Becoming Who We Need To Be

by Colin Wright

Becoming Who We Need To Be is a book about the challenges we face as societies, and how the decisions we make as individuals matter in those larger struggles.

How we seek out, filter, and parse knowledge shapes our understanding of ourselves and of the world. How we analyze, organize, and act upon this information influences how well our individual ideas and ideologies scale up to the societal level.

In both developing as individuals and evolving as groups, context matters. This is a book about broadening one's own context, and understanding how personal growth is related to societal well-being.

Genres: Nonfiction

266 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2017

Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really love Colin's podcast Let's Know Things, so I jumped on the occasion to read this book when he said that if we liked the podcast, we would probably like his book. And I did! This is basically a collection of essays on many topics lined to humanity, from Language, to Credibility and Resilience. I found the last essays to be more gripping than the first, but I guess it depends on what you know about each topic and what your perspective and them are. I would have liked the essays to be a little bit more interconnected and especially a summary at the end of the main things we as a species should work on to become who we need to be. However it was overall a very good and enlightening read!

[Stephen Heiner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read more than 70% of Colin's books and they are well-crafted and well-thought out. This one was no different, and was clearly a response to the election of Donald Trump. But, Colin, always flying at a higher level than the obvious, used the occasion to comment broadly upon challenges facing our society as a whole.

Chapter titles include, among others: "Freedom and Security," "Filters and Boundaries," "Consistency," "Credibility," "Labels," "Awareness," and "What we don't say."

Worth a read, but it's not a fast one. Take your time and engage with the ideas, even if they are broadly supportive of a self-labeled "progressive" agenda.

[Gail · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of his podcast "Let's Know Things" and decided to read his new book. Lots of intriguing questions and suggestions about making sense of the sometimes confusing slew of information with which we are bombarded every day. It can be confusing to try and keep up with the daily turmoil of political news, not to mention social media where our every move seems to be followed and monitored by an unknown army of programs and apps and algorithms. How can we learn to separate fake news from facts?

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a collection of essays than it is a book. But I have liked Colin's writing for some time and really appreciate the thought that went into this collection. View it more of a reference point with good chapters on how he thinks about the world than anything else.