{ "item_title" : "You're Not That Important", "item_author" : [" Ruan Steyn "], "item_description" : "I once gave a presentation to two hundred people with my fly down. The entire time.I spent the following months waiting for it to end my career. Then I asked around. Nobody had noticed. Not one person.That is the most useful thing I have ever learned about other people, and it is what this book is about. You are not being watched anywhere near as closely as you have been living as though you are.Start with this week. There is a sentence you said out loud that you are still editing. You have replayed it enough times to have notes on your own delivery. You have drafted the better version you should have used. At some point you checked whether that person had liked anything of yours since.They do not remember it. They were busy replaying something they said to you, which you have entirely forgotten.Which sounds like an insult until you add up what the watching costs. Managing how you come across takes attention, most of it, for most of your life. Every hour of it is an hour not spent on anything you would name if somebody asked what mattered to you. You do not get those hours back, and you are spending more of them right now.None of which I worked out from a mountaintop. I won the first cycling race I ever entered, in 2016, and put the trophy on a bookcase by the front door at eye level, where every visitor had to walk past my personality on the way in. It is still there. I am aware of what that says.You're Not That Important argues that the performance itself, the comparison, the self-promotion, the low-grade need to matter in everyone's eyes, is what stands between most of us and the lives we say we want. The desire to matter is normal. What you do with it decides whether you turn into a fulfilled human being or an insufferable jackass. This is a book about the fine line between the two.It draws on psychology research, the longest-running happiness study ever conducted, and a frankly humiliating volume of personal material.What changes by the end: You replay conversations for days. You will understand why almost nobody clocked the thing you are still thinking about at 2am.Criticism ruins your week. You will be able to take it, keep the useful part, and be fine by lunch.You compare yourself to everybody. You will see why that is judging a violin by the standards of a drum.You confuse confidence with volume. You will learn to tell the real thing from the loud version that quietly costs people their friends.You are chasing things you never chose. You will finish with a shorter and better list, including what the research now says about money.That last one is worth a sentence. In 2010 a celebrated study produced the income figure that launched a thousand LinkedIn posts. In 2023 one of its own authors published the work that substantially undid it. Most of the shelf is still quoting the 2010 version, because it is tidier. A book that tells you only the neat half is not worth trusting on the rest.So, one more time, and it should land as a relief rather than a slap.You're not that important. This is not a book about thinking less of yourself. It is a book about thinking of yourself less. That difference turns out to be the whole game.Funny where it can be. Honest where it has to be. Useful throughout.Book One in The Fine Line series: the good stuff, minus the bad version.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/004/9798190044263_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "13.99", "online_price" : "13.99", "our_price" : "13.99", "club_price" : "13.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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