– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by St. Martin’s Press on 12 Mar 2019
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Sam Horn is a woman on a mission about not waiting for SOMEDAY … and this is her manifesto. Her dad’s dream was to visit all the National Parks when he retired. He worked six to seven days a week for decades. A week into his long-delayed dream, he had a stroke. Sam doesn’t want that to happen to you. She took her business on the road for a Year by the Water. During her travels, she asked people, “Do you like your life? Your job? If so, why? If not, why not?”
The surprising insights about what makes people happy or unhappy, what they’re doing about it (or not), and why…will inspire you to carve out time for what truly matters now, not later.
Life is much too precious to postpone. It’s time to put yourself in your own story. The good news is, there are “hacks” you can do right now to make your life more of what you want it to be. And you don’t have to be selfish, quit your job, or win the lottery to do them. Sam Horn offers actionable, practical advice in short, snappy chapters to show you how to get started on your best life — now.
I chose this book because…
My daily routine is pretty relaxed at the moment, so it’s easy for me to put things off. This clever title intrigued me and hopefully it’ll give me a kick in the butt!
Upon reading it…
(I usually wait to publish book reviews until a week before the publish date, but parts of this book are so relevant to my life right now that I couldn’t wait that long!)
There are so many self-help and productivity tips out there. We all know them. But there’s a difference between knowing and understanding. Horn guides our understanding through stories instead of just spewing facts; every chapter starts with a story, and she starts the book off with her own.
I was excited to begin the book with a mutual understanding in the power of stories. However, as I made my way through the book, I had the growing feeling that I was just reading an anthology of testimonials. The book was largely made up of quoted dialogue from conversations between Horn and clients or other people she meet at conferences, retreats, workshops, other speaking/teaching gigs, etc., and my issue with all that quoted dialogue was the lack of synthesis.
Furthermore, in an attempt to provide context for these conversations, there was a lot of name/title dropping (that didn’t mean anything to me), which came off as if it was the recognition that validated the advice (again, back to that testimonial thing), though I have faith that that was not Horn’s intention.
I believe that any real, lasting change must come from within you — recognition from yourself, not from other people. It must be understood, which can be learned through your own experience or an experience shared with you (perhaps through a story), for instance.
Yet despite the overly specific testimonials, the advice was a bit generic. There was little nuance considering there were so many words.
The conversations about prioritising yourself, associating yourself with people who lift you up, asking for what you want, and pursuing what you care about have already been done. I think a more interesting and relevant conversation would be about our obsession with self-optimisation and the phenomenon of burnout. What’s with the obsession over integrating our passions with your professions? What’s with the obsession over turning our hobbies into hustles? Even if we’re not satisfied by our job, is the answer to instead make a job out of what we love? What are the consequences of that?
This book touched on good points, but I would have liked less reaffirming testimonials and more exploration of those points. There were many opportunities in this book for punchy aha moments, but they were drowned out by testimonials. I lost focus and didn’t see a clear progression through the ten life hacks, which was confusing, because shouldn’t a method that outlines itself in ten steps be, well, straightforward? This title was so clever and so punchy, and I just wanted more of that please!
To focus on my favourite aspects of this book, I think I would have preferred a workbook or pre-made interactive journal highlighting the exercises shared in the book with brief but no less effective words about the purpose of each exercise.
The exercise about aligning true priorities and time priorities really struck a chord with me — I seriously haven’t be able to put it out of my mind! — and that alignment is something I will be actively working toward this month. Don’t know what I mean by aligning true priorities and time priorities? I guess you’ll just have to flip through a copy of Someday Is Not a Day in the Week! (haha but I’m not completely evil. I’ve been thinking about sharing my process with this exercise on the blog, so this won’t be the last you’ll hear of it!)
★★★☆☆
As humans, we’ll always have problems. The question is, are they the same problems we had last year and the year before that. If so, that’s a good indicator we’re living in someday land.
Happiness doesn’t require more time, it requires that you stop waiting for the right time.
Life is to be enjoyed, not endured.
One of the many wonderful things about being a human being is we can change for good—on any given day. All we have to do is identify one thing we’re going to do differently and attach a sense of urgency to it so we’re motivated to do it now, not in the far off future.
One way to hack fears is to realize they don’t prevent things from going wrong; they prevent things from going right.
[Happiness] isn’t just a feeling or a result; it is a skill and a choice.
Courage is just trusting you can figure things out along the way.
Doing what you like isn’t indulgent; it’s an investment.
I didn’t have empty days; I had open days. Instead of seeing them as un-booked days, I saw them as unplanned days, when I had the freedom to respond in the moment to whatever whims caught my fancy.
I can’t control what happens the rest of the day; I can control what I do those first few minutes… When I invest that time, everything else falls in line.
“I love my life, I love my life.” If something’s not going well in my life, it’s amazing the power those four words have to put me in a good mood.
The way to have happiness here and now is to see things as if for the first or last time, and to use your senses to imprint and truly appreciate the blessing of being alive.
…notice what’s right, right here, right now. The happiness we seek is available anytime we want… for a moment’s notice.
Let’s frame fun and vacations around what we are doing instead of what we’re not. Instead of seeing them as taking time off work, see them as taking time on life. You’re not taking time away from your job, you’re investing time in your well-being.
We’re never really alone if we pay attention.
Hope is not a strategy.
I think authors and artists, get to live life thrice. We experience something in the moment. We experience it again when we write it, paint it, film it, or snap a picture of it. And we experience it again when we share it with others and hear how it impacted them.
Your future depends on many things, mostly on you.
Dreaming costs nothing.