Mitch Olson

Fluffy

Well written but not very interesting.

This is like a book of quotations. It's not meant to be read like a book because whilst individual sentences and paragraphs may be meaningful, when they are strung together, especially as an audiobook as I consumed this, they become difficult to make meaning of.

very good book on product positioning. Recommend to any founder for marketing exec

Th first half of this book is about the authors experience leading up to her & her family's imprisonment in Auschwitz & up to liberation. It is the most emotionally rich story-telling of a death camp experience I have ever read. It's amazingly dramatic. I don't think I've ever cried as much from a book as this one.

The second half is about her experience after the war including meeting & befriending Viktor Frankl & her experience as a therapist. I enjoyed this but not nearly as much as the first half. I think Viktor Frankl does a better job as sharing his wisdom whereas Edith Eger does a much better job at sharing the texture of her experience.

Yeah ... ok. It's not quite a 4 stars but a little more than 3.

I was hoping for more discussion around the topic of capability.

Witty & entertaining

Not enough thought-nourishing “juice” in this book to make it worth reading. I don't think I came away with any new insights.

A lazy poorly written excuse for a book.

I struggled to work out what the theme of this book was. And she didn't provide any original meaningful insights into anything she talked about.

easy to get into & engaging enough to keep me interested to the end. Not especially memorable.

I'm convinced there is good bones inside of Theory U but I also think the author has done a poor job at explaining those bones. The poor choice of words to describe the key facets of the architecture as well as coming across as a little new agey. All in all I found it difficult to extract much value from this book.

Nothing original here.

I didn't detect any significant new information on Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality in this book. A bit disappointing. Some great bones in MOQ but also relatively unrealised imo.

The key to polyself & identity-based therapies is building relationship with one's selves or what IFS calls “parts”. This is a non-trivial process because you have to reify them into existence. This book bizarrely bypasses the nuances of this critical step.

As dry as a bone. No profound metaphysical dopamine to be found here

Take some great ideas and wrap them in so much fantasy and hyperbole that you can't tell what is good and what is crap. And that's not the worst part. The biggest flaw of this book is the author's underlying theory-of-change which suggests that mere exposure to an idea is sufficient to transform someone.

The value & one's corresponding rating of a book is a measure of how its adds to the quality of your life, either whilst just reading it as entertainment, or why I generally prefer non-fiction, it has the potential to add to the quality of your life beyond the book itself (yeah fiction can do this but not nearly as often).

Philosophy should have one of the greatest potentials for this life-enhancing capability. But not this book. It is in a word ... tedious. And I daresay the ideas themselves are somewhat tenuous given that he choses an arbitrary starting point - “being” (which he calls “dasein”), & makes as much meaning as he can from this distinction whilst simultaneously is blind to those distinctions he chooses to take at face value (like “knowledge”). This is imo a poor way of building a philosophy. Any philosophy should start with metaphysics to build a proper & logical and systematic foundation (see J G Bennett for best example of this). I do resonate with some of his distinctions (which is why I read the book in the first place) like care or concern as the essence of being. I find his thinking on time similarly lacking in solid foundations. The book is also soulless. Just the worst of the caricatured Germanic seriousness. Maybe there are better writers out there who speak to Heidegger's insights.

University professor writes extended essay on the various facts of unlocking potential. A few interesting stories. Practical application - 1 star out of 5.

Entry in book on Medical diagnosis for “Excess testosterone” says “see this book”.

A book aimed at 16 - 18yo boys with inadequate father figures.
Target audience: “sociopaths”.
Strategy “win. Take no prisoners. Fuck it or kill it”.
About as dumb a book as you'll ever read.

Meh. If you have “poetic” inclination to your creativity then this book might work for you better than it did for me. I have more of an engineering orientation to creativity which entails a more explicit deconstruction to practice versus “feeling the vibe”.

targeted at people who are closer to the beginning of their “self discovery”. Plus she uses the distinction “self sabotage” as a catch-all for all forms of getting in our own way, which includes a significantly broader repertoire of behaviour than she accounts for.

21 random rants from an orthodox reductionist materialist.

Sugar coated spirituality made accessible to the masses.