I’ve never read the book Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, but I have to imagine that a good amount of what is in that book is covered in How to Let Things Go. Author Shunmyo Masuno excels at covering complex topics in a simple way that makes the book very easy and fast to read.
I finished this book in a day, and in retrospect, it might have been a bad thing to read it so quickly. After I made it to a little over halfway through the book, my mind started to trail off and I kept losing focus. It wasn’t that the topics weren’t relevant, but I kept thinking about concepts from the book that applied to my life in various ways. Sometimes business, sometimes personal, sometimes thinking about a movie or TV show I was watching where the topic was relevant.
The book discusses perspective in multiple places with one of the many core messages being that things we struggle with that cause anxiety, fear, resentment, or anger come from our own perspectives. How we view what is happening and how we choose to react to it directly impacts that “thing” and its overall effect on us. Essentially, we choose whether or not to give it power over our choices and feelings.
Oftentimes when I read a self-help book I find myself thinking that the author does a great job of explaining what the problem is but fails at coming up with a viable working solution. What can we do about any of this? To this end, How to Let Things Go succeeds in attempting to provide tips and methods for addressing most of the 99 topics covered in the book. My critique is that some of them are too simple. Some of them are BIG topics like choosing not to allow something to bother us in the moment, but that’s easier said than done when you’re in that moment.
Altogether, I enjoyed the book and I felt my body take a short breath and release a long sigh of relief multiple times. Physiologically, I could feel my body relaxing and letting go of some tension although I can’t really say for sure where some of it was coming from. Even still, it helped me to read the words and think about how many of the topics relate to me directly.
In a future article, you will see me write about the book The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Reading both of these books simultaneously was an interesting exercise. So many of the topics discussed in this book were covered by Holiday’s book. This certainly reinforced several things for me and gave me clarity where I may have stepped away from How to Let Things Go with more questions. Be on the lookout for this upcoming article. I’m still finishing the book, but so far it’s a good one!
