The War of Art by Steven Pressfield & Do the Work by Steven Pressfield

Procrastination is the enemy of success. I should know. I’m a procrastinator.

At various points in my life, I was a supreme procrastinator. Fortunately, unlike drink, one can be a little bit of a procrastinator unlike trying to be a little bit of a alcoholic. I could still function relatively well, but not near my greatest potential. The demands of work and life helped cure me of my worst excesses, but the tendency is still there. The problem usually revolves around things that require a lot of effort and high expectations (usually self-imposed). Some things you can put off simply because they don’t need to be done now and it’s more efficient to put them off. (“How about never? Never works for me.”) I’ve no problems with this. However, some things worth doing – like writing a blog –often get put off for no good reason.

My history as a procrastinator led me into investigations of the will and how we often fail to do what is in our best interest. I learned that the ancient Greeks had a term for this called akrasia. This refers to our ability to fail to do things that are in our best interest, or to do things that are clearly to our detriment. It is the first cousin of self-deception (which I believe the Greeks would consider a form of akrasia) and probably related in some way to the problem best identified by the Desert fathers, that of acedia, or sloth or torpor. In any event with you call it procrastination, akrasia, or anything else, it’s a real pest.

Writers are among the best procrastinators in the world. They even have a name for it: writer’s block. Something about looking at the blank page (or screen) seems to shut us down. This has probably happened to anyone who’s had to write something that they want taken seriously and that can have some ability to change the world and themselves--they will have put it off at some point. Writer Stephen Pressfield addresses this problem in his two books, The War of Art and Do the Work. Pressfield doesn’t identify procrastination as the primary problem, but he names it as a sub-set in the larger picture that he labels Resistance. He thoroughly describes and analyzes it... He knows it firsthand. Indeed, in the War of Art, Pressfield is all about Resistance and how to deal with it. Pressfield describes Resistance:

 Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

 Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is . . . .

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.

Pressfield, Steven (2011-11-11). The War of Art. Black Irish Entertainment LLC. Kindle Edition.

Pressfield goes on to describe those arenas where Resistance most often manifests. Recognize any of them?

 The following is a list, in no particular order, of those activities that most commonly elicit Resistance:

1)      The pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional.

2)      The launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise, for profit or otherwise.

3)      Any diet or health regimen.

4)      Any program of spiritual advancement.

5)      Any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals.

6)      Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction.

7)      Education of every kind.

11)      The taking of any principled stand in the face of adversity.

In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.

Pressfield, Steven (2011-11-11). The War of Art (p. 5-6). Black Irish Entertainment LLC. Kindle Edition.

Having read to this point, I was hooked. Pressfield’s description was like looking into a mirror. I may not be in the gutter, but I have a way to go before I could claim to have reached the point of not having to pay attention to this. 

Having defined the Devil (we can apprehend Resistance as form of evil and personify it), Pressfield goes on the catalog the wiles of the Devil, just as the Desert Fathers might have done.

RESISTANCE IS INVISIBLE. Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It's a repelling force. It's negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.

RESISTANCE IS INTERNAL. Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. "Peripheral opponents," as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.

RESISTANCE IS INSIDIOUS. Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean. It will assume any form, if that's what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

RESISTANCE IS IMPLACABLE. Resistance is like the Alien or the Terminator or the shark in Jaws. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction, programmed from the factory with one object only: to prevent us from doing our work. Resistance is implacable, intractable, indefatigable. Reduce it to a single cell and that cell will continue to attack. This is Resistance's nature. It's all it knows.

RESISTANCE IS IMPERSONAL. Resistance is not out to get you personally. It doesn't know who you are and doesn't care. Resistance is a force of nature. It acts objectively. Though it feels malevolent, Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as the stars. When we marshal our forces to combat Resistance, we must remember this.

RESISTANCE IS INFALLIBLE. Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. . . . . Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

RESISTANCE IS UNIVERSAL. We're wrong if we think we're the only ones struggling with Resistance. Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.

RESISTANCE NEVER SLEEPS Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five. In other words, fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.

RESISTANCE PLAYS FOR KEEPS. Resistance's goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death.

RESISTANCE IS FUELED BY FEAR. Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.

RESISTANCE ONLY OPPOSES IN ONE DIRECTION. Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, or spiritually.

RESISTANCE IS MOST POWERFUL AT THE FINISH LINE. The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it's got.

