Book Review - Let Them

In the fourth season episode of Mad Men entitled The Summer Man, Don Draper, having spent months drowning his sorrows in the bottom of a bottle of rye whiskey, finds himself in a contemplative mood. Banging away on at his typewriter, we hear him in voice over poring out his thoughts. People tell us who they are but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be he observes, essentially repacking the oft-quoted line from Maya Angelou that when people tell you who they are, believe them the first time. 

I thought about that scene while breezing through Mel Robbins's book Let Them. A self-help bestseller Robbins pulls a few Draper-esque tricks of her own. The big breakthrough, the revolutionary thought that apparently so struck none other than Oprah Winfrey, one finds in this book is that you can't control other peoples' behavior, only your own. Like yeah, no shit. If someone is being a jerk, let them. If someone is being pouty and uncommunicative, let them. You can't force people to change and so if you just "let them" be themselves you will have less stress in your life, feel more secure and confident, etc etc. But there is a second step, one not in the book's title, that is equally important - "Let me." Here, the focus is on your own agency, your own accountability, your own free will to make decisions.

It all has the benefit of being pithy (the chapters are cut into bite sized pieces) and Robbins is at the read with convenient examples from her own life (that I have to believe are at least slightly embellished only because they SO PERFECTLY prove her point) to show how to recalibrate your thinking. An early example she cites is one where she is scrolling through Instagram and sees photos of some casual friends of hers on a girls trip that she (Robbins) was not invited to. Her initial reaction is to feel hurt and snubbed (understandable) but then pauses to acknowledge that these are not friends she is particularly close to and that she (Robbins) had done very little to maintain the friendships. Reframing the incident in these terms both allowed her to let go of her anger and hurt. She could not change her friends' behavior and she also saw that her anger was misplaced since she was also at fault for letting the friendships wilt. 

And if you want, I don't know 150 plus pages of this kind of stuff, it's there for you to read. Robbins takes these lessons into the workplace, the home, and to family and friends alike. But it dawned on me as she went on and on that all she was doing was taking the famed serenity prayer (Lord give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference) and putting her own spin on it. In the last third, Robbins cribbed another saying I am fond of - comparison is the thief of joy - as she discussed how to get past feelings of inadequacy or jealousy at what others have. So instead of feeling envy at someone else's success, you would ask that person what they did to achieve that success if you want it to. If you see someone on TV living large, instead of feeling jealous, be appreciative of the things you have because others are worse off than you. And so on. And perhaps there is a lesson in this one because I finished this book amazed that someone could simply take ideas that are basically in the public domain, put her own spin on it, and sell millions of books.