I saw author Matthew Kelly speak at our church earlier this year as part of Dynamic Catholic's Living Your Life With Passion and Purpose series. I came away from that event feeling re-energized about my relationship with God and the things I could do with the limited talents and time I have here on Earth. Perfectly Yourself was this year's Best Lent Ever book and I didn't read it at the time so I thought I'd pick it up now and use it as a boost of adrenaline to get me back in that space I was in following the February program. On the whole, this book was not as dynamic and energizing and Matthew Kelly's live presentation. I did take away some very good nuggets of trying to attain a more perfect version of myself, but overall I found the book repetitious to the point of tedium in some places which made it a much slower read than its 210 pages would suggest. I'm really glad I read the book because I believe some of the things I picked up are going to be life-long lessons - or at least life long language that I apply to lessons. For example:When work is approached in the right way and with the right frame of mind, it helps us to become more perfectly ourselves. Who you are is infinitely more important that what you do or what you have.Um yes, possessions mean nothing, work titles can mean nothing if WHO you are is not a person worth knowing, or not being value added. I also liked this nugget from St. Augustine:Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you. It's not enough to pray. You have to put in the work. I think this message is lost a lot today, about putting in the work in order to see results. People want the easy fix, the magic pill. There is no magic pill. Results in any arena require work. And lastly, Kelly makes a distinction early in the book which I have thought a lot about over the last month - the difference between happiness and pleasure. Pleasure is the feeling you get from a good piece of cake, or a entertaining movie, a moving song. But it's not happiness. Happiness is not a thing that can be sought an attained. Happiness is a by-product of living your life in a way as to try to be perfectly yourself. Happiness is sustaining and life changing and deep. Pleasure is momentary and shallow. So now when I find myself doing something or saying yes to something, I want to make sure that I know whether my motivation is for pleasure, which is perfectly fine, so long as I'm not looking for it to fulfill my need for happiness.
3/5 Stars.
Yeah Yeah behavioral economics has been around for a couple decades. But it's NEW to me! I listened to The Undoing Project about the friendship between psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky and there were times when I wished I was reading it because the concepts are something I needed to see and mull over. All the while alarm bells are ringing in my head about how I can apply these concepts to my own job and work. Why does cross-discipline happen so slowly or so happenstance? In any event, these two amazing brilliant people somehow had the good fortune (for us) to meet at Hebrew University in the early 70s/late 60s and change how we understand how people make decisions. Until Kahneman and Tversky, everyone assumed that people are rational creatures who make decisions loosely aligned to statistical probabilities and sound logic. But guess what?! We're not. We're crazy emotional beings who make decisions against logic and failing to account for this was causing economists to miss wildly in predictions. So behavioral economics comes along and takes Kahneman and Tversky's theories and findings and blows apart all the traditional thinking about decision making and now it's a whole field and gah when can I get in on this and where can I find out more? I love the story of two brilliant people creating very lovely mind expanding theories based on the combined strengths of the group. This was well written (of course it was it's Michael Lewis FGS). And while the science could get a little heavy it was still accessible. Loved this book and the way it made my brain want more.
4/5 Stars.
YES!!! After a slightly less than stellar last edition I was so ready for this one to be awesome and it was amazing! Ploughshares Summer 2018 and was edited by Jill McCorkle who admitted in her introduction that she didn't have an overall theme in mind but said she liked "to be pulled in for a ride where I'm not quite sure where I'm going but feel confident that the driver does know and will indeed deliver me to the right place." And she totally nailed it with this collection. There were a lot of stories that brought humor out of some very dark places. So here were some of my favorites:Belle Boggs - In the Shadow of Man: This story is told from the POV of a dad who has arrived to his daughter's progressive school to find she hasn't yet returned from a field trip. What starts as parent irritation quickly descends into the spiraling panic of a separation that lasts longer than it should. I probably over-identified with the feelings and the story made me so nervous I repeatedly kept myself from advancing to the end to find out the ending. Ashley Crews - Day One: An aunt who has been given custody of her nephew. Slowly the reason for her husband being in jail is teased out and it's so much worse than I initially thought. But the way the Aunt and nephew learn to heal each other is really the bright spot of an otherwise devastating story.Lee Clay Johnson - Four Walls Around Me to Hold My Life: Yikes, this story pulled down the ennui of rural America and held on to it until the whole world was permeated with a nihilistic sense of futility. BUT it was done soooo well. A man and his girlfriend fight. He tries to drown his sorrows at a bar and then at a strip club. It doesn't go well. Louise Marburg - Minor Thefts: Oh boy, this one brought on my teenage parental divorce feelings. Emma's parents are getting divorced and her parents are making weird choices, and she's seeking out some love of her own which is not going well. I got a little angsty reading it and remembering how I felt at the same age. So here's where Jill McCorkle is spot on, because these stories just dropped me right into the feeling of the stories.Dan McDermott - Ramtha: Talk about finding humor in dark places. A teenager's mom gets into a cult and moves him out to the compound where the leader of the cult, Ramtha, rules. Yikes, but also hilarious.Serene Taleb-Agha - A Hiker's Guide to Damascus: I loved this non-fiction story about the days Taleb-Agha joined a hiking group in Damascus after living in America. It was a really timely piece both about Syria and the United States. So again, this collection was so good and I liked them so much. I can't wait to send this to my sister so she can read them and then I can relive them again in talking about them with her.
5/5 Stars.
Poor Eleanor Flood has spent the last ten years of her life fighting her own inertia. She's moved to Seattle with her famous hand-surgeon husband Joe, and is less than busy raising their 9-year-old son, Timby. Once upon a New York, Eleanor was the animation director of a popular TV show called Looper Wash. But since then she's sort of lost her way. But on this day, the day covered in this delightful book, she promises upon waking that Today Will Be Different. She will be present in her conversations with people, she will spend time with Timby, she will initiate sex with Joe. So of course her plan goes off the rails early when she is about to meet up with someone for lunch when she gets a call from Timby's school saying he has a stomach ache and needs to be picked up. Between Eleanor's awkwardness and inability to recognize/remember faces/names, a lot starts to go wrong. Joe, who is supposed to be a work is not. Her lunch date with friend Sydney Madsen turns out to be a lunch date with a former Looper Wash intern, Spencer Martel. Eleanor is forced to face the reality of her life and her wasted potential and talent. So the day does turn out to be different, just not in any of the ways Eleanor imagined. The thing I enjoy about Maria Semple's work, is that although the characters can be a bit out there, there are some real life gems in the way she creates conflict for the main characters - in this story between Eleanor and her sister Ivy. And Semple isn't afraid to not wrap up those conflicts in a neat bow. I appreciate that, because it's not true to life.
4/5 Stars.