RESISTANCE RECRUITS ALLIES. Resistance by definition is self-sabotage. But there's a parallel peril that must also be guarded against: sabotage by others. When a writer begins to overcome her Resistance — in other words, when she actually starts to write — she may find that those close to her begin acting strange. They may become moody or sullen, they may get sick; they may accuse the awakening writer of "changing," of "not being the person she was." The closer these people are to the awakening writer, the more bizarrely they will act and the more emotion they will put behind their actions. They are trying to sabotage her.

Pressfield, Steven (2011-11-11). The War of Art (pp. 6-19. Black Irish Entertainment LLC. Kindle Edition.

Okay. I must stop now, as I’ll end up including the whole book. From this description of traits, Pressfield goes on the catalog the techniques of Resistance, number one of which is—you guessed it!—procrastination. 

So what do we do with this awful thing? How do we fight the Devil? By “turning pro”.

By “turning pro” Pressfield means that you “do the work”. You show up each day and do something that you need to do to further your project. You set aside all of the crap and put on your game day face. You approach life as a warrior, as one who comes to work (even if it’s just to the typewriter on your kitchen table) ready to perform. The cure to Resistance is to turn pro and to do the work. According to Pressfield, it’s that simple, and I think that he’s right. We show up to do what we need to do just as we show up for our jobs each day and do what we need to do, only with one difference (unless you’re very fortunate): you show up for love, not just a paycheck. 

Pressfield’s list of “pro” attributes is a complete and impressive. I particularly appreciate this quote:

A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul. The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All the warrior can give is his life; all the athlete can do is leave everything on the field.

Pressfield, Steven (2011-11-11). The War of Art (p. 88). Black Irish Entertainment LLC. Kindle Edition.

Although I didn’t see it quoted in the book, I’m sure he’d give the nod to Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech as well. 

Part 3 deals with “allies”, those forces that come to the aid of the pro. Pressfield in this regard sounds a bit like Castaneda’s Don Juan, but he has a point. As the saying goes, “God helps them that help themselves”. So it is in these situations. Pressfield shares this quote:

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now."

— W. H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

Pressfield, Steven (2011-11-11). The War of Art (p. 122). Black Irish Entertainment LLC. Kindle Edition.

This part is more speculative, based on religious intuition and Jungian psychology, but it makes sense and gives a larger perspective to Pressfield’s project. He outlines a Jungian distinction between the Ego and Self in a battle between the small “I” that clings to the status quo and the “I” that represents creation and fulfillment. It’s not just our little battle, but it's part of a larger cosmic conflict. Regardless of the degree of credence you give to this perspective, it taps into some of the most potent and evocative archetypes of human kind in order to situate our struggles. 

Having defined Resistance and how we can slay the dragon, Pressfield takes a more practical bent in Do the Work (but this isn’t to suggest that The War of Art isn’t practical: to the contrary, it’s immensely practical, but Do the Work is more of a playbook). You now know what you have to do, this goes into how to do it more effectively and with greater clarity. 

In fact, early in the book, Pressfield lists traits now mentioned in the earlier book, those traits that aid us:

Our Allies Enough for now about the antagonists arrayed against us. Let’s consider the champions on our side:

• Stupidity
• Stubbornness
• Blind faith
• Passion
• Assistance (the opposite of Resistance)
• Friends and family

Pressfield, Steven (2011-04-20). Do the Work (Kindle Locations 130-134). AmazonEncore. Kindle Edition.

Pressfield breaks down the artistic process with for closer examination. He starts at the beginning and shares this suggestion: “Don’t prepare. Begin.” (Kindle Location 172). Pressfield discusses a number of practical tips to aid the process and to overcome the guiles of Resistance. For instance, he addresses one of my weaknesses, research; you know, just one more case or law review article to make sure of such and such before I start to write. But Pressfield nails it:

Do research early or late. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time. Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance. Soak up what you need to fill in the gaps. Keep working.

Pressfield, Steven (2011-04-20). Do the Work (Kindle Locations 315-317). AmazonEncore. Kindle Edition.

Yup. He’s got it figured. 

Pressfield offers an extended quote from Marianne Williamson on “the fear of success”, which he argues is foremost among our fears and actually much more intimidating that the fear of failure (which simple allows the status quo to continue). Williamson writes:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you . We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Pressfield, Steven (2011-04-20). Do the Work (Kindle Locations 717-722). AmazonEncore. Kindle Edition.

