PDF Summary:The Courage to Be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

In The Courage to Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga argue that every problem you have in life has a single cause: You care too much about what other people think of you. In turn, this causes you to live what other people want, rather than what you care about; resent other people's success since they take away from your luster; and think you're incompetent when you don't get someone else's approval, even if that approval is impossible to get.

The book made waves in Asia before becoming a bestseller in the West. Kishimi is a licensed counselor and expert in Adlerian psychology. Koga, a professional business writer, proclaims himself the Plato to Kishimi’s Socrates, transcribing and transforming Kishimi’s insights into a more accessible form for the general public.

In this guide, we’ll outline Kishimi and Koga’s radical view of life—care less what other people think, and help others out of genuine personal enjoyment. We'll explain how you can use that to tap into the freedom and joy inherent in human existence. Along the way, we’ll provide additional information about Adlerian psychology and compare Kishimi and Koga’s advice to that in other popular self-help books.

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Neuroscientists have identified a set of regions in the brain that activates whenever you’re not concentrating on any specific task, which they named the “default network.” They discovered that the default network is the same network that activates when humans navigate social situations, indicating that unless we intentionally do otherwise, we’re constantly monitoring the status of our relationships with others. The default network lights up even in the brains of newborn babies, showing that social cognition is deeply rooted in our biology.

Does this mean that Kishimi and Koga are wrong? Are we biologically driven to abandon what we really want and live the lives other people want us to? Not necessarily—unlike Newport, Kishimi and Koga make a distinction between the need for social approval and the need for positive social connection. As we’ll discuss in the final part of this guide, Kishimi and Koga would argue that it’s possible to satisfy our social needs through unconditional contribution to others instead of conditional approval from others.

Unhappy People Must Cope With an Impossible Goal

We’ve established that external approval is ultimately unfulfilling. However, this isn’t the worst consequence of making approval from others your end goal.

Kishimi and Koga imply that the main problem with making approval from others your ultimate goal is that much of the time, this goal is impossible to achieve. In the majority of cases, approval is conditional—others will like you only if you do what they want you to do. This means that whether or not others approve of you is out of your control. Sometimes, there will be nothing you can do to get someone to like you.

After failing to achieve this impossible goal, unhappy people cope with their failure in two interconnected ways, which we’ll explore below.

Coping Mechanism #1: Avoiding the Impossible Goal

Kishimi and Koga explain that when faced with the often impossible task of earning the approval of others, unhappy people often cope by setting a new goal: to avoid trying and failing to earn the approval of others. Instead of pursuing the impossible goal, they choose not to try at all. As a result, they unconsciously manufacture negative emotions such as fear and self-loathing to avoid trying to win others’ approval.

Intentionally Failing the Impossible Goal

People who avoid trying and failing to earn the approval of others, as Kishimi and Koga describe, are still building their lives around the outcome of this impossible goal, rather than disconnecting from it entirely. In doing so, they only intensify their emotional attachment to the goal, deepening their unhappiness when they continue to fail to achieve it.

In contrast, a healthier approach would be to emotionally separate from the impossible goal entirely by intentionally failing to achieve it while putting greater focus on a new, higher goal. To accomplish this, many recovering approval-seekers pursue a new goal to intentionally embarrass themselves, desensitizing themselves to social humiliation and reducing their emotional attachment to the goal of approval from others.

For example, in The Four-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss outlines a number of “Comfort Challenges” designed to increase your tolerance for social discomfort and learn to cope with disapproval or rejection from others. These challenges include maintaining eye contact with friends and strangers for uncomfortable lengths of time and asking attractive strangers for their phone numbers. Ferriss asserts that practicing these challenges will make it easier for you to suffer discomfort when striving to achieve higher goals—for example, while negotiating more favorable business deals.

Coping Mechanism #2: Adopting Limiting Beliefs

According to Kishimi and Koga, to achieve this goal of inaction, unhappy people adopt beliefs that give them excuses to deny responsibility for their own life. They assume that there’s some unchangeable part of them that prevents them from being liked by others.

