I have to admit, I was curious but dubious because any by-line that claims a single book can change your life seems too good to be true. To be sure, the authors realise this too, and the whole book is a conversation that plays on this suspicion.

So, let me tell you what’s good and bad about The courage to be disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, as well as my observations about how to avoid living someone else’s life by releasing the fear of being disliked.

The Good

Kishimi and Koga replicate a dialogue that they themselves undertook so that Koga could better understand Kishimi’s interpretation of psychology according to Alfred Adler, a peer of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Koga became obsessed with the writings and philosophy of Adler through a book that he stumbled upon years earlier, in which Kishimi overturns everyday Japanese wisdom with pithy simplifications of Adler’s thinking. The by-line of The courage to be disliked reflects this moment in Koga’s life and thinking, and communicates the hope that their book will also change their readers’s lives in a moment.

Kishimi and Koga make good on their promise to relay complex Adlerian psychology and philosophy in simple terms. This is a very readable book that you can power through in an afternoon thanks to the easy language. The examples used are also very relatable making the book accessible without the need to have any prior academic training.

There are certainly a number of simple and pithy statements that ring true in the book. For example:

• Each of us lives in a subjective world that we ourselves give meaning to.
• If we change, the world will change.
• We don’t change because the way we are living now serves specific goals that we are attached to.
• Life is not a competition; it’s enough to keep moving forward without comparing yourself to anyone other than your ideal self.
• One cannot change what one is born with. But one can, under one’s own power, go about changing what use one makes of that equipment.
• At their root, all problems are interpersonal problems that can be solved by knowing whose task is whose, and not intruding on other people’s tasks in the three domains of love, friendship, and work.

The philosopher in the conversation makes many claims (56 in total) and attempts to back them up against challenges from his interlocutor. For this purpose, they conduct their conversation through the use of scenarios from everyday life. However, the scenarios seem overly simplistic and cherry-picked to prove the claims in ways that do not admit alternative interpretations. And here lies the oppressive power of the blanket statements throughout the book because they contain an element of truth that is void of nuance and context.

The Bad

The introduction to The courage to be disliked feels like a set-up. The philosopher tells us that the reason the world appears to be a “chaotic mass of contradictions” is because we make the world complicated when, in fact, it is simple. It’s a circular argument that you can’t get around. Consistently, the philosopher will remind the youth that the problem lies with him (the youth) overcomplicating things and not with what he (the philosopher) is saying per se.

It is no accident that the pronouns I’ve used so far are masculine. The book speaks purely in terms of men. Perhaps this is why the authors so confidently assert that we can freely act as ourselves when we recognise that we are equally as valuable as the next person. While I agree that we all have equal worth, as anyone who does not belong to an elite group of men can attest, in the real world we do not all have equal power, a point that seems to be overlooked. There are moments in which the statements take on a more neutral tone with the formal use of “one”, but you never forget that this is two men talking to one another about men and traditional male and female roles in heteronormative families. Additionally, the tone of the conversation comes across as supercilious while they try to outsmart one another, making the reader feel like the writers are superior. 

Although the philosopher appears to be answering the youth’s questions about how to change, be happy and free, set boundaries, and have the courage to be disliked while also belonging to the community, this is really a utopian thought experiment more than a practical guide. There is no research to back up the claims, and little acknowledgement of the pitfalls you can encounter or the consequences that you may face as you try to implement the advice. There are no signposts for evaluating if you are succeeding, and the book contains a hyperbolic promise that anyone can change and be happy right now just by altering how they think and what they value. It’s as simple as deciding that your past does not exist and neither does the future! Live in the here and now as yourself.

The How To

Avoid Living Someone Else’s Life

“When one seeks recognition from others, and concerns oneself with how one is being judged by others, in the end, one is living other people’s lives.” Wow, that is a powerful invitation for putting people-pleasing behind me and daring to do what I think is right even in the face of the possibility I may be disliked.

In practical terms, the authors put forward an effective and useful recommendation for living your own life rather than someone else’s: know which tasks belong to you and which ones belong to others, and only perform your own tasks. I didn’t specifically go out looking for a situation to practice this for my blog post—I just got thinking about a serious situation where knowing whose task was whose worked for me. 

My manager of a few years back was insecure and used many gaslighting tactics to make their direct reports feel inferior. Shortly after I joined the team, a team member entered into a heated confrontation with our manager, including a nasty grievance process with Human Resources, after which they eventually quit. The team member shared some of their experience with me and I told them they weren’t imagining things because our manager had done some similar things to me. The team member asked me to share these things with HR too and fight their battle with them, or perhaps even for them, so our manager would have to leave. At the time, I felt I did not have enough evidence and that it was not my fight to fight. I believed that the correct response in the moment was to let the person know that they were not crazy and that what they shared was believable. 