Pressfield (via Williamson) doesn’t encourage us to play small ball. 

These books are insightful and encouraging. Light reading in one sense, not long, not complex. But they go for the jugular and if you have any endeavor that creates Resistance (such as Life), you’ll likely benefit from these works.

A Review of Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves

 

Several years ago, I was browsing a business section of a bookstore when I came upon an intriguing title: Leadershipand Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Arbinger Institute. The title intrigued me. Leadership books are a dime a dozen in the business section: business people apparently expect everyone to be a chief and no one to be a brave. So, it was the self-deception in the title that really caught my eye. While my leadership skills could without question use improvement, self-deception was something I actually thought I was probably too good at. Self-deception struck me as a subset of a problem that had intrigued me most of my adult life. The problem? Why do I do things that I know are not in my best interest? Most of us, I think, can recognize this problem, whether it involves eating and drinking too much, exercising too little, procrastination (a personal favorite), and, perhaps worst of all, mistreating those whom we care for most by impulsive and hurtful actions that we often come to regret. This is a long list!

We have pondered the problem of why we don't do what we know we should do from the time of the early Greek philosophers, who dubbed the problem one of akrasia. In modern parlance, it’s often referred to as “weakness of will”. St. Paul put the problem succinctly when he wrote plaintively: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Romans 7:15 (NRSV). Within the Christian tradition, St. Augustine took up this problem, and he’s credited as the first thinker to identify and wrestle with the problem of the will.

Thus intrigued, I bought the book. I pondered further the subtitle "getting out of the box". What the box was, I did not know, but that mystery was intriguing, along with the fact that the author was not an individual. I bought and read the book, and I was taken. I was taken because I recognized myself in it. Rather than being a recipe book about six steps to better leadership or a 12-step program to avoid self-deception, the book was a collection of vignettes about people and relationships. The vignettes presented problems in personal relations that were easily recognizable. The book suggests that the root of these interpersonal relationship problems come from self-deception, and self-deception puts us “in the box”. In the box, our view of others becomes distorted and leads to mistreatment of them.

That’s the book in a nutshell. This is a business book and therefore there are no footnotes. It's a quick and easy read. In addition, it served to pique my curiosity about where this came from. It seemed quite insightful. I decided to investigate further.

In the age of the Internet, I got online and looked it up the Arbinger Institute. I discovered that they offer information about their analysis and how one can avoid the pitfalls of self-deception. (The book explains this also). I learned that the person behind this intriguing perspective and the unassuming, but very deep thinking behind it, was a man named C. Terry Warner. Checking on his background, I learned that he had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale, that he had spent time at Linacre College at Oxford University, and that he taught at BYU. The website also linked to a short paper by Warner that outlined his thoughts in a more analytical way than set forth in Leadership and Self-Deception. While I had little doubt about the quality the insights, I did have a great deal of curiosity about how he came to his insights. The paper I read provides some hint at analytical framework that Warner developed into these insights.

Some extended quotations from the paper:

We human beings have little comprehension of what we are. The difficulty is not that we are ignorant. It's that we are self-deceiving. We systematically keep ourselves from understanding ourselves. We don't do this deliberately. In order to do it deliberately we would, Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “We’d have to know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it [from ourselves] more carefully." Instead, we do it by means of sin – by going against our honest feelings of what's right and wrong for us to do.

. . . .

It's impossible to betray oneself without seeking to excuse or justify oneself.

. . . .

Whether childishly rationalizing his moral failures or self-righteously claiming to be morally superior, the self-betrayer is blaming others and excusing or justifying himself. He can consider himself in the clear only if he can successfully find fault in others for what he is thinking or doing. There is no way around this. There’s no way of betraying oneself without living a lie – no possibility of sinning in a straightforward, guileless, and open manner. This can be seen by considering the solution to a version of a puzzle well known to the ancient Greeks. The puzzle is this: immorality – what I'm calling “self-betrayal” and “sin” seems impossible. It seems impossible than anyone could know in his own mind what is morally right for him to do and yet not do it. When we experience a genuine prompting of conscience (there is such a thing as false or distorted conscience, and I'll get to that later), way are in that moment obligated: we are requiring of ourselves the course of action it prescribes. (I'm not saying the prompting cannot originate from a source outside ourselves, but only that whatever its ultimate origin, when we experience it we recognize and accept its validity for us.) There is no room for wondering whether we ought to follow this course. In the very reception of a moral summons, we feel we ought to follow it. But if this is so, what sense can it make to say that we require this course of action of ourselves in the very moment and by the very act of refusing to comply with the requirement? What sort of self-requirement is that? None at all, the tradition has said. Either (1) we don't really understand the requirement, or (2) we aren’t really making it of ourselves, or (3) we lack the power or opportunity to comply with it. But the fourth alternative, that we are acting immorally—requiring moral action of ourselves in and by the very act of violating the requirement—seems to make no sense at all.

