Every project has a point where the recommendation is written, the evidence is on the table, and the decision belongs to someone else. The most useful idea in The Courage to Be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, is about that point. Adlerian psychology calls it the separation of tasks, and the question it asks is short. Whose task is this?
The idea in one paragraph
The book is a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man, built on the psychology of Alfred Adler. Its practical tool is the separation of tasks. You work out whose task a situation belongs to, you do your own, and you stop carrying other people’s decisions as though they were yours.
What the book argues
Adler is presented as a contemporary of Freud and Jung who rejected the idea that the past decides the present. The book calls its own version teleology. Behaviour serves a goal now, rather than being caused by an event years ago. It then makes the claim that all problems are interpersonal relationship problems, which sounds like an overstatement until you try it on a retainer.
The idea I keep coming back to is smaller than any of that. In every argument, ask whose task it is. The book’s example is a parent and a child studying. The parent can prepare the room and the hours, then the studying is the child’s task. Commanding the child to study is described as intruding on someone else’s task, and the book says the same collision follows every time you try to control a decision that is not yours.
Where it lands in client work
| My task | The client’s task |
|---|---|
| Writing the audit and saying what it means | Deciding whether to fund the fix |
| Stating that a migration needs a copy you hold | Choosing the hosting budget |
| Giving the recommendation with its evidence attached | Approving an edit to a live site |
| Reporting the numbers that moved and the ones that did not | Accepting a number they dislike |
Most of the sourness in agency work comes from mixing those two columns. When I re-argue a rejected recommendation for the fourth time, I am doing someone else’s task, and doing it badly, because their decision depends on a budget and a board I cannot see. When a client asks me to sign off on a number instead of reading it, they are doing mine.
Praise and rebuke make the relationship vertical
The book argues that praise and rebuke both come from above, so a relationship built on either one is vertical, and it argues for horizontal relationships instead. That is uncomfortable in an industry where a good month is applause and a bad month is silence. The practical version is simple to state and hard to do: report the work, name the result, skip the performance of approval.
An example I can point at
There is a recommendation sitting in my own notes since October 2026: a tightening of the spam-URL block on a site I run, waiting on a go-ahead because it is an edit to something live and the risk does not belong to me alone. Writing it once, plainly, with the risk attached, is my task. Saying yes is not. Pushing it through because I am confident it is right would be the exact mistake the book describes.
Where the idea gets misused
Separation of tasks decays into distance easily. Advice delivered, hands washed, client left holding a decision they were never given enough to make. The book’s own answer is that separating tasks is the starting point of a relationship, not a way out of one. You separate the tasks and then you stay in the room. The first-hand account of what you found is the part nobody can copy, which is why first-hand experience is the only content moat left.
What I took from it
Say the difficult thing once, clearly, in the same breath as the evidence. Then let the decision sit where it belongs. Then go back to work, because the next task is mine again and it is due on Friday. I read this one off my own shelf rather than a bestseller list, and I have been choosing books that way for a while now, which is roughly how I choose what to read next.
The part I would push back on
The book is confident that a person can choose a new goal and a new way of living. That is a psychology of the individual, and most of the work I do happens inside organisations that punish individual courage quietly, with a budget cut rather than an argument. The separation of tasks is still the right tool. It needs a second tool as well for the week when the person with the decision reports to someone who will not hear it.
If you have read it, the question I would put to you is the one I keep asking myself. The last time a project stalled, whose task were you carrying? The book is published by Atlantic Books in the UK, and the Adlerian ideas inside it are credited to Adler, not to the authors.