Kishimi and Koga explain that unhappy people use these limiting beliefs to convince themselves that they are unable to choose their own lifestyle or make positive changes in their life. In doing so, unhappy people successfully achieve the goal of avoiding failure but trap themselves in a hopeless, miserable lifestyle by convincing themselves they don’t have the power to change it.

You’re Responsible for Everything in Your Life

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson explains that one reason so many of us adopt limiting beliefs and avoid taking responsibility for our own lives is the fact that we falsely assume that we should only take responsibility for things that are our fault. We believe that if someone else causes our problem, they should be responsible for fixing it for us—it’s only fair. Likewise, we’re reluctant to put in the work on a problem we didn’t create. This in itself is a limiting belief—when we label a situation “unfair” and refuse to take action, we only harm ourselves.

The way to avoid all limiting beliefs is to abandon this notion completely: Problems are the responsibility of the person they affect, not the person who causes them. This is because the way to live the happiest life possible is to accept responsibility for every single problem in our lives, especially those that aren’t our fault. Even though many people are randomly born with disadvantages, Manson argues that they can overcome them and find happiness by taking radical responsibility for their lives.

Unhappy People Avoid Forming Healthy Relationships

Unhappy people’s need for external approval doesn’t just make them feel bad about themselves—it also actively prevents them from forming healthy relationships with others. Kishimi and Koga make it clear that as long as you’re trying to earn someone else’s approval, it’s impossible to forge a mutually satisfying relationship with them.

(Shortform note: In Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel Heller offer a counterargument: Not only is it possible to forge fulfilling romantic relationships without abandoning a dependence on external approval, healthy relationships require a constant stream of mutual approval and support. Levine and Heller argue that we’re only able to reach our full potential as independent individuals if we have a “secure base” of a loved one’s reliable approval.)

The authors argue that seeking approval from others disrupts your relationships for two reasons. Let’s explore each in detail.

Reason #1: Unhappy People See Others As Competitors

Kishimi and Koga argue that unhappy people choose to see life as a competition and other people as adversaries—if others win, it means you lose. Why is this the case?

Recall that approval is often conditional—it depends on what you do. Some people will like you for making them laugh, others will like you for being generous and kind, and another may like you for achieving career success. These are difficult things to do, and no one would be able to do it all perfectly. This means that inevitably, someone else will be better at earning approval than you.

When others succeed, they’re raising the bar, making it more difficult for you to earn the same amount of approval. Kishimi and Koga explain that external approval is a zero-sum game—the better someone else does, the worse you look in comparison. In other words, the pursuit of external approval is, by nature, a competition, with winners and losers. For this reason, Kishimi and Koga assert that unhappy people fear the success of others. They celebrate the failures of those around them instead of offering support, preventing them from forming healthy relationships.

The Infinite Game of Life

In The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek draws a distinction between “finite” games, which you play to win, and “infinite” games, which you play indefinitely for their own sake. Sinek applies this idea to the world of business, but it’s equally applicable to the pursuit of happiness. Approval-seekers who see life as a competition treat it as a finite game instead of an infinite one. Consequently, they’re unable to form supportive relationships with their “competitors.”

Sinek explains that people who approach infinite games with a finite mindset set the goal of beating the competition. Since they’re playing to win, they spend all their energy and resources attempting to best their opponents in a specific finite context—for instance, sales goals (in business), or GPA (in school). If they lose, their efforts feel wasted, and they have no willpower left to continue.

On the other hand, instead of comparing themselves to others, infinite-minded people make it their goal to advance a “just cause,” a noble mission directing all their actions. Because they’re fulfilled by continuing to play, they have an infinitely renewable source of energy, making them difficult to outlast. For this reason, people who refuse to see life as a competition often find the most success. Someone who approaches life with an infinite mindset can form healthy relationships because they don’t have to beat others to accomplish their just cause.

Reason #2: Unhappy People Believe Relationships Are Founded on Sacrifice

Another way an unhappy person’s obsession with approval harms their interpersonal relationships is by causing them to feel entitled. Kishimi and Koga argue that because unhappy people spend their lives striving to meet the expectations of others, they become resentful when others—especially loved ones—fail to meet their expectations.