Yet we do make a more requirement of ourselves in by this kind of act. We do it by carrying out the refusal in such a way that it seems to us that we are doing the very best we can under the circumstances. We make the moral requirement of ourselves by denying that we doing what we are doing. In short, we do it by hypocrisy. The hypocrisy acknowledges, in a backhanded way, the rightness of what we are not doing. Paul wrote that when we violate the law of God written in our hearts, we “consent unto the law that it is good" (ROM. 7:16). Someone who is straightforwardly doing what seems to him right has no cause to excuse or justify himself; and someone who isn't doing what seems right to him shows that he does have such a cause. In the words of La Rochefoucauld “hypocrisy is vice’s tribute to virtue."

We are deceived by this hypocrisy of ourselves because it and the self-betrayal are the same event. We do not first betray ourselves and then, following a moment in which we recognize that we've got something to hide, act as if it is someone else's fault. If this were what happened, we could perhaps hang on to the momentary, accurate knowledge we had about ourselves and thereby keep ourselves from slipping into the lie, but that's not what happens. The self-betrayal and the lie we live do not come in sequence. They are two sides of the same act, for as we’ve seen the betrayal wouldn't be possible unless it were alive from the first moment. Blaming others and making it seem that were doing our best in spite of them is the way we betray ourselves.

                         . . . .

It is important to understand that emotions are always involved in the self-betrayers lie. It would not be the same if we merely told ourselves a lie. We would not be able to get ourselves to believe it.

. . . . 

This point enables us to understand what's really going on when individuals profess, as they sometimes do, to know full well that there what they're doing find that they're doing wrong and continue to do it anyway. They are “intellectually “or verbally admitting to the truth, but emotionally base are still caught up in the lie. Everyone knows this who has experienced the deep sorrow of repentance: it is an emotion that's worlds apart from the self-betrayer’s anxiety or guilt.

Collusion

Accusing others means making ourselves out to be the victim. We’re not responsible for what's going on because we’re helpless in the face of what we’re doing. We feel unjustly used by them – wronged, threatened, or disadvantaged. Feelings of psychological and emotional victimhood are telltale signs of self-betrayal.

. . . . 

One of our dominant, almost unexamined fictions is that we are not responsible for emotions. They are caused in us, we believe, by events outside of our control. Recently this dogma has been undergoing re-examination, and it is becoming increasingly clear that it is false. Accusing emotions are performances in which we engage. In the history of a particular people, patterns of emotion evolve as do patterns of rhetoric. They arise, flourish, and become extinct. Yet the metaphor dogmatically persists that such emotions are injuries because we invoke it anew whenever we compromise ourselves. (For example, if were angry with someone we cannot fail to believe that that person is making us angry.)

This dogma is the core of every self-betrayer’s self-deception.

As you can see read from the extensive quotations, this is pretty strong stuff. It challenges us. It strikes at our normal assumptions. I don't have to think outside the bounds my own experience to identify innumerable times when I rushed to claim the mantle of victimhood. (In addition, really, when you think about it, who the hell would rationally want to be a victim?) However, we do want to be the victim for the reasons that Warner argues. I saw way too much that was way too familiar in this paper to walk away at this point. But the paper, like the Arbinger Institute books and Warner's book Bonds That Make Us Free (which I'm coming to) spend a limited amount of time and analysis on the background of the theory. In fact, at the end of this paper, he lists some sources that he reports influenced his line of thinking. Warner writes:

When I set out to solve certain conceptual problems that recur in the human sciences and in philosophy, I discovered, gradually, the important things I finally prepared myself to say had been said before—some in Eastern religious texts, some in Western authors such as certain Christian mystics and Shakespeare and Kierkegaard, some in the commonplace wisdom of guileless people in many communities, but all of it better and shown in the Hebrew, Christian, and Latter-Day Saints Scriptures. Without having it as a prior aim, I've come to feel that my work is to convey something of the power of the Scriptures to those who do not know them, and endeavored it that admittedly loses important elements in the translation.

