The Underachiever's Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great

By Ray Bennett

The Underachiever's Manifesto is the playfully persuasive pocket guide to living life to the least and loving it. This isn't your average handbook—this is a funny self-help book for our ongoing modern age of overachievement.

The book makes the case for just the right amount of effort—a lot less than we've been led to believe—and reveals how mediocrity is the key to happiness at work, in relationships, dieting, exercise, investment, and more.

• Contains easy-to-follow advice with gentle humor and genuine wisdom
• Addresses issues such as social media stress, FOMO, and the life-draining tragedy of tidying up
• Author Ray Bennett is a medical specialist in Seattle and a recovering overachiever

This welcome new edition—revised just enough but not going overboard—brings its needed-now-more-than-ever perspective to our new era of fitness tracking, app overload, and tidying up.

Turn it down a notch. Don't you feel better already?

• Humorous but actually helpful—a rarity for self-help books
• Perfect for overachievers, underachievers, anyone looking for a funny, friendly way to take things down a notch
• Great for those who loved The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson, Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop, and How to Be an Imperfectionist: The New Way to Self-Acceptance, Fearless Living, and Freedom from Perfectionism by Stephen Guise

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781797206646

Ray Bennett

Ray Bennett, M.D., is a medical specialist in Seattle and a recovering overachiever. He is still guilty of overachievement in the care of his patients, however, and he lives with his wife and children among too many overachieving neighbors.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Congratulations! Opening this book is the best decision you’ve ever made. There, that was easy, wasn’t it?

The pleasures of underachievement are many, but they are all too often lost in the pressure for success. (Or, SUCCESS!) The achievement lobby is powerful, and underachievement is, surprisingly, not as easy as it should be. Our world is so full of unrelenting messages about being the best you can be that it may not have even occurred to you to try for anything less.

We’ve been brainwashed over many years to believe that striving for success is essential to our well-being. Be number one! Don’t settle for second best! Give 110 percent! Optimize! Strategize! It’s an endless, exhausting litany, thanks to corporate advertisers and guru profiteers busy cashing in our inadequacies for their overpriced sneakers, engineered water, TED talks, and micro-managed tracking apps for sleeping, eating, exercising, even meditating. Never mind that no one agrees on what it means to be the best, and that it’s actually impossible for everyone to be it, whatever it is. Maybe you’re working really hard at resisting all that, but even if you are, chances are you’re still striving in some way to live life to the very best—and it’s killing you.

Consider: How many brilliant careers are coupled with disastrous marriages? How many talented, hardworking people are also stress-grinding their jaws at night, and exercise too little or drink themselves into oblivion each week? At the other extreme, how many fitness-crazed or hypercompetitive individuals tear up their knees running marathons or risk life and limb scrambling to mountaintops (sometimes to wait in line behind dozens of other winners at the summit)? How many brilliant and ambitious people dream of winning accolades for their genius, only to wind up working for their C+ colleagues (whose parents probably bribed their way into college anyway)? And even if you do manage to just about maintain a full-sprint schedule of personal and professional achievement, it can take something as commonplace as the flu to throw your whole highly tuned enterprise stressfully out of whack. What you’ve never realized all these years is that it’s your commitment to excellence that is the source of your

Reviews for The Underachiever's Manifesto

[mỹ trần · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A nice short book. Some of the author's views I personally disagree with. However, this is still a very nice book to read for those who want a different view of today's overachieving attitude.