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This Book Made Me a Happier Person

2022-03-30 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 19:03 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, Family

In a Book Club episode Ali gives five lessons from Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga's The Courage to Be Disliked, built on Alfred Adler: the past need not determine us, we create emotions to suit our goals, all problems are interpersonal (separate your tasks from others'), happiness is the feeling of contributing, and freedom is the courage to be disliked.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The Courage to Be Disliked: a dialogue between a youth and a philosopher on Alfred Adler's theories

  • ★★★ Ali calls The Courage to Be Disliked one of the books he has most often recommended, and says it probably changed how he thinks about happiness and made him genuinely happier. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says the lessons of The Courage to Be Disliked are somewhat controversial and do not apply to everyone all the time, but taken with nuance they can help you become happier. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali finds the dialogue form of The Courage to Be Disliked, a young man arguing with a philosopher, a novel way to write a self-help book whose theories are controversial. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ The philosopher's advice on happiness in The Courage to Be Disliked is based on the theories of the 19th-century Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler. — 00:01:31
  • ★ Though he spent a year studying psychology at university, Ali had never heard of Alfred Adler, only of his contemporaries Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. — 00:02:00
  • ★★ Ali recommends The Courage to Be Disliked for everyone. — 00:02:00

00:02:27 — Lesson one: stop thinking your past determines your present and your future

  • ★★ Alfred Adler (quoted): Against the Freudian view that childhood determines who we are, Adlerian psychology holds that we need not be defined by our past and are free to choose our behaviour, emotions and goals. — 00:02:30
  • ★★ Alfred Adler (quoted): Alfred Adler separates our present goals, teleology, from past causes, etiology. — 00:03:11

  • ★★ Alfred Adler (quoted): Alfred Adler claims trauma does not exist: no experience in itself causes success or failure; we make of experiences whatever suits our purposes. — 00:03:40

    “We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, the so-called trauma”

  • ★★ Ali calls the claim of The Courage to Be Disliked and Adler that trauma does not exist a little clickbaity, a talking point that makes everyone think it cannot be true. — 00:04:18

  • ★★ Read charitably, Ali takes Adler's point to be that negative experiences happen and affect how we grow up, but nothing is determined purely by them. — 00:04:18
  • ★★★ Ali advises reading self-help books neither at face value nor dismissing them, but with a pinch of salt, applying them to your experience and asking whether each is a useful mental model. — 00:04:47
  • ★★ Ali finds it a good mental model for his own life that he need not let the past determine his actions, and that he can change the meaning he gives past events. — 00:04:47

00:05:35 — Lesson two: we create emotions to suit our present goals; Seneca and How Emotions Are Made

  • ★★ Ichiro Kishimi (quoted): The second lesson of The Courage to Be Disliked: our emotions do not control us; we create emotions to suit our present goals. — 00:05:35
  • ★★ Ichiro Kishimi (quoted): When a waiter spills coffee on the youth in The Courage to Be Disliked, the philosopher says the youth chooses to shout and constructs anger to justify it. — 00:06:04
  • ★★ Seneca (quoted): In his essay on anger, Seneca writes that the best plan is to reject the first incentives to anger at once. — 00:06:33 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali reads Seneca as saying there is a gap between a stimulus and the feeling it creates, which we can use to choose calm over anger, courage over fear, joy over misery. — 00:07:03
  • ★★ Ali says the channel will make a video about Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made at some point, and later that they will definitely do a Book Club on it. — 00:07:03 · Book Club
  • ★★ Lisa Feldman Barrett (quoted): In How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says emotions are not responses to our environment but are constructed by the brain to help us understand it. — 00:07:32
  • ★★ Lisa Feldman Barrett (quoted): As an Invisibilia episode presents Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory, we have four primordial feelings and apply a story to one of them, generating the 100-plus emotions shaped by society and personality. — 00:07:56
  • ★★★ Ali says emotions involve interpretation and story rather than being direct factual responses, so we need not be wedded to them and can sometimes change our story and thus our feelings. — 00:08:25
  • ★★ Ichiro Kishimi (quoted): The third lesson of The Courage to Be Disliked: all problems are interpersonal relationship problems. — 00:08:54

00:08:58 — Lesson three: all problems are interpersonal relationship problems; separation of tasks

