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INTROSPECT
INTROSPECT is an ebook by @visakanv about becoming who you are. It's a modern remix of riffs from Nietzsche, Emerson, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and others. It's about hitting "inspect element" on your inherited narratives, troubleshooting them, and experimenting with them to suit you better. It's about cultivating a tinkering mindset, and tinkering with your mindset. Dismantle your inner authoritarian. Transform your inner life from prison to playground, from ordeal to adventure. Become friends with yourself. Earn your own self-respect and admiration.
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Praise for INTROSPECT:
“…this book has sutured a number of my mental/psychological wounds.� � @bejapewa
“Particularly i wanted to comment on how incredibly effective I found (Introspect’s) style which disarmed me BAM, i’ve never read a book that felt so much like a human living project, somehow i felt like i was writing it myself with all the tangents and brilliant flashes and cliches and circles and meta commentary of real life thinking.� � Nicole M
�(Introspect) is probably the self-help book with the most humility I’ve read � the way it breaks the fourth wall is well-done. The mythic framing of the journey into the self is beautiful.� � Marie
“The book has a million things good about it, plenty of practical advice tailored towards understanding yourself, building approaches to managing your psychology, and confronting your deepest fears � and astonishingly, it delivers on its immensely ambitious metaphorical arc.� � @annihalated
"I think its safe to say that this book has gently and casually shattered my self-concept." � @russlramos
�
Praise for INTROSPECT:
“…this book has sutured a number of my mental/psychological wounds.� � @bejapewa
“Particularly i wanted to comment on how incredibly effective I found (Introspect’s) style which disarmed me BAM, i’ve never read a book that felt so much like a human living project, somehow i felt like i was writing it myself with all the tangents and brilliant flashes and cliches and circles and meta commentary of real life thinking.� � Nicole M
�(Introspect) is probably the self-help book with the most humility I’ve read � the way it breaks the fourth wall is well-done. The mythic framing of the journey into the self is beautiful.� � Marie
“The book has a million things good about it, plenty of practical advice tailored towards understanding yourself, building approaches to managing your psychology, and confronting your deepest fears � and astonishingly, it delivers on its immensely ambitious metaphorical arc.� � @annihalated
"I think its safe to say that this book has gently and casually shattered my self-concept." � @russlramos
319 pages, ebook
Published February 1, 2022
43 people are currently reading
216 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 3, 2022
Pretty good but can be better. The intro is long-winded. The suggestions are repetitive and belabored. It takes a little too long to get to the meat of the matter, and there it gets convoluted. Lots of good quotes in there though. Overall framework is also quite sticky and memorable.
February 15, 2022
Probably the most incomplete book I will ever give five stars to. It's essentially just the repetition of a bunch of different mantras that modern reality frames the Great Big Question of Meaning in an unhelpful way, and that you just need to internalize that to see the way to live in a way that makes you happy. This means that it's laden with recaps, endless restatements, metacommentary, quotes that don't add much for the length - stuff like that. But his point is that any idiot can live meaningfully and if he didn't look like an idiot the whole time it wouldn't work.
So don't come at it through a context of review; it's an unhelpful frame here. The book isn't complete or even all that well put together, but a obsession with coherence is the problem and of course the antidote looks different. Also if you find it's dragging on - and I did! - you can literally just read faster lmao
So don't come at it through a context of review; it's an unhelpful frame here. The book isn't complete or even all that well put together, but a obsession with coherence is the problem and of course the antidote looks different. Also if you find it's dragging on - and I did! - you can literally just read faster lmao
April 17, 2022
This is the book I wish I could have read when I was twenty. Or hell fifteen.
A straight 6/5 no cap.
I actually got into journaling whilst going through this book, and noting things down! Something Id honestly usually lowkey dread, for some reason. Organizing implies precision I suppose, and that brings out perfectionism, which implies extreme effort and stress.
Anyway... focusing back to the book! Visa has once again proved himself to be the most relateable internet guru of this era. No really, there is no writing like this, anywhere. I mean, really, it truly is refreshing to listen to someone who actually lives and understands our current contexts, internet cultures, and new age social dynamics (rather than an outsider observing in, this feels like the real deal!)
The it is written w such a strange and almost haphazard structure made it actually made it all the more an enjoyable experience for me.