The authors explain that if an unhappy person does something kind for a loved one without receiving gratitude and appreciation in return, they feel cheated. The attitude becomes: “Because I did that for you, you have to do this for me.” This kind of conditional relationship limits the freedom and happiness of both parties.

For example, imagine someone throws a lavish surprise birthday party for a friend of theirs, then gets offended when that same friend doesn’t do the same for them. In this scenario, the person who organized the party is only using their friend as a means to get something in return. If the friend feels obligated to return the favor but doesn’t want to, they’ll come to resent the original gesture. This isn’t a mutually fulfilling friendship.

This Belief Destroys Marriages

The idea that you deserve to have others meet your expectations is often more destructive the more committed a relationship is. The less likely it seems that the relationship will collapse, the more likely it is that one party will take the other for granted. This is because when you view relationships as mutual sacrifice, at some level you’ll want to “win the trade” by contributing as little as possible. The more your partner has committed to you, the more you’ll be able to get away with.

In this way, greater commitment comes with the risk of damaging a relationship. The longer a relationship lasts, the more important it becomes for both parties to avoid the assumption that relationships require sacrifice. We’ll explore the alternative belief in the next section of this guide.

How Happy People Choose to See the World

Now that we’ve explained how the need for external approval has the potential to damage your life and relationships, we’ll conclude by taking a look at the alternative: This is Kishimi and Koga’s advice for how to live a happy life.

Happy People Aim to Help Others

Kishimi and Koga argue that instead of seeking approval, happy people make it their ultimate goal to help others. They feel genuine pleasure when they can contribute to the well-being of those around them. In this way, all it takes to be happy is to honestly believe that you’re useful to someone.

It’s important to note that feeling useful—not appreciated—is the key to their happiness: Kishimi and Koga assert that as long as happy people honestly believe that they’re helping others, they feel no emotional attachment to what others think of them. This is the “courage to be disliked” from the book’s title.

Kishimi and Koga argue that it’s inevitable that some people will dislike you. No matter what you do, there will be someone in the world who would rather you do it differently. The only way to attain sustainable happiness is to work up the courage to embrace this fact and free yourself to live what you believe to be a good life, no matter what other people think.

(Shortform note: A helpful way of coping with the fact that some people will inevitably dislike you is to look at rejection as the universe’s way to keep you away from someone who isn’t good for you. After all, the more someone dislikes you, the less likely it is that they have the values and disposition that would make you enjoy spending time with them.)

Usefulness Is Happiness

Many sources back up Kishimi and Koga’s claim that usefulness is the most reliable source of happiness. Some take this argument to the extreme, claiming that usefulness is an even more vital contributor to happiness than basic safety and security. To illustrate: Many people who enlist in the military become energized with a sense of purpose, even in the thick of a dangerous war where they risk injury and death. When these veterans return home, they often become depressed. Even though they’re much safer and more comfortable, they’ve lost the cause that gave their lives meaning and made them feel useful.

Kishimi and Koga make the case that you need to decide for yourself what “useful” means. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl places even more importance on this task. He explains that to live a fulfilling life, each individual must discover what purpose they’re living for—and ultimately, what’s worth dying for. Once you determine the most useful thing you could do with your life, doing anything else would make you feel like you’re wasting your brief time on earth. This is why it’s so important to overcome the need for approval and cultivate “the courage to be disliked”—if you fulfill the expectations of others but don’t feel useful, you won’t be happy.

Helping Others Doesn’t Require Sacrifice

For happy people, helping others isn’t a personal sacrifice—it’s something they do primarily for themselves. The authors admit that this may sound selfish or dishonest, but Kishimi and Koga insist that it’s perfectly fine if your life purpose is to make yourself happy.

Because happy people are fulfilled by doing good for others, they’re able to serve others unconditionally. According to Kishimi and Koga, helping others because it makes you happy is a far more potent motivator than if you were helping others just because it’s the “right thing to do.” Chasing ascetic sacrifice to be a “good person” is nothing more than the need for approval in disguise.

