02/19/2024
What actually makes us happy? According to Bush (author of Designing the Mind), the answers form a relatively short list. Be honest with yourself and others, work hard and help your neighbor. Start now as even relatively small steps can pay large dividends, and the road to fulfillment is paved with good deeds and other virtues. Offering nothing less than a “grand, unified theory of human well-being,” Become Who You Are presents a synthesis of the thinking of Nietzsche (the source of the title), the Stoics, spiritual wisdom, psychotherapy, virtue ethics, and more, as Bush lays out a route to achieving “eudaimonia,” an ancient Greek term for “the good life.”
Bush’s guidance and the book’s soul-searching process is crafted not only to make readers ourselves better individuals, coming into “who they are,” but also to become happier and more fulfilled along the way. Bush cuts a wide swath blending “philosophical arguments, scientific data, and therapeutic advice” with thumbnail explications of philosophical history and movements, all while digging into questions like why we feel there’s a reason to do the right thing even in the absence of consequences, and whether one person’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. Bush notes that, in a society that seemingly values material success above all else, it’s tempting to think of one’s self before others. But after the new car has lost its luster, and the trip around the world is over, what’s next?
Bush urges readers toward greater self-esteem by arguing that regularly doing the “right thing,” i.e., following a simple moral compass, is what can determine who we truly are. Although he occasionally falls short in his philosophical arguments, Bush deserves an “A” for effort. To his credit Bush neither talks “down” to the reader nor gets too grandiose in philosophical jargon. His direct, simple style, buttressed by examples from his own personal journey, which serve as life lessons, make the book highly readable and engaging.
Takeaway: The road to “the good life,” through philosophy, virtue, and ethics.
Comparable Titles: Massimo Pigliucci, Skye C. Cleary, and Daniel A. Kaufman’s How to Live a Good Life, Gregory Lopez’s A Handbook for Stoics.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
"I am interested, personally and professionally, in understanding why some people thrive after depression and other mental health challenges and in building a world in which this becomes a realistic possibility for a greater number of people. I see Ryan working toward similar ends, and his synthesis is interesting, useful, and relatively novel.
Become Who You Are is an impressive blend of research and imagination that resonated with me and left me thinking well after I finished reading. The approach put forward in Become Who You Are is promising, with potential to help stimulate people to do the work to overcome their mental health struggles. Reading the book could help catalyze a person's search for values, the courage to pursue their highest aspirations, and the climb to reach their ideal self.
Ryan's work is not quite like anything I've come across in my experience with the academic, clinical, and self-help realms of psychology. I'm enthusiastic about his project and future ambitions for Mindform and impressed with what he has been able to build so far. It's clearly adding value to people's lives, and there need to be more efforts like it!"
- Jonathan Rottenberg PhD, Professor of Psychology and author of The Depths
"Ryan Bush has done it! He has cracked the code on the happiness equation. His theory is groundbreaking and sound. It just makes sense. Anyone who wants to live a more fulfilling, joyful, and happy life should read this book."
- Matt O'Neill, author of Conquering Bad Moods and host of The Good Mood Show podcast.
"In his book, Become Who You Are - a reference to Nietzsche's famous call to arms - Ryan Bush synthesizes the insights of philosophy, neuroscience, and positive, cognitive and evolutionary psychology - bringing each field's insights into the life together into a bold new theory that feels both refreshingly novel and as old as the hills in all the right ways. It has changed my outlook on how to live life (and retrospectively, how I've been living it) and I've already caught myself multiple times launching into an exposition of the theory with friends I thought it would benefit. This book will reorient your life towards what matters most: virtue."
- James Cussen, Founder of The Living Philosophy
2024-02-06
Bush conducts an unusual, society-oriented examination of the roots of happiness in this nonfiction work.
Although his book concerns “the opposite of depression,” the author, a motivational speaker, stresses from the outset that this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s about eliminating sadness. Bush’s subject is a positive state, not the absence of a negative one; as he asserts, “It’s about striving for greatness, not recovering from an illness.” In searching for what the author refers to as a “grand, unified theory of happiness,” he proposes a new model of happiness itself. After noting that the realization of some long-held wish for sudden good fortune (winning the lottery, for example) often does not bring long-term happiness, Bush imagines a “z-axis” of virtue that complicates the usual spectrum of pain and pleasure—the z-axis is firmly rooted in the social elements of human nature. “Your actions must,” he contends, “exemplify traits that you value in others.” The author posits that “a good life is an admirable life.” Bush draws from a wide range of self-help and psychology authors as well as ancient and modern philosophers, and his book is attractively arranged and illustrated with graphs and flowcharts, but its core message is surprisingly simple: When the self one presents to the world is favorably aligned with one’s own values, one’s happiness increases. While he’s elaborating on this idea, Bush’s prose is always bracingly direct (“You don’t need meaning,” he writes; “You need virtue”). Some of his ideas might be controversial—the author tends to take motivational rather than medical stances on issues such as depression and autism, and his “z-axis” may resonate with monsters (“You should only care about social approval insofar as it reflects your own approval” sounds good on paper, but it’s also the life philosophy of sociopaths). Still, the bulk of the text has an energy that self-help readers will find invigorating.
A paradigm-challenging new look at real happiness.
