Ali (00:00): On the outskirts
of the thousand year old city lived a philosopher who taught that the world
was simple and that happiness was within the reach of every man instantly. A young man who
was dissatisfied with life went to visit this philosopher to get to the heart of the matter.
This youth found the world a chaotic mass of contradictions and in his anxious eyes
any notion of happiness was completely absurd. That is the opening to this absolutely incredible
book, The Courage to be Disliked. Which is one of the books I've most often recommended to people
and a book that probably changed the way that I think about happiness, and that probably made
me genuinely happier. And that's a book that we're talking about in this week's episode of Book Club,
the series where we distil and discuss highlights and lessons from some of my favourite books.
Ali (00:38): If you new here, then hi,
my name is Ali. It's nice to meet you. And on this channel we like to explore the evidence based
strategies and tools that we can use to help along our shared journey of living healthier, happier,
more productive lives. And to that end, I do like to do these sort of reviews of books to summarise
the lessons I've learned from them. And I think this book fits really nicely into our happiness
category, because I think if you can take away the lessons from the book with a bit of nuance because
they are somewhat controversial and not fully applicable to absolutely everyone all of the time,
but with enough nuance you can take relevant bits from this and can genuinely help you become
a happier person. Ali (01:09):
All right. So what is the book about? Basically the vibe is that there is this young guy who is
dissatisfied with life and he goes and visits this philosopher. And the book ends up being a dialogue
between the young man and the philosopher. Just on a meta level, this is a somewhat novel and
interesting way of doing a kind of non-fiction self-help book because a lot of the theories
that the philosopher is going to talk about in the book are pretty controversial. And so we,
as the reader, we are in the shoes of the youth being like what? You're saying, trauma doesn't
exist. Screw you, of course it does. What about like children who have like bad upbringing,
of course trauma exists. Then the philosopher is like, well, no because blah, blah, blah.
And so it's really this sort of somewhat confrontational dialogue where the student
is like asking the philosopher to retract his theories. And the philosopher is being
like a zen legend and explaining the theories about how to be happy at the end of the day.
Ali (01:53): Now, the advice that the philosopher is giving
in the book on how to be happy is ultimately all based on the theories of the 19th century Austrian
psychiatrist, Alfred Adler. Now, even though I spent a year studying psychology at university I'd
never actually heard of Alfred Adler. I'd heard of Sigmund Freud and Carl Young, who were his
other contemporaries, but Adler was like the third child of that trio that fewer people know about.
But his theories are super, super interesting. Ali (02:15):
Anyway, this is a book I'd recommend for everyone, but I want to summarise the five key lessons that
I took away from the book when I first read it a few years ago and the five lessons that
I continue to think about fairly often as it relates to my own life and my own happiness.
Ali (02:27): And my first takeaway from the book is that
we should stop thinking that our past determines our present and our future. Now this is somewhat
counterintuitive because most of us have bought into the Freudian school of psychology, which says
that your childhood and your upbringing, all of that stuff determines, to an extent, who you are
as a person today. And therefore, if you want to figure out stuff about today you look at your past
and then you figure things out and then et cetera, et cetera. Like for example, we would assume that
if you were bullied as a child or if your parents divorced when you were younger then you might have
a bit more of a pessimistic outlook about marriage because that was the experience that you had when
you were a child. Ali (02:58):
But one of the key insights from Adlerian psychology is that we in fact do not need
to be defined by our past. And he thinks that we should be, and in fact we are, completely free in
the present right now to choose our behaviour, to choose our emotions, to choose our own goals
and to not let the past define us. If we use this marriage example again, ADLA might say that, hey,
not everyone whose parents were divorced has pessimistic views about marriage. And so it's not
a requirement that if your parents are divorced you now have pessimistic views about marriage.
