Full Disclosure: The author gifted me this book to do this review.
In an industry where our primary goal is to give simple advice, how many of us can say that the advice we get is all that simple to do? With all of our lives being different, there are nuances and complexities to it that advice givers often forget about.
Some of us grew up with a tonne of privileges while others weren’t so fortunate. Others had to do things some of us could only imagine doing to get to where they are now. Our lives are never as simple as do this thing or you have to try this and somehow our problems will get fixed.
It’s for this reason that I’ve been skeptical about the industry that I’m in. It’s why I want to take a more realistic outlook at this industry and have done so from the start. There is potential for a lot of good in it, but we have to face the fact that things aren’t so simple in life.
At least most things are that way.
One exception to this is the book Simple Fucking Advice For Everyday Humans written by Simeone C Fruke. As you’d expect from the title of the book, it really just is simple advice that anyone can use.
This advice isn’t guaranteed to blow your mind, make you into a multi-millionaire, or set you up for the rest of your life. No. It’s simple advice. Advice that makes you less ignorant, and perhaps more prepared for the trials that await you.
It’s rough around the edges in terms of language, but as Simeone has said, it’s a book for you if you can set your ego aside and read through it.
At its core, it’s simple advice to make a mental note of.
And I love it for that.
And that’s why I’m excited to share this book with you all.
The Problem With The Industries “Simple Advice”
In an industry filled with random people online and offline, rich, middle class, and poor people telling you how to live your life is that we’re all pretty biased. We’ve all had different experiences, seen some stuff and interpreted in a different way, and so on. What we believe in when it comes to living the ideal life is passed on through our work.
And for me, I believe it’s the people’s responsibility to take that information, distill it into something meaningful for them, and to apply that.
Unfortunately, a lot of advice is taken as the unvarnished truth. People take it too seriously or literally and they end up going somewhere else in their life. Typically a place they don’t want to be at.
In other cases gurus know this and actively steer people towards being mini versions of themselves. That or at least be major fans of them.
In Simeone’s book, you don’t really run into that situation at all.
Unlike so many other books that promise you you’ll get ahead in life, this book is honest right out the door.
In his dedication, Simeone says:
“In my short time on this spinning rock, I have come to realize many things. First and foremost, that I genuinely know very little.”
In an industry where self-help gurus are usually positioning themselves as experts and great fonts of knowledge, it’s refreshing to see someone speak plainly and present themselves as a human being. Someone who makes mistakes. Someone who understands life is ups and downs.
This is in addition to willingly offer some genuinely simple advice while swearing like a sailor most of the time.
The Simple Advice (Without Expletives)
Simeone has a total of 19 pieces of advice with each chapter dedicated to one and is wrapped up with his final thoughts. With each chapter mentioning the word Fuck or Fucking in it at least once, I immediately got some Mark Manson vibes from him in terms of his writing style.
Combined with him being an award-winning educator, it was clear that the delivery and his writing style is going to be direct and to the point. And that was the case throughout the entire book.
Looking over the chapter titles alone, you can already piece together what the advice is all about because of that. Some of that advice entails things like:
- Slow down and enjoy life; but speed up if you see opportunities to do so.
- The 4 stages of what it means to be an expert and recognizing people who take those steps are always learning and growing.
- Stop trying to impress everyone.
- Don’t make big decisions when you’re really happy or really angry
- Your snags in life can be opportunities if you treat them accordingly
Expanding on those ideas, Simeone provides life examples, human observations – like our obsession for instant gratification – and spins it into life lessons and perspectives. All of which is wrapped up with blunt wording and of course the occasional “fuck” thrown in there.
As someone who is used to Mark Manson’s books, I didn’t find it too overbearing, though one of the few criticisms of this book from some reviewers I could find is the overuse of swear words.
Personally, I have to agree with it. Swearing to me is a way to emphasize something important. If you’re not someone who swears a lot, like me, then the use of swearing can snap someone’s attention to what one is saying. That or completely shock people.
However, overuse of swearing makes people grow numb to it. Even if what you’re saying is pretty important, swearing can kinda dilute your messaging to some people.
