I did commit to myself to write about all the books I read during the trip so here it comes.

I read Choose Yourself book during beginning of my trip. Here come my musings inspired from the book. (Similarly to here, here, and here).

Musings

The main claim of Jame’s book is that in this “new era” you have to become an artist-entrepreneur.

He kind of explains how the new era looks like:

“This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth. It is a phase where ideas are more important than people and everyone will have to choose themselves for happiness”. (page 23)

However, I did not see him explain why is it a new era, why is it happening right now (and not 10 years ago, or will happen in 5 years). Perhaps I missed it or I do not remember. A lot of the book felt like he is telling his opinion (which is absolutely fine, that’s why I read this book), but I personally like seeing a bit more explanation and reasoning for thoughts and opinions.

“Rejection – and the fear of rejection – is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.” (page 30)

Does he tell how to deal with it? Yes, somewhat:

“The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.” (page 31)

I agree, but I liked better how Jia Jiang put it in his project and talk. Jia actually explains and gives examples of how he did it. Whereas I don’t remember James giving any specific examples of how he overcame fear of rejection.

Clearly I’m not the target audience:

“All of the people who are stuck or frustrated or scared or anxious or filled with regret, please try these ideas so you can see for yourself.” (page 55)

“This is how we form a better society. First we become better as individuals. You can’t help others if you look in the mirror and hate what you see. And it’s very easey to hate what is there. We live most of lives hating the mirror. Heck, I’m pretty gruesome to look at in the morning. It’s a daily challenge!” (page 55). 

I definitely don’t hate myself, neither in mornings nor any other time.

Here is another confirmation to strive to find your true self and live accordingly:

“People don’t even know they are wearing [masks and costumes]; they go through so much of their lives pretending to be someone else, someone who is liked, instead of being who they really are.” (page 95).

Good definition of entrepreneurs:

“Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent.”

From my observations of myself and other people, it seems that execution is the hardest thing for people to do, perhaps because fear of failure.

I like this quote:

“The Mental Body: People have lots of ideas, but they are mostly bad ones. The way you get good ideas is to do two things: 1) Read two hours a day. 2) Write ten ideas a day. By the end of a year, you will have read for almost one thousand hours and written down 3,600 ideas. One of these ideas will be a home run.” (page 119)

I would like to get into habit of that. I’m already reading quite a lot, now onto writing down ten ideas a day!

“Luck is created by the prepared.” (page 129)

 Completely agree! There is even scientific evidence of that, see my thoughts on the book “Get Lucky”.

Writing

Overall the book is too negative for my taste. The word “hate” appeared 48 times (via kindle search).

It felt sporadic. I didn’t feel there is any organization to the book. It felt like blog articles put together. Some of the stories repeated from one chapter to another. The book was not cohesive, for example, there is a chapter about business ideas and then suddenly he starts again about daily practice.

Summary

Overall, I think I’m glad I read the book. If anything, if James can write a book that’s basically a brain dump, I can too.

My personal usefulness rating of  Choose Yourself! is 3. If you are not sure about reading this book, I think a better book to read instead would be Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg. If you are very sensitive to negativity don’t read Jame’s book.

Here is my scale:
5 – a must read, absolutely everybody should read it
4 – a good, useful read
3 – an ok read, read if you are into this genre
2 – meh, there are other, better books on this topic
1 – don’t read, a waste of time