“Ah, self-confidence. You fickle, fickle slut, you. Sometimes you’re there, other times you’re with some other jerk, nowhere to be found.”
-Chris Hardwick in The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (in Real Life)
I’ve been traveling a decent amount lately so audio books have quickly become a good friend of mine. For my most recent trip, I downloaded The Nerdist Way by Chris Hardwick without really knowing what it was about. I’ve listened to his podcast “The Nerdist” (more on that later) and figured it would just be more of the same witty banter. It is…but it’s also a self-help book. Yikes. I kind of cringe at the idea of self-help books in general. But this was really great. It was mostly self-depricating and funny with a ton of “hey, I made this little change and it made my life infinitely better” tips thrown in. He kind of took the scariness out of the self-help stuff by making it supremely nerdy. He divides the book up into three sections of improvement:
My character "Hipster Mermaid" that I drew for my Character Tome.
My favorite was the Mind section. He recommends that you create a Character Tome. Which is, basically, from what I can tell, a very Dungeons and Dragons/video game way of listing your goals and coming up with logical ways to achieve them. I’m pretty sure this is the nerdy version of a vision board or goal mapping. Somehow, I feel more comfortable having a Character Tome in my house than a vision board. I was talking to my older brother about this book a couple nights ago and mentioned the vision board thing. He said “yeah…a vision board just seems like something you’d find fifteen years later in your attic and you’d just weep looking at all the pictures of unrecognized dreams.” So…Character Tome > Vision Board.
The only thing I didn’t really care for in the book was listening to the exercise descriptions in the Body section of the book. It’s just a part of the book that doesn’t really work with audio…so…I’ll probably have to buy a different version of the book. If you’re really interested I would definitely recommend getting a hard or digital copy instead of audio. The bonus with the audio, however, is that you get to listen to Chris Hardwick read it…and he’s really dreamy funny.
To give credit where credit is due, I came up with the idea for this blog a while ago, but listening to this book kind of encouraged me to just do it. Anyway, if you are at all interested in a nerdy kind of self improvement, it’s definitely worth your time and money…probably.
