For today’s blog post I’ve decided to do a book review. Looking through the Kindle at the books I’ve recently read, “Own the Day, Own Your Life” by Aubrey Marcus was the one that jumped out at me.
I first discovered Aubrey from listening to Joe Rogan. This led me to listening to the Total Human Optimization podcast. If you consider listening to it keep in mind three things. First, the name has changed to Human Optimization Hour. Second, it has a new host (Kyle Kingsbury), and I haven’t listened to it with him in the driver’s seat so I can’t speak for the quality of it now. And third, some of the content is explicit so if that would be offensive to you, definitely give it a pass.
Now back to the book. The whole book is about improving yourself by making small changes to how you start your day that compound on each other to produce a better you. It’s very much like the concept I mentioned in yesterday’s post about a little boulder. The idea is that instead of trying to create a change or event in your life that fixes the whole rest of your life in one move, a rather unreasonable and unlikely plan, you should focus on owning one day. When you learn the skills to own one day, you can own any day. String enough days together and own them all and you naturally own your life.
Instead of seeing things in big picture terms, which can be very ominous and unwieldy, the book gives you a list of small changes you can make in every day practices that will add up to owning your day. And owning one day is a much more reasonable and manageable goal to have.
Each chapter covers a specific topic. Some of the topics covered are nutrition, sun exposure, exercise, and even how sex can figure into owning the day. Aubrey breaks those topics down into four important areas. Getting owned, Owning it, Prescription, and Now do it.
Getting owned explains the problem. How does this particular area typically affect most people’s lives. The answer is inherent in the section title. How are you getting owned by this situation?
The Owning it section is a general discussion about how you can accept responsibility for the area and begin a process of changing things for the better. This naturally transitions into Prescription. Prescription is a much more detailed section on specific steps or processes you can take action on to improve that area of your life.
Finally comes Now do it. This is, as Aubrey puts it in the book, the “kick in the pants” to get you started implementing the Prescription. It ends with what he calls the Three Pointer. Three important points from the chapter you need to focus on to be successful.
Occasionally there are other additions to the chapter. He includes Pro Tips, which are additional tidbits of information that you don’t have to include in the process, but can give you better results if you do. Deep Dive covers extra resources to further broaden your knowledge base on a given topic, if you really want to know all the nuts and bolts. And last are Caveats, which will let you know what the risks involved in some of the Prescriptions are.
Although the book is designed to be read start to finish, I don’t think jumping around from topic to topic in the Table of Contents would be too big a problem. Some of the chapters will reference other chapters before it and why a previous Prescription will set you up to better deal with the current Prescription. In that case you could just jump back to the referenced chapter and get the information. All in all though I do think that at least on the first read through you should go from front to back.
As far as readability goes, he made the book very conversational in tone. That makes for an easy read. Aside from the Deep Dive areas he keeps the discussion at a layman’s level. He doesn’t use a lot of jargon that might be confusing or interrupt the pace of reading. There are a lot of pulp culture references, so if that isn’t your thing it could be a little distracting I suppose.
It’s definitely not a one read book. There’s a lot of great information in it, so you will want to go back over places in the book as you put the plans into action. And by the way it’s designed it’ll be easily usable as a section by section reference book after the first read through.
If you are interested in an easy to read book with lots of helpful advice on how you can make small changes in your day that will have big down the line effects on your life, it’d be hard to beat this book. If want to get a copy for yourself I’ve included an Amazon affiliate link to the Kindle version of it, just click on the picture below. On that page you can also select a hard cover, paperback, or audio version of the book. It’s a great book, but wait, there’s more. There’s a Facebook community (coincidentally called the Own the Day community) you can join with tons of people ready to help you apply what you’ve learned from the book. And also to share success stories with. The book seems a little pricey, but measured against the improvements it can bring into your life, it’s a bargain indeed. The choice is yours. Should you decide to buy it, I wish you happy reading.
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