Areté: Activate Your Heroic Potential by Brian Johnson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I had high hopes for this book. Having followed Brian Johnson’s work for some time now–“Philosopher’s Notes,” “+1s,” and “Master Classes.” I was hoping this book would be more like the Master Classes or the coaching program, But the author chose to barely edit and put into writing a bunch of short video narratives (used to be called +1s), renaming them “+1 degree micro chapters.” I’m disappointed in the organization and structure.
The author states, “…I wanted to create a book that is basically The War of Art + War and Peace. Pithy microchapters + dense brick of a book. Dense brick yes, but War and Peace it is not. As to the War of Art comparison? Missed that target as well. Like Pressfield Johnson attempts pithiness but falls short–instead we get single sentence paragraphs lacking flow. Pressfield is masterful at this style, saying everything that needs saying in one sentence. Johnson, not so much.
Given the choice made discussed above (printing video narratives), this book is as another reviewer states, “quick bite social media post or an ultrashort YT video.” As previously mentioned this is because the author has merely (barely) edited his short +1 videos. The +1s were meant to be one-a-day bits of wisdom told to you by the author on video. That’s exactly why they are overly (annoyingly) conversational. A good editor would have fixed this.
Speaking of editing, the book claims to be published by “Heroic Blackstone.” Is this a made up publishing company or just a spin off of Blackstone Publishing? Either way, it is obviously self published and edited. First off the author waffles between first-person plural and first person singular narration. Again this is probably due to the source videos where it works well.
More a bothersome to me is the various methods of implying emphasis: all caps, bold, italicised, asterisks, and mid-sentence parenthetical exclamation points. The author also occasionally puts a period after words, no spacing, and no capitals, such as “every.single.day.” Bad grammar for effect is still bad grammar. There is too much use of onomatopoeia, like “Haha.” Hashtags pop up now and then as well.
Frequently the author chooses to drop in “P.S.” and “P.P.S.” followed by a sentence or two. At the end of a chapter it indicates extra information that didn’t fit in the chapter? If it doesn’t fit, leave it out. If it is relevant then work it into the narrative. Either way, the postscript or “P.S.” isn’t necessary. At least once there was a postscript in the middle of the chapter. Why?
I did like the index. This will help me to do what I hoped the author would do–well organized lateral thinking and deeper dives into the source material by reading the books the author mentions.
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