The Unreasonable Why

Who it is for

Not people in crisis. People who are, by any external measure, doing fine — the job is stable, the bills are paid, nothing is wrong — and who carry something they stopped mentioning years ago.

That is the harder audience to write for, because there is no emergency to point at. Comfort does not announce itself as the problem. But being reasonable is what built the room you are quietly restless in, which is why the reason to leave it has to be unreasonable.

It is also for anyone who has been told, by someone whose opinion genuinely mattered, to be realistic — and has not been able to fully believe in the thing since.

What is actually inside

Ten chapters, each one a reason. They are short. The book is 113 pages, readable in an afternoon, and built to be returned to rather than read once. Each chapter follows the same shape:

• The reason, argued — usually opening from research or a plain observation about how people work.
• The counter-argument you are already making in your head, taken seriously rather than dismissed.
• An ordinary story. Not billionaires. People from Rodel’s own life, like Alex from his hometown, who worked at a hardware store and sketched between customers.
• A reflection section — five questions, meant to be answered in a notebook, not skimmed.

What the first two reasons are

Reason one is your dream is one of a kind. It opens with Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s work on intrinsic motivation and self-determination theory, and makes the argument that a dream aligned with your identity behaves differently from a goal you adopted — it persists, it costs less to sustain, and it does not go away when ignored. The practical turn is about comparison: seeing someone else already doing your dream is not evidence that the space is taken, it is recognition, and recognition is data about you. Read the whole chapter →

Reason two is that great things take time — a direct argument against the instant-gratification framing that makes a slow dream feel like a failing one.

The remaining eight are in the book. We are not going to paraphrase them here badly.

What it is not

The Introduction says it outright: “This book isn’t here to offer you quick fixes or shortcuts. It’s not about giving you some magical formula that guarantees success in 30 days or less. Those kinds of promises? You and I both know they’re too good to be true.”

There is also no promise that the dream works out. The book is careful about that. What it argues is that the decision to keep going should be made on the strength of your reason, not on the strength of the odds — because the odds were never the thing that was stopping you.