Review: The Lazy Genius Way (by Kendra Adachi)

 

My Rating:  3.5 stars

This week has been a bit of a struggle for me reading-wise due to some personal issues I’ve had to deal with that has been a huge drain on both my time and energy.  Prior to this issue cropping up, I had started Kendra Adachi’s The Lazy Genius Way and since it’s a relatively short book, I figured I would be able to finish it quickly.  In hindsight now, I realize that was wishful thinking, as I ended up slogging through this book and taking way more time than I should have to finish it.  Just to be clear though, this is one of those situations where it’s me, not the book.  In general, non-fiction books always take me a longer time to get through, mainly because I feel that I have to grasp and absorb each detail in order to make the reading experience worthwhile – unlike fiction where I don’t need to make a conscious effort to remember every detail, just enough to get into the story and its characters.

In any case – even though it took me longer than I would’ve liked to read, I did enjoy Adachi’s book overall.  In addition to being well-written, one of the things I appreciated most about this book is that it doesn’t follow the traditional “preachy” self-help book path -- you know, those books that always come across as though the author  (usually an academic) is trying to persuade you to live your life a certain way because they (supposedly) know more than you do.  With her book, Adachi takes the opposite approach in that the main message is about doing what matters to you, NOT what matters to someone else.  Using her own experiences as examples, she lays out 13 principles she lives by that help her “be a genius about what matters and lazy about what doesn’t.”  I found the advice practical and the way Adachi went about conveying it was engaging enough to keep me interested in what she had to say.

With all that said however, the sticking point for me is that, unfortunately, a lot of what was talked about in the book didn’t resonate with me.  Technically, this isn’t the book’s fault – it’s more I don’t have much in common with the perspective that Adachi writes from (white, middle class, Christian wife and mother), plus I consider my personal situation a bit unique, so it was hard for me to see how some of the principles fit into my life.  With self-help books, resonance to the subject matter is absolutely important for me, so much so that when I’m not able to relate to a lot of the book, I feel like I just wasted my time reading it.  Of course, this is not to say that timing could’ve played a role as well, since, as I mentioned earlier, I’m going through some things right now where my frame of mind may not be as receptive to books like this at the moment. 

Overall, I would still recommend this one, as I feel that, as far as self-help books go, this is definitely a good one.  Also, I don’t doubt the usefulness of Adachi’s advice or the fact that the Lazy Genius method does work for many people, it’s just I’m not able to see the relevance and application to my life as it is at this moment.  I do want to try listening to Adachi’s Lazy Genius podcast at some point though to see if perhaps that format will work out better for me.