This is third book in the Ryan Holiday’s stoicism (inspired?) trilogy of books.
This book is divided into three parts
- Mind
- Soul
- Body
These parts broadly talk about the virtues, and how to think about these aspects of one’s life. Personally, I was not the biggest fan of this book. Here are the reasons where I think the book faulters
- There is a formulaic template to all the mini chapters in the book. It goes something like this - a historic figure faces a problem in his life, and how there is a virtue that helps him/her overcome it. This general template gets a little old over time.
- The advice he gives throughout this book is without doubt good advice, but, many times, feels very anecdotal. It sometimes feels like he doesn’t back it up adequately, or appropriately build to it.
- And finally, this is not a very philosophical feeling book. This felt more like an inspirational self help book . I am sure that this would inspire people, but maybe this was not what I was looking for.
Despite being a little critical of this book, I do feel like this book has a lot of good advice, and may help people realign their thoughts in certain aspects of their life, but it isn’t something that I found super engaging or useful. I aspire to be still, and I agree with pretty much everything written in the book, but this just didn’t do it for me. For me, this was a 3/5.