A lot of interesting ideas in this book, but it's mostly just that: ideas without a solid concept of how to put them into action. Villanueva brings upA lot of interesting ideas in this book, but it's mostly just that: ideas without a solid concept of how to put them into action. Villanueva brings up thought-provoking points, laying out personal stories mixed with historical lessons and information about the philanthropic industry. (Because the truth is, even nonprofits are built like profit-driven businesses.)
I certainly agree that it's crucial for the wealthiest people in the world to make an actual difference with their money, rather than simply perpetuating ongoing cycles of victimization and white dominance.
But a lot of Villanueva's ideas honestly boil down to...relying on wealthy, powerful people to grow consciences. And it's hard to see how that's possible, especially reading this book in the absolute slog of depression and disillusionment that is 2020.
I think this is more useful as a guidebook for the top tiers of management in powerful organizations; if people in charge could think about ways to begin dismantling and distributing their excessive power, that would start to create a lot of important changes. But I'm not sure it gives me much in the way of actionable paths to make a difference.
"Even just asking the question opens us to radically different possible realities," he says, and I suppose that much is true. I'm trying to open my mind to other possibilities and to see the world as it can be, which is hard, because...the people with the power to make that difference don't particularly seem to care. But perhaps there's still hope, and this is, ultimately a book built on hope - and the idea that humanity can come together to heal longstanding wounds....more
Alternately inspiring and infuriating. Ultimately, by the end, it falls much more into the latter category.
It's fitting that, like with Burnout: The SAlternately inspiring and infuriating. Ultimately, by the end, it falls much more into the latter category.
It's fitting that, like with Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, I had to wait months for my library hold to come through, then spent weeks stressing about having the time to actually sit down and read it before it was overdue. (I'm several days past that point now; thank goodness my library no longer charges late fees.)
Odell's overarching premise is solid, and I agreed with a fair amount of her thoughts and reflections. We are spread far too thin. We spend our days at work, and our nights and weekends feeling guilty for not accomplishing enough in our "down" time. This can include anything from what seems like an endless list of "productive" activities: chores, family life, conversations with friends, errands, cooking, cleaning, hobbies, writing, even taking the time to read books like this.
Odell opens by talking about us being "in a world where our value is determined by our productivity," which is absolutely true and is definitely crushing a lot of us beneath its insupportable weight.
However. This book is a mess.
Odell says somewhere near the beginning that the book changed and flowed and became other things as she wrote, which is absolutely true and makes it rather hard to read as an actual book that's meant to convey a coherent set of information. It's more like a series of blog posts or journal entries cobbled together into something with a professional binding and a marketing campaign that (judging from the ridiculously long library hold list) was quite successful.
But what does this book actually say? What substance does it have? What guidelines are there to the actual question proposed in the title: How to do nothing?
I feel like I absorbed a lot of information over the past couple of days while learning and retaining very little. Except that Odell really, really loves birds.
She tries to say several times that she's not "anti-technology," yet so many of her discussions of technology are eye-rollingly obtuse. As someone who used to work for Facebook (??), she seems to conclude that you can't just quit Facebook. (Except I did, four years ago, and I haven't missed it for a single day of that?) She also doesn't seem to be aware of any of the complexities of using social media, particularly the concept of ever having accounts that aren't tied to your real name and face. Does she think everyone on social media is an aspiring YouTube personality? (Although she doesn't even mention that whole side of the internet.)
She has these weird, completely useless ideas of adapting to networks where you have to physically walk to a location to view a digital messageboard, like people did in the 70s. Because...? Physical space, face-to-face contact, and the need to travel somewhere to access information is of primary importance. Which is great for people who are disabled, poor, from other countries, unable to travel to other locations for any number of reasons...
While Odell periodically refers to the idea of privilege, she constantly demonstrates her own, as someone who lives in the Bay Area and only has to travel to a physical workplace twice a week. The rest of the time, she makes money creating abstract art or sits around in the Rose Garden, listening to birds, reading books, and thinking of ways to tell other people to step away from the endless rat races of their lives.
