I received a copy of this book by Marie Forleo as a gift from a friend a couple years ago. I don’t think I had ever heard of it before, but as tends to happen once something comes on your radar, I was suddenly seeing it everywhere and other friends were telling me how awesome it is, so I decided to check it out.
It’s as good as everyone says it is. It’s all about mindset and how you can change your thinking and your beliefs in order to change your life. As you can tell from the title, the theme of the book is, “everything is figureoutable.” It’s Forleo’s mantra and she uses it again and again, not just throughout the book, but throughout her life. Every time something seems impossible, she reminds herself that everything is figureoutable, and she uses that mentality to find a way to get what she wants. Not surprisingly, she encourages the reader to drill “everything is figureoutable” into their brains until it becomes something we live by, day in and day out.
Each chapter ends with a list of journal prompts that encourage you to take pen to paper and figure out what you really want and all the different actions you could possibly take to help you get what you want. This book is not meant to be read passively. It’s meant as something the reader can engage with and use to create an action plan to create their ideal life. That means thinking about what you really want and conducting a kind of SWOT analysis to help you get it.
I also appreciated that each chapter ended with a testimonial. Apparently Forleo used to have her own TV show called MarieTV, which I had never heard of before picking up this book. Almost every testimonial is from someone who either saw her TV show and/or enrolled in her school to learn out to figure out ways to make their lives better.
It’s easy to think of someone inserting so many testimonials into their book as tooting their own horn, but first of all, none of the testimonials are designed to sell anything, and many of them are stories of Nobel Prize winners who never encountered Forleo or her TV show or her school, but managed on their own to figure out a way to make their lives better. Second of all, these stories are all so inspiring. Reading about how people with challenges much greater than my own managed to figure out a way to get everything they wanted and needed through seemingly overwhelming odds I think really does prove that everything is figureoutable.
I filled 14 pages full of notes by reading this book, and celebrated finishing it by figuring out how to fix my back door, which has been sticking for weeks. Then I finally assembled and installed a wall lamp I had been wanting in my bedroom for years (turns out you don’t need a drill bit or a screw gun after all).
What will you accomplish when you realize everything is figureoutable?