There is something else going on, which is not as simple as like the Freudian school of psychology
will have us believe. And there's a few different funky terms in a Adlerian psychology to explain
this idea. And his main thing is that he wants us to separate our present goals, which is teleology
from the past causes, which is aetiology. And this separation between teleology and aetiology means
that Adler makes some pretty strong claims. Ali (03:44):
For example, one of the bold claims in Adlerian psychology is that trauma does not exist. I know,
super controversial. Now I'm going to quote Adlerian here where he says no experience is
in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, the
so-called trauma, but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined
by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining. Now, when I first read this
and came across this philosophy in the book for the first time, I was like the young youth in this
being like what? That can't possibly be right, obviously trauma exists. What about children
who suffer child abuse? What about people who've had terrible upbringings? You can't possibly say
that trauma doesn't exist. And to be honest, it is a little bit of a click bitty thing that the
authors of the book and Adler have like espoused here, this idea that trauma doesn't exist. It's a
good talking point that immediately makes everyone think, oh my God, this can't possibly be true.
Ali (04:30): But I guess if we
interpret that charitably and the kind of the way I think about it is not that trauma doesn't exist.
It's that, yes, negative experiences happen to a lot of people and, of course, negative
experiences can affect the way that we grow up and the way that we relate to people as adults.
But his main point seems to be that nothing is determined purely by those experiences. What
Adler says and what the philosopher says in the book is that we are free to choose the meaning
that we ascribe to those events. And to quote the wise philosopher who is in fact, quoting Adela,
no matter what has occurred in your life up to this point it should have no bearing at all on
how you live from now on. Ali (05:00):
Now I want to say another caveat when it comes to self-help books like this,
it's not really a case of like taking their insights and their teaching at completely face
value and thinking this person says trauma doesn't exist, therefore they're a dickhead,
therefore I'm not going to listen to anything they have to say. It's about taking everything that we
read in these advice giving-y self-help-y type books with a bit of a pinch of salt and applying
it to our own experience and thinking, is this a useful mental model for me to have moving forward?
And for me personally, I think it's a pretty good mental model that for me and in my life
I don't need to let the past determine my actions in the present and in the future. And in fact,
I can change the meaning that I ascribe to events in the past if I really wanted to.
Ali (05:35): All right, lesson number two that I thought was
particularly interesting in the book was the idea that our emotions are not controlling us, instead
we create emotions to suit our present goals. And there's a part in the book where the unhappy
student, the young man, describes a situation where he was at a restaurant and the waiter
accidentally spilled some coffee on him. And then he had this burst of anger because the waiter
caused him to be angry by spilling the coffee and therefore, of course, he had to respond in anger.
But what the wise philosopher says is that, no, that's really not what's going on. When you choose
to respond and shout at someone it is not the anger that is causing you to shout at someone,
sure you're experiencing the feeling of anger, but it's you who's choosing to channel that feeling of
anger into the action of shouting at someone. Being angry does not have to intrinsically
lead to you shouting at someone, it's not their fault, it was an accident, et cetera, et cetera.
You're doing that because you're choosing to shout at them and you're constructing the
emotion of anger and using it as a justification for your action which you chose to do anyway.
Ali (06:29): Now, again, this was
super interesting to me because it seems a bit controversial that what really, we construct
emotions to fit a narrative for the actions that we actually want to do in the moment, that doesn't
seem right. But it does relate to something that the stoics used to teach as well. For example,
Seneca, one of the original stoicism bros wrote an essay on anger and here's something that he
said in that essay. He said the best plan is to reject straight away the first incentives to anger
because reason goes for nothing when one's passion has been admitted to the mind and has by our own
free will been given a certain authority, it will for the future do as much as it chooses, not only
as much as you will allow it. And basically Seneca is saying that feelings are kind of like choices.
In most situations there's a gap between the stimulus that happens to us and the creation
of a feeling in reaction to that stimulus, and we can use that gap to think about whether we really
want to choose anger overcome, choose fear over courage, or choose misery over joy.
