P R O B L E M A T I C

While I agree with a lot of the book, I think the author has serious blind spots including not addressing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He hand waves away pursuits of psychological safety as self indulgent silliness. To be honest, it sounds like the experience with his son’s self esteem evaluation triggered him to dismiss the whole field of mental health. To be clear, yes, you can have insecurity and low self esteem and still create, but that doesn’t mean poor mental health is not a common impediment. Anyone with PTSD knows psychological safety is necessary to realize one’s full potential, not to mention, in the words of Mel Robbins: “Really well-meaning good people do really shitty things when they feel shitty about themselves.”

The author cited a study of Korean students who scored above the US on a math test, but ranked themselves lower on their own ability as evidence that one does not need to have high self regard to perform well, but the author fails to report that S Korea has the highest suicide rate of any developed nation. Can’t create if you’re dead. To be clear I am not arguing that we should be artificially inflating kids’ self esteem as boomer parents did, but the response is not to pretend psychological needs don’t exist. The answer is to help kids feel valued and safe regardless of their inevitable flaws and weaknesses. Pretending the weaknesses aren’t weaknesses serves to reinforce their importance in determining worth. Pretending their needs are irrelevant is just as, if not more, short sighted.
Also problematic was the overly confident tone of the book. Beliefs are presented without sufficient humility or acknowledgement that they may be wrong. Observations of correlations are presented as causal relationships. The author’s reasoning is (maddeningly) not subjected to the same pedantic scrutiny he holds plebeians to when they say the sky is blue: “BuT hOW dO yoU kNoW??!”. While I actually agreed with him on several of his points, the lack of an investigative tone coupled with the apparent inability to empathize with common psychological blocks that disrupt people’s ability to function raised flags for me. The narration also amplifies this tone of superiority in a really tiring way. And finally, I found the transition music to be clunky, but didn’t subtract stars for that.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!