  • ★★ Ali does not agree with The Courage to Be Disliked that all problems are interpersonal: getting sick, for example, is a physical problem, though he finds the viewpoint useful. — 00:09:23
  • ★★ Having lived a privileged life, Ali found many of his own problems genuinely interpersonal, such as worrying what someone thinks of him or whether a person he asks out will reject him. — 00:09:53 · unfair advantage
  • ★★ Ichiro Kishimi (quoted): The Courage to Be Disliked says all interpersonal problems come from intruding on another's tasks or having one's own intruded upon; the solution is the separation of tasks. — 00:10:15
  • ★★★ Ali applies the separation of tasks to the fear of rejection: what other people think of us is their task, not ours, and trying to change it causes problems. — 00:10:45
  • ★★ Ali tries to tell his mum that what her children do with their lives is their task, and her being okay with that is her task. — 00:11:14 · Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★ Like the stoic dichotomy of control, Ali says he can control only his own actions and to an extent his thoughts, so he should not worry much about the rest. — 00:11:43 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali says changing thought patterns can take years, and many people benefit from therapy, counselling and CBT, which focus on rewiring thought patterns. — 00:11:43

00:12:16 — Lesson four: happiness is a feeling of contributing; Tiago Forte's servant hedonism

  • ★★★ Ichiro Kishimi (quoted): The fourth lesson of The Courage to Be Disliked: true happiness is a feeling of contributing to something or someone, of being useful, so ask what you can give rather than get. — 00:12:16

    “true happiness, real meaning and happiness and fulfillment is a feeling of contributing to something or someone”

  • ★★★ Happiness as contribution was probably the main idea Ali took from The Courage to Be Disliked; it changed his approach, as before he assumed that if his life was good he would be happy. (hedged) — 00:12:16

  • ★★★ Ali's happiest moments were not hedonistic pleasures but times he put in work and was useful to others; teaching, in real life, on his Zoom classes and in his Part-Time YouTuber Academy, is one of the things that bring him the most joy. — 00:12:57 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Zoom
  • ★ Ali says that, as parents and parenting books tell it, having children apparently reduces day-to-day happiness, but the feeling of contributing makes it worth it. (hedged) — 00:13:26

  • ★★ Tiago Forte (quoted): Tiago Forte advises that when torn between two options in life you pick the one that helps more people, an idea he calls servant hedonism. — 00:13:55 · Tiago Forte

    “he calls this the idea of servant hedonism”

  • ★★ Ali calls servant hedonism fantastic: contributing to others makes us happier, so contributing is in a way selfish and hedonistic. — 00:14:24

  • ★ Ali calls The Courage to Be Disliked a bit of a clickbait title, since the book is not really about the courage to be disliked. — 00:14:24

  • ★★★ Ichiro Kishimi (quoted): The fifth lesson of The Courage to Be Disliked: ultimate freedom is having the courage to be disliked. — 00:14:24

    “ultimate freedom is having the courage to be disliked”

00:14:40 — Lesson five: freedom is having the courage to be disliked; not caring how his videos perform

  • ★★ Alfred Adler (quoted): Alfred Adler holds that wanting to be liked is a recipe for unhappiness: seeking recognition and caring only how others judge us, we end up living other people's lives. — 00:14:53
  • ★★★ Ali knows hundreds of people who want to start YouTube channels, businesses, podcasts or blogs but do not, because they lack the courage to be disliked and fear being judged. — 00:15:19
  • ★★ Ali says fear of judgement is not the only factor keeping people in their work: with a family to feed or a mortgage to pay, you have to do some kind of work. — 00:15:48
  • ★★★ Applying the separation of tasks, Ali became a lot happier when he tried to stop caring how his videos perform; he used to feel very worried when one did badly. — 00:15:48
  • ★★ How a video performs with the audience is not Ali's task: he can only show up and speak authentically, and thinking about viewers' reactions takes the fun out of being a YouTuber. — 00:16:18

00:17:05 — Sponsor read for the Fabulous app

00:18:24 — How he read the book, Shortform summary, Book Club playlist, sign-off

  • ★ Ali has read The Courage to Be Disliked twice cover to cover, then read its Shortform summary to put this video together. — 00:18:44 · Shortform

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether Ali gets authors' permission to discuss their books, the channel replies no: authors are usually cool about it. — creator comment
  • ★ To a viewer who found The Millionaire Fastlane badly written, Ali replies that everyone else he has spoken to who read it and started a business raves about it. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Alfred Adler · separation of tasks · The Courage to Be Disliked

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Carl Jung · Lisa Feldman Barrett · Seneca · Sigmund Freud · Tiago Forte

Projects: Book Club · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Building a Second Brain · How Emotions Are Made · Invisibilia · On Anger

Concepts: cognitive behavioural therapy · dichotomy of control · etiology · servant hedonism · stoicism · teleology · unfair advantage

Products: Fabulous · Shortform · Zoom

Only in the description or credits: Fumitake Koga · Ichiro Kishimi · The Millionaire Fastlane

Also centred on separation of tasks: 21 Life Lessons I've Learned

Also centred on The Courage to Be Disliked: Monthly Favourites #7 - Ali Abdaal

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