Ali (07:15): So that was Seneca's take on anger
and how it relates to the teachings of Adler and the teachings of the philosopher. But there's this
other really interesting book which we're going to do a video about at some point called it, How
Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and that's by the neuroscientist,
Lisa Feldman Barrett. And she also says that emotions are not in fact responsive to our
environment. Instead emotions are constructed by the brain in a way to help us understand the
surrounding environment. And there's a really good episode of the Invisibilia Podcast where they're
interviewing the author of this book about this new theory of emotion. The classical theory of
emotion being that like something happens and then we respond emotionally to that something. Whereas
the new theory, it's this idea of, yes, we have this primordial essence of four different feelings
that we might feel in response to a thing, but then all the 100 plus emotions are construct based
on societal narratives and societal upbringing and personality and all those things. And essentially
what we do is we take one of these four stimuli, we apply a story to it and that generates the
emotion that we're talking about. Ali (08:07):
I think this is really important stuff. I link to the book and the podcast,
if you want to check out these references in more depth, but I found it really compelling. It goes
counter to the narrative that we sometimes have in society today that feelings are fact, that the way
we feel about something tells us intrinsically about the thing itself and we should learn from
the way we feel about things in response to stuff. And I think that's true to an extent,
yes, we can absolutely learn from our feelings and our emotions about things, but I guess what
Adler is saying and what these neuroscientists are saying about the way emotions are formed is that
our emotions are not necessarily a direct kind of factual response to something that happens. There
is a large amount of interpretation and narrative and storytelling that goes on there as well.
And so we don't necessarily need to be absolutely wedded to the emotion we have about something,
we can sometimes and in some cases choose to change the story we tell ourselves and choose
to change, therefore, the emotions that we feel about the thing. Loads more to talk about that,
we're definitely going to do a book club talking about how emotions are made. So do subscribe
if you haven't already. Ali (08:57):
But let's now move on to lesson number three from the book, which basically says that all
problems are interpersonal relationship problems. And again, this sounds really weird, and this is
one of the reasons why I like this book so much. I don't agree with everything in the book, I just
think the insights and the teachings from Alderian psychology, that the philosopher in the book talks
about. It's a lot of food for thought, like all problems are interpersonal relationship problems,
like what the hell is going on there? Surely there are problems that don't fit into that category.
And yes, again, this comes into the idea of taking stuff that you read in self-help non-fiction books
with a bit of a pinch of salt. Obviously there are problems that are not interpersonal relationship
problems. If you get sick for example, that tends not to be about interpersonal
relationship problems, just a physical problem with the fact that you're sick.
Ali (09:33): But I think there is something
we can learn from this viewpoint anyway, so let's go along with the Adlerian school of thought for a
moment. And as the philosopher says in the book, if one were alone in the universe and all other
people were gone, all manner of problems would disappear. And again, to a certain extent this
is true. To the extent that it's useful for us to think in this way, it's true. Obviously, if
you get physically ill there's not much you can do about that, it's not an interpersonal relationship
problem. But I found after I read this book, I was kind of reflecting on the problems in my life and
to be honest, I've lived a pretty privileged life. I have so many privileges and unfair advantages
and luck stacked in my favour. And so a lot of the problems that I experienced in life are genuinely
interpersonal relationship problems, like worrying about what someone thinks of me, worrying about if
I ask this person out are they going to reject me? Are they going to say yes? What's the deal
with that? A lot of the stuff that goes on my mind is all kind of related to interpersonal
relationships. So that's interesting. Ali (10:19):
But they go step further and he says that, okay, so A, all problems are interpersonal relationship
problems. But secondly, all interpersonal relationship problems are a result of one
party intruding on the task of another party, or having one's own tasks intruded upon by other
people. And within Adlerian psychology that the philosopher talks about there is this very clear
separation of tasks. There are things that are my task and there are things that are your task.
And anytime I intrude on your task or you intrude on my task, we're going to have some kind of
interpersonal relationship problem. And so the solution to all these interpersonal relationship
problems is to just really understand this idea of separation of tasks and just not intrude on
other people's tasks. Ali (10:54):
For example, a lot of the fear that we have about putting ourselves out there,
a fear of rejection or worrying about what other people will think of us. What other people will
think of us is not our task, it is in fact their task and if we try and intrude on that,
if we try and change what other people think about us, that's going to result in problems for us and
possibly even problems for them. Similarly, if you're in a relationship and you are the
jealous type, then you might be concerned who is my girlfriend or boyfriend going to meet at
work? Are they going to fall in love with someone else? That's their task, it's not yours. There's
nothing you can do about it, there's no point intruding on that task of someone else. Similarly,
if you're a parent, something I try and tell to my mom is that what her kids do with their lives
is kind of their task and her being okay with that is her task. So separation of tasks all around.