Rewards Flow to Those Who Serve Unconditionally

In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma cites a Chinese proverb about helping others: When you give away a flower, some of its sweet scent sticks to your hand. Here, Sharma’s Buddhism-inspired ideas align with Kishimi and Koga’s Adlerian psychology—by helping others, you’re simultaneously helping yourself.

Unlike Kishimi and Koga, Sharma emphasizes that the people you care for will give you some of life’s sweetest gifts in return—for example, he argues that if you show continuous love to good friends, they’ll be there to support you in times of need. Whereas Kishimi and Koga deny the need to receive anything in return from those you serve, Sharma sees relationships as a more traditional give-and-take.

However, it’s possible to embrace both perspectives: When you do good without expecting to receive anything in return, every gift is an added bonus on top of the intrinsic fulfillment that Kishimi and Koga promise.

Happy People Believe We All Help Others by Simply Existing

Since all you need to to be happy is to feel like you’re helping others, Kishimi and Koga assert that anyone can be happy by recognizing the fact that their mere existence makes others happy.

Humans care about each other. Other people don’t need to do anything special to improve our lives—their mere presence is gratifying. To illustrate: The day your child is born, they don’t need to do anything impressive to make you happy; they just need to exist.

Using this logic, happy people believe that all humans are valuable, even if they haven’t done anything “good” with their lives. Kishimi and Koga insist that, because they hold this belief, happy people are able to accept themselves unconditionally. Even if they’ve made countless mistakes in the past, or are far less well-adjusted than their peers, happy people realize that their existence is still a gift to others and feel good about themselves despite their flaws.

Kishimi and Koga admit that some people do more good than others. However, whereas unhappy people would see the goodness of others as a threat to their image, happy people celebrate others’ success. Since they believe everyone has the power to make others happy by simply existing, and therefore everyone has value, happy people have no need to see life as a competition. The success of others can never take away any of your innate human value.

How to Accept Yourself

It’s easy to rationally understand that we all have value, but it’s more difficult to genuinely feel this way about yourself. In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach describes a meditative practice designed to help you embrace your inherent value and alleviate your internal suffering.

This practice, “radical acceptance,” is a two-part process—first, you recognize the emotions and sensations you’re feeling, and second, you offer yourself compassion, wishing yourself well instead of resenting yourself for not being good enough. Brach implies that you should practice doing this as much as possible.

For example, imagine you see a sweater you can’t afford and feel the impulse to shoplift it, immediately feeling guilty for considering theft. To practice radical acceptance, you would first notice that you feel guilty, then ask yourself gentle questions until you realize why. Then, you’d offer compassion, reassuring yourself that selfish desires don’t make you a bad person.

Instead of judging people based on their inherent baseline value to others, as Kishimi and Koga do, Brach argues that we all have value due to a shared nature of goodness. Drawing from Buddhism, Brach states that each of us, at our core, is a being of pure awareness and love. We can feel worthy because we are a part of a universal force of good, not merely because we exist.

However, like Kishimi and Koga, Brach acknowledges that accepting yourself as worthy and valuable makes it easier for you to genuinely want the best for others and celebrate their successes. Buddhists label this supportive type of love “metta,” or “lovingkindness.” Brach insists that if you force yourself to show others the same radical acceptance you show yourself, over time, you’ll feel genuine concern for their wellbeing, even if those feelings weren’t there to begin with.

Happy People Set Boundaries in Their Relationships

Kishimi and Koga argue that the foundation of all healthy, fulfilling relationships is strict boundaries separating your life from the lives of those around you. To this end, the authors offer a simple rule that dictates ideal personal boundaries: No one should take responsibility for a decision that doesn’t directly impact their own life. For example, if a student’s best friend goes out and parties all night instead of writing an important term paper, it would be ultimately damaging to the relationship for that student to write their friend’s paper for them.

Additionally, Kishimi and Koga argue that you shouldn’t let other people hold you responsible for their tasks. Don’t feel obligated to do anything for anyone—as we’ve established, relationships built on conditions and restrictions are unfulfilling for both parties. All your acts of service should be given unconditionally because you’re happy to give them.

