Far More Religious Than You'll Expect

In the beginning, the book offered some advice that I found basic but useful - par for the course for a book of this type. The author interjected the right amount of humour, with only some of it being cringey "dad jokes", and he's a good speaker which helped immensely. Keep that "in the beginning" in mind, because I'll be getting back to it.

Content-wise, the first half was essentially a collection of the author's musings and interests, loosely structured into a "system" for improving your life. Basically just the author's thoughts on meditation/prayer (good), yoga (bad because it lets demons into your body), logic (good), making your bed (good) and faith (super good). Most of this is presented in a completely shallow way. For example, the segments on meditation don't tell you how to meditate, only that you should, and the segments on logic similarly provide only a few pointers but don't get into what makes a good argument.

Tonally, the first half was all over the place. It went from folksy, g-rated wisdom about being a generalist vs. specialist, would slam the shifter and start carrying on about how the literal devil makes you resist writing your sc-ifi novel about a sex-robot uprising, and then drop a joke about premature ejaculation. It honestly felt at times like the author had found God half-way through writing, but didn't want to go back and edit anything for consistency.

I'm not religious, but the author clearly is and interjects this throughout the book. Initially, I didn't have an issue with it - it's helpful to know where an author is coming from, and I don't need to agree with everything in the book to get value out of it.

However, about halfway through the religious interjections went from a background hum to a full sermon delivered by a sidewalk preacher with a megaphone. There's a section on the importance of faith where the author goes on a long meander about good and evil, which reaches its nadir when he talks about how kids with cancer are a good thing because they make people nicer to each other. Really? God gives kids cancer so people will be nicer to their parents and feel better about themselves because they aren't dying in agonizing pain? Great, I'm sure those kids and their parents will appreciate being used as a prop in other people's uplifting life lessons.

This was the point where I decided I needed to see other books.

I flipped through the reviews for this book on Audible and Amazon, of which there seemed to be a curiously high number (and virtually all of the reviewers giving a perfect 5-stars), and the heavy-handed religious messaging isn't mentioned once.

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