Sunday, April 2, 2017

You Don't Need this Book if You Have Everything you Need

Everything You Need You Have was really really not what I thought it would be. I thought it was a book on minimalism. Yeah.You have everything you need so you don't need more junk? 

But it's a self-improvement book. Ooops. I should have read the blurb more carefully.

Also, I'm a Christian, and my faith is a big part of who I am. Unfortunately, this book started slowly to descend into spiritualism (despite not being a religious book), and I found it harder and harder to connect. Between a lot of empty talk with no practical use whatsoever and a lot of stuff about ancient Chinese pseudoscience...I was not interested or entertained. The therapeutic anecdotes felt random and did nothing to add to the writer's credibility, and at times it felt like the writer himself either misunderstood the situations he describes, or deliberately altered them to suit his views.



Bonus quote: "Health doesn't have to be 'healthy'." What?


I also found Kite's ideas to be a little far-fetched, and not particularly practical. He included a great deal of case studies to enhance his ideas, but I didn't find they added to anything - rather than see the positive effect he himself and his teachings had on his patients, instead it seemed to me like they seemed to discover things for themselves rather than because of what he was telling them.

I also found the inclusion of the five elements a little confusing as I couldn't really relate them to what he was trying to paint as their influence. I just found the whole book a to full of mysticism for my liking.


The topics covered here could help someone if this is the first time they're looking into meditation and "enlightenment" (for lack of a better term), and if they are not religious in a organized way, but it could also totally deter them because the information here is kind of a haphazard mess at times. I'm not even sure what the end goal of this book was... it mostly sounded like Kite was paraphrasing other big thinkers and schools of thought, which made it a bit brief & shallow. And if you've read other similar books, there's nothing new here and many parts were questionable... like Kite didn't fully get the concept.


I was given this book for a free review. I didn't like it. 1/5 stars.