For example, it would be wrong for your brother to guilt you into babysitting his kids. Ideally, it would make you happy to help him out in this way, and you would gladly volunteer. However, if the experience is deeply unpleasant for you, you shouldn’t feel obligated to do it. Moral impositions like this would eventually cause you to resent him, ruining the relationship.

Setting boundaries like this can be difficult, especially with family members and close friends, but Kishimi and Koga insist that this is a prerequisite for any healthy relationship.

The Origins of Codependency

In Codependent No More, Melody Beattie explains that failure to set proper boundaries is a central symptom of codependency—a relationship dynamic characterized by self-neglect and overinvestment in another person.

Beattie’s advice on avoiding codependency closely overlaps with Kishimi and Koga’s—she defines self-care as the process of taking responsibility for your own life and emphasizes how important it is to avoid fixing other people’s problems. However, she dives more deeply into the topic, explaining why it is that codependents behave the way they do.

Beattie argues that codependency is a set of habitual coping mechanisms developed as a reaction to prolonged stress. The source of the prolonged stress that causes codependency may be obvious—for example, a substance abuse problem—or it could be subtle: For example, Kishimi and Koga would argue that the persistent failure to earn a loved one’s approval would cause enough stress to foster codependency. Desperate to alleviate this stress, codependents believe they need to control their loved ones to make themselves happy, often resorting to emotional manipulation to do so.

Happy People Live in the Present

Finally, happy people ignore the past and future and live fully for the joy of the present. Kishimi and Koga assert that we all have the power to choose to be happy at any given moment.

As we discussed earlier, happy people understand that past traumas have no power to prevent them from being happy, here and now. The flip side of this idea is that likewise, the future should have no bearing on your current happiness. Kishimi and Koga assert that many people think they need to accomplish something great to be happy, but this is a lie. As we’ve established, anyone can be happy by simply recognizing the value they contribute to those around them.

Kishimi and Koga clarify that this doesn’t mean you should avoid working toward any future goals. Rather, you should find meaning and joy in every step of the path toward that goal. This way, if you were to die at any moment, your life wouldn’t feel like a waste.

In short, Kishimi and Koga emphasize that you have the power to find satisfaction and meaning in every individual moment of your life.

We’re Wired to Live for the Future

Earlier, we discussed how we’re biologically predisposed to seek approval. Likewise, another reason our biology stands in the way of our happiness is the fact that we’re biologically predisposed to obsess over the future. The same “default network” in the brain that monitors our social standing is also constantly reconstructing our past and imagining our future. By default, we don’t live in the present.

What, then, can we do to find satisfaction and ground ourselves in the moment? Aside from finding fulfillment in every good deed we do for others, as Kishimi and Koga suggest, experts offer these tips:

• Investigate your sensory experience. By paying attention to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that are constantly around you, you can override whatever concerns about the future are on your mind and ground yourself in the present.

• Practice gratitude. Constantly focusing on the future can be discouraging, as you’re always thinking about things you want but don’t have. Writing out lists of things you’re thankful to have in your life will reorient your attention toward all the parts of your present life that spark joy.

• Take a break from technology. While social media and other inventions make us feel connected to a world far bigger than the one around us, they’re a poor substitute for the real thing. Giving your brain some time away from screens will help you appreciate concrete pleasures instead of their digital representations.

Conclusion

Shifting your mindset to one that no longer desires the approval of others isn’t easy. Kishimi and Koga argue that it takes years—sometimes decades—for someone to fully accept these truths and put them into practice. Still, the fact remains that happiness is available to everyone at any time. You simply need to choose to see the world in an empowering way.

(Shortform note: In Mindset, Carol Dweck warns that while you’re transitioning from one mindset to a better one, you’ll temporarily feel like you’re losing your sense of self. We cling to our current beliefs for a reason—at some point, they helped. Adopting new standards often means becoming a failure by your old standards, which can feel devastating. Only after pushing through and experiencing the benefits of your new mindset—in this case, feeling happy without external approval—will you fully realize it’s worth the pain.)