Book Review: The Icarus Deception

First of all, let me just say that this book is one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time. I can’t guarantee that it will be one of yours, but no book has ever motivated me to overcome my fear and start doing important work than this book has.

It’s the book that I currently most recommend and I anticipate that it will stay one of my most recommended books for a long time.

The main point of the book is to tell us that chances are, we’ve set our sights too low.

He mentions the Greek myth of Icarus and mentions how the modern take away was that since Icarus was told not to fly too high lest the sun melt his wax wings, we shouldn’t shoot too high either. Seth points out that the second half of the warning to Icarus was not to fly too low to the water lest his wings get wet and become useless.

This means that we grew up with a system that encouraged us to keep our head down, fit in, and become a cog in an economic machine.

Seth wants us to fly higher, he wants us to be bolder, he wants us to make “art.”

I put “art” in quotes because his definition of art is significantly broader than the  conventional way we use the word. In his own words:

“Art is the truly human act of creating something new that matters to someone.”

So art is not just paintings and sculptures and other mediums of fine art, although it certainly includes those things. For Seth, making art requires the emotional labor of bringing something new to the table. He says there are three things that define art: new, real, and important.

So then, any of us can make art, and art can take an enormous variety of forms. A blog can be art. A business can be art.

Not only do we have the ability and opportunity to make art, we have an obligation to do so. Here’s a quote that struck me to the heart:

“You are hiding your best work, your best insight, and your best self from us every day.”

That quote is a huge reason why this blog even exists for you to read. I realized that I had valuable insights that would be useful to people and by not sharing them, I was hiding.

The blog, YouTube channel, Instagram account, and email list are the things I put in place to make sure I’m getting my best work and best ideas out into the world as much as I possibly can.

Here are some of the notes that I took from the book. Pretty much all of them are direct quotes because he puts things better than I ever could. This is pretty much just the tip of the iceberg as I took pages and pages and pages of notes on this book:

• “Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.”
• One point that he makes that I’ve implemented and consider to be important is that you should look people in the eye who serve you and thank them. They are doing valuable work and also we should give them the dignity they deserve as human beings. So next time you’re at Chipotle and the server adds your meat and passes your bowl to the next server, look them in the eyes and say “thank you very much.”
• “Everyone you interact with will be changed forever. The only questions are how will they be different? and how different will they be?”
• “We’ve greatly exaggerated the risk of sinking without celebrating the value of swimming.”
• “If not enough people doubt you, you’re not making a difference”
• “If you’ve announced that you have no talent (in anything!), then you’re hiding.”
• “You need to know the conventional wisdom inside and out. Not to obey the rules, but to break them.”
• “Rejection says something about the critic, but not about you. Perhaps it means you chose the wrong audience. And yes, perhaps if you’ve exhausted all possible audiences, it means that you need to make better art.”
• “The reaction isn’t yours, it belongs to them. The art is yours,”
• “Write like you talk. Often.”
• “The reason they (we) need you: there is work that you (and only you) can do”
• “The only thing that’s clearly true is this: “you are an artist.'”
• “If you have decided that you can’t do art until you quiet the voice of the resistance, you will never do art. Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop.”
• “Angela understood that her best asset wasn’t the secrets of what she’d learned, it was the guts to do the next thing.”
• “ANXIETY is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you’ll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn’t make you better.”

I’ll wrap it up there, hopefully that whetted your appetite, but looking at the list, there’s even major concepts in the book that I just barely touched on. Again, this book is definitely worth a read. In fact I would say this is a book that is worth getting the audiobook and listening to it in your car on repeat. I read the print version on this one, but have listened to other audiobooks by Seth and he does a great job narrating his own work.

You can get the audiobook for free by signing up for a free trial of audible (I highly recommend this option for this book. You actually get two free audiobooks that are yours to keep, even if you cancel the trial, and like I mentioned before, this is the perfect book to listen to again and again):