Why Did Nobody Tell Me This Before?
This post is about the book: Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?.
This is my second try at writing the blog post about this book. Writing about this topic has proven more difficult than I originally thought. I thought I would lay out some tips and ideas that the book present, nicely give a few examples, and tell you to go read the book yourself. But it turns out that after finishing it, I have been pretty lost. Lost with all of the ideas presented, and everything that is discussed. This book is so saturated with content and filled with information that it is quite hard to decompose and analyse some of the ideas that this book presents. Regardless here I am going to try to do just that, and how good of a job will I do? I don't know.
I will first tell you that you should read this book. This is a great book to start with if you want to change your mindset, think more positively, and make slow and steady progress. This book encapsulates every proven technique, and acts a lot like a manual rather than a self-help book. For me personally, the amount of information embedded in this book has made it overwhelming. Understanding of the topics is not the problem, it is the amount of the topics. You have to really think about some of those aspects in order to really remember them, that is also why I described this book as a manual. It's a handbook. A handbook to keep on hand when you need support.
This is also accounted by the fact that this book has very short chapters. So short in fact that when I read for a longer time it annoyed me. It would constantly change the topic it was talking about, almost on a whim. Maybe for someone that is very good at changing tasks this isn't a problem; I'm known for trying to achieve deep focus and understanding for a relatively long periods of time, rather than study on a whim (which i know works for some people). All of those points made me realise that this is a handbook, not a self-help book; while you can read it all the way through, I would not recommend it, as it is quite a chaotic experience. Get it, read what you need, and whenever needed return to it and remind yourself what you need to do in order to improve your mental health.
Mental Health. This is what this book is about, so let us talk about it. Mental health is a topic that i gladly skimmed over in my early-teenager age. I could not be bothered to understand and nurture something that i could not see. I was an impatient person. I wanted to see results. As quickly as possible. I didn't have time to make slow improvements over time; making my habits have more quantity rather than quality was not my style; and mental health basically enforces that with all its will. I'd much preferred to stay up all night and have a decentish-quality project working, rather than work on it for weeks on end. This is a quality that is good for gigs, and jobs that do not require long-term commitment, but anywhere else, this method will burn you out, and slowly drain you. This con of mine I have tried to, successfully, fix with my Bullet Journal. By spacing out tasks mindfully I have been able to make slow, but steady, and definitely more stable, progress.
What does this have to do with this book? The point of the previous paragraph was to show you what changes that book would have helped me make if I read it before i found out about bullet journaling. This book will at its core advocate for slow and steady progress, with sprinkles of useful knowledge in-between. And it does it with all of the usual problems that people nowadays have with mental health: depression, anxiety, self-doubt, and things of this nature. This is a great starting point for someone just diagnosed, or someone that is struggling. I would not however recommend it to someone that has suffered from some issues for quite some time. A lot of the stuff from that book is, frankly, shallow, and it offers common advice. You will not find rare gems that will improve your mental health here. It's your usual everyday advice. Although it does sometimes offer common advice from a new, fresh perspective. It might help you that way.
That is all that I have to say about this book for now. I would like to make a longer summary about it. Something along the lines of Headway or Blinkist. But that will take some more time, and I wanted to get a blog post about this book earlier.
Thank you for reading.