All of that said, the messaging for Simeone’s book is simple and is easy to see all around:
This is a book devoted to self-identification. Or as he puts it, “Know who the fuck you are.”
It’s a message that I can get behind as I think self-reflection and knowing who you are can let you sift through advice better. When you know who you are and where you want to go in life, you can make better decisions.
All around, the simple advice helps you in some way shape or form to build up that self-identification and how to go through life to some degree.
Self Identification: The Meat Of The Book
Every book builds up to a core theme that is meant to fix particular problems in your life and help you grow. The Secret had the Law of Attraction, Rich Dad; Poor Dad had strategies to seeing wealth and how to build it.
In the case of Simeone’s book it’s self-identification.
This stuck with me because it showed that underneath all the swearing was a man who valued growth and wrote a book to help people figure out themselves.
By all means, the book is simple in its advice. It’s not going to hold all of the answers to all your problems or revolutionize your life. However the thing with simple advice is that it helps you build up momentum. Provided that it’s practical.
One of the starting points for me to gain confidence and figure out who I am started as I began my self-help journey back in 2010. I struggled with talking to people and trusting other people and all around I was in a weird place mentally speaking.
That encouraged me to take a government funded program where I lived with ten other strangers for nine months in various rural town. The experience ultimately gave me the opportunity to travel across Canada.
While I’ve said times before in writing that I didn’t get the most out of the experience as I wanted, that experience did impart simple things about myself. That experience helped me to identify more of who I am, what my desires are, what my values are, and how I genuinely see certain problems.
I had the beginning of who the fuck I was and wanted to be.
The more I delved into self-help, the more I came to learn how important that was. This experience, which as a teen I brushed off as “not as good as it could’ve been” was a pivotal and defining experience for me. And having that meant I couldn’t be swayed as much.
This is most important because in an industry that teaches us about ourselves, so little is spent learning about who you are. We tend to get pulled in and focus on specific solutions to our problems. We don’t actually dwell on why we want to solve those problems or whether these problems are worth solving in our lives right now.
So to have a book dedicating multiple chapters to directly talk about those elements is great. Some passages that spoke to me around this subject are as follows:
“When we shift back to a more realistic view of our lives, we can characterize millions of things we want. Without those, we are left with only a few high-priority things we need. I am in no way saying you shouldn’t have and also enjoy the wants in your life, but we need to keep them in perspective. Our insatiable pursuit of wants should never get in the way of obtaining our needs.” – Simeone Fruke, on finding out our wants and needs in life.
“ When you realize that nothing should ever be beneath you, you also choose to depend upon the person you should be able to count on the most; yourself.” – Simeone Fruke, on never looking down at opportunities.
“It’s not enough to recognize our growth areas, and just acknowledge that we are not experts in everything. We must also be willing to grow in those areas in which we are lacking. The easiest way to do so is to yoke up with those who actually are experts.” – Simeone Fruke, on knowing what you don’t know.
There are a lot of nuggets like these scattered throughout, and as you can tell from the quotes, they’re pretty simple to process. They still have some amazement, and for those who are in that self-discovery stage, this will help. But for those who are already ahead of that, we can still take solace in this.
This is good and simple advice and it doesn’t hurt to reinforce it and see it from a different angle too.
Simple Advice Is Simple To Implement
Unlike a lot of self-help books, genuine implementation is not that complicated. It’s a matter of reading this book and taking some of the words to heart. Between the book being not that long and larger than usual font, it’s easy to flip through the pages to find particular passages.
All of the chapters are relatively short with each chapter dedicating 3 pages to three quotes. It’s why this book is 186 pages long, about a third of them are dedicated to these quotes and insights for quick reference.
All around, this simple advice book delivers what it promises. It’s not going to fix your entire life, but it’s a quick read even for someone like me, who is generally a slow reader. Honestly it was a good book to ease myself back into after not reading that many self-help books for years.
And I have no doubt other people will enjoy it too.
Want the book? Order it on Amazon here (not sponsored).