The key to living well is so much simpler than you think, says Rolf Dobelli in new book
Unlike most collectors—whose collections include everything from stamps to sailboats—Swiss writer Rolf Dobelli has been collecting stories of failure, “botched attempts at work, family life, marriage and life in general”. It might seem like a morbid obsession, but Dobelli has gleaned some great life lessons from them—a kind of success manual in reverse. And that’s exactly the format he uses in his latest book, The Not-To-Do List; he calls it the inversion method. So in each of the 52 chapters, he describes shortcuts to a miserable life and then, in the end, adds a “quiet voice of reason”, which overturns his own advice.
For example, in the chapter ‘Feed Your Weaker Self’, he writes about the importance of “trusting your inner sloth”. Motivation has to come from the outside, not from within. He gives the example of gorillas who just sit around scratching themselves and digesting food. Since we share 98 per cent of our genes with them, we should just follow their lead.
By the time you’ve finished that inevitable eye-roll, Dobelli gets to the ‘quiet voice of reason’, in which he inverts his own advice and writes about the need for taming the innere Schweinehund, German for ‘inner pigdog’. Sloth, he says, is a natural tilt of our temperaments, right from our hunter-gatherer days. To overcome it, one must develop the “muscle” of self-motivation. But here, too, there is a balance. If you overexert yourself, the muscle will get tired and you’ll find your willpower waning. But by making demands on that muscle, you are training it, and literally willing your willpower to grow. Thus you increasingly conquer your inner pigdog.
Other chapters in the book give such ‘edifying’ advice as being unreliable, drifting through the day, messing up your marriage, setting the wrong goals, getting involved in other people’s drama and practising ingratitude. Dobelli says he got the idea for the inversion method from a Harvard commencement speech by American investor, Charlie Munger, which was bizarrely titled ‘How to Guarantee a Life of Misery’. Munger flipped conventional wisdom on its head and instead spoke about four fail-safe ways to achieve zero success in life. “We can’t pinpoint what leads to success, but we know for sure what makes it an impossibility,” writes Dobelli. “The key is to keep the killer in your sights and give him the slip, then the right path will automatically open up ahead.”
In an interview with THE WEEK, Dobelli says that he tries to use the 52 pointers that he’s distilled in the book all the time. “Some of them have become second nature; others still require a lot of effort on my part,” he says. “One that is not easy for me is scheduling my day in terms of blocks of time. If I don’t take a moment to plan my day first thing in the morning, it becomes utter chaos. Unfortunately, this still happens way too often for me.”
I ask him to describe one life philosophy that has been the banner flying high over his own life. “One that flows through most chapters in the book is: The quality of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts and the quality of your relationships,” he says. “People often think that money or status leads to a successful life. But they mean nothing if your thoughts and your relationships are toxic. You want to be very careful what you think and whom you surround yourself with.”
Much of what Dobelli writes seems evident—self-help gold whose shine has dimmed over time. What makes the book interesting, however, is its plethora of anecdotes, examples, philosophies and quotes. Dobelli has done his homework well. It doesn’t hurt that the writing is sharp and suave, threaded with a sly sense of humour which is accentuated by his format of story-telling. As he says, he has been collecting stories of success and failure since his days as a philosophy student. “I have also collected wisdom from the great thinkers of the past 2,500 years,” he says. “Out of this huge mountain of unstructured notes, I tried to distil the 52 most salient points.”
And what helped him fine-tune his research into these 52 points? Keeping his children in mind and thinking ahead to when they become adults. “I pictured them at, say, 25 years old,” he says. “I would hand them this book and tell them: Don’t do any of these 52 things, and you will have a good life.” Now that’s wisdom!
Lifestyle