Author
Oleg Konovalov

Published
2025

First read
December 2025


I didn’t finish this one; it felt a bit like a set of strong essays that had been expanded into book length and, through that process, lost some of their power. That said, there was one crystalizing concept I took from it: people in chaos lose their internal mooring. They look to external sources of blame as their internal system of thinking is a mess. This pushes them into a reactive state of mind.

In essence a person cannot make decisions and does not understand: Where am I going? What am I striving for? What will I do next? There is no understanding of the goal; there is only a state of experience. There is no thought, only reaction…They are slow in accepting that reality isn’t in chaos — they are.

I’m Andrew, the Head of Customer Experience at Automattic, where we make great products for the web. I'm an avid reader, runner, and traveler.