Thanks to witnessing what happened to my co-worker, I realised that my task on my own behalf was to document anything untoward that happened in my relationship with my manager. I knew I was documenting these moments to help keep me sane and not let my manager get inside my head. Unfortunately, a moment arrived in which it was clear my manager was sabotaging me and I used my documentation to alert the relevant people higher up in the organisation. The organisation has a policy to not force people to lodge a grievance against their will, so while the higher-ups asked me to do so, I declined. I realised that I was not being paid enough to get rid of this toxic manager, and that I did not have the power to do so anyway. I knew that if we went through a grievance process, even if the organisation found in my favour, my bridges with my employer would be burned and both my manager and I would have to find work elsewhere. I was not in the business of destroying anybody.

The higher-ups respected my decision to refrain from lodging a grievance, but they also knew that my manager was a problem and they had to do something about it. They moved me onto a new team and promised that I would never have to work directly with the manager who sabotaged me. Thankfully, they made good on that promise and I never worked directly with the toxic manager again. It is very uncomfortable to bump into them form time to time, and we actively dislike one another although we treat one another cordially when our paths cross.

When I chose not to launch a grievance because I felt it was not my job to get rid of my manager, I was in essence saying that my manager’s manager and HR had their own jobs to do. I chose not to live their lives for them, and only live my life which at that moment was to take care of my own employment and experience of employment. This was the same situation when I refused to get embroiled in my co-worker’s fight with our manager—I gave them the opportunity to live their life.

No matter how clear the tasks and roles in my story seem after the fact, at the time they were not. Regardless of what Koga and Kishimi claim, life is not simple. Additionally, as much as I strongly believe in justice, I chose not to fight alongside my co-worker and not to lodge my own grievance because I know that how people perceive me affects my future opportunities. And while it may make sense in theory that we will be free to act if we care less about what others think, it is a psychological reality that we understand ourselves through our relationships with others. Not only that, being seen and recognised is critical to our mental health and being able to move through the world.

Conclusion

The courage to be disliked comes across as a cheap trick that preys on recovering people pleasers with its catchy title. The whole book seems to be an exercise in juxtaposing two opposing views to prove a point using straw men, cherry-picking, blanket statements, and circular reasoning. It starts as a conversation that promises some insight into how to happily live your one true life but ends just offering reasons to adopt some catchy meme themes. That’s not to say there isn’t an element of validity or truth to some of the catchy meme themes. Those half-truths weren’t enough, though, to overcome my annoyance with the fallacious arguments and the lack of nuance. It also annoyed me that the book offered a seemingly universal solution to a universal problem, viz., how to be happy and free, in a very male-centred way. I feel certain the authors will defend their exclusion of the rest of us through omission by saying they are exercising their freedom to be disliked!

If negative stars were part of my rating scale, the categories I use to rate all the books I review would produce a minus 1. Instead, I’ve given this book no stars. But, if you’re searching for examples of fallacious reasoning for a paper you are writing on rhetoric, your search is over.

The Good

Chris Voss knows something that Screwtape does too:  when we don’t look out for our interests, all hell breaks loose.  Hence the title: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it. 

The book is about negotiating in your own self-interest without being selfish.  You do this through understanding who you are negotiating with, and perceiving what they want. 

Each chapter is dedicated to developing and learning to use a specific tool that will definitely improve your communication skills, and potentially also your negotiation skills in the future.  Some of the skills are not new to those who have studied the field, and for some of us a few of them are already habits (like labelling, for instance).  There are lots of great techniques and skills that are easy to put into practice and that will surprise even seasoned conflict transformation practitioners.  As Voss says, they are game changers.  (See below on How to Master No) Each skill builds on the previous one. In theory, by the end of the book you should have a full tool-box that will turn you into a better negotiator in the home, work, school, community, and social settings.

Voss turns conventional wisdom about negotiating on its head through the stories he tells, and by referring to scientific studies in behavioural economics and psychology.  What I really appreciate about the book is the philosophical underpinning along with the core values espoused by the author.  This is not a winner takes all book about negotiation.  It is a profoundly humanising approach that values connection, creating relationship and getting people to talk and think together above all else.  The emphasis is on deeply empathising with the party you are negotiating with, even if you detest what they stand for.  Voss’s starting point is always the person sitting in front of you, and asks you to quiet your own mind and assumptions while you do that.   Then you can move from there to disagree when needed without being disagreeable.  I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell looks at all the “disagreeable” people he admires whether he will find that they know how to disagree without actually being disagreeable?  Although, just to be clear, Voss is not talking about saccharine niceness either.  He says this is disingenuous manipulation that won’t get you far.  That is why mastering the art of “No” is so important.

The Bad

I have at least two friends who struggled to get to the end of this book.  I did not have that problem.  Perhaps it is because I have a background, and therefore an interest, in conflict transformation.  I will say that the tone sometimes skates dangerously close to false modesty alternating with arrogance, which I find quite off-putting until I get into the nitty gritty of what he is saying, and then I concentrate on content rather than tone.

