A review of a book that I wanted to like but couldn’t.
An attempt to motivate myself drove me down some of the ‘productivity’ YouTube rabbit holes as I determined to read better, take and make better notes, clarify my life through the use of technology and just learn more about technological solutions, including different apps, that might help me achieve my goals.
Thus it was I came across Ali Abdaal’s YouTube channel and found some of the content useful, particularly about using calendars and Notion. I watched less of the more recent content but know that he has been enormously successful and on that basis I borrowed his new book, ‘Feel Good Productivity’ from a library. It has some great reviews and he’d been doing the publicity rounds so it turned up in lots of places I had been looking.
I know the subject title talks about me ‘hating’ the book, and yes, that’s click-bait, because I don’t really feel THAT strongly about it, especially as I didn’t pay for it, but I was frustrated by the book. I know it’s probably not aimed at people like me. I’ve passed my 20s and am not looking to be an ‘entrepreneur’. I’m actually very happy in my career and my life for the most part, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve ways of working — and that’s really the rub.
What frustrated me was the lack of depth of the book. It talked to ‘the power of science’ to prove particular points, and referred to psychological experiments under specific circumstances with the language seeming to infantilise the reader but maybe that’s more about the way the book is pitched.
There’s nothing remarkable about stating that feeling good about yourself and your work will lead to a more productive life but I wonder if we are chasing the same things. One has a sense, throughout the book, through the writer voice, that this is a man who has never known struggle. His voice was not one that was sympathetic or empathetic. Yes, he was called a nerd as a kid at school, but it was from a position of privilege that he sailed through to medical school and then made a choice to drop out.
It seems like it’s easy to write a book called ‘Feel Good Productivity’ when you’ve never really experienced any bumps or challenges along the way, and maybe it’s because of my life stage that I’d find a book that I can relate to, with some of the failures writ large, rather than that of a very successful YouTuber who has sailed from job to business. Yes, he might not have been happy as a junior doctor, but the sense you get, is that it probably wasn’t the right job for him anyway, and it was about status and earning power, rather than a genuine empathetic concern to care for people.
Maybe I’m too harsh, but that side distraction of lacking any empathy with a struggle or understanding true struggles, put me off as I read about his advice about ‘reframing failures’.
There are some useful parts of the book, I found the discussion about burnout and the different forms it takes to be interesting and that made it’s way into my notes as a learning point, but much of what he has written can be better expressed in some of the source books.
I think I was spoiled a little by coming to this after reading ‘7 Habits of Highly Successful People’ which is so much richer on the basis of the life experience of the author. As I saw more reviews emerge, on various websites, podcasts etc, I wondered if it’s a bit ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ because these sub-communities are all about supporting each other and they all seemed to love it.
I wanted to learn from it because I don’t invest time in reading books unless I think I can learn from them and there were many times I thought about not finishing the book, but finish it, I did and I am not sure it was the best use of my time.
This felt a little shallow and flippant and there’s so much better literature in this space, that I am glad I didn’t pay for it.
