I just reviewed Sapiens. This one's different — I grabbed it almost by accident and barely remembered why I bought it. Robert Glover's No More Mr. Nice Guy turned out to be one of those books where I recognized myself on nearly every page, and not in a flattering way.
What the Book Actually Argues
Glover's core claim: most men today are "nice guys" — not nice in the good sense, but a specific pattern where you suppress your own needs to win approval from everyone around you, especially women. I'd guess that's true of a huge share of the men I run into every day in sales and networking, though that number is a gut feeling, not a stat.
Where It Comes From
Glover traces it back to right after World War II. Men came home from years overseas, and the GI Bill wasn't enough to cover a family, so they worked constantly just to make ends meet. That meant fathers were absent twice — once at war, once buried in work — while mothers ran the household. Add a school system that was 80-90% women teachers, and you get generations of boys shaped almost entirely without a male role model.
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Layer in the women's rights movement, which I'm fully behind, and separately a version of feminism Glover frames as telling men they're not needed, and you get boys with no one showing them what being a man actually looks like. To be clear, that's not toughness or shutting off emotion. It's having a purpose, making decisions fast, leading inclusively, and being courageous enough to stick with what you're passionate about.
My Own Nice-Guy Phase
My dad worked a lot, so my mom raised me. I was a textbook nice guy until about 18, swung hard the other way into being a jerk, and eventually landed somewhere in the middle — hunting for role models who actually had it figured out. Richard Branson kept coming up: courageous, decades-long marriage, wealthy, still fully himself. Guys like that don't ask permission to want what they want. They tell the people in their life "this is my path," and the right partner sticks around for it, even through the broke years, because she's betting on where he's going, not managing him into someone smaller.
Do the Thing You're Afraid Of
Glover's fix is simple to state and hard to do: do things that scare you. New job, the gym, finding actual positive male figures — not just people you know, guys you can watch operate. Nice guys also can't accept help, can't delegate, and can't take a compliment without deflecting it, so they end up doing everything themselves and resenting it quietly.
Here's where it got personal for me. I play hockey a few nights a week and I don't answer texts during work hours — before 8:30 or after 6, that's it. I've had girlfriends get annoyed by both. My answer isn't "sorry," because I'm not. It's "this is what I do." I've watched friends give up the things they actually love because a partner didn't love it back, and six months later they're sitting at home miserable, and now she's mad about that too. You don't have to choose between the relationship and the passion. You build a life with room for the job, the money, the relationship, and the hockey.
Being nice and being a pushover aren't the same thing. You can still be a decent person and flatly accept that not everyone is going to like your choices, and be fine with it.
A few things I'm still applying:
- Say what I actually want instead of managing someone's reaction to it
- Stop treating "no" as something I owe an apology for
- Keep chasing the thing I'm afraid of, because whatever's on the other side is usually what I actually wanted
Who Should Read This
If you're the guy who apologizes for having a life outside your relationship, who can't say no without guilt, who does everything himself because delegating feels like failure, read this one. It's not therapy-speak. Every chapter ends with an action step, and you'll recognize yourself fast enough that it stings a little. That's the point.
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