition, the need to triumph over someone disappears.”

“But is being normal, being ordinary, really such a bad thing? Is it something inferior? Or, in truth, isn't everybody normal?”

“One needs to think not What will this person give me? but, rather, What can I give to this person? That is commitment to the community.”

📒 Summary + Notes

10 Key points

1. The Life-Lie

The state of coming up with all manner of pretexts in order to avoid the life tasks

2. Reward and punishment education

When trying to be recognised by others, almost all people treat satisfying other people’s expectations as the means to that end.

3. separation of tasks

We need to think with the perspective of “Whose task is this?”Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made? and continually separate one’s own tasks from other people’s tasks. One does not intrude on other people’s tasks.

4. Inclination

According to Kant: To human beings, not wanting to be disliked by others, is an entirely natural desire, and an impulse.

5. True Freedom

In short, “freedom is being disliked by other people”.

It is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom, and a sign that you are living in accordance with your own principles.

6. Social Interest

In order to develop an "interest in society", we need to make the switch from attachment of self (self-interest) to concern from others (social interest). In Adlerian psychology, a sense of belonging is something that one can attain only by making an active commitment to the community of one’s own accord, and not simply by being here.

7. Horizontal versus Vertical Relationships

Vertical: When one praises another, the goal is “to manipulate someone who has less ability than you.” It is not done out of gratitude or respect. “Judgment” is a word that comes out of vertical relationships.

Horizontal: For “encouragement” you convey gratitude, saying “thank you”, “I’m glad” or “that was a big help”. In horizontal relationships, there will be words of more straightforward gratitude and respect and joy. When one hears words of gratitude, one knows that one has made a contribution to another person.

8. Self affirmation versus Self acceptance

Self-affirmation: making suggestions to oneself, such as “I can do it” or “I am strong”, even when something is simply beyond one’s ability. It is a notion that can bring about a superiority complex and may even be termed a way of living in which one lies to oneself.

Self-acceptance: if you cannot do something, one is simply accepting “one’s incapable self” as is and moving forward so that one can do whatever one can. It is not a way of lying to oneself.

9. Work

Labor is not a means of earning money. It is through labor that one makes contributions to others and commits to one’s community, and that one truly feels “I am of use to someone” and even comes to accept one’s existential worth.

The greatest unhappiness is not being able to like oneself. The feeling of contributing to a greater cause, even if it is not visible, is the only thing that can give one a true awareness that one has worth.

10. Mediocrity

You are probably rejecting normality because you equate being normal with being incapable. Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority.