What I Just Read

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...

This short and humble book will be priceless to an open-minded reader.  It discusses how to cultivate present-moment awareness, how to focus on process rather than product, how to make haste slowly, and many other practices that are increasingly indispensable in our haste-filled, results-oriented modern era. Several years ago I heard an unforgettable story from the owner of a language school in Santiago, Chile. She told me about a disgruntled customer who had been taking Spanish classes for weeks, but wasn't getting any better. This student complained, loudly, "I paid my money. Where is my Spanish?" This story stuck with me for well over a decade because it's a metaphor for how people confuse buying something with learning something, confuse "taking a class" with actually learning a domain and developing a sincere practice of that domain. We've productized so much of life in the modern era that people think they can buy language fluency off the shelf, li...