Have you ever read a book and thought, ‘This is so true. I have to recommend it to everyone I know!’
Well I’ve been doing exactly that about a recent purchase called The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k by Sarah Knight. My book purchase couldn’t have come at a better time. I’d had an incredibly frustrating day full of disrespectful people and challenging situations when, there on the news agency shelf, I saw the book title and just knew I had to buy it. And it has definitely delivered! Now, if you’re offended by the F-word then this clearly isn’t the book for you. However, if you are okay with it then this may be the text that changes your life or at least gets you to reassess the obligations, duties and things you currently believe you have to care about.
Because it’s true many of us can spend a lot of time trying to do the ‘right thing’/give a f**k about things we don’t really care about and this sucks away our energy, time and money. Often the ‘right thing’ doesn’t align with what we want to do, who we want to be, how we want to spend our time or what we’re interested in. Yet we say yes and are drawn into the ‘vortex of should’ when really we just don’t want to do those things at all.
Knight takes a very irreverent (seriously, I laugh aloud when I read this book) approach to looking at the things we think we should do/give a f**k about and challenges every single one of them. From friends to work to family, she casts a glaring spotlight on all those parts of our lives where we feel obligations, guilt and shame and asks us to look at them a differently. Even more importantly, she challenges the reader to begin living more in alignment with what will make them happy rather than trying to make everyone else happy all the time (which we all know is a fool’s errand anyway!). Even more fabulously, Knight provides polite strategies and techniques to help you manage all those important relationships in your life while still saying ‘no’ in a way that helps you ‘stop giving a f**k’ about the things that really add no value to your life.
For example, in her section on boundaries and maintaining friendships Knight offers the following (p.77):
p. Anecdotes and analogies like this are sprinkled throughout the book like hundreds and thousands on party bread and if you don’t laugh several times then I’ll be very, very surprised.
I’m only about two-thirds in but, as I mentioned it to yet another friend this afternoon, I felt I just had to write about it now. Forthright, practical and hilarious, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k by Sarah Knight is a great book and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Let me know what you think.