Book Report: Gorilla Mindset by Mike Cernovich (2016)

Book coverI ordered this book when I saw Cernovich’s name mentioned on two blogs on the same day. Sorry, I forget which blogs they were, but they were likely ones from the blogroll.

So this book is all about shifting your mindset, a self-help title focusing a little on how you frame things/alter your perspective, that you should be in the moment, and that you should drink vegetable juices using the juicer that sponsors his podcast.

I’ve read a number of self-help books over the last couple of years, including The Power of Positive Thinking and Eat the Cookie, Buy the Shoes in late 2020. The first is from 1952; the second is from 2010, but from an author a generation or two up from mine (probably closer to one, since I apparently have reached the age of lower auto insurance rates). This book, the one under review, comes from someone of my generationish (he’s five years younger than I am), and much of the book seems adapted from quick hit blog posts and podcast transcripts. If you read the books in chronological order, you see a definite decline in the depth of the prose. One wonders if we are still printing and reading books in ten or twenty years if self-help books will be but collections of memes and inspirational quotes on images or more akin to Dav Pilkey books, lightweight prose broken up by rudimentary cartoons. It could go either way.

At any rate, a little actionable information in the book, I suppose. I mean, there’s a bit on recognizing negative self talk, and I took action on it, thinking That’s negative self talk when I did it, which dropped my negative self talk down to fifty percent of my interior dialog with the introduction of 50% thinking That’s negative self talk. I did realize how grousy my mother’s family was, in total, grousing as a large part of their other-to-other talk. But I have not completely reframed my perspective with that knowledge or that book.

A quick read, not very deep as I mentioned, and akin to the stuff you might find in popular Buddhist philosphy/mindfulness books and whatnot.

Perhaps it is best to read Cernovich in blog form or listen to him on his podcast to hear him in his native enviroment rather than in book length chunks.

He’s had a lot of success with the podcast and notoriety from his blog, so he’s doing well for himself. Good on him, I guess, but I don’t know if I need to read more of his work. And it might be another year or so until I try another self-help book (aside from philosophy or whatnot, which is university-grade self-help) for another year or more. I mean, it’s not telling me much that I don’t already know.

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