When a book sells itself as “Marie Kondo, but for your brain,” you don’t expect a distilled remix of century-old psychology filtered through Greek stoicism and Japanese self-restraint. Yet that’s exactly what Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to Be Disliked delivers—and it sells beautifully. Over 10 million copies worldwide, a TikTok sensation, and the latest go-to productivity framework for mindset maximalists.
The book resurrects Alfred Adler, the forgotten third giant of psychology, alongside Freud and Jung. Through dialogues between a philosopher and a young man, The Courage to Be Disliked repackages Adler’s century-old insights: your past doesn’t determine your future, all problems are interpersonal and everyone starts inferior, not as a flaw, but as the human condition that drives growth. The kicker? You can transform your life immediately, today, by choosing to see differently.
This promise of instant transformation is precisely what the anxiously ambitious crave. When venture capital titans like Marc Andreessen champion a book, it signals something beyond typical self-help. But what happens when high achievers gravitate toward a book about accepting imperfection? Is it liberation they’re seeking, or just a more sophisticated form of optimization?
The Great Life Hack
In the world of high-functioning burnout, everything must serve success. Meditation becomes training, and sleep is an eight-hour productivity tool. Failure—that most human of experiences—gets rebranded as “iteration” or “pivot,” stripped of its sting and repackaged into content. Pain has become a pitch deck in the self-improvement economy: struggle becomes aesthetic, curated, almost aspirational.
This same impulse drives the formula of the self-improvement bestsellers: taking universal human struggles and repackaging them as revealed secrets for success. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne literalizes a metaphor. James Clear’s Atomic Habits turns success into a stacking game of micro-choices. In The Four Agreements, author Miguel Ruiz distills Toltec wisdom into a pocket-sized personal code. Unfu*k Yourself, Gary John Bishop’s burnout-era bestseller, follows the script to a T with a call to action wrapped in the title. Even ancient wisdom traditions are distilled into bite-sized, actionable guides. Ryan Holiday compresses Stoicism’s two thousand years of wrestling with fate into The Obstacle Is the Way—a guide to staying calm in board meetings. Zen Buddhism, with its koans and emptiness, transforms into Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits—enlightenment repackaged as minimalist productivity.
Adler joins the pantheon of self-help saints rebranded for the productivity economy—his once-nuanced philosophy now streamlined into a bullet point on a mood board. Adler, via Kishimi and Koga, offers perhaps the ultimate life hack: the idea that your problems aren’t actually complex at all. You’re not struggling because life is genuinely difficult, systems are broken, or the world is in chaos. You’re struggling because you’re thinking about it wrong.
What’s particularly interesting about Kishimi and Koga’s approach is how they present their rejection of trauma as a revolutionary breakthrough. They write as though Freud’s ghost still haunts every therapist’s office, as though we’re all still lying on couches talking about our mothers. But modern psychology moved past strict determinism decades ago. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, schema therapy and trauma-informed approaches all acknowledge that people can change their patterns without pretending their past experiences don’t matter.
The Courage to Be Disliked isn’t selling a revolution in psychological thinking but a spiritual shortcut wearing the robes of psychological revolution. In this framework, trauma becomes optional, something you can simply choose not to be affected by. And that’s where the dissonance sharpens, because we live in an era where trauma itself has become a kind of personal trademark. Healing is a journey, yes, but also an Instagram growth strategy with brand deals and affiliate links. We’ve learned to heal publicly, visibly, with disclaimers and hashtags. Meanwhile, this book suggests something radically unfashionable: don’t bother.
Inferiority United
At the heart of Adler’s work is his concept of the inferiority complex—his observation that we all begin life in a state of complete helplessness and dependency. We start inferior, not as some kind of cosmic punishment, but as the basic human condition. Yet, where you might expect dominance or superiority as the cure, Adler prescribes an entirely different path: “The only individuals who can really meet and master the problems of life are those who show in their striving a tendency to enrich everyone else, those who forge ahead in such a way that others benefit too.” His solution is connection, community and social interest—that deep sense of belonging and contribution that makes us fully human.
But watch what happens when this concept enters our modern optimization ecosystem. Where Adler saw universal inferiority as a call for mutual support and community building, the productivity-obsessed see something else entirely: the ultimate underdog narrative. Your early struggles aren’t wounds that need healing or experiences that shaped you in complex ways—they’re your brand differentiation.
Take someone like Matt D'Avella, whose 3.9 million YouTube subscribers watch him optimize, document and build a visual aesthetic around overcoming his anxiety. Or Ali Abdaal, a doctor-turned-productivity-guru who evangelizes The Courage to Be Disliked as a framework for releasing perfectionism. Both credit the book’s “separation of tasks” concept as transformative—the idea that what viewers think of their content isn’t their task to manage. Other people’s reactions are their own responsibility. This resonates deeply because it offers what content creators desperately need: permission to stop managing everyone’s emotional responses and to create without the exhausting job of making everyone happy.
The book’s most radical claim—that competition doesn’t exist, that it’s just a mental construct we’ve agreed to believe in—becomes something curious when you see who’s reading it. The Courage to Be Disliked is devoured in the most viciously competitive spaces imaginable: content creators fighting for views, startup founders fighting for funding and consultants fighting for clients. The denial of competition becomes its own competitive strategy. It’s like watching sharks agree that the ocean is a social construct while actively circling the same prey. “I’m not competing with you,” says the YouTuber who checks their analytics every hour. “I’m just focused on my own journey,” tweets the founder while obsessively tracking competitor funding rounds.
The Simplicity Trap
Here’s where the book’s promise reveals itself. The framework insists problems are simple: make better choices. But this simplicity creates its own anxiety. If the solution is this straightforward, what does it mean when people still struggle?
It’s probably not that simple after all. Soon, another book will “revolutionize” old wisdom, “disrupt” ancient philosophy and promise “simple and straightforward” answers to happiness. In a world where happiness is inseparable from success and achievement, such books transform into quarterly performance boosters. In the case of The Courage to Be Disliked, inferiority becomes the purest productivity fuel, not disguised as perfectionism or ambition, just raw incompleteness monetized.
And the market is hungry for it. Eighty percent of Americans believe in the idea of self-improvement. They’re willing to spend time and money on it and want the best deals. Simplicity sells because complexity doesn’t scale. No one gets a TED Talk for saying, “It depends.” Adler’s Understanding Human Nature is free on Kindle, with fewer than 500 reviews. With its streamlined certainty, The Courage to Be Disliked is a best-seller, feeding a self-improvement industry expected to hit $90 billion by 2033. At that scale, monetized anxiety isn’t a side effect; it’s the product.
