Ever since I started university – and consequently began to read dozens of pages of psychological theory a week – my mind’s grown a bit too tired for casual reading. So much so that I’m not reading as much fiction as I used to and trust me, I was a proper bookworm back in sixth form. As a result of that, I’ve more recently delved into the world of motivational books – quick, accessible, light reads that help me relax before bed and get my mind going in the morning. Since I started on my self-improvement-oriented journey, these books have given me a whole lot to think about and empowered me with ideas and concepts I wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
When I began to research this department, one of the first names I stumbled upon was Sarah Knight. A Harvard University graduate and an editor with a successful career developed in New York City’s top publishing houses, Knight decided three years ago that she’s had enough of the corporate lifestyle and went freelance. A bold move that culminated with the release of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k, which soon became an international bestseller and for all the right reasons. Sarah Knight has become the mastermind behind the No F*cks Given Guides, a series of motivational self-help books focused on building a life based on your own desires and expectations rather than what everybody else wants for you. The series includes titles like Get Your Sh*t Together and You Do You, and the fourth release of this empowering saga, Calm The F**k Down, is set to hit the shelves on the 31st of December.
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I started reading Sarah Knight’s book towards the end of my first year of university, for no reason other than the fact that I saw one of her books in an Instagram post and I thought to myself, well, that looks like a book I should read. Of course, we’re talking about The Life-Changing Magic… I’ve always thought of myself as a sensitive individual who cares a lot about a lot of things, sometimes too many things. Little did it occur to me, until I read the book, that I have the option to change that about myself, not to the point where I become a heartless a-hole, but just enough to pull up protective barriers between me and the world around me who’d have all my time and energy if it could. I’ve gone through every single book written by Knight since then but unusually enough, for today’s review, I’m talking about the third instalment of the No F*cks Given Guides series: You Do You.
(source: personal archive. Featuring Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 Black camera.)
It is the book of hers that I related to the most, and you will soon see why. The volume is subtitled: How to be who you are and use what you’ve got to get what you want, and that is an accurate summary for what You Do You is about. The book explores the importance of self-discovery, embracing your true self and turning this approach into a daily practice and, eventually, a lifestyle that does your life only good. According to Knight, we are socially conditioned to follow a specific set of rules describing how we should live our lives. Sometimes, they remain unspoken and sometimes, they are indirectly hinted at or put out there in such a manner that they don’t sound like rules, they sound like facts but they are still rules at their core – and they are limiting our possibilities of living the lives that we want and deserve. You Do You is a comprehensive analysis of these rules, what they are really about and in what ways they actually say nothing about our lives – therefore giving us one more reason to politely send them all to hell.
For it to make a bit more sense, I’ll give you a few examples of such ‘rules’ through which people try to put a personalised course to our lives. You should always put family first. You should smile more. You will change your mind. You won’t get anywhere with that attitude. Don’t be difficult. Do be a team player. At least one of them sounds familiar; I know for a fact I’ve heard each of these at least once, and I’m twenty, I’ve barely left the nest. Reading Sarah Knight’s You Do You made me aware of how used I actually got to having such things said to me by pretty much every single person in my life, including family, teachers and mentors, friends and people I have dated. How many of these things were said in conversations that involved some of the most controversial, yet rewarding decisions I’ve ever made, including pursuing university abroad, moving in with my partner and writing this blog. How naturally these directives came to me whenever I was supposedly not doing stuff right, when I wasn’t smiling or I was having a bit of an attitude or I wasn’t keen on being a team player. Finally, how disappointed I would be with myself for failing to respect all these ‘rules’.
In a nutshell, it’s safe to say that I’ve followed ‘rules’ all my life, and this book came just in time to save me and my self-respect.
In You Do You, Knight doesn’t beat around the bush: do you want to live the life that you’ve always wanted, and live it happily? Let go of all these rules. Is it going to be easy? Absolutely not. Will people feel hurt or offended once you start on this self-liberating journey? Maybe. Will you regret it? Not a single bit, especially not when you start reaping the results. Knight has a punchy, straight-to-the-point style that fit perfectly with my fast and impatient pace of reading, and at no point does she try to BS you in any way. I was happy to find that she isn’t guilty of one of the capital sins of self-help book writing: going back to the same points, over and over again, until it becomes a vicious circle meant to meet a certain page quota and it all gets boring and you stop wanting to change your life. It’s almost as if the author knows exactly when a certain message gets to you, so she no longer dwells on that and she moves to the next point. And I loved that. Literally sped through the book in the time window of two flights.