It's all very nice (I would like the life she leads), and I do agree with some of the points she makes, but she buries the important, tangible bits in muddles of pretentiously dense and often inaccessible language. This isn't the worst example, but here's an excerpt of how she writes for 204 pages:
"Basically, the space of appearance is an encounter small and concentrated enough that the plurality of its actors is un-collapsed. The dynamism of this plural encounter is what underwrites the possibility of power; we know this intuitively from the form of the dialogue, where the interplay of two arguments leads to something new."
The paragraphs often don't flow well into one another (what point is she trying to make? a lot of the time I couldn't tell, and I don't think she knew or cared, either), and the chapters largely didn't connect. For one chapter, she spent most of the time praising performance art. (Which, frankly, I find annoying and have next to zero interest in.) More to the point, I didn't see any real connection drawn between a man pulling down his pants and pooping on stage and the idea of restoring the ecosystem around us. The latter, I have a lot of interest and investment in. The former? I don't understand how that man is one of your heroes, Odell. Would you actually talk to him if you'd met him on the street?
I don't have alternate suggestions for books to read, but I'll keep searching for ones that talk more substantially about the very important, very timely issues Odell unfortunately buried beneath a lot of dense language and disconnected stories....more
Nothing makes it more clear that you need a book about burnout than sitting down to read a book about burnout and feeling stressed the entire time thaNothing makes it more clear that you need a book about burnout than sitting down to read a book about burnout and feeling stressed the entire time that you're not doing a dozen other things simultaneously.
My rating veered back and forth as I read, and I occasionally wrote down very irritated notes as I argued with the authors on points I didn't think they made clear or specific enough. This isn't a perfect book. You're not going to come out of it with your life solved and all the messy pieces put neatly back together. That's kind of the point of the book, though.
It's not meant to fix you, at least not right away. It's giving you something to hang onto as you take a few steps in the right direction.
It's a very approachable, readable book, which can come across a bit cutesy at times, but I appreciated this format. When I'm already stressed and feeling like my time is stretched thin, the last thing I want to do is sit down and read a dense academic text that I have to puzzle through and pull out a ton of reference books to adequately understand. I simply wouldn't do it. (It's like a healthcare system that's structured so people who need therapy for things like anxiety are forced to pick up the phone and haggle with insurance and explain why they need the help and jump through hoops to acquire the care that would better enable them to take those kinds of self-supporting steps to begin with.)
Anyway, I didn't mind the tl;dr sections and the sprinkles of pop culture to add interest and context. (Although if you're going to add an "ugh" after Nietzsche when quoting him, you should be doing the same for Cassandra Clare, are you kidding me.) The only thing that consistently annoyed me about the writing style was the inclusion of "(ugh)" after every time they mentioned "the patriarchy." Okay, I get that you're trying to soften it for people who grimace and check out when faced with that word, but it comes across as patronizing and insincere.
The other thing that bugged me was that despite passages where the writers set forth very progressive, inclusive, diverse views of feminism and the world, both their case studies were very heteronormative. They compiled a lot of different patients/data/stories into two women whose lives we followed throughout the book, which was an interesting and fairly effective format. Except one woman's stress was largely centered around her family life - the responsibilities she had to her kids, and the husband who ended up being more supportive than she'd given him credit for, once she backed off and let him try to handle household chores in his own way without nagging him.
Then the other woman, an immensely intelligent black scientist who geeked out over Star Trek and had never felt the need for a romantic partner to complete her, met and fell in love with a man who...kind of completed her.
I am so tired of women's stories always coming back to men and children. Yes, that is important to cover for a large segment of the population. What about the rest?
Similarly, there are a couple of quick asides about how introversion and extroversion can make results and needs a little bit different, but this was never explored in the slightest. The main advice was essentially: get exercise, build a community, and make the time to rest properly.
All good advice, and it does get a bit more detailed than that in some areas that I found helpful for further thought, but it didn't do a lot to decrease the general theme of burnout. We're so burned out and guilty and anxious that we don't feel like we have the time or resources for...a lot of the things that the writers insist we Must Find The Time For.
