Brave Not Perfect Paperback – August 20, 2020

Got this for a girlfriend who is a second generation immigrant and a woman of color.

Received order when expected and no product issues. Overall, a great experience. But the book is terrible. Written for a third grader.

Many girls, teens, and women have lived their lives striving for perfection. While most people in today's society might not admit, or even internally acknowledge to themselves, it is expected that women should always present themselves as, and try to achieve, perfection. For males, however, society has created an environment that allows for falls and failure. This conscious, or unconscious, lack of equal allowances, training, treatment has lead to a world where many women are too anxious to do anything brave for fear of failure.Reshma Saujani takes the reader through biases that they have unknowingly witnessed, endured and inflicted. She helps the reader realize the inequalities in their upbringing and environment that has led them to their feelings of guilt and inferiority. Using this, the author works to help the reader recognize the moments of self-sabotage and retrain their thought process. While, of course, not every woman has had the same experiences. This book is for the woman who is a people-pleaser to a fault, the woman who is stuck feeling unfulfilled because they are too frightened to take the leap, the woman that has taken that leap and fallen flat on their face. This book is for them.

The book has essentially one idea: Women and men have stereotypical behavior. Women are timid, perfectionistic, deferential, etc, and men are risk taking, bold, aggressive etc.. On page 64 she says it all: "The examples are endless". She restates theses stereotypes about 300 times with irrelevant details that only fill pages in the 180 pages of text. Of course she urges women to be braver and take more chances, even if they fail. No doubt some people fit these stereotypes but I would guess a large fraction of the population do not. Sprinkled through the text she uses vulgarity to emphasize some points. I am not against appropriate vulgarity but in this book I think its primary purpose is to prove she is "brave".To her credit, she urges girls and women to get involved with STEM education and activities. She also gives some standard self help book ideas on how to change habits but there is a new, better book with new, different, much better techniques and detail on that task: "Atomic Habits". (I am a retired psychiatrist and that is why I got both these books).There is a relatively new science, Behavioral Economics, that studies the logical errors most of us make in our daily life. I believe Ms. Saujani exhibits many of these in her book.

I listened to a speaker broadcast and loved what Reshma had to say. So, I figured why not read her book. Well, good thing it was only $4 from ThriftBooks because I was not as impressed with the book. A lot of what she writes about is very true and needs to be changed, but I could have done without the politics and redundancy.