Simplicity was Kayvan Kian’s goal when he set out to write a book of advice for young people that draws on the works of major thinkers from Epictetus to Martin Seligman. While Kian’s high school education included reading classical philosophy texts in the Greek and Latin—“reading the original texts felt fascinating to me,” he explains, adding that “many of the things they wrote down, they might have written last week”—he knew those formats were inaccessible to most 21st-century readers.
The result is What Is Water? a book Kian describes as a collection of answers to a crucial question: “What are helpful ways to lead your life?” Kian, an Amsterdam-based consultant for the multinational company McKinsey, combined his longtime interest in philosophy with the techniques developed in his professional career to turn ancient musings into practical advice, bringing out the key elements of time-tested stories and making use of existing wisdom rather than starting from scratch. “Consulting often helps with skills of synthesizing,” he says. “It’s not necessarily about writing long pages.”
In a concise and thoughtful 160 pages, Kian breaks down deep insights into actionable advice via a format that Kirkus Reviews calls “a forceful, engaging program for taking a clear, calming look at an increasingly alarming world.” The book moves from stories of Icarus and Daedalus, the Trojan War, and Alexander the Great’s first encounter with Diogenes to concrete examples of challenges the reader may be facing in everyday life:
You could ask yourself: what is the minimum skill level (varying from zero to Olympic level) you need to elevate your weaknesses to, so that they don’t stand in the way of you reaching your goals? If, for instance, you have to briefly speak in public, and you’re neither good at it nor enjoy it, what would be the bare minimum you need to learn? Try to define what you need to learn for those five-minute presentations, not what you need in order to become a talk show host.
Like all the book’s tips, the public speaking advice is what Kian describes as “tested by myself.” The exercises are based on personal experience, and he edited the text ruthlessly, leaving out “anything that sounded nice but wasn’t of practical benefit.”
What Is Water? Kian says, has broad applications. He hopes that as readers use the insights of great thinkers—made simple and comprehensible—to find solutions to their own problems, they will then begin to ask, “What does this mean for society? What does this mean for my community?”
Though he created the text during seven-plus years of research and writing (“much longer than originally anticipated, for all the right reasons”), Kian says he still returns to his own guide when problem-solving. That is precisely what he hopes readers will do. “You don’t need to finish it from A to Z or all in one go,” he says and encourages readers to make their way through the book in whatever format and at whatever pace works for them.
“Making it accessible was very important,” he says, which is why e-book and audiobook versions are available, and the plain language (“The more you are aware of your favorite things, the better you can integrate them into your day-to-day experience and not leave them up to chance”) is designed to be comprehensible to readers who, like Kian, do not speak English as a first language. There were “advantages and disadvantages” to writing in English, Kian says, and he is grateful for feedback he received throughout the writing process. He credits an editor who helped him develop a fluent and colloquial voice, turning some initial phrasing Kian describes as “Dutch in English words” into readable prose. (One of his favorite reviews came from a teen who told him she had no trouble understanding the book despite her lack of higher education.)
Talking about his motivations and his path to becoming a writer—in addition to What Is Water? his writing can be found on LinkedIn and on blogs published by McKinsey and Fast Company—Kian reiterated his main goal: to transform the works that he had found so useful over the years (“these ways of thinking that have helped me, that have helped many people across millennia”) into a tool that could be used by anyone facing a critical moment in a world he describes as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA, a term that appears throughout the book).
“Eventually, many of the lessons of the book life will teach you in one way or another,” he says. He hopes the book will make those lessons as frictionless as possible, especially for young people, instead of the sometimes-painful lessons taught by experience. “There is a sincere wish for the best for the reader,” he said. “I hope the book can be there for people during challenging times, whatever those challenges might be.”
Sarah Rettger is a bookseller and writer in the Boston area.