No one accidentally picks up Chomsky. You sort of brace for him. But I was curious—and tired of hearing words like “freedom,” “growth,” and “reform” thrown around like jargon salad. So, I picked this up. And what I found wasn’t a rant, but something more uncomfortable: clarity.

This book should be made into a billboard. Why? There’s a kind of advice that sounds smart but costs nothing to say. We’ve all given it. We’ve all taken it also. And now I’ve learned to be more careful with both.

For a long time, I was told something was wrong with me. I was the quiet one. The thinker who preferred to doodle. The person who needed time to think before speaking. And somewhere along the way, it seemed that this was a flaw. Something to fix. There was a time I pushed myself to be louder, quicker, more “leader-like.” To be more outgoing, and bold. Whatever that means. I struggled to fit in my own skin.

This book looks like it’s about making art. But really, it’s about what stops us from doing anything that matters. It put words to something I’ve felt for years but never quite said out loud: the fear that what I make won’t be good enough, that I’ll never get it right, that maybe I shouldn’t even try. I’ve put off writing, speaking, starting things—waiting for the right time, the right words, the right version of me. That time never came. This book didn’t solve that. It just made me see the pattern.

A dying Nazi soldier asks Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor, for forgiveness. Wiesenthal says nothing. He walks away. But the question stays. And he spends the rest of his life wondering if silence was the right response.

The first time I came across this book was when I was in 10th grade, and because I had read many other books by the same author. Over the last few decades I have gone back to this book many times. In this book Bach tells the story of a seagull who wants more than just fighting for scraps and following the flock. He wants to fly. The other seagulls think he’s crazy for practicing flight maneuvers instead of just surviving.