A straight 6/5 no cap.
I actually got into journaling whilst going through this book, and noting things down! Something Id honestly usually lowkey dread, for some reason. Organizing implies precision I suppose, and that brings out perfectionism, which implies extreme effort and stress.
Anyway... focusing back to the book! Visa has once again proved himself to be the most relateable internet guru of this era. No really, there is no writing like this, anywhere. I mean, really, it truly is refreshing to listen to someone who actually lives and understands our current contexts, internet cultures, and new age social dynamics (rather than an outsider observing in, this feels like the real deal!)
The it is written w such a strange and almost haphazard structure made it actually made it all the more an enjoyable experience for me.
February 7, 2022
Visakan's second book! It was hard to put down, and I took a few pages of notes along the way. This is probably the self-help book with the most humility I've written—the way it breaks the fourth wall is well-done. The mythic framing of the journey into the self is beautiful. There are rough patches, places where an idea isn't quite finished or a sentence that drops off, and it does go on to overly repeat itself in a few places. I enjoyed reading it. It asks good questions that will keep me busy when I'm journalling over the next while.
This book will help a lot of people.
This book will help a lot of people.
May 22, 2022
I don't know if I can recommend this book. It has lots of good advice, and moments that really resonated with me, but other bits felt really thin and platitude like
August 31, 2024
I haven't read many self help books (truth be told, I haven't read a single one in more than a decade) but I would say that Introspect outshines them all. Partly because it's not strictly a self-help book, but mainly because it operates on such a huge number of different frames that it makes it a rare occurrence among books in general. (And it does that elegantly, so you don't get a jittery experience.)
I was happy to see it stated explicitly that the book is written by "just some guy." I just love that lens, the trope that whoever you're talking to, whoever's book you're reading, everybody is just some guy. There's no authority in other people's experiences. I also totally loved the honesty about the imperfections of the work, which is true and which makes the experience much more relatable and alive.
This book is definitely more structured than Friendly Ambitious Nerd, and it's also more creatively chaotic. You can condense most of Introspect into a list of bullet points, but you cannot replace it with such a list.
Last but not least, it's great to see how Visa's own life is in accord with the things he writes about. The same words written insincerely maybe wouldn't have caused much harm, but they also obviously wouldn't carry as much power. It's beautiful to witness a living, breathing person behind the pages of the book.
Some random thoughts:
- Visa's selection of quotes is unmatched.
- It's not only a book about improving your life, it's also a proto-handbook for beginner bodhisattvas.
- The book develops strongly after the first 60-80 pages in terms of absolutely golden sentences, sometimes almost casually dropped.
- It's certainly good that Introspect is in the permanent WIP state. It is more relatable that way, more than a Finished Work would have been.
- Introspect is your buff to WIS you get almost for free.
Bonus point: this is one of the rarest books I was taking notes on while reading it. That's the secret behind this review being longer than two sentences!
I was happy to see it stated explicitly that the book is written by "just some guy." I just love that lens, the trope that whoever you're talking to, whoever's book you're reading, everybody is just some guy. There's no authority in other people's experiences. I also totally loved the honesty about the imperfections of the work, which is true and which makes the experience much more relatable and alive.
This book is definitely more structured than Friendly Ambitious Nerd, and it's also more creatively chaotic. You can condense most of Introspect into a list of bullet points, but you cannot replace it with such a list.
Last but not least, it's great to see how Visa's own life is in accord with the things he writes about. The same words written insincerely maybe wouldn't have caused much harm, but they also obviously wouldn't carry as much power. It's beautiful to witness a living, breathing person behind the pages of the book.
Some random thoughts:
- Visa's selection of quotes is unmatched.
- It's not only a book about improving your life, it's also a proto-handbook for beginner bodhisattvas.
- The book develops strongly after the first 60-80 pages in terms of absolutely golden sentences, sometimes almost casually dropped.
- It's certainly good that Introspect is in the permanent WIP state. It is more relatable that way, more than a Finished Work would have been.
- Introspect is your buff to WIS you get almost for free.
Bonus point: this is one of the rarest books I was taking notes on while reading it. That's the secret behind this review being longer than two sentences!
