3 books to help you rethink satisfaction, happiness and living a good life.
The Song of Significance by Seth Godin will help you rethink finding satisfaction at work, The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman will help you rethink how to find lasting happiness, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson will help you rethink the path to living a good life.
Rethink finding satisfaction at work
Seth Godin is a prolific author, expert marketer and one of the early internet pioneers.
In his latest book, The Song of Significance, Godin lays out what he thinks is wrong with our workplaces – and it’s the absence of doing work with meaning and significance.
Our workplaces are like beehives he reckons, where we busily do tasks that we are set buzzing around in the hope the activity will bring us satisfaction.
But unlike in our workplaces, the bees choose significance over safety, teamwork over individual recognition.
In a beehive, when a new queen is born, the old queen and a few worker bees leave the safety of the hive with the purpose of finding a new location to repopulate and continue the colony. Its perilous, challenging and involves great teamwork to pull it off. This gives them purpose and meaning.
Research shows most of us want our workplaces to provide purpose and meaning. And when we get it, these are the best jobs we have ever had.
Finding meaning in work is more straightforward than we think he believes and can spur you and your team to reach targets and drive innovations beyond anything you ever thought possible.
The key points I took away from his book are:
Create the conditions for significance to thrive – ditch industrial capitalism concepts and replace with market capitalism, which focuses on making profits through identifying and then solving problems. Enlist everyone to play a role to support it.
The organisation goes first – the organisation needs to change first and create new norms and expected behaviours that shine a path for workers to follow. Mistakes are good, no more meetings for the sake of meetings, tension is good – stress is bad, feedback on outcomes not on people.
People power instead of human resources – working with people will always be amongst the most significant things you’ll do. Focus on enrolment and ditch coercion as a management strategy. Expand the focus of hiring to bring in people that add to the collective strength of the team. They may not be like everyone else, but their uniqueness will make everyone better.
Read this book if: you’re searching for way to re-engage your team or choose your next career focus.
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Rethink finding lasting happiness
Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning journalist and contrarian thinker.
His book, the Antidote: Happiness for people that can’t stand positive thinking, Burkeman takes a not so subtle cannon and fires it at the self-help industry to explode the myths they peddle, that all you need for happiness is positive thinking.
If that’s all people really needed to be happy then we could be done with it by 9.05am each morning and go home.
He also argues that instead of buying the traditional self-help industry message that we need to have everything just right to be happy – he reckons we just drop trying to be happy all together.
It’s the conditions of happiness we place on ourselves that create a gap in our ability to be happy.
The key points I took away from his book are:
Accept failure is an inevitable part of life – being happy isn’t conditional on having material success or the absence of failure. It’s our attachment to these conditions that cause suffering, not the pain we experience from them.
Embrace suffering, not seek to avoid it – the more we choose to focus our energies on not feeling something, the more we end up suffering. In other words the more we try to not feel something, the more we end up feeling it and the less joy we experience in our lives.
Uncertainty is the only certainty in life – the threat of negative things is a certainty and part of life. To worry and obsess over the past and having all the answers to achieve closure just leads to misery. Rather than correct our negative thoughts – just let them be, and accept them.
Confront your fears by realising them – they aren’t that bad. By experiencing the unpleasantness of our fears, we see how much we’ve exaggerated them.
Detach yourself from your thoughts – observe them as if they were weather events. When we are attached to things we suffer when they change. If you have to finish an important assignment but end up procrastinating, detaching yourself from thoughts of whether you do or don’t’ do the work can free you to ‘just do it’.
Read this book if: you’re done with the happy-clappy self help books and want a dose of realism to help get you unstuck.
Rethink the path to living a good life
Mark Manson is a New York Times best-selling author, podcaster and educator. He writes with a wit and no bullshit style that can wake you up better than a can of red bull after an all-night bender.
Manson’s book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, lays out how to live a better life by caring about fewer things. And not giving a f*ck about the rest.
The key points I took away from his book are:
Find the right struggle for you – whatever you do in life will be a struggle, so you need to find the struggle that’s right for you. Working on something that makes you happy will mean you'll not only be undeterred by the constant battle, you'll grow to love it. There’s no point looking for an easy life – because that will guarantee you life a life you’ll hate. Know better.
Suffering is good, but only if you have the right values – what you value has a major impact on how you perceive your life. If success means earning more than others you know – and if they do better than you, you lose. Dumb value to have and guarantees either disappointment or hollow success. Choose better.
Ditch victimhood for responsibility – we sometimes feel like victims, but positive change only happens when you take full responsibility for your life. By realising and working on your mistakes, especially the most painful ones, you grow and avoid them in the future. Then you can live a better, happier life. Be better.
Be careful where you source your identify from – without realising it our identity is often shaped by things like the job title we have, the cars we drive or the way we look. When our identity is threatened, we tend to flee to safety. When we do this, it’s more hindrance than assistance as it can hold us back from taking risks and pursuing paths that could lead us to living the life we dream of. Do better.
Read this book if: you need shot of adrenaline to wake you up from a long career sleepwalk.
Want more books to read? I’ve put together a list of the top 30 books I’ve read in the past year for you to check out.
Good luck!
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