On how to lead kinder, richer and more authentic lives - and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish.
Table of contents
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
School curricula are not engineered on the basis of close study of the determining ingredients of fulfilled adult lives.
To obtain a tactical advantage, use selective honesty, diversion, and a surplus of secrecy.
Adaptability and timing are essential to retaining power.
🎨 Impressions
I completely agree with the author on the importance of learning emotional alongside technical skills. This past year has highlighted for me my own setbacks in this field when encountering obstacles, and I look forward to continuing to grow and improve.
🔍 How I Discovered It
Browsed through School of Life's books.
👤 Who Should Read It?
The book goes into emotions, friendships, relationships and self evaluation. This was a good “beginner to psychology” book and I recommend if you are interested in how your upbringing affects your everyday life
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☘️ How the Book Changed Me
It changed the way I viewed the wielding of power by proving that...
Everyone wants and needs to have some degree of power and control over their situations.
Don’t judge people based on their stated goals, but rather on their actual results. Many people who claim they don’t want power are either naive or manipulative.
There is always a way to gain power without causing others to resent you. Power is so important in gaining the respect and admiration needed to raise one's social status.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
"We have grown bored of the world we haven't begun to study properly. That, among other things, is why time is racing by." - C18 Time is Short
“Life is a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal-seeking. The only stable element in our lives is craving: the only destination is the journey.” - C20 There is no Destination
There might still be a way to live light-heartedly amidst catastrophe.
📒 Summary + Notes
Pilot light idea: of making sure we keep at least a small light on within that reminds us of our sanity and self-kindness when we’re tumbling through a variety of emotional messes.
1. A Suspicion of School
we might have children of our own and by all appearances be an adult, and yet still be living within as though there were ‘exams’ to pass and cups to be won.
When worried parents try to tame their fears as to what will ultimately become of the precious and vulnerable little person they have succeeded in putting on the earth, performance at school is (understandably) clung to as the one reliable marker that things are going to be well
A good life requires us to do two relatively tricky things: know how to go along with the rules sufficiently well so as not to get mired in needless fights with authority; and simultaneously never to believe too blindly or too passively in the long-term validity of everything we’re asked to study.
many of us in fact don’t manage to leave at that point at all. In a deep part of our minds, we may linger long into adulthood, not in a classroom precisely, but in terms of how our minds work, caged within the confines of a school-based worldview
a school worldview inspires a belief that those in authority know what they are doing and that one’s task is to obey
2. No one Knows
so-called geniuses don’t have thoughts different from those we have. They have just learnt to value them differently
our education system primes us to feel that the right thing to do – whenever we want to understand something – is to read what someone else had to say on the topic. In the process, we automatically give up on an equally and often far richer source of insight: our own experience.
In order to give our minds the true respect they deserve, we may need to learn to be a little less respectful of the minds of others.
3. Understand Your Childhood
Our chances of leading a fulfilled adult life depend overwhelmingly on our knowledge of, and engagement with, the nature of our own childhoods, for it is in this period that the dominant share of our adult identity is moulded and our characteristic expectations and responses set
Distortions’ – departures from reality and an ideal of mental health and maturity.
Without a proper understanding of our childhoods, it won’t matter how brilliant our qualifications, how many fortunes we have made, how stellar our reputation or how outwardly cheerful our families, we will be doomed to flounder on our own psychological complexities
The sign that we have graduated in the topic with honours is when at last we can know and think non-defensively about how we are (in small ways and large) a little mad, and what exactly in the distant past might have made us so.
4. Love yourself
To fail is the norm
Everyone is a mess
Our brains are very faulty
Our histories
We are more than what we do
5. Be Kind
As we grow up, we get better at the superficial mechanics of kindness – but not necessarily better at understanding why kindness should matter as it does
6. Time Is Short
The more we experience new things, the longer every section of time will seem; the more we are navigating the familiar, the more time will feel as if it is rushing past.
7. Give Up on People
It’s in the lives of children that we see the inability to give up on someone take on its starkest and most regrettable forms
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