Flinch: to shrink back from pain or perceived discomfort.
This book is about being aware of the moment we flinch, and going towards what makes us flinch rather than away from it.
We tend to flinch away. This book is about flinching forward.
The kind of book this is
If books are conversations, many non-fiction books are lectures.
They present a collection of arguments and evidence to take you towards conclusions that give you deeper knowledge of a subject.
This is not that kind of book.
In conversation terms, this book is the ex-classmate who joined the military and is here to remind you that you’ve grown soft.
I don’t recall seeing any research findings in the book. And the argument is clear enough within the first few pages. It’s because this book isn’t about information.
The point of reading this book is to make a change.
Investing time in this book makes it more likely that you will notice yourself flinch and take on the discomfort of over-riding it.
If you’re sincere about it, you may even be able to teach yourself to love overriding the flinch.
That, I imagine, would be transformative.
To be honest about my own experience, I read the book a year ago but haven’t done much more risk-taking since. Maybe I did a little initially, but things have regressed to the mean.
I think that’s more on me than on the book. The Flinch gives you the conceptual tool you need to be more courageous in your life. But applying this in practice is something you have to do for yourself.
I still carry the idea of the flinch with me. And that makes it a little more likely that I will take a meaningful risk in the future.
Problems of Abundance
The central problem of this book belongs to the family of modern challenges I’ll call problems of abundance and comfort.
While we are adapted for scarcity, the world around us is abundant.
Today, we are on average more likely to die of obesity than starvation, to lose our minds from overstimulation than boredom, and to suffer for taking too few risks rather than for taking too many of them.
The flinch is specifically about the last problem: the excessive risk aversion which limits our growth and self-actualization.
If you’re interested, Antifragile by Nassim Taleb is an excellent book that explores a range of modern problems of abundance.
Two Kinds of Risk
This is a response, not a review.
And if there’s one thing I would to add to The Flinch, it would be this short section in the first third of the book. Julien if you’re reading this, feel free to include it in future editions.
Let’s say there are two categories of risk.
Hospital risk is any risk which can seriously incapacitate you in the future. A subset of this is existential risk: any risk that can kill you.
Then there’s non–hospital risk: any risk that has a negligible chance of putting you in the hospital for an extended period.
Humans evolved in environments of hospital risk.
Skip stones at the lake and you could be ambushed by a crocodile. Anger your tribe and you could be exiled to the savannah. Make people uneasy and you could be burnt for witchcraft.
Modern risks are not hospital risks. Especially, modern social risks. The cost of most social risks today is low, but the upside is huge.
You can alienate all people you meet for twenty years without exhausting the number of potential contacts you can meet in a single city. But social risks well taken could lead you to transform your career and relationships and meet brilliant and inspiring people from across the globe.
Our lives would get significantly better if we took dozens of reasonable social risks every day.
But we don’t.
Because our physiology still believes we’re in a 500-person tribe in the savannah. We flinch.
The solution?
Pay attention to the flinch and respond by flinching forward. Dive into the thing that scares you.
Just make sure it’s not a hospital risk.
Should You Read it?
The Flinch wouldn’t be in my top-shelf. But the book is what it aims to be.
If you’re the person who responds to this kind of thing, or if you’re not but really need to hear it, this book could be the slap in the face you need.
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Note: The Flinch is free, and ebook versions of it can be found online.