Getting Your Head Straight Phrases

Most advice books ask you to trust the author. This one asks you to distrust him, selectively. In the introduction Barry Biegler tells the reader to skip any phrase they think is stupid and go looking instead for the one phrase that makes life a little better. On the last page he adds that he does not want to hear which ones you disagreed with. It is the most honest opening a self-help book can have, and it turns out to be a fair description of how the book works: 127 short sayings, each with the story of how a retired software founder and thirty-year youth hockey coach came to rely on it, offered one at a time, take it or leave it.

What kind of book this is

The nearest relative is Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living (2023), a list of several hundred aphorisms with no explanation attached. Biegler has written the opposite book. There are far fewer sayings, and every one comes with the incident that produced it: a friend planning a wedding who is agonizing over the color of a drinking straw, a salesman who could not close until he started calling himself “a check getter,” a grandmother turning on a lamp and announcing that light kills all monsters. The stories are the point. A bare aphorism is easy to nod at and forget; a phrase attached to a hotel owner on a twin bed in Maui saying “Why I need computer?” stays put.

Each phrase is a chapter of one or two pages, always starting on a right-hand page, with a title that is the phrase itself. Most chapters follow a loose shape: what the phrase means in plain words, the story behind it, and how he uses it now. The introduction says the chapters stand alone but are arranged so ideas build on one another, and that is true: the book opens with how to think (“Watch Your Own Thinking,” “Is That Really True?”), moves through emotions and other people, then problem-solving, then a long stretch on running a company, and closes with the personal quest that started it all, ending on the same phrase it began with.

The voice

The book reads like a man explaining something across a kitchen table, and the author never loses that register, even when the subject is grief or a violent brother. He swears when a sentence needs it. He says “I call ‘bullshit’ on that idea” and “No Cheetos on the table or in the house” and “Get off your butt and figure this out.” He also admits, repeatedly, that he fails at his own advice. Two chapters, “Easier Said Than Done” and “It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Remember to Do,” exist mostly to say so. That candor is what keeps the book from sounding like a guru, and it is why the advice feels earned rather than preached.

The specificity does the rest. Nothing in here is “a customer once.” It is eight pressure reducers and 3,000 feet of pipe, a seven-iron on the 18th at Pebble Beach with the wind in a sixteen-year-old’s face, 840 million minutes of uneventful driving, a support employee who finished her boss’s sentence with the wrong utility number. The details are what make the lessons believable, and the author knows which details to keep.

At the sentence level the text is clean, and what a reader will notice instead is voice: comma-joined sentences, a few run-on lists, a closing line here and there that is a fragment. Those are choices, and they are the right ones for a book that is supposed to sound like the author talking.

The chapters that earn the book

• “Even Einstein Had a Limit.” A math major hits a wall in Ring Theory, a professor says something kind, and fifty years later the author still hires someone to mow the ranch. The model chapter: a title you remember, a story that explains it, a use in real life, and a last line that lands.
• “Love Is Earned.” The bravest chapter in the book. Biegler explains why he did not attend his brother’s funeral and does not soften it. Readers will argue with it. They will also not forget it.
• “Sometimes Agree When You Don’t Agree.” A parking-lot collision, a party bore, and a Hawaiian hotel owner who has never trusted a computer. The funniest chapter, and the best piece of sales writing in the book.
• “The Therapy Trap.” Six subheads that a person in therapy could use as a checklist tomorrow: is there a goal, is there progress, what happens in the other 167 hours of the week. Nothing else in the book is as immediately practical.
• “You Can’t Hire Yourself” and “Don’t Decide from a List of One.” Two of twelve back-to-back management chapters, each built around a rule the author actually ran a company on: hire six to keep three, set every salary once a year in January, invent a “senior support” job so your best people never have to become managers. Unsentimental, tested, and short.
• “You’re Never Going to Remember a Layup.” The most moving chapter in the book, told at his father’s funeral and told again here. It ends with two words, and they are the right two.
• “That Is a Blue Straw Problem.” The phrase most likely to enter a reader’s vocabulary by the end of the day.

Where it falls short

The book changes audience in the middle. The introduction names its readers honestly: an eighteen-year-old trying to build a good life, and also anyone who manages people, coaches kids, is raising a family, or just sold a business. No one reader is all of those, and the book does not pretend otherwise. Roughly a fifth of the chapters are about running a company, and twelve of them run consecutively, from “Management by Wandering Around” to “Sometimes Agree When You Don’t Agree.” They are among the sharpest chapters here, but a reader who has never hired anyone will feel the book turn away for twelve chapters in a row, and the eighteen-year-old will skip “Don’t Die at Your Maximum Net Worth” and “Don’t Think of Yourself as Old” for another fifty years. The introduction gives permission to skip. It is still a visible seam.

Some phrases outrun their chapters. “Consider the Source,” “Better Late Than Never,” “Make Your Own Events,” and “Easier Said Than Done” state the idea and stop, and next to “Even Einstein Had a Limit” they read as placeholders. Nothing in them is wrong. There is just less there.

Stories repeat. The report card with four A’s and a B appears three times, once in the very first chapter and again near the end in the same words. Lee Shulman is introduced as “a therapist I worked with” in eight chapters. The Los Angeles Kings consultant gets two chapters. For a book meant to be opened at random this is the correct choice, and the author says as much. A cover-to-cover reader will notice anyway.

It will lose some readers deliberately. “Always Tell a Child the Truth,” the financial-incentive argument in “The Therapy Trap” and “Don’t Work on a Relationship All the Time,” and “People May Need to Vent but I Don’t Want to Be the Target” are stated flat, with no hedging. The book is better for it, and the author warns you. Those are the pages reviewers will quote, and the pidgin dialogue in the Hawaii story will make a few readers wince even though the hotel owner comes off as the smartest man in the room.

Ayn Rand stands at the door. Her name is in a chapter title and heads the resources page. Readers who dislike her may put the book down before reaching the chapter where the author explains that her philosophy left him angrier and no happier, which is one of the most honest pieces of writing in the book.

Who it is for

• A smart 18-to-25-year-old who wants a good life and is suspicious of anything labeled self-help. The first two dozen chapters were written for this person and it shows.
• Anyone starting or running a small company. The middle third is a compact management manual disguised as a phrase book, and it would be worth the price on its own.
• A parent or a youth coach. “Always Tell a Child the Truth,” “You’re Never Going to Remember a Layup,” and “You Can Be the Parent, Boss, or Coach—and Friend” are worth the price for that reader.
• Anyone in therapy, or paying for someone else’s, who has wondered whether it is going anywhere.
• Anyone recently retired and surprised by it.
• Not for readers who want citations, a program, or a book without swearing.

Verdict

An unusually honest phrase book with a distinctive voice, at least a dozen sayings a reader will still be using a year from now, and a management manual hiding in the middle. Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of a book built to be dipped into rather than read straight through, and the author names most of them himself. Four stars out of five, and a strong recommendation for the eighteen-year-old it was written for, the manager and the parent it was written for too, and any reader who has had enough of polished self-help.

For the back cover

“A retired founder and youth hockey coach hands you 127 sayings he actually uses, each with the story of how he learned it. Blunt, specific, and short enough to try one today.”

“The rare advice book that tells you to skip the parts you don’t like, and means it.”

Close the full review