I finally finished The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz, a book I got from my mom last Christmas, meaning it took me a whopping 10 or so months to finish. I read about 70% of it in January, picked it up here and there throughout the year and finally got past the last 50 pages on a short 4-hour flight. That is not to say I didn’t like the book. In fact, I loved it! It got me thinking a lot. This is my attempt to “review” it because for reasons unknown to me I feel compelled to do so (and a dead blog is rather sad).
For starters, this is a difficult book to recommend. It is a self-help book, which may put people off. I found it difficult to take it seriously at the start because it’s very earnest. It does, shamelessly, promise to be “life-changing”. It does proclaim its wisdom with no shame or doubt, absolute certainty in its truth. It does also plug the author’s credentials, seminars, company and all its success stories. This is no great work of philosophy, you will find little self-awareness here.
Yet, I must say, I found myself quite captivated by the ideas here. Why is that so? I tried to approach this book with a very open mind and the earnestness of its presentation did help with this; it did not feel like it was trying to hide anything from me. “Heed this advice or move on”, it said. Another thing, and it also makes this book quite difficult to review or recommend, is that in its early chapters it explicitly advises you against making any use of its advice until you’re done reading.
That was an interesting hook to me. A self-help book that honestly tells you to grapple with the ideas before anything? Peculiar. It turns out that I’d rather classify this as a meta self-help text. Indeed, the ideas in it are more about how to think about improving one’s own life than actually doing so. Much of the book is building frameworks of thought. Frameworks that I found to be quite practical. I’ve been of the opinion that a lot of wisdom is simple and much more a matter of internalization than comprehension; The Path of Least Resistance did a good job, for me, at working on such internalizations. Cutting through “the fluff”.
Trailing thoughts, “review” over.
Author John Hyde Preston once asked Gertrude Stein,
But what if, when you tried to write, you felt stopped, suffocated, and no words came and if they came at all they were wooden and without meaning? What if you had the feeling you could never write another word?
Gertrude Stein replied, laughing,
Preston the way to resume la to resume. It is the only way. To resume. If you feel this book deeply it will come as deep as your feeling is when it is running truest, and the book will never be truer or deeper than your feeling. But you do not yet know anything about your feeling because, though you may think it is all there, all crystallized, you have not let it run. So how can you know what it will be? What will be best in it is what you really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.