The book Daring Greatly by Brené Brown has insightful life lessons that anyone could benefit from by incorporating those lessons into their daily life. In this book review Roger will be discussing the 5 lessons that stayed with Roger after reading this book.
Highlights
1:50 – 5 Important Lessons
3:18 – Worrying about scarcity can limit your success
5:00 – Stop judging and just be yourself
Transcription
Hi, this is Roger, and today we are going to be doing a book review on Daring Greatly. This was a recommendation to me from Maverick Camp, Yanik Silver, and I was absolutely blown away by this work, by this book. What I’ve been working on personally over the last couple years is really making that transition from the $100 a week hustle, successful business, all the whole seeking money and glory over everything else into learning about habits, understanding ego, learning how to find passion, and then most importantly to me as I get closer to the age of 40 is, “How am I going to set my legacy?”
This book plays a big role in that, including some other books that I’ll be doing on reviews on here shortly. If you haven’t read this book, let me tell you what you are going to learn when you do. One of the slides that I put in my presentations for a long time is the word perfection flipped upside down. I’ve always talked about how perfection is an imaginary state of being that delays speed of implementation. That’s my saying. What they say in this book goes in line with that. Nothing will every be perfect, but the context in which they deliver that message, I think, is better than one that I have heard before, that was that in seeking perfection, what we’re actually doing is squandering time.
It’s not just about speed of implementation or success. It’s about time, which as you get older, is your absolute most valuable asset. If you can learn how to not squander time and how to take advantage of every moment of life and become that enlightened, first off, you’d probably have a little bit more progress than I have, but if you’re working on it, then we can follow this journey and this path together as you’re going to see with a lot of the book reviews that I’m going to be doing here over the next couple months are definitely on that topic.
5 Important Lessons:
Let’s go over five important lessons that I got out of this book and then we’ll give you an opportunity to go out and read it, and make some comments or let us know what you think. The first one is to define whose opinion matters. I thought that was a really good one because as I have in the past, struggled with ego and trying to fit into every social circle that exists, all you really do is burn yourself out and realize that most people are fucking idiots and you don’t really care what they think anyways. It’s a good idea to actually make a list. Write down the people’s names whose opinion matters, and in most cases, it might only be one name. It might only be two names. In my case now, today, it’s only one.
The next thing is stop worrying about scarcity. I hear people talking about this all the time. It’s scarcity is the biggest, or the scarcity mindset, is really the biggest killer of success. There’s another book that I’ve done a review on in the past called The Poverty Mindset or Overcoming the Poverty Mindset, that really thinks about this, is that I can sit here and tell you that we live in a world of abundance, that there’s unlimited opportunity if you just go out and try. You’ll call my bullshit because you internally don’t believe that to be the case. This book really outlines from a story and a psychological perspective how the mind works when it comes to scarcity thoughts, and how scarcity is, the scarcity mind thought … More coffee. Have a nice day. That worrying about scarcity can actually limit your success.
I know that people that have read this book are going to wonder why I’m not talking about this, that it’s really about the courage to be vulnerable. When I do book reviews, I do them from my perspective. I’ve a read a lot of other book reviews out there on this book, and a lot of them do talk about that vulnerability, and that fear-based mentality that they’re trying to overcome. I’m doing this from my perspective, so if you as an entrepreneur or following a similar path that I am, then what I am telling you should make sense.
The next one is stop being scared. Stop being scared of what other people think. Stop being scared of failure, and really the way to overcome that that is that it’s not easy to tell someone to stop doing something. I find that it’s almost nearly impossible to destroy a negative habit without replacing it with another habit, whether it be negative or good. In my mind, what I do is I replace being scared with being grateful. Any time a negative thought enters my mind, and this comes from the book, this isn’t something that I just came up with out of the blue, I start to think about instead on that that topic the fear of loss of a loved one. Instead of having that fear and letting it overcome my thoughts, is to be grateful for the time that I have with that person, that thing, that pet, that whatever it is, right now in being grateful for that.
In fact, every morning I have this that I’ve been wearing for about two or three years. This came from a Master Mind with Kevin Nations and the Family in Hawaii. This is my turtle. I call him my grateful turtle, so every morning when I put him on, I tell the world what I’m grateful for, and I never start the day on a negative note. If I start the day by saying, “Thank you,” I’m always going to have a good day.
Number four in this book was stop judging and just be yourself. I don’t know if this is looking over the fence, the grass is greener, whatever you want to call this, but the more time you spend judging what everyone else is doing, the less time you can spend on just being happy, and being yourself. Stop worrying about what the gurus are doing. Stop worrying about what your competitors are doing, to the point where it’s causing you to not take action, or causing you to have inaction. Just be yourself, which is one of the hardest things to do. Something that I’ve spent the last few years working on is trying to figure out in my late 30s who I actually am. This book talks a little bit, actually a lot, about finding your true self, and then using that to guide you in your life.
The last point was really interesting. Now I’ll admit, I don’t have children, so there was a section on parenting, and I almost skipped it, but when I read it, it turned out to actually be the best section of the entire book, because it doesn’t just relate to how you deal with your children, it relates how you deal with your staff, your clients, or just about anyone in the world. What it comes down to is be the person that you want others to be. You can call that leading by example. You can call that not shaming people into trying to do something that they’re not willing to do.
It’s really that if you want your team, which is the way that I most refer to this, to do something, you don’t get them to do that by telling them to do that. You get them to do that by doing it yourself. Leading by example. This goes all the way back to the Bible, and earlier, it’s something that’s been mentioned and ingrained in our society, but it’s something that we still don’t really follow. The section on parenting, which I’m not going to talk about the parenting aspects, because I don’t think that I have the opportunity to do that just yet, but read the section on this, and really pay attention to it, because it really has some impact-full stuff of how you interact with the world.
When I summarize this book from my point of view, now I would give it five out of five stars, which in reality, every book review that I do gets five out of five stars, because if I get about a third of the way through the book and I’m not learning anything, I stop reading it. There’s a good hundred books sitting on the shelves over here that that has happened with. Be authentic. Be yourself. Be compassionate, or at least considerate of where other people are in their lives, and what their path is. Don’t try to change their path as much as try to control your own.
In the end, cultivate meaningful work. There are so many stories in this book about people who didn’t follow their path, and that in doing so, you can find more success, your calling. There’s a couple other books that I’m reading on this that I’ll review soon that really have that. What this book and one other book have taught me in the last few weeks is that if you don’t really consider what you’re doing, and the legacy that it will leave behind, you’re probably going to end up unfilled.
I spent my twenties seeking wealth, fame, fortune, and I was actually really good at it, but all it did was inflate my ego, wear me out, and burn me out. When you start thinking about legacy, and you start thinking about what your life is going to look like ten years from now, or in the case of some of my mentors, what will a 100 old, I think it’s actually 111 year old you, look back and be most grateful for? It’s not going to be the 100 hour work weeks. It’s not going to be that one deal that you did. It’s going to be how you used your time, and what came of the time that you used, who you used it with, and how successful your life was. The book’s called Daring Greatly, and really, in summary, that I challenge everyone that’s watching this video to Dare Greatly, to be compassionate, to be authentic, and to really live your true self. It’s not easy, but this book will help you on that process. Thank you for watching this video and have a nice day!
