I’ve always called myself politically liberal but temperamentally conservative. From his podcasts, I sensed that this brash business school professor had the same sentiments. He railed against the COVID stimulus bills prop up the wealthy while minimizing support to the folks who really need the help, and he never misses an opportunity to hammer our tech giants whenever they are stifling the wider economy.
Given the affinity, I was quite interested in this book but didn’t want to deal with the hassle of handling physical media in a COVID world. After breaking the e-book barrier with BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, I returned to the Libby app and picked up a copy of the audiobook, narrated by Prof G, himself.
I had been avoiding books on tape because I’ve long felt that books require a certain level of concentration to properly appreciate. However, self help books are the junk food of non-fiction prose. With a run time of less than 4 hours this was barely a nice diversion from my usual slate of podcasts.
I was right.
This book is a nice easy listen. It feels like a compilation of blog articles that muse on the importance of hard work and developing meaningful relationships. It is a fragmented memoir focused on his upbringing, personal success and failings, and the joys of raising his boys. As an exercise in confirmation bias, it was a pleasant exercise to nod along with a nominally self aware, almost-obnoxious, rich, influential, white guy speaking truths I already believed.
The main thing is that I’ve now broken the ebook and audiobook barriers that had limited my intake of this sort non-fiction velvetta. Given everything available in the library catalog, it looks like I’ll be getting all the self help I can handle at 1.5x speed.