Like all of us, Voss has some blindspots… There are a number of assumptions and some background information that are glossed over:  

• He takes as a given that you understand and can practice empathy.  
• He assumes you know what you want and how to establish, as well as respect, boundaries.
• He assumes that you know the basic mediation and negotiation skills, like active listening.  He takes active listening to another level in his book.
• He promotes himself as just an ordinary guy who has found himself doing extraordinary things with the skills he has unlocked. We know he isn’t an ordinary guy from his dedication to his parents who unconditionally loved him.  How many of us can truly say that?  More than 50% of us, at least, have traumatised childhoods to talk about.  And that directly impacts on two of the points above – honed empathy skills, and being good at boundaries.
• Similarly, he glosses over how being a white male opens doors for him that it doesn’t for others.  There is limited if any power analysis or attention to negotiating off the back-foot.
• He works as part of a large (and elite) team whose job it is to do this.  Most of us have to go into these situations under-resourced, without a budget or exclusive time dedicated to negotiating the issue at hand.

Another issue I have is that he seems to approach every situation as if it is a negotiation and implies that almost all of life is just that.  This leads to the syndrome of “if you have a hammer, everything becomes a nail”.

There are a number of sweeping generalisations, such as  “I’ll try” always means “no” in practice, or what I just mentioned above.

Like other authors on mediation, negotiation and arbitration techniques, he doesn’t address what to do when the person you are negotiating with has also read the same book.  Essentially, they can see through what you are doing and have been inoculated against your technique.  He also doesn’t warn you about how these techniques can backfire when dealing with someone toxic who you have to see day in and day out.  Very different things are at stake in life and death negotiations with hostage takers who you will never see again and don’t have to live or work with daily.  Life and death, or any other, negotiations with narcissists who are part of your family, friendship or professional network are entirely a different story.

How To

Beware ‘Yes’ — Master ‘No’

Not all “Yeses” and “Noes” are created equal.  Usually we think of “Yes” as something positive, and by extension “No” must be negative because it is “Yes’s” opposite.  We instinctively jump to the conclusion that “No” is an act of rejection, a manifestation of stubbornness, or that it means the end of the discussion. Rather, Voss puts forward some powerful arguments for why we should seek a “No” in order to begin the discussions.  “No” protects the status quo while buying time to think and providing an oasis of control.  

You would have to read Chapter 5 of Never Split the Difference to follow all the arguments that lay out what “No” does. In summary, though, No

• allows the real issues to be brought forth,
• protects people from making ineffective decisions, or allows them to change them,
• slows the conversation down so that people can embrace their decisions
• helps people feel safe, secure, emotionally comfortable and in control of their decisions, and
• moves everyone’s efforts forward because it spurs people to action and gets creativity flowing.

He argues that if you want to negotiate a good outcome that everyone can feel good about, you have to learn to ask for “No”, then become comfortable hearing “No”, and train yourself to listen to what it actually means.  Potentially “No” means:

• I am not ready yet to agree;
• You are making me feel uncomfortable;
• I do not understand;
• I don’t think I can afford it;
• I want something else;
• I need more information; or 
• I want to talk it over with someone else.

While Voss puts this forward as a complete list of possible extended interpretations of the word “No”, I wonder if it is exhaustive.  Please feel free to add an interpretation that comes to your mind in the comments section below.

He also says that if you try every which way to get a “No” that is not forthcoming you should run.  It means that your counterpart is confused or indecisive or has a hidden agenda.  (This is one of those categorical statements that I mentioned may be problematic).

So, what’s wrong with “Yes”? Because as Fischer and Ury posit, Getting to Yes is what we want at the end of the day.  Again, the author explains how we conflate the positive value of that final “Yes” with a positive value of “Yes” in general.  Like “No”, “Yes” doesn’t always mean “Yes”.  We are told to listen carefully and identify which one we are being offered.  

• Are we being offered a counterfeit “Yes” designed as a polite way to get us off their back?
• Is it a confirmation “Yes”, a reflexive response to a black-and-white question? Or
• Is it a commitment “Yes”, a true agreement that leads to action?

To quote Voss, “Triggering “No” peels away the plastic falsehood of “Yes” and gets you to what’s really at stake.”

Conclusion

I liked this book.  It is very practical and I think that there are things that anyone from any background can use (like mirroring and labelling) that improve communication, understanding and connection in a conversation.  I value the affirmation that creating human relationship is the first goal of any negotiation.  However, the book is offered as a series of techniques for anyone to use in almost any circumstance.  It obviates the need for discernment, understanding what the consequences can be in on-going relationships, and that these skills are not built overnight. Practice, practice, practice is needed in order to see results.  What happens when it backfires?  And what happens if you are the woman in the room who puts a great suggestion on the table that everyone ignores, only for a man to put that same suggestion on the table later and it to be taken up whole-heartedly?  For “woman” add person of colour, a person with a disability, a person identifying as LGBTQ+, poor, with an accent, dressed differently (you get the picture) or any combination of all these things.

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