Where are we supposed to grab the time for sufficient self-care? From work, where we have to go to make a living so we can continue eating and paying rent? From sleep, which we're not allowed to carve extra hours from because that can literally kill us? We can't make the days longer. That's kind of the big issue facing our entire society right now. And saying "school days should be shorter and workplaces should accommodate this change for parents, too," is a great idea but also not a thing we as individuals can really go about fixing. Unless we run for office, which certainly isn't going to leave a lot of time for rest and self-care and burnout reduction.
Also, some of the time breakdowns were absolutely absurd. In the chart for how to fit 10 hours of rest into every 24 hour period, "rest" was broken down into 8 hours of sleep, 30 mins of "connection," 30 mins of "exercise," 30 mins of "food," and 30 mins of "wild card/misc."
THIRTY MINUTES FOR FOOD? "Don't fret," the authors say soothingly on the next page. "That includes all meals, shopping, cooking, and eating."
I'm sorry, what world do you live in where eating three meals a day, cooking those meals, and going to the grocery store only takes thirty minutes? It's a very distinct example of how weirdly out of touch they were with reality at various points.
Still, there were enough interesting charts and tips for me to try out some of the methods for a while to see if I can structure my days better. I definitely need to learn how to balance rest and the constant urge to Be Productive (and the guilt over never doing enough). And I do think this is the kind of book that would benefit from multiple slow, careful rereads as you work through the steps and ease into a more balanced life.
Unfortunately, I'm too busy for that. Too many other books to read and not enough time in my day to fit it all in.
I do, however, want to try to find some other books in this vein that can help fill in some of the other gaps. I need to look into Toxic Productivity more, for example, and see if I can find anything in the self-help category that seems like it's written for a person more like me, whose end goal isn't to get married and join a bunch of active social groups or the gym....more
I heard about this book through a coworker who periodically has extended conversations on her desk phone about how she plans to go back to school and I heard about this book through a coworker who periodically has extended conversations on her desk phone about how she plans to go back to school and transition into a different career path. Since I am a nosy eavesdropper, I looked up the title of the book she mentioned as one of her inspirations.
I love the concept: sharing inspirational stories about women who achieved great things later in life - past the point when women's lives are considered "over" by traditional society, especially if they're not centering their lives around their family and children. The execution is unfortunately iffy.
A lot of the stories are very privileged. Yes, if I came from a wealthy family or a decades-long career at the absolute top of my industry, I could also take a year off to travel the world or live off my savings for the rest of my life while dipping my toes into surfing or painting or yoga or writing a blog or whatever else half of these women are being celebrated for. I don't see how that's an achievement, and it's certainly more about having had success early enough in life to indulge in dreams in later decades. That's the opposite message from the one I'd been expecting (hoping) to find in these pages.
Other stories, though, are much more in line with what I was looking for.
Had I taken better notes while reading, rather than lying on my couch with a hot water bottle across my lower abdomen because I haven't hit that particular stage of my womanly life just yet, I would stick a series of quotes here that made me stop and murmur in agreement. Here's one passage, though, that I pulled out for a friend who's in my age range - not quite 40 yet, but old enough to be wondering what we're doing with our lives, if we should know and have a plan by now, and if it's already a bit too late to be getting started:
"Women, meanwhile, are taught that their value lies in their use to other people: their husbands, their children, or, barring these, society at large. (For so long, implicit in the choice not to have children has been the sense that women are obligated to justify this decision by articulating how they will then devote their lives to otherwise making the world a better place.)"
This is absolutely a struggle I have. This book focuses on 40+ because that's generally the cutoff for women's childbearing years, and thus for their traditional value to society. Once you can no longer produce a child from your body, who are you as a woman? Fortunately, this is never a struggle I've gone through; I do not envy the women who desperately want children in their lives and panic as their biological clocks tick away. (There's one story about a woman who had both a biological child and an adopted child in her 40s - not relevant for me, but still an interesting and worthwhile read.)
But the rest of that paragraph still resonated with me. Because while I don't appear to have been born with a maternal bone in my body, there is still a drive to make a mark on the world, to leave something behind so people will remember me. To make a difference so my life has meaning and a purpose and some sort of value.