(source: personal archive. Copyright owned by Sarah Knight and Quercus, 2017)
Partly related to the concept of ‘rules’, Knight also explores the dichotomy between one’s strong and weak points, and how society views it and shames us into either concealing or working hard to change our weak points. According to Knight, that’s a battle lost before it even began: there is no way in this world you can ever become perfect, but if it were, you’d just be boring – and that’s not exactly perfect, is it? As an alternative to that, the author proposes changing your perspective on your weak points, in order to see the silver lining to the things that you dislike the most about yourself. By doing that, not only do you empower yourself and shift your focus on the positive, but you also defy the capital rule of do your best. The very start of the book includes a couple of exercises revolving around this topic, and I was wary of them until I tried them myself – and good golly, they worked like a charm. That’s when I knew that Knight really isn’t fooling around with this book.
In You Do You, Sarah Knight invites the reader to a celebration of the self, with its good and bad, its abundance and lacks. The author embarked on the journey of writing this witty, tongue-in-cheek guide to being yourself because she thought the readers deserve to know how awesome they are when they are being themselves – and by the end of the book, you will find, too, that you are deserving of that. Also, you will find that you are deserving of taking control of your life and living it according to your own terms, and that’s probably the most important lesson I’ve learned from this book. When you truly take control of your life, and twist and turn it until it becomes what you’ve always wanted it to be, it might feel as though you are doing a careless, selfish gesture, and you aren’t taking others and their feelings about it into account as much as you should’ve. But the thing is, you don’t have to! We live in a society that shames us out of doing things our way, to the point where something as beautiful as following our dreams can suddenly feel like a stab in the back for others. This has always felt odd to me, but seeing it, words on paper, convinced me that I’m not crazy. The world wants to stop us from doing ourselves and we’ve got to do something about it.
Knight’s empowering self-love manifesto comes with its fair share of warnings, though, and I appreciated that they were there to remind me that hey, it can’t always be my way or the highway. Being yourself is never an excuse for hurting somebody else’s feelings, and pursuing your freedom is socially acceptable until it limits somebody else’s freedom. Knight pauses to expand on topics such as the ‘social contract’, being a psychopath and the differences between good and bad selfish, and her inclusive explanations reveal how crucial it is that we are being ourselves without hurting or preventing others from doing the same. I found these breaks from the main narrative of the book very useful and clear enough about the balance that must exist when we decide to do ourselves.
Finally, I found the book to be a great reminder that we are all human. We all have good and less than pleasant sides to our personalities, we all do good deeds and mess up every now and then. We are all born with the unique capacity to be ourselves, and we spend too little time pondering over how outstanding it is that we are the only people to be ourselves on the face of this planet. We have been gifted a priceless legacy that we haven’t been aware of until now, but it’s not too late to make the most out of it. And even though it doesn’t feel like it most of the time, we are in this together. And the more tolerant we are and the more open we become to supporting each other, the more likely it’ll be that we do ourselves in a safe and enjoyable environment. And if that’s not the end game to the futility of human life, I don’t know what else is.
This might’ve gotten a bit deeper than I would’ve hoped but yeah, You Do You. I am so very grateful to have read this book, which taught me so much but first and foremost, that it’s worth being myself. If you’re not familiar with Sarah Knight’s writing just yet, go ahead and give her books a try. Following their order is not compulsory for you to have a great time and learn a thing or two. And if you guys have enjoyed this post, I’m more than happy to talk about any of her other books in my future book reviews!
Now I’m not that keen on self-promotion, and you might already know the jazz. Leave a comment, follow me on social media, yadda yadda yadda. And thank you for being here. These past couple of weeks have been awesome for the blog, and I can’t put into words just how much this has meant for me. Hang around, more stuff is coming your way.
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Photo sources: personal archive.