As I perused the ubiquitous “Best Books of the Year” lists from thought leaders whose reading prowess I respect, one book I hadn’t read kept popping up, so I decided to explore it over the holiday stretch. Aided by its curious title, The Courage To Be Disliked is a parabolic conversation between a youth and a philosopher designed to explicate the intersection of Greek philosophy and Adlerian psychology.
Wait—I realize that might not be the most tempting of descriptions, so let me share three specific concepts from the book and how they can help you live a richer life.
First, a touch of background. Alfred Adler was a contemporary of Freud and Jung you may not recall from your Psych 101 class, but his work is notable especially because of his break from Freud. While Freud notoriously fixated on the more primitive (and apparently inescapable) sexual and aggressive drivers of our behavior, Adler offered a seemingly more evolved posture, suggesting that we can (and should) be motivated by future goals and aspirations.
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And that’s where we begin to see the applications of this compelling book in our financial life planning. Here are three Adlerian concepts and how each can be applied in our lives and money management:
The Separation Of Tasks
Without an ounce of hyperbole, I believe this concept alone could change your life. As the philosopher instructs the youth:
We need to think with the perspective of ‘Whose task is this?’ and continually separate one’s own tasks from other people’s tasks. In general, all interpersonal relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own tasks intruded on. Carrying out the separation of tasks is enough to change one’s interpersonal relationships dramatically.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack in that, but the simple yet powerful essence is that we must separate the tasks of life that are others’ from our own. Here, we gain new perspectives in many areas of life, but with more than half of marriages ending in divorce and half of the splits citing financial disagreements over money as the primary reason, is it possible that the separation of tasks could aid us not only in saving our money, but also our marriages?
We can also extend this concept to suggest that we must focus—read: stress—less on that which we can’t control, pouring our energy instead into that which we can. For example, you can control how much you save and how you allocate your portfolio, but you can’t control the markets. Our attention, and especially our anxiety, spent on the uncontrollable, is simply wasted.
The 3 Major Life Tasks
Adler—and The Courage To Be Disliked authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumiktake Koga—instruct us further on tasks, suggesting that there are three particular types that, when considered in concert, help compose a fulfilling life: the tasks of friendship, work, and love. Here’s how Adler, himself, put it:
“Three problems are irrevocably set before each individual. These are: the attitude towards one’s fellow man, occupation, and love. All three are linked with one another by the first. They are not accidental, but inescapable problems.”
I encourage you not to focus on the word “problem” here, as he’s using it in a way that is not intentionally pejorative. Think about it more as three challenges—three major life tasks that we all must navigate in life.
First, as we grow up from infancy to adulthood, we all develop our “attitude toward fellow man,” how we relate to others in our families, communities, and society, and precisely how we view them. Adler encourages us to view (and treat) others on a horizontal level—as equals, as “comrades,” as friends—while noting that school, work, and society, in general, tend to nudge (and occasionally try to force) us into a vertical or hierarchical view of humanity that is ultimately counterproductive.
That’s how this task of friendship—our outlook on navigating humanity itself—prepares us for succeeding (or failing) in our work and then in love. Without a horizontal view of those we work with and love, we are not optimally positioned to navigate life—or money, for that matter.
Indeed, our approach to “our fellow man,” our work, and our loved ones can’t not impact how we approach and utilize money. We all wrestle with the false notion that “if I only had more money, everything would be better,” and too often, money wins. And when money wins, we all lose.
Teleology Over Etiology
Yet perhaps the most encouraging of the book’s themes involves the least common words (unless you’re a psychotherapist) and the primary dividing force between Freud and Adler. Freud was the proponent of etiology, a backward-looking theory that ascribes our behavior today to our shaping and forming early in life. Adler’s chief concern with Freud’s approach was that it was unnecessarily deterministic—we are who we are, and we can’t do anything about it.
Adler’s teleological approach reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy in that it is forward-thinking. It ascribes our motivations less to our past nature or nurture and more to the goals and aspirations—the meaning and purpose—in front of us. We can be called to a higher cause rather than trapped by causation.
For further listening, here’s a discussion I had with Dr. Daniel Crosby on his Standard Deviations podcast about Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search For Meaning, and the application of logotherapy in our financial planning.
And here’s the encouraging part about this. If you’ve made any financial mistakes in the past, and especially if you’ve demonstrated trends of poor behavior with money in the past—overspending, underspending (yup, that’s a thing), hoarding, speculative investing, money shaming, piling up debt, financial suicide, or any number of all-too-common challenges—Adler strips you of the excuse that you are destined for failure. In so doing, he frees us for future success.
Here’s how Kishimi and Koga make the hard-to-argue argument against hard-core etiology and determinism. Three children are born into the same household. They share DNA and identical living circumstances, yet each manifests distinctly different outcomes in life. And they argue further that we are also not individually beholden to even our past tendencies and trends:
“No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead, we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”
In other words, we are not merely the byproducts of what happens to us—good, bad, or indifferent—but the byproduct of how we react to what happens to us. Don’t you find that encouraging?
Or, as Adler says, “Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.”
Yet when we do understand it, our behavior and our response to the world (and whatever it throws at us) are no longer left to chance or “fate” but are now within our domain of control. In other words, people can—and do—change. And you can, too.
One of the first steps, according to Dr. Daniel Crosby, author of The Soul of Wealth, is to stop labeling ourselves as inferior in money dealings—“Oh, I’m just not good with money.”—something that can lead to a genuine “inferiority complex,” a term Adler popularized.
If you’ve had a tendency to cast one of these inferiority labels on yourself, “you’ve engaged in an Alderian safeguarding behavior,” Crosby told me. In this case, you “position the power (and thus the solution) just outside of your reach. The emphasis is either on a personal trait that is perceived as unchangeable (e.g., not good with money) or an externality over which we have no control (e.g., the economy). When there is no power, there is no responsibility to act. Where there is no responsibility to act, we can do the safe thing, and no one can give us a hard time.”
So let’s notice when we engage in these safeguarding behaviors and self labeling. Let’s muster the courage to believe in our ability to change, to improve, and to master the art of financial life planning.
How can you apply this?
As you reflect on these Adlerian principles, consider how they might reshape your financial and life planning. Embrace the separation of tasks by focusing on financial decisions within your control, such as budgeting and saving, while letting go of market fluctuations and other phenomena beyond your influence. Acknowledge and examine the three life tasks—friendship, work, and love—and recognize their profound impact on your financial choices and overall well-being. And consider the benefits of a teleological perspective, setting future financial goals that inspire and motivate you, rather than being constrained by past financial missteps.
I encourage you to read The Courage to Be Disliked to delve deeper into these transformative concepts and their practical applications. This insightful book offers valuable guidance on living a more intentional and fulfilling life, both personally and financially. For further reading, consider Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning and Dr. Daniel Crosby’s newest volume, The Soul Of Wealth.