The Courage to be Disliked
Kishimi & Koga
A long conversation arguing you're freer than you think, as long as you can stand being disliked.
The whole book is a conversation over five nights between an old philosopher and an angry young man who has come to prove him wrong. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga use it to explain the ideas of Alfred Adler, a psychologist who worked around the same time as Freud and disagreed with him about almost everything.
The biggest claim is that your past doesn't decide who you are. Adler looked at people's goals instead of their causes. He argued that people use old wounds as reasons to avoid things they are already afraid of. The young man hates this. It takes the whole book to find out whether the philosopher can convince him.
The most useful tool in it is what they call separating tasks. Before you worry about something, ask whose task it really is. Your job is to do your work well. Whether someone else likes it, or likes you, is their task, not yours, and you can't do it for them. Freedom, the book says, costs some people disliking you. If nobody ever does, you're probably living by their choices.
It's on the shelf because that idea is useful for anyone who wants to do something slightly unusual. You can build the thing, or you can make sure nobody ever finds you strange. The book argues you rarely get both.
