Hi guys,
I have a website where I share short summaries of the books I read as much as I can. https://uygarkurt.github.io
I recently read [The Courage to Be Disliked](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43306206) by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga. I created its summaries too.
You can check it out [here](https://uygarkurt.github.io/summaries/courage_disliked.html). I’ll paste it to here too:
1 Sentence Summary: Fictional dialogues between a young person and a wise old man about Adlerian way of thinking through the young persons life and other real life examples.
Favorite Quote: “Living in fear of one’s relationships falling apart is an unfree way to live, in which one is living for other people.”
About the Author: There are two authors: Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Koga is a student of Kishimi and was introduced to the Adlerian way of thinking by reading one of his books.
About the Time Book Was Written: This book, published in 2013, carries Alfred Adler’s ideas from the 1930s. Its subject is human. How do we become happy? What makes us unhappy? How do we live our lives? The same problems and solutions to them have been the topic of debate since the beginning of humanity. It’s correct to say this book is timeless in that manner. It’ll stay relevant as long as we exist.
Summary and Thoughts: Written in dialogue, this book serves as an introduction to the Adlerian philosophy or way of life. Through a dialogue between a young person and a sage, we are introduced to ideas such as community, belonging, interpersonal problems, etc.
One of the main points of the Adlerian way of thinking is that we focus on the present rather than the past. What decisions do you make now? What actions do you take instead of dwelling on your past traumas or what caused them? For example, in the book, if you get a fever, you want it to be healed, not to hear how you got it. In alignment with that philosophy, this book represents real-world problems from the standpoint of the youth and introduces an Adlerian approach to them. This style of writing makes the ideas solid and applicable.
It’s an introductory book that covers many ideas and concepts. As a result, most of the ideas are not explored in depth. Question marks tired to be erased by the clever questions of the youth. However, you’ll find out that there are still many missing pieces.
3 Lessons
Lesson 1: Everyone Is Your Comrade.
We feel safe and happy when we are in harmony with the society. One of the triggers of this is when we start to see other people as our friends/comrades. The opposite is when we think everyone is our enemy. Such as they try to harm us. When this happens, we end up in a constant state of alert—a bad life to live. However, there’s the reality that there are people who hate you. How do we see them as comrades? The book discusses that it’s their problem, or ‘task’ to put it in an Adlerian way.
Lesson 2: You Don’t Have to Be Special.
Being special and having a desire for recognition go hand in hand. We go to great lengths to seek that recognition and be special. We leave our freedom behind and live to fulfill other people’s expectations and to become that special one. During the process, we lose the self. Maybe having the courage to be normal and say, “This is what I’m capable of, and it’s fine” is what makes you special alone.
Lesson 3: Everyone Is Your Equal.
There are two types of interpersonal relationships. “Vertical” and “Horizontal”. If there’s a hierarchy, we see someone above or below us; we are in a vertical relationship. If we see someone as our equal, as our comrade, in a way, we are in a horizontal relationship, which is what we want. We want to act in cooperation and harmony. For that, we strive for a horizontal relationship.
5 Influential Quotes and My Interpretations
Quote 1: “Freedom is being disliked by other people.”
Being disliked by someone proves that you’re exercising your freedom and living in accordance with yourself. This doesn’t mean being a prick, of course.
Quote 2: “In a word, happiness is the feeling of contribution. That is the definition of happiness.”
We want to feel we have value, and this is felt by the contributions we make. These contributions can be actions or just being, existing.
Quote 3: “If ‘I’ change, the world will change. This means that the world can be changed only by me and no one else will change it for me.”
The world is just electrical signals created by our senses and reconstructed in our brains. We give meaning to them, and we can change them.
Quote 4: “Our world is rife with injustices and misdeeds of all kinds, yet there is not one person who desires evil in the purest sense of the word.”
Evil may not committed in its purest sense. However, it can be committed to benefit the self. Hence it won’t be evil for the committer.
Quote 5: “Loneliness is having other people and society and community around you, and having a deep sense of being excluded from them.”
The notion of loneliness is created by the existence of other people. By being excluded, it’s felt.
Have you read the book? I would be happy to get your ideas and discuss!
by uygarsci