Pre-order our book, or, what's so special about Cate?

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Our book is up for pre-order, and getting it now is the best way you can make the book successful, as well as set us up for future books. If you like what we’re doing, please click buy. More information is available on Cate’s great post about the book, to which the below is a supplement.

Self-help books are, at their best, personality transmission devices. Consuming the self-help books that have changed my life, like The 4-Hour Workweek and Existential Kink, changed me not because of any one tactic, but because the human gestalts within were helpful additions to my default tendencies. (This is why reading self-help books cover-to-cover tends to be more helpful than just grazing them for tips, even though a summary of the average self-help book could fit on a napkin.)

While our book contains good tactical advice, my real hope was for You Can Just Do Things to capture Cate’s unusual mind-shape, such that readers could download a useful sliver. I’ve improved as a result of living with Cate, and I would like to be the only person living with Cate, but I also want other people to have a similar opportunity for improvement.

Cate has accused me of writing about her as if she’s a mythical creature. This is a fair accusation, and I can report that she’s a human being. We’re going on four years together, which makes me the world’s foremost expert on her foibles and irrationalities.

However. My assessment of her overall competence and personal qualities, which I wrote about breathlessly in our early days, is the same as ever. She continues impressing me. I continue asking: what makes Cate so different? What makes her so fucking good at everything? I have come to an updated brief answer: extremely high confidence, extremely low defensiveness. In other words, Cate both believes that she can do anything, and believes that she’ll get there by being completely open to feedback, rather than clinging to competence as an identity.

If Cate’s worst enemy lobbed an insult at her, I think she would stop to ask: is there a good suggestion for improvement in there? Almost nobody is like this.

Lately we’ve been watching a lot of Top Chef in the evenings. It’s an opportunity to polish our Padma Lakshmi impersonations, but it’s also an opportunity to see how poisonous defensiveness is. There is a trait shared by almost all the top competitors: they almost never pout in response to the criticism of the judges. They listen. Perhaps they don’t agree, but they search their conscience about whether the judgement contains useful information. Meanwhile, those who are doomed to early elimination are indignant when challenged. They greet feedback like “it was mushy” with disbelief or excuses, like, “this is just my style of food.”

Cate’s journey as a writer is an example of the opposite of defensiveness. People sometimes ask me: how much do I help with Cate’s writing? The answer is that my role has shifted over time. At the book’s inception, I was helping a lot—nearly all of the first vomit draft (which she has completely overwritten) was mine, based on notes from our conversations. However, I barely touch her writing anymore. We give each other about the same amount of writing feedback. She has learned almost all of the relevant skills I have—I’m no longer the main writer in the relationship.

Previously, friends and partners have viewed my writing ability as a gift to envy, a mutation they couldn’t possibly acquire. I don’t think that perspective ever entered Cate’s mind. She just observes. Since our relationship began, through viewing my early drafts, watching me work, and asking me questions, she has relentlessly downloaded the viewpoint that allows me to be creatively productive and non-neurotic. When I read her an excerpt of something I admire, and she doesn’t immediately get why I’m so impressed, she asks: “why do you like that,” and she scans for nutrients she can absorb. Later, I see little glints of them turning up in her work.

This is how anyone should act if they had the perspective “Sasha is a better writer than me, I want to learn why, I’m going to maximize my learning rate until I’m just as good.” But nobody else who’s been close to me has done this simple thing, despite the fact that many expressed a desire to learn.

One of the many lovely benefits of our marriage is that I really don’t know what Cate is going to do next. Assuming this book gets the reception it deserves, “public intellectual” would be an easy lay-up for her at this point, another addition to an already surprising list of past professions. She’s already done the TEDtalk, and could open up a fancy consultancy in a second flat. She might spend some time doing this, but I find it hard to believe that I’ve seen the last plot twist, or even the next-to-last. She’s too smart to want an identity that would require defending.