Antidote: Self-Help for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Everyone wants to be happy. But despite our goal of being happy, many of us still live frustrated, frustrated, and stressed. Oliver Berkman’s Antidote will not bring you instant happiness, but it does offer some extremely helpful tips on how to cope with life’s adversity.
Who is it for
The subtitle of this book is “Happiness for People Who Cannot Become Positive Thinking,” and it is accurate. Antidote takes a lot of the usual advice about positive thinking and turns it upside down. This is a self-help book for people who are fed up with the typical self-help books, “be positive” (although you’ll love the Antidote , even if you love positive books). It inspires hope without making you roll your eyes.
Small portions of the book share common themes, reminiscent of Ryan Holiday’s “Hurdle is the Way” (which we have already covered ) and ” David and Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell. For the most part, if you found these two books helpful, you will probably enjoy this one as well.
What do you get
Author Oliver Berkman shares his own experience of (and dislikes) positive self-help thinking. Despite this, he embarks on a quest for a deeper understanding of happiness, leading him to places like the Albert Ellis Institute (whose founder berates its members for their own good) and the Insight Meditation Society. He also collects information about happiness through interviews with people such as The Power of the Present, Eckhart Tolle, and by studying the works of the philosophers Seneca, Alan Watts, and Erich Fromm.
Berkman combines wisdom and advice from this diverse source and breaks down his knowledge into eight chapters, some of which include:
- Trying too much to be happy
- What would Seneca do? The Stoic Art of Resisting the Worst Scenario
- The Storm Before Calm: Buddhist Guide to Not Thinking Positively
- Security Trick: The Hidden Benefits of Insecurity
- Museum of Failures: The Case for Accepting Your Mistakes
One of Berkman’s main points is contrary to common sense: you are unhappy because you are trying too hard to be happy. He quotes the philosopher John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself if you are happy and stop being happy.”
Berkman explains this point:
A person who chooses to “think positively” must constantly scan their mind for negative thoughts – there is no other way the mind could ever assess its success with an operation – nevertheless, this scan will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts.
When we try to suppress negative thoughts or drown them out with positive ones, we end up achieving the very result that we tried so hard to avoid. It’s like when someone tells you not to think about a polar bear for at least a minute. What’s on your mind right now?
One trick you won’t succeed
One of the most interesting points discussed by Berkman concerns goal setting. While this may sound like a trivial “high-level” task, setting a goal and determining its importance is critical to the development of your life. You may have a specific goal or milestone that you aspire to by a certain age in order to “achieve” your happiness. Berkman tells the story of a man who wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was forty:
Chris Kayes recalled that during one course he taught, “at the end of the class, a leader came up to me and said that his goal was to be a millionaire by the time he was forty. This is what you hear all the time in business schools. And he did it – he was forty-two, so he hit right on target. But he was also divorced and had health problems. And his children didn’t talk to him anymore. ”
Fame, ego, and pride do not necessarily bring happiness and fulfillment. Worse yet, they can lead to results you didn’t expect. Berkman writes:
As Chris Keys noted, the climbers who died while climbing Mount Everest in 1996 successfully achieved their goal: they climbed to the top. The tragic unintended consequence was that they did not return alive.
This is a simple reminder that, for whatever reason, many of us forget in the midst of our daily stresses and routines. This does not mean that you should not dream a lot. However, remember the goals that you set and everything that may be associated with these goals: what you have to give up, what shortcomings this goal is associated with, etc. Your goal will make you more enviable or something that are you really interested and excited ? Achieving a goal at the expense of everything else or ignoring other risks can lead to unpleasant surprises and regrets.
Our opinion
I first learned self-help when I was graduating from high school (shout “Tony Robbins’ Unlimited Power “). I found that Berkman shares great advice that I only found in excerpts from various other self-help or philosophy books. It reminds us that simply putting extra effort into “trying” to be happier does not necessarily make us happier, and what we think will make us happy may not actually do. Berkman also reminds us of the power of negative thinking by pointing out the benefits of things that seem like flaws, such as failure and personal insecurity.
You can buy the book on Amazon for $ 16.05 on the Kindle, or $ 13.21 for the paperback version. Oliver Berkman also writes a weekly column, This Column Will Change Your Life, for The Guardian . You can find out more about Oliver Berkman on his website.