Ali (11:32): Again, this very much has stoicism
vibes where the Stoics will talk about the idea of the dichotomy of control, there are things that
are within my control and there are things that are outside of my control, and broadly the only
things that I can control are my own actions and, to an extent, my own thoughts. Everything else
is something that I just can't control, therefore, I shouldn't spend too much time worrying about it
if at all possible. Obviously all of this is way easier said than done and it takes years and years
and years to change thought patterns if you are not a person who thinks in these sorts of ways by
defaults, and a lot of people benefit from therapy and counselling CBT, and all these other different
forms of talking therapy, which essentially focus on rewiring our thought patterns so that we then
think in more productive ways or ways that don't lead to a negative spiral of doom.
Ali (12:16): All right, moving on lesson four is a bit of a
left turn and that is the idea that happiness is a feeling of contributing to something. And I think
this was actually probably the main idea I took away from the book, and it sort of changed the way
that I approach happiness. Because in the past, before reading the book and before coming across
Adlerian psychology, I didn't really give much thought to happiness but my default assumption
was that if my life is good, then I will be happy and stuff. But actually what Adlerian
psychology says and what the philosopher says is that fundamental happiness, true happiness, real
meaning and happiness and fulfilment is a feeling of contributing to something or someone, it's a
feeling of being useful to other people. And so in a way, this means that if we want to actually be
happier and have a more meaningful and fulfilled life, our goal within interpersonal relationships
should not be, what can I get from this person, but more like, what can I give to this person?
Ali (12:59): This resonated with me so much
when I first came across it because I reflected on all of the different high moments in my life,
all of the areas of my life where I felt like I was truly alive and I was truly happy and et
cetera, et cetera. And all of those were not areas in which I was experiencing some like
hedonistic pleasure of like, I'm not having a massage or something. It was areas in which I
had put in some level of work and I was being useful to other people. For example, one of
the things that brings me the most joy fulfilment and happiness is teaching. Teaching in real life,
teaching on my Zoom classes, teaching on my Part-Time YouTube Academy. But that's very much
a feeling of contributing to something, it's a feeling of being useful to other people.
Ali (13:32): Often parents as well say that one of
the things that bring them the most happiness and fulfilment with regarding their kids is that they
are now able to be useful to this other person. And even though apparently having kids actually
reduces your day to day happiness, because they're a bit of a pain and when they're growing up,
you go spend a lot of time with them, et cetera, cetera, et cetera, it's all kind of worth it.
Also, parents say, also I'm told, and I've read in some of these parenting books, it's all kind of
worth it because the feeling of contributing it's such a meaningful thing, having kids, allegedly,
that's why so many people do it. There's a related way to think about this, that my friend
Tiago Forte, who's got a new book coming up, Building a Second Brain. You should check it out,
preorder link down in the video description. Ali (14:05):
Anyway, the way Tiago Forte describes it is like when you are torn between two options in life
pick the option that will just help the most people or help more people or help people more
than the other option. And he calls this the idea of servant hedonism, which is
combining the idea of being a servant, IE being a servant to other people, and hedonism IE
pure pleasure and happiness for yourself. That recognises that when we are contributing
to other people, when we are being useful to others, that in fact does make our own selves
happier. And therefore it's kind of selfish and kind of hedonistic to be contributing to others
because we know it's going to make us happier, and that's just sick. That's fantastic.
Ali (14:37): And finally, lesson number five,
which relates to the title of the book, [inaudible 00:14:41] a bit of a click bait title because the
book is really not about the courage to be disliked, but lesson number five is ultimate
freedom is having the courage to be disliked. Now it's an intrinsic part of human nature for
us to want to be liked by other people, but as Adler says this is a recipe for unhappiness. When
we look for recognition from other people and we only care about how we're judged by other people,
we end up living other people's lives. And I think this is a really great lesson, like the courage to
be disliked. There are so many areas in life where we hold ourselves back, where we chain ourselves,
where we're not free, we're not free to be happy because we don't have the courage to be
disliked. We don't want other people to dislike us, we don't want other people to judge us.