A lot of people achieve this through children (which I think may be why a lot of children grow up to resent their parents and the burdens placed on their shoulders). Back when I was still in my early 20s, one of my friends had just gone through another rough breakup and told me that if she didn't settle down with a guy in a few more years, she'd adopt just so she wasn't so alone. I thought at the time (and still think now, a decade and a half later) that it was both a weirdly selfish and fully understandable reason to want a child.
Books are my children; like children, there's no guarantee that they'll love or care for me in my old age, but I can't help pouring everything I have into them, because I was born wanting this in my life. And as I move into my late 30s, it gets more discouraging to hear all these stories about people who had their big breaks "later in life" - by which they usually mean late 20s or early 30s. It's really not that inspiring anymore. What about the people who take longer? What happens with them? Is it still possible?
There are some of those stories in this collection, including the example everyone knows, Grandma Moses. There are others that I found equally comforting, because maybe it's not all about leaving a mark on society or the world. Maybe just living - being yourself, as happy and genuine as you can - is worthwhile, too. Maybe you don't have to be "successful" as a mother or in a career for your life to hold value.
And one path may not define you, or may not hold true for your entire life. A lot of the stories include divorce after 40 as a transition, as women discovered that being married wasn't the end of their journeys and that they weren't happy and weren't being true to themselves. It's something that's often seen as selfish and privileged in its own way - one of the women dropped her young children with her husband and went off to find herself - and perhaps that's true, but would it be seen in the same way if it was a man's story?
I wish there was more to this book. I'd like to dig into more of these questions and toss aside the self-important stories from people who think that being a yogini and a vegetarian is something wildly innovative (seriously, why were some of these people chosen??? you had space for 38 and these are the women you profiled?). I'm also not really sold on Lisa Congdon herself, whose art isn't terribly polished or unique, and who is listed as the author, despite having done very little of the work herself. Many of the entries are essays by the featured women, and in the acknowledgments at the close of the book, Congdon says that her sister wrote several of the profiles - yet isn't credited as an author? Instead of Congdon's illustrations, I would've liked to have seen photos of the women being featured, or in many cases, of their artwork. If you're including a woman who made exceptional pottery, or who invented a new art form, your readers are likely to want to see that incredible work. Not Congdon's drawing of a lemon meringue pie.
Strange choices.
Fascinating concept, though, and one step towards figuring out what life can be for a woman heading towards 40....more
The only problem with books about introversion is that usually the only people reading them are introverts. This book starts and ends with the premiseThe only problem with books about introversion is that usually the only people reading them are introverts. This book starts and ends with the premise: if you understand and appreciate yourself, you won't be ashamed of your introversion! Thing is, I'm not. I'm frustrated that the wider world - particularly workplaces and areas where extroversion is the only way to get ahead - doesn't attempt to understand and appreciate people who don't fit into that socially acceptable mold.
This is a nice little book that uses humorous illustrations to explain a bit about how introverts function. Why don't we like parties or big, loud gatherings? Why do we sometimes seem like we're not paying attention to or participating in conversations? Why is it so difficult to find the energy to go to the grocery store after a full day at work, even if you've barely talked to anyone?
A lot definitely struck home, although as the text explains, every introvert is at their own spot on the spectrum. That means not every description or explanation is equally true for everyone in the category. For instance, while I do enjoy deeper conversations, I often prefer smaller groups to one-on-one outings/dinners/etc - largely because it takes the pressure and spotlight off me and allows me to observe and think in peace, contributing when I have something to say but not feeling trapped into being the only focal point.
And while I find small talk annoying, nothing will make me clam up faster than this book's suggestion of asking invasive/personal questions to cut to deeper, introvert-friendly topics. Introverts are slow to open up to other people and need time and space to trust someone enough to start peeling away those layers. You will absolutely drive them away if you start off a conversation with anything resembling: "Tell me about yourself." (I had an extremely extroverted roommate who would greet strangers/new acquaintances with a completely genuine: "Tell me your deepest, darkest secret." I am still baffled this was seen as a possible way to get to know new people.)
