Strive
Adam Fraser
“Strive shakes up everything you know about happiness, turns you around, and sets you on the track to true fulfillment. It’s not what you think—happiness is not found in achievement and luxury and having all the free time in the world. Humans are most fulfilled and feel best about themselves when they are striving towards a difficult goal that involves struggle and discomfort.”
This book is firmly in the business non-fiction category. So, it’s actually a review by my wife (with edits from me for clarity and order). With that being said…
When I first saw this book on the shelf to be reviewed, I wasn’t keen on it because it seemed like it would just have the same old message of that happiness is the key to life. Happiness is a state of emotion, not the end goals of life! You shouldn’t feel bad for having negative emotions, you want to work towards your goal more when you have struggle.
The work we do when we don’t take the easy way is better. The easy way is if you just have everything you want – then what’s the purpose in life? Third generation rich kids are a disaster because they didn’t have to earn it and they don’t understand the struggle that took place to get there. Parts of the book made me smirk, because what was being said was just so true!
There are dot point summaries at each chapter end to make sure you’ve gotten the main points out of the chapter. This book isn’t going to be a complete reread, but it’s worth having as a reference book for flicking through when I need inspiration.
There’s a little picture that gets updated as you go through each chapter. [Rose: I can’t find the whole thing online}. This image basically acts as a guideline as it goes along of where you are up to in terms of learning about the strive pathway.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of it. I get the overall point, but there are some people who work for work’s sake, but that’s not necessarily the right path – don’t struggle for the purpose of struggling!
This book isn’t just his opinions, Adam Fraser has a PhD in biomedical science and did actually do research on over 800 leaders to see what they actually did. I’m going to pass it on to another friend who needs this motivation to keep striving and succeeding.
This book was both interesting and problematic. I wasn’t really sure what to do with the information I learnt beyond that forensic science is really cool! once again, I loved the blood splatter analysis. It reminded me fondly of a 
I fully admit that I don’t follow politics and I specifically ignore the news because I find it quite depressing and frustrating. Thus, although I was aware of the ‘Greta phenomenon’ happening, I wasn’t really aware of the specific circumstances about it. This book won’t give you those either. What it will provide you with is a thoughtful commentary by Greta’s mother on some of the challenges of raising a neurodiverse child.
The cover, as you can see, is a business guy head desking on top of a meeting agenda. I figured I’d just skim over it and then read the other bookies waiting in my bedroom. A trusted business friend recommended it to me – otherwise I wouldn’t have picked it up on my own. Once I had it, I thought I might get more insights into meetings.
I wanted this to be new and innovative, but in the end I actually felt disappointed. I’ve read a similar novel/memoir in the past that still stuck with me. What really frustrated me about this was that it had a ‘fearless new talent’ but the writing itself wasn’t that amazing. It seemed to reply on shock factor, and speed, in order to keep the reader interested.
This memoir almost moved me to tears with the hopelessness and frustration that leaked out of its pages. How could no-one help Lucia when she was obviously in so much pain? Surely bleeding from the vagina should always be treated as serious. I guess that this was some years ago, when endometriosis and Crohn’s Disease were poorly understood, and even more poorly treated.
This is more like a teaser rather than a collection of stories. Although the chapter headings lead me to believe that each chapter would be its own little narrative, instead the narrative seemed to jump around a lot. There’s too much packed in, and not enough details.
Wow, I actually also learnt some things from this novel! Did you know that there is such a thing as a ‘Bali dog’ type? And that sadly, they’re interbreeding with common imported dogs, so the breed is being lost. Also, that they eat dog (which I don’t have a problem with) but that some people think that they taste better after the dog has been tortured? Anyway, there were some cool facts and there was certainly a swing to also educate the reader about different dog breeds and their misconceptions.
This is likely to be an alienating book. What self-respecting straight cis-gendered person would want to be caught reading it? Well, they should want to be caught reading it, because it’s a good book with plenty of helpful information and insights. The publicizing of ‘Call me Caitlin’ and the like should hopefully bring this book to the fore as a ‘real’ or ‘regular’ person’s journey in being trans* (rather than someone with unlimited money and resources).