To reach a happier and more fulfilling life, Rachel Hollis advises you must unlearn the lies you’ve been telling yourself and push yourself beyond whatever limits you assume are there.
I am not at all a self-help book reader, though I have plenty of friends who enjoy consume this genre in books and podcasts and social media posts. To each their own, I suppose. But listening to true crime podcasts while walking my dog made me start wondering if we’d ever run across a body in the creek one day, so I probably needed a change of pace anyway.
I have complicated feelings about this book. On one hand, Hollis makes for an engaging and enthusiastic narrator who made me feel like I was getting a personal pep talk. Though some of the topics she covers aren’t really relevant to me (for example those discussing motherhood), other chapters were thought-provoking, even if I didn’t always agree with her. The Christian through-line was consistent without being cloying.
On the other hand, while I suppose a lot of self-help books are hit-and-miss in how they apply to one, Hollis’s perspective adds an extra layer of distance. The main thrust of her motivational talk is that you are in control of your fate – that it’s only through your hard work and belief in yourself that you can succeed. I agree with the whole ‘help yourself’ principle in the broad sense, but the way Hollis attributes where she’s gotten in life to nothing but her own drive feels reductionist.
Hollis comes at you with the premise that many of her concerns are yours – and some even are – but in the end I cannot buy the whole ‘we are just the same’ premise, and therefore have trouble buying into the book as a whole.
It would be nice, don’t get me wrong. I would love to be a best-selling author. And who doesn’t want to be a millionaire?