How do you befriend an introvert? Open up about yourself first, sharing details in a way that invites and encourages conversation, but doesn't force any personal revelations. And if an introvert starts shying away from a certain topic or says something awkward, for heaven's sake, don't COMMENT ON IT.
I have a lot of thoughts about these things. Moving on.
I think the workplace section of this book could've been a bit longer, but it sounds like the author actually hasn't been IN a typical cubicle-and-offices workplace for a while and thus doesn't have as much personal experience to draw from there. Lucky artist/writer, living the introverted dream. The focus was more on coworker interactions, which can be a difficult area to navigate. What bears more examination, though, is the relationship between managers/supervisors/authorities and their introverted subordinates. With the corporate environment being so heavily weighted toward, as the book says, "extroverted characteristics-such as being outgoing and being able to think quickly on your feet and verbalize off the top of your head," introverts often aren't respected. An extrovert - louder about the work they do and often needing to show little in the way of actual results - is perceived as doing more work than the quiet and diligent introvert.
That's why I think managers should be required to read books like this, or more in-depth studies about different personality traits. How are you going to get the best out of your employees if you're only judging them by very specific, limited, and biased standards?
Humor's a good way to sneak in important topics like that. This book would be a nice introduction to introversion; it'd be a good idea to include a small list of more involved books to follow, for those who are interested enough to continue learning about themselves, or about people who aren't like them....more
Ah, I badly wanted to give this five stars, since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the only author who's earned that rating for every single one of her booAh, I badly wanted to give this five stars, since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the only author who's earned that rating for every single one of her books thus far. This one's just a little too simplistic for that last star.
I'm not convinced it should've been published as-is. I think it was a little lazy to publish a (slightly edited) version of a letter to a friend. While it does follow in the tradition of publishing things such as graduation ceremony speeches, having a singular addressee limits the audience far more than something that was originally geared toward hundreds (even thousands) of individuals.
Adichie's writing is eloquent, sharply intelligent, and thoughtful, as always. She has very important things to say about raising a girl in a world where being female comes with an almost unavoidable set of restrictions, limitations, and assumptions. I agree with nearly all of what she says, particularly the point she hammers home over and over about marriage and children not being something that should define a female's sense of self-worth.
One of my final thoughts as I closed the book was: "But why isn't she talking about how to raise a feminist son?" The answer is, of course, that she was writing to a friend who had just given birth to a daughter. Another question is: Am I feeding into my own internalized, socially-influenced sexism by wanting the conversation to be about men, too? But no, I think it's important to put that weight on the men, too.
Adichie does talk about this sort of thing more in her earlier (and similar) book, We Should All Be Feminists, which is the volume I would recommend if you're only going to read one of these. It's crucial for women to be raised in a way that affirms their individuality, their value, and their independence. But for equality to truly happen, you can't just tell women to be confident and self-assured, because men are still in power, oppressing women, and being raised to believe that women are something to be owned, earned, or controlled. We cannot change society without changing the mindsets of women and men.
I go to work believing I am as valuable as any man or woman there. That doesn't change the fact that men are more likely to be promoted or recognized for their work or that women, on average, earn less money than men for doing similar work or having similar experience.
The other issue I had was Adichie's focus (which she admitted in passing) on heterosexuality as the norm. "I'm writing this assuming she is heterosexual," she tells her friend. "I am assuming that because it is what I feel best equipped to talk about." This wasn't a book about sexuality, no. Her editor probably would have told her it was muddying the message if she'd tried to include that in this slim essay. But I think assuming heterosexuality is as damaging as any number of the other anti-feminist assumptions she cut away at here.
I'm sounding more critical than I intend to be, because I'm only writing about the parts that felt insufficient to me. The rest was typical Adichie, which is a high compliment. This one just lacked a wider, more expansive view, which made it a very wonderful letter to a friend but didn't exactly make it worthy of publication. I wish she'd taken more time to expand it into a true set of essays, because I know she'd have more brilliant thoughts about these topics that would shine if given the space to do so. ...more
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