When you write a book about mindfulness, you hope to offer people a quiet space to slow down. You don’t necessarily expect to cause property damage !!!
I woke up a few days back to this unvarnished Amazon review for my book "When Attention Settles", and I am still trying to find a quiet way to process it (screenshot attached below):
“I was sitting on my couch reading about Uncle John, and I had such a profound, aggressive breakthrough about how much mental energy I waste trying to manage and manipulate every single conversation that I literally stood up, walked out to my balcony, and threw my smartphone into the parking lot. I don't even care. Who needs a phone when you have absolute clarity?”
To be completely honest, reading this is incredibly humbling and equally gratifying. As an author, you spend years working on an idea and then on the manuscript in quiet solitude, hoping that your words might offer a gentle pocket of rest to a stranger looking for a respite. To see a reader feel so deeply understood, to see them genuinely connect with the exhaustion of "pretending to listen while secretly waiting for a turn to speak", is the greatest gift an author can receive.
As my friend Jeff Schmidt wrote in the foreword of the book, “the moment he still carries, I don't carry at all. The one giving doesn't get to pick what lands. That's for the one receiving it to decide.”
That said, as a retired technology executive, I feel legally and morally compelled to advise against executing "tactical takeovers" on your personal electronics.
My father's cousin, Uncle John, is a professor emeritus of neurochemistry and the most unhurried man I have ever met. I feel quite certain that if he saw a shattered smartphone in a parking lot, he would smile and observe that cleaning up the glass only adds unnecessary effort and strain to the sweeper's afternoon.
If you do decide to read the book, please consider doing so away from open balconies, parking lots, or deep lakes (which the reviewer also hilariously claims to have targeted in the headline). Your attention can settle perfectly well while your device remains safely in your pocket. 🧘♂️💥
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