A Book That Changed My Life

Otherwise known as: my review of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.

I heard about this book from a source that provides the occasional nugget of wisdom, Twitter.

The tweet in its original glory

Maybe I was susceptible at the time (it was November last year) but I clicked the link and it was one of the first (of many) books I purchased on my Kindle. I should also point out that another friend was interested in reading it that I didn't know about at the time, but he has good taste so it's worth mentioning.

So you could argue, that it was the tweet that lead to the book that changed my life.

But hold up, you might have heard me spout this claptrap before. Over a year ago, I referenced a book I read called "It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be".

I didn't really mention the content of the book other than it was inspiring and admired the serendipity in which I came about to discover it.

Make no mistake.
I was fucking right.

A little over a year of reading that book I got to:

• travel Europe in the best holiday I ever had
• self-publish my own book
• lose 20kgs in six months
• run my first half-marathon

Well another book came along and it was this. 

The book had me laughing, smiling knowingly, and nodding. Applying techniques from schools of thought such as Stoicism, Buddhism, the writing of Eckhart Tolle, and even the Mexican Festival of Death; Oliver Burkeman sows together a compelling argument for making the most of what you have.

The book is wonderfully articulate and is by a better writer than me.
So I'm calling it like I did over a year ago this book was life-changing and for the better.

How come I'm crapping on about books? Because I was told to.

I remember reading article from VICE a while ago, called the guide to Adulthood.

It had this awesome quote:

If you consider yourself a “full-grown adult” and have not read (like, completed, cover to cover) a book of any sort in the past three months, you are probably someone we never want to be friends with. TV and movies are great and all, and it’s good to keep up with carefully curated show selections, but if you look forward to making it home in time to catch The Big Bang Theory or whatever, you’re probably hopeless and should be sure to only befriend similarly boring people so you don’t turd up conversations. Non-fiction, medical journals, fiction, whatever, just read a fucking book already.

Words to live by.

This set a slow motion chain-reaction of events to spew forth:

1. Announce on my OKCupid profile that I was "I want to get a Kindle, but am not sure of how much I would use it."
2. Bought a Kindle
3. Read several books some months later
4. Realised how stupid I've been all these years

I've since read about five books which is more than I did last year, and thus spurs on the title of my next blog entry: Books I'm reading and why it's f***ing important.