Obsidian Essay | Book] Reflection on life of principles & Book review: Stand Firm (2017) - Svend Briknmann

Stand Firm

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I. About the book

Stand Firm was published in 2017, before the pandemic upended how we live and work. Reading it now, Brinkmann's argument feels almost prophetic. He identified the unsustainability of the relentless self-optimization rat race years before mass burnout, "the Great Resignation," and "quiet quitting" entered the cultural conversation. Humanity was accelerating in the name of capitalism and technological progress, yet the marginal utility of all that striving wasn't increasing—people were simply feeling more overwhelmed. In a sense, Brinkmann had the foresight to name the exhaustion before the rest of us caught up to it.

The book is deliberately provocative and tongue-in-cheek—some chapter titles ("Suppress your feelings") are partly ironic, meant to needle the self-help genre rather than be taken as literal prescriptions. And it's been critiqued for romanticizing Stoicism and being light on practical "how." Acknowledging that the book is more philosophical provocation than instruction manual will make your own essay stronger.

II. My reflection

13 years, hardcore finance, my way or the highway.

I lived like I didn't care what the system thought, and in many ways, I genuinely didn't. I was forging my own path, full of Joan of Arc energy, a kind of Elon Musk conviction that if you just see clearly enough and push hard enough, you'll get there. And I did get there in the ways I cared about. But somewhere in that relentless forward motion, I missed something, something about other people. That reckoning came slowly, then all at once. I sat in a book club the other day discussing Sven Brinkmann's Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, i.e., On living without proving your worth. And the question that kept surfacing wasn't about productivity or burnout or work-life balance. It was more uncomfortable than any of that.

Had I been exercising another form of violence this whole time? Not physical, not even intentional, but the corrosive violence of self-righteousness, of being so certain of the highway that I was without fully realizing, looking down on everyone who wasn't on it. Judging people for not getting it, for not living it, for not seeing what seemed so obvious to me. That's a hard thing to sit with.

Here's the thing about me, though. I've always been a space kid. Not metaphorically. I mean, I grew up genuinely obsessed with the cosmos, with why we're here on this specific improbable rock hurtling through space. What is the purpose of life? Why this planet? Why now? Why us? That one small yet vast question has run underneath everything I've ever done in my life. And in that struggle to find the answer, I think I spent most of my life trying to solve my own puzzle, not in a collective way. Solo, internal, convinced that if I could just figure it out for myself, the rest would follow.

My friend and I talked about nihilism at the book club, and my belief is that there's no inherent right or wrong. It's a rather unfortunate situations because we get disappointed by other people's wrongdoing. But in absolute sense, I do believe there's no right or wrong. It's only relative right or wrong. And the universe doesn't hand you the rule book. But I don't land there, not fully, because underneath the nihilism, there's something that feels true to me.

We are all expression of a universal intelligence that wants to understand itself. Some of us are pushed toward outward motion, building, conquering, expanding. Others toward inward motion, depth, stillness, meaning, hence the history of colonization. And on balance, in the greater scheme of things, the universe might have been trying to find the balance by going through such experiences itself. Of course, we should all try to find the balance of both inward and outward push and pull, and yin and yang balance, but I do believe there is a collective force at work in play that we need to factor in. And there is an element of interconnectivity in this universe that trickles all the way down to how we live on Earth, how we treat each other, how our individual lives rhyme and echo and refract like fractors of the same underlying force.

Each person's life story is one vantage point of the collective "I", one expression of the whole thing, trying to understand itself from a particular angle in a particular body with a particular set of wounds and gifts. I didn't really get that for a long time, not viscerally, not in the way that changes how you actually show up. So I left the cave, and this came around during the pandemic. I started to actually engage with muggles and human beings, borrowing Harry Potter's expression, so to speak. And what I found was not what I expected. I found that every single person has a story that is, if you actually listen, genuinely fascinating. Not fascinating in a polite cocktail party way, fascinating in the way that stops you, that makes you realize you've been missing something enormous by keeping people at arm's length from inside your own castle of moral superiority. Every life story is a reflection of that universal law expressing itself, a fractal of the continuation of the life force. And this book, this philosophical, occasionally maddening book, was a reminder that honoring people as their being and their presence, full stop, is not a soft thing. It's not a weakness or a compromise. It is actually the whole point.

This matters especially where I work. Finance is not known for its tenderness. It's known for performance reviews tied to KPIs, compensation structures built on economic value creation, and a zero-sum logic that runs so deep. Most people don't even notice it anymore. It just feels like reality, although it's a human construct. In that world, being a kind leader is not the path of least resistance. It takes more strength and more resilience than the alternative because you have to accommodate more, listen harder, understand people's pain points and their history and their trauma, and do it again and again without losing your edge.

