Useful Not True is another gem by Derek Sivers. Whenever he publishes a new book, I order it immediately, no matter what it is about. I know from experience that everything he writes is packed with wisdom and insights I don’t want to miss.
Let me start with the form of the book (I am referring to its physical
version here): It is short, as Derek’s books usually are. Most
chapters are one or two pages at most, very few are longer. The font size is
pretty large, as well as the distance between lines, and the lines are
rather narrow, which makes the reading a very pleasant experience. This is
in contrast to many other books which look as if they were laid out with the
goal to pack as many words as possible on each page. With Derek’s
books, it is the exact opposite, with respect to both form and content: They
look as if the goal was to use as few words as possible (and it
was!). They are a perfect example for James Altuchers’ maxim
“To increase the value of your words, make them
as few as possible.”
The content of the book perfectly matches its form: It is distilled to the bare minimum of what is necessary to convey its point. Nothing is superfluous; every word serves a purpose. One could certainly easily inflate the books’ content to 1000 pages, but it would not be possible to reduce it to fewer pages without losing content.
Useful Not True is a book about perspective. Everything is relative; nothing is absolute. There is no “right” or “wrong”, just “useful” or “useless”. While reading it, so many associations popped up in my mind:
To Zen Buddhism with its belief that everything is made up by the mind alone and its seeking for looking at things as how they are, without making up things about them in our mind.
To phenomenology and its concept of epoché (and similar concepts in Stoicism and other philosophies), a method for refraining from subjective judgements of things or situations.
And even to physics and mathematics, in different aspects: In gauge theories, there are intrinsic unphysical degrees of freedom. By fixing the gauge, those unphysical degrees of freedom can be removed. And this can be done in different ways, depending on what is most useful in the respective situation.
Also, physical theories are formulated as models which describe (physical) reality. They never do it perfectly, though, because they cannot capture every aspect of reality. And yet, good models are extremely useful (and a good model is not necessarily one that describes reality most accurately; it may be perfectly sufficient to describe a very particular aspect of reality with a certain coarseness if it still captures the relevant physical mechanisms). As George E. P. Box put it: “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
The importance of the book lies in the fact that, while its statement seems perfectly plausible, we very often tend to ignore it. Ask two people standing opposite each other where the river is. The one says: “On the left.” The other says: “On the right.” Who is right? It is remarkable how firm our belief is that there is “right” and “wrong”, while it is so obvious that this is usually not true, if we just looked at things as they are. While the consequences may be trivial as in the example above, they can be arbitrarily grave in other situations.
So, on the one hand, recognizing there are no absolutes can prevent us from making mistakes in judging situations. But there is another aspect, which is hinted at in the title of the book: We can turn this realization to our advantage. You can face a wall, or you can turn around and look at a serene beach. Both perspectives are “right” or valid. Why not choose the one you like better? There lies power in not being confronted with the one “true” perspective, but instead being able to choose ones preferred perspective, and this power can be harnessed – provided we know that we can simply turn around.
I will end with my usual recommendation of Derek’s books: Buy it, read it, and digest its content as fully as possible! It is worth every word.