I struggled to write this review. This book is good. Really good! Did we expect anything less from Sahil (“SA-hill”) Bloom, *the* Sahil Bloom, the potentially most optimized person I’ve ever met, with his six-pack of steel, his membership to the Core Club in Manhattan (where he’s the youngest member), his double-Stanford pedigree (which he jokes in the book and other spots doesn’t keep up with his Yale sister, Harvard dad, and Princeton mom, who still encourages him, to this day, to “try for medical school” (page 5)). Even his haircut is “intimidating”—according to Susan Cain, who makes a wonderful wisdom-drenched cameo on page 229 in a two-pager co-written with Sahil titled, somewhat unSusanny, “Mental Hacks I Wish I Knew At Twenty-Two.” I mean, the man wakes up at 4am every day to take a televised ice bath. He is OPTIMIZED. I picture him discussing one-legged Romanian Deadlift angles and best brands of organic avocado oil in a group chat with Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, and Bryan Johnson. And big respect to all those guys—it’s not easy being so public, pushing yourself, pushing our understanding of how hard pushing is possible. Just for me I … didn’t quite connect with the book the way I expected to and way I often do with Sahil’s wonderful email newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle. On page 7 Sahil writes: “I was thirty years old and making millions of dollars.” And right away it’s like—um, that’s a tough place to connect. He confesses right afterwards that “…the feelings of happiness and fulfillment I expected were nowhere to be found.” We know this! We hear this everywhere. Money doesn’t make you happy! Just that most of us would like the millions of dollars first—you know, just to be sure. Unfulfilled workaholic twentysomething multimillionaire? This is your bible! He speaks, like we all do I suppose, to the me-of-yesteryear. I guess for me that super left-brainy, quantitative, systems-everything guy is still in there, for sure … just a bit distant. I think I kept wanting to *feel* the book more—in my gut, in my heart. But it just kind of put its feet up in my left brain. I like my left brain! I have sticker charts and trackers up the wazoo. But I also think I read, partly, to get away from that, to tone down that side of myself, to enter places of greater vastness and spirit and soul. As ever: right book, right time. And I do think this book will catch people—like it caught famed billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who Sahil shares he reached out to over Twitter for lunch years ago, or billionaire Apple CEO Tim Cook, who Sahil shares he met while working out regularly in a gym in SF at 4am (“There are no losers in the gym at 4:45 AM,” he says). It’ll catch people who maybe need to chill more? Need to call their mom more, need to get outside more, need to sleep more … need to think about money *less*. In some sense this book feels like you fed every uber-popular self-help book (like those that’ve sold >5 million copies) and every uber-popular self-help viral tweet or LinkedIn post (those that’ve been viewed >5 million times) and you stirred, stirred, stirred them together in a big yellow bowl before pouring that chunky batter into muffin-cup chapters and baked it all into something moist and delightfully chunk-free. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s incredibly hard to do this! I’m just saying that if you’ve read the genre widely then you probably read about the Eisenhower Matrix (pages 96-97) in ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’; the history of Parkinson’s Law (pages 100-101) in ‘The Happiness Equation’ and, let’s be honest, before that in ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ (and, before that, probably in ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen); and you probably saw Benjamin Franklin’s ‘daily calendar’ (pages 115-116) in … ‘The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.’ If you’ve been online a lot you’ve probably seen the viral Ikigai graphic (pages 212-213), heard the Steve Jobs commencement speech (pages 216-217), and heard many versions of famous Joseph Heller “I’ve got something he can never have … enough” story (pages 313-314) a few places. But, of course, those pieces have gone viral for a reason, and finding them all, bringing them together, is no small feat. This is a book full of “life productivity techniques.” Not getting more done, but maximizing yourself on all the scales. On page 55 he encourages everyone to sit down and write a letter to their future selves. This is the kind of thing I want to do, and maybe should do—but it’s hard. It helps that Sahil generously shares the letter he wrote to himself in 2014 at age 23 which includes lines like “You have a lot you hide from the world. You’re insecure. You compare yourself to everyone but yourself.” and “I hope you live closer to your family” and “I hope you’re working on something that feels meaningful.” Now he his! And you love him for it, for finding and following his dream. He details in the opening chapter a story that feels like Tim Urban’s “The Tail End”—about how a friend told him given he only sees his east coast parents once a year, and they’re in their mid-sixties, he’ll only see them 15 more times in his life. Of course, some of the examples on how to correct this, are … kind of funny. Like on page 37, when Sahil discusses Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph's sturdy rule for himself. What’s the sturdy rule? Every Tuesday night Marc makes sure work is “wrapped up by five” so he can have dinner with his wife. He developed the system after working “eighty hour weeks.” I mean, on one hand, sure. But on the other hand, who the heck is working 7am to 7pm for 7 days a week—so much so they need to calendar in a weekly dinner with their wife? I’d resonate more with the story if it was the other way: tracking nights away from dinner with your family, which feels like the more obvious expected baseline. But I do agree: if you never have dinner with your wife scheduling one a week is a good start! Sahil is an eager and hard-working disciple and distiller and his efforts come through. In this 369-page book, stuffed to the absolute brim with tools, models, “razors,” quotes, and heuristics, you will likely find one thing, perhaps many things, that you can reliably and valuably apply to improve your life. This man has the steepest learning curve, the steepest output curve, and one of the sharpest minds of anyone I know. He's in his early thirties and I know will be someone to follow for decades. I can't wait to see what he gives us in 5 years, 10 years, and beyond.