I've learned not to shoot first on the battlefield, metaphorically I'm speaking, at least not preemptively, and I don't regret that decision. In the end, I learned karma works always, love wins, kind people win. I believe that with the same conviction I bring to everything else. That said, and I wanna be honest here, I only agreed with some of what Brinkmann is saying here in this book. I've spent most of my career like a monk in the center of Wall Street, disciplined, detached in certain ways, clear-eyed about the game. And the truth is, you can't operate purely from the philosopher's mountaintop when the rules of the game you're actually playing are still zero-sum. Calling for higher ground alone is not enough when the collective consciousness isn't there yet.

When first-principle thinking, like the Greek philosophers' instinct to ask what is the purpose of this thing's existence in the first place, loses the footing the moment it meets a quarterly earnings call. Briknmann is right that we have become too obsessed with constant self-optimization, with measuring human worth in units of productivity and output. I do believe that he's right, that the secret to a more meaningful life lies not in relentless finding yourself, but in coming to terms with yourself so that you can coexist with others. I feel that. But the book doesn't resolve the tension between those ideas and the actual mechanics of the systems most of us work inside. And I truly believe the only way forward and upward is to be the embodiment of the alternative leadership that we wanna see, the kind leadership in the organization. Because at the end of the day, it's all human constructs, zero-sum, competitive games, this pyramid structure way of operating. So, my belief is that if you want to see more light in the organization and be the light, then be the embodiment, and that's what I am at least trying to, and I hope more people will jump into that wagon as well.

My friend asked whether this book would have even land outside Anglo-Saxon markets such as the US and the UK, where self-help and philosophical non-conformity have a ready-made audience. Probably not in France, certainly not in Italy. The appetite for this kind of book is itself culturally specific, which tells you something about its limits as universal advice.

So what I'm left with this, is this: This book doesn't give you a way out of the system, like the movie Matrix. What it gives you is a place to stand within it, A place where your worth is not determined by your output, your last deal, your performance review, or your ability to keep proving yourself to an audience that will always want more. After thirteen years, I think I'm finally ready to stand there. Not because I stopped caring about doing excellent work or pushing hard or wanting to win. At the end of the day, I'm a racehorse. But because I've finally separated those things from my sense of what I am or my self-worth, you can strive and still know that if the striving stopped tomorrow, you would still be something worth honoring. That's what the book is really about, and that, more than any of the philosophy, is what the book club gave me the space to actually feel.

Thanks for listening. What do you think? Do let me know. I know some of you guys think that this kind of blog post should sit with Substack or podcast. I had my Substack, but I am reorganizing my thoughts at the moment, so for the time being, it's gonna sit within my platform.

Have a lovely day. As always, thanks for your time. Stay strong and be the light that you are.

Note) Stand Firm by Svend Brinkmann (a Danish psychology professor) is a satirical, contrarian self-help book that argues against the self-help genre itself. Published in 2017, it pushes back on the culture of constant self-improvement, mindfulness, and relentless personal growth, drawing on Stoic philosophy to argue that the healthier response to an accelerating world is to stand still rather than keep developing.

The core argument is that modern culture treats the self as a project to be optimized endlessly, and that this demand—to be flexible, positive, adaptable, and always "growing"—is itself a source of anxiety and exhaustion rather than fulfillment. Brinkmann offers seven counterintuitive steps as an antidote.

III. Key takeaways:

1. Stop navel-gazing (look outward, not inward): Brinkmann argues that endless self-reflection erodes confidence and decisiveness. For leaders, this translates to grounding decisions in external reality, duties, and the needs of others rather than perpetual introspection about "authentic self" or personal feelings.

2. Focus on the negative in your life (cultivate honest realism): Borrowing the Stoic practice of negative visualization, he argues that acknowledging limits, risks, and what can go wrong builds resilience. Leaders who can sit with difficulty—rather than mandating relentless positivity—make sounder judgments and model honesty.

3. Put on your "No" hat (the dignity of refusal): A central leadership lesson: the ability to say no firmly and clearly is more valuable than infinite agreeableness and adaptability. Saying no with integrity is a form of standing firm and protects what matters.

4. Suppress your feelings (composure over emotional display): Provocatively framed, this argues against the modern pressure to emote and over-share. For leaders, it means cultivating dignity, restraint, and steadiness rather than performing authenticity.

5. Sack your coach (resist the externalization of guidance): A critique of the coaching/optimization industry. The leadership takeaway is self-reliance and turning to enduring sources—friends, mentors, tradition, real expertise—rather than commodified self-development.

6. Read a novel, not a self-help book or biography: He argues fiction develops nuance, empathy, and a tolerance for ambiguity and complexity—qualities far more useful for leading people than tidy "success formulas."

7. Dwell on the past (value tradition, continuity, and commitment): Against the worship of constant change and reinvention, Brinkmann argues for rootedness—keeping commitments, honoring obligations, and maintaining a stable sense of self. For leaders, this is integrity and consistency over chasing every new trend.