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A review by firstiteration
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder by Arianna Huffington
3.0
This book was okay.
Overall, the content/message was good! A lot of it is pretty common sense at this point, and it does tackle some important health issues in North America rn (definitions of success, people not sleeping, etc etc).
There were a few major issues from my point of view though. The first being how the book was loaded down with so many quotations. I find it made it difficult to actually read the book, and because there were so many on them, they didn't have that much impact. I think Huffington's arguments also used too many sources, which sounds terrible because research and naming your sources is important! But I felt like little examples were constantly being thrown at me without the proper amount of contextualizing or writing about each one. Sometimes I felt like the writing was trying to win me over through the sheer amount of resources rather than building a persuasive argument.
It would also have been nice to see more success stories from average people. Hearing that a super rich successful person was also valued for being a good person is like... that's nice, but the vast majority of us are not going to be wealthy and successful, and focusing on "thriving" within the context of our lives would have been more useful and relevant for the average reader.
I also felt reading the first few sections of the book difficult because it felt like Huffington didn't acknowledge enough that people aren't sleeping and resting properly not just due to personal choice, but due to systemic issues. I'm Canadian, but I have read about how America in particular doesn't have proper laws to allow many workers (mostly minimum wage workers) proper rests. It's also hard people to rest enough when they need to work a ridiculous amount of hours to get by on a minimum wage that is too low. So for that section, I think it would be appropriate for Huffington to argue that a lot of the solution does need to be top-down. In other sections of the book she does praise certain CEOs for treating their employees with human decency, but for some reason it was missing from that first section.
In summary: despite having a few major flaws, this was a decent book that was of use to me personally.
Overall, the content/message was good! A lot of it is pretty common sense at this point, and it does tackle some important health issues in North America rn (definitions of success, people not sleeping, etc etc).
There were a few major issues from my point of view though. The first being how the book was loaded down with so many quotations. I find it made it difficult to actually read the book, and because there were so many on them, they didn't have that much impact. I think Huffington's arguments also used too many sources, which sounds terrible because research and naming your sources is important! But I felt like little examples were constantly being thrown at me without the proper amount of contextualizing or writing about each one. Sometimes I felt like the writing was trying to win me over through the sheer amount of resources rather than building a persuasive argument.
It would also have been nice to see more success stories from average people. Hearing that a super rich successful person was also valued for being a good person is like... that's nice, but the vast majority of us are not going to be wealthy and successful, and focusing on "thriving" within the context of our lives would have been more useful and relevant for the average reader.
I also felt reading the first few sections of the book difficult because it felt like Huffington didn't acknowledge enough that people aren't sleeping and resting properly not just due to personal choice, but due to systemic issues. I'm Canadian, but I have read about how America in particular doesn't have proper laws to allow many workers (mostly minimum wage workers) proper rests. It's also hard people to rest enough when they need to work a ridiculous amount of hours to get by on a minimum wage that is too low. So for that section, I think it would be appropriate for Huffington to argue that a lot of the solution does need to be top-down. In other sections of the book she does praise certain CEOs for treating their employees with human decency, but for some reason it was missing from that first section.
In summary: despite having a few major flaws, this was a decent book that was of use to me personally.