April 10, 2022
Take this review with a grain of salt, as I'm an avid fan of Visa's twitter and was waiting for this book to come out for months. As a recovering self-help addict, I tend to be skeptical of this genre, but Visa truly made something special here. This book manages to be both comforting and discomforting, while avoiding the major pitfalls most self-help books fall into - condescending tone, vague and unactionable advice, unreplicated research, and worst of all, pages and pages of fluff. Instead, this book serves as both a compassionate letter to his younger self, and a sort of troubleshooting guide to most people's internal problems.
The 300 pages in this book contain very little fluff and quite a lot of actionable information, some of which I started implementing in my life before I finished reading. Some of the most powerful for me have been "do 100 thing", "focus on what you want to see more of", "show up, don't die, don't quit", and "joke about the outcomes you want", but there are so many more useful methods and ways to frame situations.
As someone with many ADHD-like traits who has often felt lost and indecisive in life, I resonated heavily with most of the content in this book. But anyone looking to understand themselves a bit better (introspect, if you will) can find something useful for themselves. I recommend reading this book once straight through, and then using it as a reference as needed. I've personally been looking back on it from time to time, and plan to give it a deeper reread since I felt like there was too much good information to soak it all in properly the first time.
Obviously the book isn't perfect, and has some sections that are vague and harder to implement, and others that are explicitly incomplete. All this means is that us readers have more to look forward to when the next version of an already great book comes out.
The 300 pages in this book contain very little fluff and quite a lot of actionable information, some of which I started implementing in my life before I finished reading. Some of the most powerful for me have been "do 100 thing", "focus on what you want to see more of", "show up, don't die, don't quit", and "joke about the outcomes you want", but there are so many more useful methods and ways to frame situations.
As someone with many ADHD-like traits who has often felt lost and indecisive in life, I resonated heavily with most of the content in this book. But anyone looking to understand themselves a bit better (introspect, if you will) can find something useful for themselves. I recommend reading this book once straight through, and then using it as a reference as needed. I've personally been looking back on it from time to time, and plan to give it a deeper reread since I felt like there was too much good information to soak it all in properly the first time.
Obviously the book isn't perfect, and has some sections that are vague and harder to implement, and others that are explicitly incomplete. All this means is that us readers have more to look forward to when the next version of an already great book comes out.
March 3, 2023
Some really good concrete things to try. Lots of references to things I've heard of and now know heard of in more nuance.
Chaotic by nature which was expected, meant this way but also hard to follow at times. Like that the chapter titles and content didn't fully match.
Chaotic by nature which was expected, meant this way but also hard to follow at times. Like that the chapter titles and content didn't fully match.
March 5, 2025
I have never highlighted so many passages on so many pages in a book as I did in this book. The spirit is liberating from jump -- equal parts erudite and inspiring. The tone that Visa takes acknowledges constantly that he is approaching self-actualization as an exploration, not that he has figured it all out; and after reading this, I wonder that other authors don't take this approach.
Subtly life-changing -- at least for me!
Subtly life-changing -- at least for me!
April 23, 2024
There are some great ideas in here, but ultimately the text is so long that it paradoxically encourages inaction, and it feels like this is more about the author's introspection than the reader's.
February 28, 2023
Loved how this was not a typical self help book. It genuinely felt like someone was talking to me and advising me through life. Would definitely return to this book at different points in my life
November 20, 2024
I enjoyed Introspect a lot. I liked the quest framing, the cheerfulness, the scrapbooking of quotes and journal entries. I liked the author's ongoing dialogue about what he's really trying to say, and the inventive self-help suggestions.
I liked that it modelled its ethos 'embrace-mistakes' by publising what the author considers a work-in-progress. I'm sure the book's improvable but that does seem to be the author's point!
Some of Introspect's ideas were familiar to me from Visa's Twitter but others were new, and I appreciate having them all conveniently curated together. It'll be a reference book for me. Strongly recommended!
I liked that it modelled its ethos 'embrace-mistakes' by publising what the author considers a work-in-progress. I'm sure the book's improvable but that does seem to be the author's point!
Some of Introspect's ideas were familiar to me from Visa's Twitter but others were new, and I appreciate having them all conveniently curated together. It'll be a reference book for me. Strongly recommended!
April 1, 2025
i cried multiple times reading this book because it was so resonant. this book and visakan's writing in general has changed me for the better. you can feel his tenderness and love for himself and others emanate from the writing.
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