• Complain

Oliver Burkeman - The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking

Here you can read online Oliver Burkeman - The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2012, publisher: Faber & Faber, genre: Religion. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Oliver Burkeman The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking
  • Book:
    The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Faber & Faber
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2012
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The Antidote is a series of journeys among people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. What they have in common is a hunch about human psychology: that its our constant effort to eliminate the negative that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure, and unhappy. And that there is an alternative negative path to happiness and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid. It is a subversive, galvanizing message, which turns out to have a long and distinguished philosophical lineage ranging from ancient Roman Stoic philosophers to Buddhists. Oliver Burkeman talks to life coaches paid to make their clients lives a living hell, and to maverick security experts such as Bruce Schneier, who contends that the changes weve made to airport and aircraft security since the 9/11 attacks have actually made us less safe. And then there are the backwards business gurus, who suggest not having any goals at all and not planning for a companys future.

Burkemans new book is a witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head and forces us to rethink completely our attitudes toward failure, uncertainty, and death.

Oliver Burkeman: author's other books


Who wrote The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Oliver Burkeman is a feature writer for the Guardian. He is winner of the Foreign Press Associations Young Journalist of the Year award, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. He writes a popular weekly column on psychology, This Column Will Change Your Life, and has reported from London, Washington and New York, where he currently lives.

oliverburkeman.com

textpublishing.com.au

oliverburkeman.com

The Text Publishing Company

Swann House

22 William Street

Melbourne Victoria 3000

Australia

Copyright Oliver Burkeman, 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, 2012

Published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2012, by arrangement with Canongate Books

Cover design by W.H. Chong

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Author: Burkeman, Oliver.

Title: antidote : happiness for people who cant stand positive thinking /

Oliver Burkeman.

ISBN: 9781921922671 (pbk.)

ISBN: 9781921921483 (ebook : epub)

Subjects: Happiness.

Self-actualisation (Psychology)

Positive psychology.

Negativity (Philosophy)

Dewey Number: 152.42

To my parents

I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the backwards law. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float insecurity is the result of trying to be secure contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought, what the hell good would that do?

Ronnie Shakes

1
On Trying Too Hard to Be Happy

Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

Fyodor Dostoevsky,

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

T HE MAN WHO CLAIMS that he is about to tell me the secret of human happiness is eighty-three years old, with an alarming orange tan that does nothing to enhance his credibility. It is just after eight oclock on a December morning, in a darkened basketball stadium on the outskirts of San Antonio in Texas, and according to the orange man I am about to learn the one thing that will change your life forever. Im sceptical, but not as much as I might normally be, because I am only one of more than fifteen thousand people at Get Motivated!, Americas most popular business motivational seminar, and the enthusiasm of my fellow audience members is starting to become infectious.

So you wanna know?, asks the octogenarian, who is Dr Robert H. Schuller, veteran self-help guru, author of more than thirty-five books on the power of positive thinking, and, in his other job, the founding pastor of the largest church in the United States constructed entirely out of glass. The crowd roars its assent. Easily embarrassed British people like me do not, generally speaking, roar our assent at motivational seminars in Texan basketball stadiums, but the atmosphere partially overpowers my reticence. I roar quietly.

Here it is, then, Dr Schuller declares, stiffly pacing the stage, which is decorated with two enormous banners reading MOTIVATE! and SUCCEED!, seventeen American flags, and a large number of potted plants. Heres the thing that will change your life forever. Then he barks a single syllable Cut! and leaves a dramatic pause before completing his sentence: the word impossible out of your life! Cut it out! Cut it out forever!

The audience combusts. I cant help feeling underwhelmed, but then I probably shouldnt have expected anything different from Get Motivated!, an event at which the sheer power of positivity counts for everything. You are the master of your destiny! Schuller goes on. Think big, and dream bigger! Resurrect your abandoned hope! Positive thinking works in every area of life!

The logic of Schullers philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled, isnt exactly complex: decide to think happy and successful thoughts banish the spectres of sadness and failure and happiness and success will follow. It could be argued that not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for todays seminar provides uncontroversial evidence in support of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours time, by George W. Bush, a president far from universally viewed as successful. But if you voiced this objection to Dr Schuller, he would probably dismiss it as negativity thinking. To criticise the power of positivity is to demonstrate that you havent really grasped it at all. If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about anything else.

The organisers of Get Motivated! describe it as a motivational seminar, but that phrase with its suggestion of minor-league life coaches giving speeches in dingy hotel ballrooms hardly captures the scale and grandiosity of the thing. Staged roughly once a month, in cities across north America, it sits at the summit of the global industry of positive thinking, and boasts an impressive roster of celebrity speakers: Mikhail Gorbachev and Rudy Giuliani are among the regulars, as are General Colin Powell and, somewhat incongruously, William Shatner. Should it ever occur to you that a formerly prominent figure in world politics (or William Shatner) has been keeping an inexplicably low profile in recent months, theres a good chance youll find him or her at Get Motivated!, preaching the gospel of optimism.

As befits such celebrity, theres nothing dingy about the staging, either, which features banks of swooping spotlights, sound systems pumping out rock anthems, and expensive pyrotechnics; each speaker is welcomed to the stage amid showers of sparks and puffs of smoke. These special effects help propel the audience to ever higher altitudes of excitement, though it also doesnt hurt that for many of them, a trip to Get Motivated! means an extra day off work: many employers classify it as job training. Even the United States military, where training usually means something more rigorous, endorses this view; in San Antonio, scores of the stadiums seats are occupied by uniformed soldiers from the local Army base.

Technically, I am here undercover. Tamara Lowe, the self-described worlds number one female motivational speaker, who along with her husband runs the company behind Get Motivated!, has been accused of denying access to reporters, a tribe notoriously prone to negativity thinking. Lowe denies the charge, but out of caution, Ive been describing myself as a self-employed businessman a tactic, Im realising too late, that only makes me sound shifty. I neednt have bothered with subterfuge anyway, it turns out, since Im much too far away from the stage for the security staff to be able to see me scribbling in my notebook. My seat is described on my ticket as premier seating, but this turns out to be another case of positivity run amok: at Get Motivated!, there is only premier seating, executive seating, and VIP seating. In reality, mine is up in the nosebleed section; it is a hard plastic perch, painful on the buttocks. But I am grateful for it, because by chance it means that Im seated next to a man who, as far as I can make out, is one of the few cynics in the arena an amiable, large-limbed park ranger named Jim, who sporadically leaps to his feet to shout Im

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking»

Look at similar books to The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.