The Courage to be Disliked Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Basing their advice on Adlerian psychology, Kishimi and Koga discuss the importance of living in the present, and focusing on your own ability to change your life and your circumstances. We often live as if our fate is fixed, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. You may have to risk rejection or fear, but you have the ability to change your outlook and your choices, no matter your circumstances or the events of your past.

About the Author

Ichiro Kishimi is a Japanese Adlerian psychologist and the Director of the Japanese Society for Adlerian Psychology.

Fumitake Koga is a professional writer. He worked alongside Kishimi to write The Courage to be Disliked and The Courage to be Happy.

Topics

Philosophy

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Key Insights

The Courage to be Disliked uses a blend of Adlerian psychological principles and self-help to guide readers toward a new way of considering mental health. Under Adler, readers will be asked to see themselves as active agents in their own lives and to focus on their own values and actions instead of the values and actions of others. The book explains that personality isn’t rigid, and there is always space for personal change. It also discusses child psychology and uses metaphors to discuss self-worth and competition in contemporary culture.

We are not defined by our trauma; we are defined by our choices.

Much of contemporary psychology is defined by Sigmund Freud, who believed that everything we experience is rooted in our past. Our past traumas define our lives. If we hear about a recluse living in the apartment upstairs, we assume they have been traumatized and are acting out that trauma by avoiding the world. But this book focuses on a different brand of psychological understanding - the work of Albert Adler. Adler believed that while we do experience trauma, we are not necessarily defined by it. Instead, we make the choice whether or not to act on that trauma. According to Adler, we might make choices because of our trauma, but we are not stuck in that particular pathway. If someone chooses to become a hermit because of fear of being harmed, for example, they can always choose to make a change and channel that fear in other ways. Adler reminds us that not everyone who is traumatized as a child becomes a social outcast as an adult. There must be another way - Kishimi and Koga explain that this is true because we have a choice about how we act in each moment.

Our personalities aren’t permanent, but we don’t like to change them.

When we think about personality, we often think of people as fixed in a certain way of being. For example, someone might be perpetually an optimist, or perpetually a pushover. But Adler prefers to use the word lifestyle over personality of character. This is because, unlike some other psychologists, he believes that we actively choose each day what kind of person we want to be.

We are not born with our personalities - instead, they are manifestations of how we view the world. Someone who is a pessimist, for example, has a negative outlook, and they act accordingly. We begin to make active choices about our outlook and lifestyle around the age of ten, based on previous life experiences. But we are not stuck in those ten-year-old viewpoints - we can change that outlook at any time.

That being said, changing your outlook is not something that humans frequently want to do. People prefer to be comfortable and not change, even if they don’t enjoy their lifestyle very much. For example, someone who is isolated and complains about not having friends might sound like they want to change their lifestyle. But in reality, despite their talk people rarely take...