THE MYTH OF SUCCESS AND THE TRUTH OF ABUNDANCE

Standeven offers a post-pandemic reassessment of life’s priorities.

The author takes aim at a handful of what she sees as long-standing social myths and re-evaluates them in the light of the experience of Covid-19 and the rethinking that it prompted across wide swaths of the culture. “Popularity is the feeling of judgement externalized, which likely explains why popularity can so easily morph into discrimination, bullying, and exclusion,” she writes about the Popularity Myth, for instance. “Judgement is a choice to measure yourself and others according to traits that are tied to the external, rather than what is inside.” Whether it’s the Myth of Beauty or the Myth of Position, Standeven examines priorities that tend to rule people’s lives, searching them for the kinds of deeper truths that the pandemic and its shortages and lockdowns seemed to reveal. Regarding the Myth of Position, for instance, Standeven draws on her experience coaching corporate clients to highlight the importance of what she calls “the Flow,” which she describes as “the feeling you have when time disappears and everything else falls away as you do the thing you love.” She uses a direct, highly energetic prose style that serves her particularly well when she’s staking out more controversial claims, as when she contends that the Myth of Family has distracted society from the fact that one can love family members unconditionally, which she calls “the greatest gift anyone can bestow,” even when their actions cause “friction or pain.” She effectively urges readers to “be brave enough to risk disapproval and embark on those challenging conversations.” Throughout the book, Standeven comes across as the kind of clear-eyed, straight-talking acquaintance that many readers would be glad to encounter.

A thought-provoking sorting-out of social mores.