Ali (15:18): I know hundreds of people at this point through
emails and like podcasts and Instagram posts and DMs and everything who want to start YouTube
channels, who want to start businesses, who want to put themselves out there, want to start
a podcast, want to start a blog, like whatever, but they're not doing it because they don't have
the courage to be disliked. They think that their friends and family are going to dislike them. The
word dislike is a bit weird, but you kind of got me. We feel that we're going to be judged by other
people therefore we won't do that thing. We feel like we're going to be judged by other people, our
friends and family and our parents or whatever, won't like us anymore if we quit our jobs and
actually follow our passion, which is why we end up chaining ourselves to a lot of the things that
we end up doing. Obviously I'm not saying that's the only factor we need to take all the stuff with
the pinch of salt, we all have things that we have to do. If you've got a family to feed, if
you've got your own bills to pay your mortgage, et cetera, et cetera, you just have to do some kind
of work. There's not much you can do about it. But I think there is some truth in the idea that
freedom is having the courage to be disliked. Ali (16:04):
And for me personally, the way it manifests is just in that idea going back to point
number three, I think it was, of separation of tasks. What I do and how I think is my task,
how other people respond to that and what they think is their task. And so I actually found
myself becoming a lot happier when I tried to stop carrying how my videos perform. For
example, like in the past I used to feel so worried when a video didn't perform well,
I'd get comments being like, oh, this video's not good, et cetera, et cetera. These days, lots of
our videos don't perform well. There's this idea of like nothing in nature blooms all year round,
it's a bit of a sign wave. Sometimes videos are good, sometimes videos are bad, bad and good by
the metrics of the audience, but that stuff is not my task. There's nothing I can do about that.
Ali (16:41): All I can do is show up, talk
about this book that I like. Try and talk about it in a compelling way. Try and talk about it in
a well structured way where I'm speaking from the heart and authentically telling you what lessons I
learned from the book. And your response to this video is your task rather than mine. And if I
think too much about your task in responding to this video and how you feel about it and how you
might comment and whether you might hit the like button or smash the subscribe button or whatever
the YouTubers say, it takes the fun away from it, it takes the happiness and joy away from being a
YouTuber. And it makes me feel like I'm being a slave to other people, which is just not fun.
Ali (17:09): Now, if you vibe with some of
these concepts like personal development and self love and not really caring about what other people
think you might like to check out the sponsor of this video, which is Fabulous. Fabulous is
this absolutely beautifully designed app, which sort of acts as your own personal mindfulness
coach. There's also a bunch of stuff in there about how to actually build good habits. And so,
for example, I use Fabulous to remind me to take a swig of water as part of my morning routine and
to do a little bit of stretching as part of my morning routine. But within the coaching
aspect of the app, there's some really good stuff around mindfulness, around self love,
around compassion, around some of the things that touch on the concepts in Alderian psychology.
Ali (17:38): And so when you log to the app for the first time,
A, it's just absolutely beautiful. It's like the best designed app I think I have seen in many,
many years on iOS at least. When you log into the app for the first time they ask you to pick
what would you like to incorporate into your daily routine. So for it's me, it's like
getting a better morning routine, but also I do want to incorporate more mindfulness into it. And
there's a bunch of different categories that you can choose from based on what you want to
level up in your own life, and it helps you build your own daily routine around that kind of stuff
accordingly. Within the app, all of the insights are based on behavioural science. So it's all very
evidence based, which is what we're all about on this channel, or at least we try to be. And the
other cool thing about it is that it basically lets you go at your own pace. I'll be honest,
I have not been sticking to my drink something every single morning when it comes to my glass of
water or my meditation or anything like that. But it's nice, the app is gentle. It doesn't make me
feel like a failure for having missed out on these things that other habit tracking type apps do. So
I really like that aspect of it as well. Ali (18:24):
If that sounds up your street and you want to check out Fabulous, then do click the link in
the video description. And the first 100 people to click on that link will get 25%
off the Fabulous premium subscription. So thank you so much Fabulous for sponsoring this video.
And if you do want to learn more about Adlerian psychology, I 100% recommend you read the book,
it's genuinely really good. Or if you've read it already, you can revisit it using the short form
summary, which is how I put together the content for this video. I read this twice so far from
cover to cover, and then I read the summary on short form, which is actually really good,
as a way of helping put this video together. So you can check it out on there if you want link
in video description. And if you like this video, you might like to check out this playlist which
contains my most popular other videos in the Book Club series. So thank you so much for watching.
Do hit subscribe button if you haven't already, and I'll see you, hopefully in the next video-