Though I am by no means the first to make these claims, it seems worthwhile to keep repeating them: our ignoble desires are not ultimately derived from an ignoble nature, and our anxieties are not the result of being unable to make ourselves whatever we are striving to be. These desires and anxieties stem from our betrayal of what we really are, from our refusal to love, from an exercise of our agency that ties that agency in knots—in short, from sin. If we are emotionally troubled, it's not because we were created to be that way but because we have betrayed, perverted, denied what we were created to be. The condition of our liberation from unwanted desires and anxieties is our responsiveness, in love, to what others need from us, and to the supreme loving act that makes our love possible.

Having read the paper cited from above and Leadership and Self-Deception, I was certainly hooked as a matter of intellect and, I hope, converted (if you will) to his way of thinking. Whether I reflect it in my actions is hard to say, except to the extent I’ve acted the better for it in any degree, it has been at best imperfectly. Of late, I've had occasion to think about my relationships and those of others, and I took up once again the book that I discovered Warner had written before the Arbinger Institute books came out. I bought a hard copy and read it, and recently (thank goodness for Kindle), I was able to re-read it and contemplate it anew. This re-reading led to this review

Bonds That Make Us Free (a wonderfully ironic title that reflects a deep truth) should first of all be described by what it is not: it is not a philosophy book or self-help book, at least in any usual sense. It is a book primarily about people and their relationships. Much of it comes from first-hand accounts of people with whom Warner has worked. He's obviously worked with a great number of people in applying these insights. In this way, Warner is a philosopher in the deepest sense of the word in that is analytical abilities are turned to building a better way of life. He embodies what Pierre Hadot has called “philosophy as a way of life”. This book is full of stories of people and their relationships, with relatively little analysis and only fleeting reference to well-known figures. Tolstoy, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Kierkegaard all get passing mentions or the briefest of quotes, but that’s it. This is not a philosophy book. However, there is one figure who Warner did not mention in the article cited above, but who receives repeated reference in this book (although not in any kind of philosophical explication). That thinker is Martin Buber, a German-Jewish intellectual who in 1923 wrote a book that was translated in English as I and Thou. (The translation I and Thou is controversial and considered by many to be a mistranslation. For Warner's purposes at it should be translated as I and You.) Buber's book argues that there are two ways of relating to others: either is a You or an It. Buber suggests that with others the You relationship is best. One can imagine how well this fits into Warner’s thinking. It is by treating others as an It that we can allow ourselves to sneak into self-betrayal.

The book's many vignettes offer opportunities for Warner to elucidate his insights and to answer questions that most readers will have. Because it is not a comprehensive work of philosophy, but a practical effort to provide insight into our actions, it does not seek to extend or delimit the work as a body of theory. Nevertheless, Warner answers every easy objection to his insights that a person might initially bring forth.

This book is for anyone. Although a Mormon, Warner's religious beliefs don’t intrude upon or limit his theories. Whether one is Mormon, Christian, or nonbeliever, I believe Warner's insights will still prove deeply insightful. (The fact that he can quote Jean-Paul Sartre and benefit from Sartre's insights suggests that Warner's mind is open. Also, although treated only toward the end of the book and briefly, Warner freely acknowledges his religious background and how it ultimately roots his thinking. In the paper, he also understands that some will have a skeptical attitude because of his religious faith.

So, to whom do I recommend this book? Anyone who seeks deeper insights into his or her relationships with others. Given that we are human beings—and perhaps only truly human—when we are in relationships with others, this means everyone. It is not difficult book to read. It’s relatively easy reading. The only hard part is when you see yourself and your loved ones in the tales that others tell of themselves in the many vignettes. Some of this is hard. Hard in the way that we have to look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning. It's not always a pretty sight, but by doing so we see ourselves as we are, and perhaps can make some improvements. I gave this book a five star rating on Amazon because I think it has the potential to change our ways of being in the world, and that's the highest compliment you can give to a book