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I have a confession that will tell you everything you need to know about how I came to Jen Sincero’s “You Are a Badass.”
I resisted it for years.
Every time someone mentioned it, I made the face. You know the face. The one where you smile politely while internally thinking “yes yes, a book called ‘You Are a Badass‘ written by someone named Sincero, I’m sure that’s going to be very profound and not at all like a motivational poster someone stuck on a Pilates studio wall.” I am a CFO. I run nearly two dozen companies. I read Michio Kaku for fun. I was not about to be caught reading something with a profanity in the title that I bought next to the checkout at an airport Hudson News.
I eventually bought it anyway. On my Kindle. At midnight. So no one would see me.
And then I read it in two sittings and had to call my friend Angela the next morning to tell her she should have made me read it five years ago.
Angela, to her credit, said “I told you so” with the restraint of someone who has been friends with me for decades and knows exactly when to deploy that particular phrase for maximum impact.
Who Jen Sincero Actually Is (And Why It Matters)
Before I get into the book itself, let me tell you why Sincero’s voice lands differently than most of the self-help books I’ve consumed in 40-plus years of voracious reading. (And I have consumed a lot of them. My self-help bibliography is extensive enough to qualify as a second education, possibly a more useful one than the first.)
Sincero is not writing from a place of “I always had my act together and let me explain how.” She’s writing from a place of “I was broke and flailing into my 40s and then I figured some things out and I’m going to tell you exactly what they were and I’m not going to be precious about it.”
There’s something about a woman who admits she was sleeping on a converted garage floor at 40 that makes her subsequent advice land differently. She’s not theorizing. She lived the gap between knowing better and doing better, which is the gap most of us are actually living in, if we’re being honest about it.
I related to this more than I wanted to admit.
The Thing This Book Is Actually About
Strip away the branding and the sass (which is genuinely funny, by the way, not forced-funny, actually funny), and this is a book about one thing: the distance between who you know you are and who you’re currently being, and why that gap exists, and how to close it.
Sincero’s thesis is that most of us are operating from a set of beliefs we absorbed before we were old enough to evaluate them critically. We decided things about ourselves… that we’re not the type of person who does X, that people like us don’t have Y, that wanting Z is selfish or unrealistic or just not how things work for us specifically. And then we spent decades building an entire life around those beliefs, and now the beliefs feel like facts because the evidence is everywhere.
She calls this the Big Snooze. Which, yes, is a very Sincero-esque name for it. But the concept is solid and it is also, if you’re over 50 and paying attention, more than a little uncomfortable to sit with.
Because I looked at some of those beliefs of mine. The ones about what I deserve, what I’m allowed to want, whose needs matter more than my own. And I thought about where they came from. And then I thought about my mother, and being adopted, and being the family fixer by the time I was 11 years old, and I thought… okay Jen Sincero, I see what you’re doing here. And I don’t fully appreciate it. But I see it.
The Mindset Shift That Made Me Put the Book Down and Stare at the Ceiling
Sincero writes about how your thoughts create your reality, which I know sounds like every other self-help book ever written, but she gets at it from an angle I hadn’t encountered quite this way before. She’s not just talking about positive thinking. She’s talking about the specific frequency you’re broadcasting on and what you’re unconsciously signaling to the universe, to the people around you, to yourself.
She asks you to notice what you believe you’re worth. Not what you’d say if someone asked you. What you actually demonstrate you believe, through your choices, your relationships, your tolerance for being undervalued.
I sat with that one for a while.
I am a CFO who got handed 17 additional companies with no raise and a bonus that was roughly 1% of what my market value suggests I should be earning. And I said yes. I kept going. I built systems in my off-hours and called it dedication and told myself I was being strategic.
Was that dedication? Or was that a belief about what I was worth playing out in real time?
I am not saying Jen Sincero diagnosed my compensation structure. I am saying she handed me a lens and I turned it on some things that needed looking at.
The Part About Fear
She says fear is just the lying side of your imagination. Which sounds flippant until you actually apply it to a specific fear you’re carrying.
I thought about the things I’ve delayed because I was scared. The writing I talked myself out of for years. The personal projects I started and stopped. The way I’ve historically prioritized everyone else’s needs until there’s nothing left for mine, and told myself that was generosity rather than avoidance.
Fear is sneaky at our age. It doesn’t always announce itself as fear. It comes in as “I’ll do that when things settle down” and “it’s probably not the right time” and “who am I to think I could pull that off.” It wears very reasonable clothing. That’s what makes it effective.
Sincero just… keeps pulling at the reasonable clothing until you see what’s underneath it.
What Doesn’t Land (Being Fair to You)
She’s breezy about money in a way that can feel tone-deaf if you’re not coming from a place of basic stability. The “invest in yourself” and “hire the coach” messaging assumes you have discretionary income to invest, which is a real assumption, and not everyone reading this book does.
Also, if you’re a highly structured, systems-oriented person, the lack of concrete framework can be frustrating. She tells you to believe differently but the “how” is sometimes light on specifics. It’s a mindset book, not a methodology book, and knowing which one you need matters.
And she’s in her 40s when she writes it. There’s a specific texture to navigating this stuff at 60 that she hasn’t lived yet. Some of what she describes as bold and revolutionary feels, at our age, more like “yes, and also I have approximately 20 fewer years of runway and some knee issues, so the urgency calculus is a bit different.”
I say all this because I respect you enough to give you the honest version, not just the endorsement.
Why I Still Think You Should Read It
Because even with the caveats, this book does something most books don’t do. It makes you look directly at the gap between who you know you are and who you’re currently being. And it does it without letting you off the hook, but also without making you feel like a failure for the gap existing.
It says: you know you’re more than this. So stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting until you feel ready. Stop arranging everything so perfectly that you never actually have to leap.
At 60, I find I have less patience with the waiting. Every time I think “I’ll do that when X happens first,” I know more clearly now than I did at 40 that X has a way of becoming Y, and then Z, and then you’re out of alphabet. The book lit a particular kind of fire under that awareness.
It also made me laugh, out loud, multiple times. Which I was not expecting from a book I resisted for three years. Sincero is genuinely funny and the humor makes the harder observations go down easier.
The Line That Actually Lives in My Head
“You are a badass because you say you are.”
I know. I know how that sounds. But here’s the thing about self-worth at this stage of life. Nobody’s going to hand it to you. Nobody’s going to eventually notice you’re doing the work and officially certify that you deserve to take up space and want things and pursue them without apologizing. It doesn’t come from outside. It comes from declaring it. From deciding. From saying it enough times that some part of you starts to believe it, and then that part gets bigger.
I’ve rebuilt myself from dollar store glue and self-help books, as I’ve been known to say. This one earned its place on the shelf. Three years of resistance and two sittings later, it is firmly on my best self-help books for women over 50 list, right next to all the other books I resisted first and loved anyway.
