Friday, January 15, 2016

Book #3 of the Year

I'm reading The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) by Chris Hardwick. (affiliate link)

Yes, some people think he is a dick. Some people think he has appropriated the Nerd title and used to build a fake geek empire. Some people just think he's full of himself.
Photo by Chris Glass

I think he is a comedian who has worked in the industry long enough to have a lot of relationships with people I wan to hear more from and works really hard to surround himself with people who make great stuff.

A lot of people ask me if I listen to WTF with Marc Maron and a few others if I listen to Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin. I don't. I listen to The Nerdist. I think at their base, all three shows are the same, the only difference is the personality of the host, the one who is leading the conversation with the guest. Well, The Nerdist has one other difference and that's the other hosts, Jonah Ray and Matt Mira. But often they act more like us, the listener.

For whatever reason, I've connected with Chris Hardwick's version of pompous ass so I listen to his show.

I put The Nerdist Way on my To Be Read list sometime last year or the year before and just happened to find it on the discard rack at my local library. I scanned through it and thought I would not bother reading it, until I remembered it was on my list. So I spent my cherished 50 cents and bought it.

I'm a hundred pages into a roughly 300 page book and here are my thoughts.

Chris Hardwick's writing style is best described as THIS IS IMPORTANT SO I'M WRITING IT IN ALL CAPS.

Honestly, there are so many all caps in this book it hurts my brain to look at the page.

Also, he is writing as a person talking to the reader, so everything is him telling me how I feel and it's really frustrating because I do not feel the way he is yelling that I do.

Reading this book is less relevant to me than the CBT training I took. I do not suffer from any of the negative thinking he is "teaching" the reader to let go of.

I had hoped this book would talk more about being creative and building things. I admire people who create jobs out of doing what they love, especially when it's completely unrecognizable as a job. People who can describe what they do for a living and the most common response is "Wait, you can get paid to do that?" really interest me. I want to hear more.

The book is divided into three parts, Mind, Body and Time. I have stopped fully reading the section I am on, Mind, and I suspect I will zoom through Body, but hopefully, there will be something I actually enjoy in Time.

And even though I am not reading every word, and skimming quickly through pages at a time, I will still count this as a book read at the end of the week.

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